00:00:15 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:00:15] S0: Juan, welcome on the show. The audiences that don't know who you are, let's just talk a little bit about Mariana Minerals just for a quick second. You guys are backed by some pretty cool people. You guys have raised $400,000,000. How does that feel? [00:00:30] S1: It's a lot of work. [00:00:31] S0: You're backed by some premier VC such as Kochla Ventures, a sixteen z, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Green Oaks, BHP Ventures, PAX Ventures, Halo Fund, Stepstone Group, Washington Harbor Partners, Graycroft, General Innovation Capital Partners, the CIA's Venture Fund, Earthshot Ventures, and Mudu... I'm a butcher. You gotta say Mitsubishi? [00:00:54] S1: Is it Mitsubishi? Mitsubishi. [00:00:58] S0: My apologies to the Japanese people. My bad. They make cars too. Oh, well, we drive Honda. That's also Japanese. Alright. Tell me a little bit more about what you guys do. You know, you're kind of in this mysterious phase where Are we you raise a lot of money, but I've never I've never heard of you guys before. What do you guys do? [00:01:17] S1: Okay. We're a mining company. [00:01:18] S0: Yeah. [00:01:19] S1: Okay. So, yeah, we're we're a vertically integrated software first Mhmm. Metals and minerals mining company. So we are here to bring metals to market. So our product is ultimately copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum, manganese, a bunch of stuff, all finished metals that are sold directly to... Into the supply chain. [00:01:38] S0: Oh, okay. And do you guys actually build any physical hardware or is it just software?
00:01:38 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:01:38] S0: Oh, okay. And do you guys actually build any physical hardware or is it just software? [00:01:42] S1: Well, so we own and operate the mines. Right? We like build the facilities, the refineries, we dig the dirt. We're a mining company. [00:01:50] S0: Yeah. So fully end to end? [00:01:52] S1: Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We don't like build necessarily all the equipment or all the parts. Right? Like... But vertically integrated in the sense that we like own and operate the mines and then mine the material, refine the material, and then sell it into the market. [00:02:04] S0: What does that process look like? Because I can imagine how difficult it would be to secure a mine, let alone run it, and then agentify it, right, with some solution, right? Yeah. You know, I have a lot of friends in YC that are doing vertical b to b SaaS, but vertical mines sounds a little bit more complex. What does
00:02:22 · JC Lozano, Ryan Deng
[00:02:22] S1: that Believe it or not, like buying a mine is actually not very difficult. Really? Yeah. You can you can just go and buy them. Mhmm. Yeah. So... No. You can... Like, we, you know, we started the company two years ago. Mhmm. Been doing a lot since then. Just closed our series b, which is what you're referring to Mhmm. When a bunch of those folks came on to the cap table. But no, we started it two years ago with the goal of kind of two real reasons, you know, like, at the end of the day, if you think about the modern economy, it's like powered up metals. Right? Right. And so our goal with the company is, you know, in order to fuel things like robotics, energy transition, defense tech, basically anything in the modern world, right, is a lot of metals. And our thesis, which continues to to bear evidence to being true, is that, like, the existing mining companies are just not ready for that wave of demand that keeps coming. And so whether it's, like, fueling the energy transition with lithium for batteries Mhmm. It's building or mining copper Right. That goes into conductors, that are used in data centers, that are used in basically anything electrical, like all that. You know, we're of the belief that keeps, like, being true that, like, basically, there's there's gonna be a ton of demand coming down the pipe. Right. And so we need just a new way to mine fundamentally. And so a new way to mine and refine all these metals. So [00:03:47] S0: Yeah. Part of this, like, American Dainism wave, sort of industrialization Mhmm. Industrialization country. Right? Yes.
00:03:47 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:03:47] S0: Yeah. Part of this, like, American Dainism wave, sort of industrialization Mhmm. Industrialization country. Right? Yes. [00:03:53] S1: So believe it or not, we were doing that before that started. Yeah. So we... Yeah. We started the company two years ago now, basically on this premise that we kind of saw this demand coming Mhmm. And, like, didn't believe that the minerals industry was ready for it. And so I think the, like, American dynamism kind of thing was was just getting started then as well. But no, like when we originally started it, we were like definitely looked at as pretty out there, [00:04:21] S0: let's say. So you're the OGs of the of the movement. Now everybody's on the wave. Right? Energy for data centers, you know, mining for robotics. You guys are kind of in there in the beginning. [00:04:31] S1: We were there early, which is awesome. So... Because it means like, you know, we started it November 2024. Wow. October 2024, something like that. [00:04:40] S0: So it's been two years now? [00:04:41] S1: Two [00:04:41] S0: years. Yeah. Two years, 400,000,000 later. Yeah. Correct. Crazy.
00:04:41 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:04:41] S0: years. Yeah. Two years, 400,000,000 later. Yeah. Correct. Crazy. [00:04:45] S1: Yeah. Two years, 400,000,000 later, $1,600,000,000 valuation, things are going well. But like what was cool is that because we had started it, when we were excited about it Yeah. We thought that like the the market was gonna move that way, it meant that we could build, like, a really, really good team. Right? So we were, like, in the perfect position to... As the market started to accelerate, like, we'd already built our core team out. Mhmm. We'd built out our initial facilities. We had our first project. We'd already started detailed... Our basic engineering on that first project. Like, so we're in a really good spot to basically, like, take advantage of of a lot of the the tailwinds that that we've seen over the last, like, year, year and a half, which has been great. Right? Like, the best time is, like, right before the market starts, like, exploding is when you wanna be in there because you can... You have access to a really good talent base. You can sort of build out your build out your team and build out your sort of, like, execution motion [00:05:34] S0: Mhmm. [00:05:34] S1: And then just, like, really start accelerating.
00:05:34 · JC Lozano, Ryan Deng
[00:05:34] S1: And then just, like, really start accelerating. [00:05:36] S0: I've always had this question for, like, founders that are building, you know, very ambitious projects. Right? Because I think most would agree that, like, software today is pretty commoditized. How did you guys get your first round of funding for this? Because to me, I've always been astonished by how people, especially in Silicon Valley and San Francisco... Right. Don't get me wrong. There's crazy ideas everywhere. Yeah. But just get funding and just buy a mine. What does that process look like? How did you get your first check? What do those conversations look like? Yeah. How did you find your cofounders? Like, what happened? What... Like, how? Like, November 2024, we're on the tail end of election year. Like, what what makes you say we're doing this, guys? [00:06:12] S1: So me and the other two cofounders, Baker and Turner, who's our CEO. Baker's who are our CFO. We've actually been friends since college. So we've known each other for too long now. Thirteen years. Stanford [00:06:23] S0: University. Yeah.