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.
00:21:33 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:21:33] S1: And why was it that when you went to search for the company that was already doing this, nothing came up? Like, what about this problem in particular didn't seem sexy to people? [00:21:42] S0: I think it was just a completely unknown problem. It's the sort of thing where people just [00:21:47] S1: assume just think about the reactor, and then they don't actually think about the supply chain behind it?
00:21:50 · Scott Nolan
[00:21:50] S0: Or you assume the supply chain's fine because, like, you know, existence proof. We have nuclear power in the country today. Obviously, the supply chain exists. Obviously, there can't be an issue. But then when you actually realize, Okay, we need to do something slightly different, we don't have the capability to do that, you start pulling the string and realizing you do the research, and you realize the the current status. So I think it was off people's radar. I think when you, you know, you think about an enrichment business, it sounds like a big industrial chemical business, a processing business, which it is, and that doesn't sound that sexy. And then I think there was also an element of wondering, are we even allowed to do this? And so when we started, our first conversations were with the DOE. Hey, this is what we're hearing from reactor vendors. This is the problems that we're seeing. Is this really an issue? Is this something that a private company could help solve? And the answer was yes. But prior to that, you would would say, okay. Let's let's look at who's done this before, it's all nation state or state owned entities, spinouts of of National Labs, companies that used to be part of the Department of Energy, clearly, like, very strong government DNA and a history within the government. And so is this even something a private company is allowed to do? And so through a lot of conversations, we were encouraged to do this. We learned that, yes, you can do this, but we need to work really closely together. And so I think it's a combination of, to your point, it's not the world's sexiest business. It's also not something that's been generally on people's radar because there was no need for new expansion of enrichment in The US, at least so people thought. And then there was a question of, is this even allowed? And and what would it take to get the government support? And so now through a few years of work, really starting in 2023, We're we're working very closely with the DOE and the NRC on on bringing this capability back.
00:23:56 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:23:56] S1: You worked at SpaceX from, like, 2003 to, I think, like, two thousand seven ish. Right? Mhmm. What was that like? And then what were you able to kinda, like, take from that to starting this company? [00:24:06] S0: Yeah. So SpaceX was not my first job. Even though it's my first job out of college, the one... The place I worked right before SpaceX was Boeing. And so during college, I was an intern at Boeing on what seemed like the coolest project you could do, which was a government military project at a top secret location working on a military program. And so I had been a mechanical engineer, aerospace engineer, undergrad undergrad and master's, and so this seemed like a great place to go, much more interesting than working on commercial airliners, I thought. So let's work on a military program, and let's try and push the limits on what's possible in the aerospace world. And, it was a multi thousand person project out in the desert, and it was relatively slow. I tried to work as fast as I could, do as much as I could. And I actually got feedback from coworkers who said, hey, you're doing too much. You're going too fast. You should slow down a little bit. We have to make this they literally said we have to make this project last. [00:25:11] S1: Is it because of the incentives with how they were getting funded?
00:25:11 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:25:11] S1: Is it because of the incentives with how they were getting funded? [00:25:14] S0: I think it was partly culture. It was partly the people there. But ultimately, you could say it came back to the incentive structure of running a cost plus program, where whatever you spend, you get that times one point x, and that's the money that you make. And so, yeah, there's a very clear incentive to maintain the contract, do the best job that you can, take very little risk, and on the margins, maybe go a little bit slower to do a better job and take less risk. And that's gonna that's gonna increase the budget of the project. Now you you only wanna do that up until the point that the the project keeps going. You don't wanna push it so far that it gets questioned. But to a limit, that was the incentive. And so I had worked on a very large aerospace program in college, and then after college graduated. Well, before graduating, I was an intern at SpaceX in 2003 and then joined full time in 2004. And when I got there, it was, you know, 30 something people as an intern, 50 something as a as a full time employee, and it was like night and day. And even after my internship, I knew SpaceX was going to win on... In the launch market just by seeing the two cultures. [00:26:25] S1: And This is, like, years before... Didn't they land their first rocket in 2008?
00:26:30 · Scott Nolan
[00:26:30] S0: First successful launch or orbital launch. Yeah. 2008. And so, yeah, to your question, what was it like? It was a was a team of, let's say, 50 people working on the basic infrastructure required to achieve the mission of SpaceX, which was let's make spaceflight much more affordable so we get much more of it. And let's make it reliable and safe and bring down the costs, and let's actually help humanity make the next step towards Mars. So there were 50 people who were a mix of new grads, people from the industry, all true believers in the mission, working in this small company that was relatively unknown at the time, not taking the standard aerospace job, but believing that a small group of people could do something to move an industry forward that had completely stagnated for decades. And so when I was there, it was 2003. We were starting on building test stands. There was initial engine designs, initial engine tests, and we just scaled it up into engine development program on Merlin, on other engines, get those working, get performance up higher and higher, integrate those into Falcon one and the original Falcon one launches. So that was like a three year arc to see that progression. And it was just a lot of people working as hard as it took to make things succeed and working constantly sixty hour weeks or more, but not one hundred hour weeks every week. We know where we're headed. We wanna get there as fast as possible at the lowest total cost. And, yeah, let's let's do our best to to make this succeed.