Sachin and Adam
00:00:07 · Carrie von Muench, Sachin, Adam Miller
[00:00:07] S0: There is no more important mission than trying to produce basically unlimited abundant energy forever. We're seeing energy as the bottleneck to technological progress right now in a way we haven't seen in a long time. I think the AI revolution has certainly shined a big spotlight on how much more energy we need. [00:00:24] S1: Are there kind of any priors that will help us imagine what Pacific Fusion could look like in fifteen years? [00:00:30] S0: I think one pretty good analogy is that, you know, the fusion industry now is where the space industry was twenty years ago. Yeah. I think we're in a similar place with fusion in terms of the private sector picking up and commercializing things that are possible because of fifty years of public innovation. People say it's impossible until the day it's done. [00:00:48] S1: But do you have any kind of, like, guiding philosophies or way in which you guys have built Pacific Fusion? [00:00:53] S0: I think the simplest way that I think about it is our job is to hire a lot of the best people in the world and empower them to do the best work of their lives. Yeah. Never underestimate a talented engineer and what they can come up with when you resource them to do something real. [00:01:05] S2: Why do we need more energy than China? [00:01:07] S0: I mean, if we wanna be able to win the AI race, we wanna be able to manufacture things in this country at all, then we need more energy. I'm a Patriot, I wanna see us win. If we're gonna win, we gotta build more power. [00:01:25] S2: Carrie, how are you doing?
00:01:25 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:01:25] S2: Carrie, how are you doing? [00:01:26] S0: Good. Happy to be here. [00:01:27] S2: Yeah. Thanks for having us here. We're sitting in one of the best formats we've ever been in for an interview. We've got the flag behind. We've got these modules behind us. Actually, us, are we sitting right now? [00:01:39] S0: We're sitting in our build center in San Leandro, so this is fundamentally a manufacturing R and D center, where we're building a lot of the first of a kind components for our demonstration system that'll be built in Albuquerque. [00:01:50] S1: And talk us through a little bit about your journey to getting where you are today. You know, we're talking before we started rolling about how you've had exposure on the investor side, and maybe you're quite skeptical about some of these frontier technologies and when they would actually make their mark on society. So how did you kind of decide to, you know, go and co found a start up in one of hardest kind of spaces possible? [00:02:11] S0: Well, so I'm the only member of the Pacific Fusion founding team. There's five of us that is not a scientist Yeah. And certainly not a fusion expert. [00:02:19] S1: Yeah. [00:02:19] S0: I was an engineer by training, spent a bunch of my early career doing industrials and public sector consulting, so usually for large engineering projects with a big physical footprint. [00:02:29] S1: Yeah.
00:02:29 · Carrie von Muench
[00:02:29] S0: Spent some time at Google and then moved over to the private investment side where I was investing in early stage, mostly hardware, some biotech companies. And fusion had always been fascinating. Right? This was back... It was post the clean tech one dot o bubble. It was when a lot of folks were focused on climate tech, and the lack of clean firm power was always the elephant in the climate room. Right? Like, if you have affordable clean firm power, you can do a ton of really good things. If you don't, you can't. And I think that was sort of one of the things people were trying to work around for a long time in the field. And fusion had always been through the holy grail. Right? You can build a machine that makes a ton of energy from water. Basically, infinitely scalable if you can do it. Just the question is in parentheses, when can you make it work? And I had been, I would say, not as a skeptic of fusion that I always thought was interesting, but maybe a skeptic in its venture backability. I always thought for fusion to be venture backable, you had to, a, know pretty much exactly what you're doing scientifically. Like, you've gotta be pretty confident the thing you're building is gonna work, and you've gotta be building something that can be delivered at a cost structure that makes sense. Right? Power is a commodity market. It has a race to bottom on cost. We've gotta deliver affordable, scalable firm power. And I think a lot of the things I saw in this space maybe were kinda close scientifically to where they needed to be, but had a really challenging path to scale and low cost or the other way around, had a fairly straightforward path to scale and low cost, but you had to believe in a factor of thousands or more scientific improvement for them to work. And I I initially met the Pacific Fusion founding team as they were coming together to do this project, and it was right after a bunch of things had changed in the field in 2022. After our colleagues at Livermore National Laboratory, about 40 or so miles from where we're sitting, achieved ignition, which meant that, you know, know if you drive a certain amount of energy into a fusion target, you're gonna get a lot more energy out than you put into the target. It's a really big deal.
00:04:17 · Carrie von Muench
It changed the challenge in the field from where in the scientific landscape could this work to how do we drive a target to this pressure, which is a a challenge the private sector is very well suited to solve. Our colleagues at Sandia National Laboratory had achieved the second best fusion performance ever with a much, much, much more efficient system. And then my cofounder Keith had invented technology that makes those kinds of systems, pulse power systems, even more compact and cost effective like you're seeing right here. And so put those things together, you knew the conditions for ignition high gain fusion. You can build an affordable modular mass manufacturable device to reach them. You've got a big fusion project that's a big engineering and execution project together with all the things that are hard about first of a kind projects, but not a scientific moonshot. And so the team had come together to do this. Eric Lander, Keith, who you met, Will, our chief scientist, and Leland, our VP of engineering. And it was clear we could do this thing. Also, it was gonna cost order a billion dollars to build a fusion machine that gets more energy out than is stored in the system, and that it might be a lot easier to find the first 100,000,000 than the next nine. So I, yeah, I met the team as they're beginning to wrestle with that question, this question of how do we solve for this. And my old team had done some... Had tried to solve for this problem in biotech, particularly for new modalities or new kinds of drugs where know that if you deliver a big thing, it's massively valuable for investors and the team. And, also, there aren't enough comps in the market. Not enough people have done this to know exactly how the market's gonna value progress along the way. And so you can derisk financing risk for investors and for the team by saying we're gonna collect commitments for the capital we need to do the whole thing, and we're gonna call it as milestones that we pre agreed are achieved. So I met the team, yeah, as a friendly extra brain to help figure that out, and, I got so excited about what they were building, both the scientific foundation and the tractable path to low cost.
00:06:02 · Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
Everybody I was calling for diligence was voting with their feet to come make this happen, including many of the people who built the last big fusion machine in this country to have worked at the National Ignition Facility. And, yeah, we had a great group of investors around the table, and I blanked, here we are. [00:06:16] S2: Yeah. And deciding to join a mission like this, it's such an arduous task because this is not a company that you're gonna return the funding like a few years time. This is like a, you know, a decade or multi decade journey. What's So your personal why for joining on a journey like this and really committing to that?
00:06:34 · Carrie von Muench
[00:06:34] S0: Well, I think there is no more important mission than trying to produce basically unlimited abundant energy forever. We need so much more energy in this country. We need to build energy to power AI, right, the age of intelligence, but also advanced manufacturing, also all the things that drive human quality of life. Right? There are no energy... There are no sort of poor countries that are energy rich. That's not a thing and vice versa. And looking ahead five, ten years at a world in which, for example, we in The United States are energy constrained and our adversaries are not, that's a really scary world. If you look at a world in which we can produce as much energy as we need to do all the things we wanna do as a society, that's a really exciting world and a really freeing world. And so I can't imagine a more exciting mission to be a part of. Then the question becomes, do you believe you can do it? Like, do you believe this is gonna work? And do you, are you excited to work with people that are gonna be in the trenches with you every day along the way? And I think the reason I'm here is because I got to conviction on the answer that'll work. And I really love working with the people every day. That matters. Right? Your partners in the trenches every day are super important. And I think, yeah, we've got a real shot at at changing the energy landscape forever.