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.
00:06:23 · JC Lozano
[00:06:23] S1: So we all went to Stanford together, knew each other there, were friends there, stayed in touch afterwards, and then we're always like... You know, our careers went in different directions. So Baker is on the finance side of things, so he went into basically like energy investment. So he worked at a couple of like nontraditional energy investment types of firms as well as some like more name name brand firms. Turner went to Tesla for a while where he started first on kind of like the battery supply chain side of things, on actually the cathode side of things, and then eventually kept moving upstream. And then I went the traditional, you know, Silicon Valley startup route. So I was... Started a company that did three d mapping of indoor spaces, and then did an AI developer tools company, and then eventually ended up at a buy now, pay later company called The Firm. But we'd always stayed in touch. Like, were always, like, looking for a way to collaborate and a way to, like, do something together. So we stayed in touch. Always we're just kinda, bouncing ideas around. And then eventually, we're like, oh, wow. Like, this is actually... Because the problem is you have to, if you're gonna work with when you're looking for your co founders, right, like you wanna find people that are, you know, you get along well with Right. That you have like a super high degree of trust in Mhmm. Which is obviously really, really critical. Mhmm. But then you also need to find something that is like at the intersection of all those skill sets. Right. And so if you think about it like physical industries, finance, and then software and machine learning, like there's not that many things that are kind of in that like intersection of those those three sets. And so this ended up being one of the ones that was very obviously where like, wow, this is really exciting. We're super passionate about this. We're really excited about the energy the energy transition. Mhmm. And it's just turned out to be a great fit for all of our backgrounds. And so we're like, we absolutely have to do this. So you
00:07:59 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:07:59] S0: got three n of one people, including yourself in different industries. You prestige maxed, obviously, with the Stanford University. Like, where did you go, like, to find the VC? Were you just like, hey. We wanna buy a mine. Let's go around Silicon Valley. Like... [00:08:12] S1: Well, we didn't start with... We we didn't tell anybody we were gonna buy a mine [00:08:15] S0: eventually. [00:08:15] S1: Right? Like we're [00:08:16] S0: How did it start, though? Tell tell me. Give me the secret. [00:08:19] S1: Simpler. No. No. No. So the the first project we have, which is under construction right now, is a lithium refinery in East Texas. Mhmm. And so felt like we had an inside track there. We felt like we, like, were ahead of the market on sort of extracting lithium from oil and gas wastewater. Mhmm. [00:08:33] S0: It's a [00:08:34] S1: fairly simple process, but the point is is that we felt like we had, like, an angle there where we're like, okay. This is our first project. We can, like... We have a route to getting our first contract. Like, let's go do that. And then we always knew we were gonna expand into mining, but then you have to, like, go and find the mine. Right? But we also need to build a bunch of facilities. We need to build the team, like, all that stuff. And so [00:08:55] S0: who did we... We talked to a [00:08:56] S1: bunch of venture capitalists. I mean, was like a... Like,
00:08:56 · JC Lozano, Ryan Deng
[00:08:56] S1: bunch of venture capitalists. I mean, was like a... Like, [00:09:00] S0: where you just cold... Because like for me, like, I'm I'm out here like cold emailing VCs. And they're not responding. Right? So Yeah. What what were the secret sauce there in the beginning? [00:09:08] S1: So I think we got lucky. Like, I've been doing startups for my entire career. So like I had some folks to talk to. Turner had some folks to talk to. Baker had some folks to talk to. And so we were like, got lucky in the sense that like all three of us have always been like super active in this. I wouldn't say active in the VC communities, but, like, you know, we, like, have good friends and, like, we're just fond of our way through, if that makes sense. Yeah. And I think I'm I'm trying... Like, breakthrough was the original first check. Uh-huh. [00:09:35] S0: And What was that moment like for you when you raised for this company? Did you know that it was gonna be this big?
00:09:35 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:09:35] S0: And What was that moment like for you when you raised for this company? Did you know that it was gonna be this big? [00:09:42] S1: That's a good question. So I guess, yes. Mhmm. That was always the belief. Yeah. It was definitely exciting to get the first check. Then it's like pretty stressful, right? Because there's like a lot of negotiation gets into it. Did you get good terms though, hopefully? I feel good about them, yeah, given the state of Love where we're at now. Okay. But no, it's just like it's The thing that we were super excited about, right, is like, it's rare that you get to work with people you really respect, that you have a close relationship with, that you have a high degree of trust with. And then you get to work on super meaningful problems, like things that actually matter. Mhmm. And so that was just, I think once the three of us realized, like, oh, there's an opportunity here, we already knew we got along really well, we already knew we trusted each other, it was just like, okay, gotta go for this. And at that point, you're just like, you know, you're doing everything you can to like make it work, but I think like the... Yeah. Like, I wouldn't say... It's happening really fast, which is awesome. Yeah. I would say we're like a year of where... Yeah. Maybe like six months ahead of where I thought we'd be. But like the plan was always to move at as fast as humanly possible to do this and and make it as big as possible [00:10:53] S0: for sure. So a 16 z series a Yes. Kochla series b
00:10:53 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:10:53] S0: for sure. So a 16 z series a Yes. Kochla series b [00:10:58] S1: Yes. Was the future Well, Kochla is also one of our seed investors. [00:11:01] S0: Oh, wow. So they they doubled down. [00:11:02] S1: They did double It's [00:11:03] S0: a great signal. High signal. There we go. Let's go. Okay. What does the future of the company look like in ten years? Right? Are you gonna have these Yeah. Minds autonomously running? Like, humans in the loop. Kalanick is looking at something similar with Adams. [00:11:18] S1: He is. Yeah. [00:11:19] S0: How are you guys? Competitors, what does that look like? What does that landscape look like? [00:11:23] S1: That's a good question. So in ten years... So our, like, our our kind of, like, credo is, like, 10 projects in ten years. So we wanna build 10, like, large scale [00:11:30] S0: Mhmm. [00:11:30] S1: Mining projects in the next Well, 10 the next eight years. We've got two, and we'll, know, have a couple more following very quickly here. Mhmm. And so, you know, we wanna build, you know, the next generational mining company Wow. Fundamentally. And so in ten years, we're gonna be well on our way to doing that. We'll have 10 projects. So, you know, they're increasing in size. The first project is like a $100,000,000 in CapEx. The next one is about $250,000,000 in CapEx. There's some other stuff going on as well. Then we've got like, you know, we're just gonna keep moving up orders of magnitude in terms of the size of the projects, the size of the impact.