00:13:50 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
[00:13:50] S0: Yeah. Not in the West. So the... Yeah. If we go back to the whole origins of General Matter, it was it was around this question. To answer your question directly, if if there were $25,000,000,000, what would I do? I would probably... You know, if you wanna get started today, you would deploy some some large reactors. You'd deploy some AP1000. There's a huge wave of advanced reactors coming through many startups, some incumbents. These are very promising. It is likely the path to bring down the cost of nuclear and to scale it rapidly. And so I would save some of that money for when they are licensed and they are ready to deploy deploy and some of those. You might do a mix of some microactors for some environments, for some remote applications, or if you can get their costs low enough, you can tile them together, and then other SMRs for applications like data centers and behind the meter. [00:14:42] S1: When we were talking before we started recording, you mentioned that basically with Founders Fund, the way that you guys decide or, you know, you decided to start this company is almost under duress. Like, you ideally are trying to go find someone else that's doing it and, you know, go fund them. But if, you know, something is super critical and no one else is doing it, then maybe you're the right person to do it, and you go do that. How'd you kind of make that decision?
00:15:07 · Scott Nolan
[00:15:07] S0: Yeah. So the the origin story was really... At Founders Fund, I was looking at many different engineering companies, everything from transportation to space to nuclear, and so met a a number of nuclear companies, other energy companies over the years. By the late twenty... Early 2020s, there were a bunch of interesting advanced reactor companies, and Founders Fund invested in one of them, and I was talking to them about the path forward. And the prior on this was that the hardest thing would be getting license, because for a long time, no one had gotten a license on a new reactor design. And they said, yeah, there's something there that's not trivial, but there's a known process, and we're going do that process. It's just that no one's really tried to do that or no one's done it well, and we're gonna do it well. That was that was what the reactor company told me. And then they said the much bigger challenge besides getting a license is actually getting the fuel. And so I started looking into this and trying to understand, you know, what do you mean why the fuel is so hard to get? Clearly, we have reactors on the grid today that are running on fuel. Is it that much harder to make, HALEU, the more advanced fuel that you need, than to make LEU, you know, the 3% to 5% enriched fuel that all reactors run on? And I said, why the companies in The US that make that fuel make HALEU? And they said, aren't... What do you mean? There is no company. Yeah. There are no companies that make it in The US. We completely import it from Europe and from Russia. And so I said, well, okay. Where are you gonna get HALEU? And they said, there's there's one place. It's Russia. We have to import it. And so this, you know, combined with the... This was already challenging for them, but then combined with the Russia ban, it was extremely difficult. So
00:16:51 · Ty Morse
[00:16:51] S1: When you, like, initially get that information, what's going through your mind on this this clearly doesn't work? Like, there's this massive roadblock that's going to happen that you can see is going to happen. And for some reason, people are just kinda, like, saying, you we'll figure it out.
00:17:04 · Scott Nolan
[00:17:04] S0: Well, I think it wasn't something people were worried about or it wasn't relevant for a long time. So if you're a utility operator, you have a bunch of nuclear reactors, you you're purchasing fuel from Europeans or enrichment from European firms. And, you know, you're importing some from Russia because it's been historically very low cost. And, you know, it hasn't really been a problem. The grid hasn't been expanding. You keep your contracts going. The utility fuel buying teams purchase where they can get it from, and there hasn't really been the impetus to create new enrichment capacity in The US. As reactor developers, like all the startups working on reactors, I think they have been the first to really encounter that the supply chain in The US is not where it needs to be. I think utilities may have been aware of this, but there's... You know, it's not within their scope. And so they'll buy from where they need to purchase from. New reactor companies kind of discover this as they go and realize that, Okay, it's time to start thinking about our supply chain now that we have a design, and then you realize this really weak part of the supply chain. So the founder's fun story was they were telling me about this issue, and then I spent basically all of 2023 trying to find a company that was solving this and working on this. And after an extremely thorough search, understand all elements of the supply chain from mining to conversion to enrichment to fuel fabrication, they were right. It was really an enrichment issue. And so spent months trying to find the right company that was doing enrichment, realized it didn't exist, realized that, like in the past, like with Palantir and Anduril, a new company needed to be created. And so started about how do we pull together that company in 2023, and then officially incorporated, officially launched at the start of 2024 with a core team. And so to your question of under duress, yeah, it's not something that Founders Fund does programmatically or even desires to do, but it's something that when there's an opportunity that no one is solving, it's been the case that people on the team find it worthwhile to put everything else aside and go go start something. So we started this with the with the desire to bring back domestic enrichment to make it much more scalable, much more reliable.
00:19:16 · Scott Nolan, Ty Morse
It's already extremely safe. And then to bring down the cost that we can power everything The US is trying to do that's gonna require a massive increase in the grid or behind the meter power production. [00:19:28] S1: I was reading this doc that you gave me earlier this morning, and you basically said most of the time when you're talking to founders, you're almost trying to convince people to not start companies because they're not necessarily doing it for the right reasons. For you yourself, this is like a very long journey. How did you kind of come to the conclusion that you wanted to spend the next maybe decades of your life working on it?
00:19:48 · Scott Nolan
[00:19:48] S0: Yeah. I think, yeah, to address that point of trying to convince people not to start companies, yeah, I'm certainly not the first person to say this. I think there's been allusions to this by Peter at Founders Fund, who's long said, the average like, the one hundredth person at Google made way more money to put it in financial terms than your average founder in Silicon Valley. So if people are trying to start companies for financial reward, it's often much better to just join a great company. And I think a year or two ago, Jensen said this also. Someone asked him if you're gonna do it all over again, what would you do do differently? He said, don't do it. Because, yeah, I I think starting companies is hard, and I kind of knew what I was getting into after twelve years of working with different founders at Founders Fund and three, four years working at SpaceX very early on. It's something you should do only if you have to do it. So my criteria... A lot of people would ask me during my decade plus at Founders Fund, Would you ever go start a company? And I had a pretty standard answer, which was, Yeah, I would do it under three conditions. If there's a really important problem that's not getting solved and somehow I have a good shot of helping solve it, then I'll do something. And so with this one, through talking to reactor companies, it became obvious this important problem of actually making the fuel that they needed was not getting solved. So that checked number one and two. And then when I really dug into it during 2023, it became obvious you would need a few different things that had to come together for this to work. And I felt like my background unexpectedly set me up to do that.