Sachin and Adam
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.
00:07:42 · Sachin, Carrie von Muench
[00:07:42] S1: Do you remember a particular, like, moment where you realize that, okay, you know, China's very far ahead on on energy kind of production compared to The US. If you kind of go down the supply chain, you know, nuclear is one of our big moonshots of getting there. Was there a particular moment where you realized, oh, wow. This is where I wanna spend, you know, the next decade plus my career? [00:08:02] S0: I don't... I can't pinpoint a specific moment. It's more of a growing realization, if that makes sense. Yeah. I think I think we've... Right. We've seen demand now, energy demand grow at rates we haven't seen since World War two. Like, we need... And that's been changing year over year over year, so I think the urgency of the problem has been growing. And I think I think the thing that was interesting for me was sort of the gradual dawning realization that, like, this could actually work. That particularly what Pacific Fusion is doing, what this team is doing, what our our technical team can do could solve that problem forever. Like, that was something that didn't happen overnight. You spend a lot of hours with people. And particularly for someone like me who's not a fusion expert, what that means is you talk to a lot of experts in the field. And when your conclusion every time you call one of them is that they come join your company, often walking away from, like, a pension to do it, that's a pretty strong signal.
00:08:02 · Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:08:02] S0: I don't... I can't pinpoint a specific moment. It's more of a growing realization, if that makes sense. Yeah. I think I think we've... Right. We've seen demand now, energy demand grow at rates we haven't seen since World War two. Like, we need... And that's been changing year over year over year, so I think the urgency of the problem has been growing. And I think I think the thing that was interesting for me was sort of the gradual dawning realization that, like, this could actually work. That particularly what Pacific Fusion is doing, what this team is doing, what our our technical team can do could solve that problem forever. Like, that was something that didn't happen overnight. You spend a lot of hours with people. And particularly for someone like me who's not a fusion expert, what that means is you talk to a lot of experts in the field. And when your conclusion every time you call one of them is that they come join your company, often walking away from, like, a pension to do it, that's a pretty strong signal. [00:08:54] S2: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned you weren't a fusion expert, so you had to be extremely diligent in this decision to join the team. You had to do all your research. Why choose to spend your life in Korea on nuclear fusion rather than any other types of energy sources?
00:09:08 · Carrie von Muench
[00:09:08] S0: Well, we have lots of other types of energy sources that work. Right? Like, the lights are on in this building. We we are powering a lot of what we do today with things like solar and wind and and combined cycle gas turbines and geothermal and traditional fission. I think the thing we're running into right now is we can't seem to build the technology we have fast enough to meet demand. Otherwise, we wouldn't be seeing such a big shortfall. And the the reason that fusion is such an exciting solution is because it solves all those problems. You don't need fuel, really. Like, your fuel is basically water. It is so energy dense. So let's think of it like manufactured energy. You build a fusion machine, you get energy out in perpetuity. You don't need pipeline infrastructure, so you're not constrained in where you can site it. You don't need natural resources like wind or sunshine, meaning that, you know, if you're outside of London in December, you can still power the things that you need to do, and there are no carbon emissions from the process, and you don't produce long lived waste. So it's been a holy grail for a really long time. The question is, can you make it work? And in parentheses, when can you make it work? And how much will it cost to make it work? And I think that's where we've really seen a a bend in the curve in the last couple of years with the breakthroughs breakthroughs that I mentioned.
00:10:14 · Sachin, Carrie von Muench
[00:10:14] S1: And why kind of take a modular approach the way you're building this? You know, we know that other kind of folks going after fusion have like, you know, versions of a giant sun, right, which may work, but then scaling that to the masses becomes really difficult. Why did you guys make the decision to kind of start with a modular approach with how you're building everything? [00:10:33] S0: Oh, because we're trying to deliver affordable power. Yeah. And I think... I mean, look at the cost curve for something like solar [00:10:38] S1: Yeah. [00:10:38] S0: Where you've got... You're iterating on a relatively small building block. You can iterate so much faster when the core building block is small. And as a result, you can learn so much faster and come down the cost curve so much faster than you can for something like traditional fission where the building block is large. Right? Like, it takes a lot longer, a lot more capital to learn and iterate, and therefore, it's hard to build something that's affordable at scale on the timeline that we need. I guess the other thing I'll mention is that when you've a modular approach, you can parallelize construction of the facility and manufacturing of the machine, and that allows your your delivery timelines to shrink by quite a bit than if you have to do those things in series. So across the board, if you wanna build something that's affordable, try to build it in a modular way.
00:11:17 · Adam Miller
[00:11:17] S2: Carrie said something that every founder should hear. The science is the headline, but the execution is the real work. That's true for media as well. You see, we prep for months for these episodes and you only get one launch day unless you keep these alive. So we've built our own bespoke clipping system using Notion for the Sachin and Adam show, so we can seem like an always on media company. We built this clipping HQ in Notion. Sora, our creative producer, runs every transcript from an episode through this editorial agent, which then creates these briefs to put in this database. From this interview alone, we ended up getting eight clips out of it. These clips like how to raise $1,000,000,000 and build it like solar. Each clip is tagged by platform and archetype, and then gets put in the queue for our editor Jethro. Jethro edits, Sorav approves, and then it gets put through scheduled and post. It. That's one clip a day for every week after launch, helping us build this always on media engine. We built this in Notion, so the strategy, this taste guide and all the clips live in one place, and our team across the world from Sydney to The Philippines are able to access it easily. Head to notion.so/sachin and Adam for three months of Notion business for free. And Pacific Fusion raised over a billion dollars in its initial funding, and it feels like we see a billion dollar funding rounds every day now especially the Neolabs. It's happening all the time. But when your team did it, that was so unusual and extraordinary. How did you convince investors to give you a billion dollars?