Sachin and Adam
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?
00:12:44 · Carrie von Muench
[00:12:44] S0: Well, I think our founding investors, you might know some of them actually, like Hemant of General Catalyst that are around. We've got a bunch of great company builders around the table, folks like Eric Schmidt and Patrick Collison who joined our board, and a number of great institutional investors around the table, people like Ken Griffin, people like Gil, people like Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon that have been doing fusion for a long time. And I think, I guess the thing I would say about the financing is I think people recognize that the risk profile is pretty different than what you've seen in fusion for a long time. Right? You could be now building on the number one and number two highest performing approaches to fusion ever. You've got a lot of confidence in the science as a result of fifty plus years of research at the national laboratories, and you're building something that is affordable, modular, mass manufacturable that, you know, can reach those conditions. That sets itself up to an execution based financing in a way that you couldn't do if you had a lot of binary scientific risk remaining. And then our founding team are awesome. Right? Like, you've met Keith. I don't think there is a person who is as operationally focused and as deep a subject matter expert as he is in our field. Eric, our our founding CEO, is, I think, the only person I've ever met who's delivered big scientific projects ahead of schedule and under budget. And a lot of our early team, yeah, came together before we'd raise money, again, voting with their feet saying, yes, we can do this, including many of the people most responsible for making those breakthroughs I talked about happen. So I think it was a combination of confidence in their risk profile and confidence in the team.
00:14:10 · Sachin, Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:14:10] S1: And when you think about kind of the path forward, the path, you know, our audience watching will be thinking about, okay, this all sounds great. It seems like good in theory that this can be scalable. When do you think people can expect tangible progress in this field? [00:14:26] S0: I mean, I think you're seeing it right here where we're sitting, right? The nice thing about our modular approach and about the way we structured our financing is that you can lay out a very methodical roadmap of actually delivering things that work on your way to this big goal. So as Keith likely mentioned, the pulsar that we're building the driver in Albuquerque consists of a 156 identical modules. You're sitting next to one of them here. You can build one of them, show that it works, build the factory, show that you can meet your manufacturing milestones, and then you're on your way. And that's true for a lot of other parts of our system as well. So I think we're seeing very tangible progress on the path of delivering this big project right here, And it builds on breakthroughs in the last couple of years that changed the risk profile of building such a machine really materially. [00:15:08] S2: Can you break down that roadmap a little bit more? So we've got building a module, then building lots of modules, I think showcasing net facility gain, and then is that when commercial agreements come? Like, what does that road map to commerciality look like?
00:15:08 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:15:08] S2: Can you break down that roadmap a little bit more? So we've got building a module, then building lots of modules, I think showcasing net facility gain, and then is that when commercial agreements come? Like, what does that road map to commerciality look like? [00:15:22] S0: Yeah. So I think taking a big step back and just looking at the fusion field Yeah. A couple of big milestones that matter on the way to commercial power. The first is scientific gain. Like, can you get more energy out of the fuel than went into the fuel? That was done in 2022 at the National Ignition Facility. The next big, big milestone for the field is can you build a fusion machine that produces net energy, so it produces more fusion energy than was stored in the system? That's what we're working to do in Albuquerque by 2030. And when you look at our milestone gated financing, it ties to the milestones associated with delivering that product, and we can talk about what some of those are. Then once you've done that, the question is, okay. Can you harness that fusion energy to boil water, turn a turbine, and deliver power to a customer? That's the final step toward commercialization. So for us, we're working to deliver net facility gain by 2030, first power plant by the mid twenty thirties, and a lot of the milestones along the way relate to demonstrating that the core components of those systems work as expected so that by the time we've built the full thing, we can be confident that it will work.