Sachin and Adam
00:29:44 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:29:44] S2: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I'm just staring at the flag, and so I had a geopolitical question come to mind again. But, like, you everyone's sort of talking about we need more energy than our adversaries, and, obviously, we're talking about China. So the underlying thing is that we need more energy than China. Why do we need more energy than China? [00:30:03] S0: I mean, do we wanna be able to win the air race? Do wanna be able to manufacture things in this country at all? Then we need more energy. I think full stop, most of the industries that we care about, defense industry, anything physical that you wanna make, Plus now, right, the engine powering our intelligence requires a ton more energy, and you can get specific about any one of those pieces. In fusion alone, after we achieved ignition on the National Ignition Facility right up the road, China started spending tens of billions of dollars to build big fusion projects. You can see them on satellite imagery. There's a bunch of available stuff. In The United States, we are building no big publicly funded new fusion projects. Everything big being built here is being built by the private sector, and that's good. Right? I'm glad there's multiple private fusion companies winning or building because we've got to build. Right? This isn't a tabletop thing. You have to build these big projects to show that this is possible at scale, and then you've got to deploy those kinds of systems. [00:30:58] S2: Should the government be subsidizing, the sector then?
00:30:58 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:30:58] S2: Should the government be subsidizing, the sector then? [00:31:01] S0: Yeah. I mean, I think it comes back to this commercial space point. I think we're kinda close to where commercial space was twenty years ago. The government's funded r and d for a very long time, brings a track record of doing that for fusion for energy and defense. And now we're at a place where if we wanna move rapidly toward commercial deployment, the government's an important early customer, and the government incentivizing that kind of rapid movement is gonna make a big difference in how quickly we can build. [00:31:24] S2: How do you think about, like, [00:31:26] S1: capital structure and availability of capital ongoing? Right? After you hit these milestones, by 2030, would it look like an IPO for a company of this structure? I imagine because there's probably not many buyers that are big enough to to to kind of, yeah, buy a company like this. [00:31:41] S0: Yeah. I mean, we're seeing our first couple of public fusion companies now, which is great that we're seeing... It's becoming a lot more mainstream. I think a lot more investors are recognizing the tremendous upside potential in making this technology work. For a company like us, our goal is to build one of the world's largest energy companies. [00:31:57] S1: Yeah. [00:31:57] S0: And so certainly that looks much more like an IPO exit than it does like an M and A exit. [00:32:01] S1: Yeah. Great.
00:32:01 · Sachin, Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:32:01] S1: Yeah. Great. [00:32:01] S2: Yep. Do you think the market can hold having many nuclear fusion companies? You know, like market structures for energy, often you've got a few sort of, it's like an oligopoly like structure, will it be the same for fusion, do you think? [00:32:14] S0: I think there's room for... Energy generation's fundamentally a portfolio, no matter where you look. If you look at a service territory, if you look at a certain market, if you look at a certain customer segment, like folks have a number of different generation technologies in their portfolio. And in fusion, you can imagine, you know, technology A being economic at a certain scale and technology B being more economic at a certain scale and those things fitting into the broader portfolio. So I think that there's certainly room for multiple companies to be successful. Right? So the power market is a massive, massive market. And so at the end of the day, it's also a commodity market, which means if you're winning on cost, it's really hard for customers not to adopt your solution. And that's how we've built the company, right? With the fundamental thesis that at the end of the day, it's a question of how quickly can we deploy and how quickly can we get to a cost structure that makes sense.
00:32:14 · Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:32:14] S0: I think there's room for... Energy generation's fundamentally a portfolio, no matter where you look. If you look at a service territory, if you look at a certain market, if you look at a certain customer segment, like folks have a number of different generation technologies in their portfolio. And in fusion, you can imagine, you know, technology A being economic at a certain scale and technology B being more economic at a certain scale and those things fitting into the broader portfolio. So I think that there's certainly room for multiple companies to be successful. Right? So the power market is a massive, massive market. And so at the end of the day, it's also a commodity market, which means if you're winning on cost, it's really hard for customers not to adopt your solution. And that's how we've built the company, right? With the fundamental thesis that at the end of the day, it's a question of how quickly can we deploy and how quickly can we get to a cost structure that makes sense. [00:32:57] S1: We're kind of at like maybe the point in the story where I think we understand the market really well. We understand your approach to the problem. We understand, you know, we've met a bunch of the team. I'm curious to understand, for all the audience watching that wanna build companies that are interested in frontier technology, what do you think would surprise them the most if they went inside your mind and saw your day to day in building a company like this?
00:32:57 · Sachin, Carrie von Muench
[00:32:57] S1: We're kind of at like maybe the point in the story where I think we understand the market really well. We understand your approach to the problem. We understand, you know, we've met a bunch of the team. I'm curious to understand, for all the audience watching that wanna build companies that are interested in frontier technology, what do you think would surprise them the most if they went inside your mind and saw your day to day in building a company like this? [00:33:19] S0: Interesting question. I I almost... Yeah. I I almost think that people would be surprised by how just, like, normal a lot of the day to day challenges are that we face. I think there's a huge amount of overlap between the challenges... Between most folks building first of a kind projects and what that means operationally for your day to day. [00:33:42] S1: Yeah. [00:33:43] S0: And I think for us... Yeah. I I think that that would maybe be surprising to folks that our our headspace is often, yeah, is this fire gonna deliver on time? How will these things come together? Are we gonna meet this manufacturing milestone? All of those just, like, what people talk about as just execution. Like, the execution is the work. Yeah. And I think that is, I think that's something that maybe would be unexpected to folks who have thought about this as a primarily scientific project for a long time.
00:33:43 · Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:33:43] S0: And I think for us... Yeah. I I think that that would maybe be surprising to folks that our our headspace is often, yeah, is this fire gonna deliver on time? How will these things come together? Are we gonna meet this manufacturing milestone? All of those just, like, what people talk about as just execution. Like, the execution is the work. Yeah. And I think that is, I think that's something that maybe would be unexpected to folks who have thought about this as a primarily scientific project for a long time. [00:34:09] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Well, I think that wraps up the interview for the most part. But, yeah, thanks so much for talking to us. I think that was such a broad expose about energy, building companies, fundraising, really fascinating. [00:34:21] S0: Yeah. It's been a pleasure.