00:46:41 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:46:41] S1: My chief of staff is laughing over here because she knows what war... What wartime looks like. Yeah. I mean, I I think, like, to some extent, you have to you have to keep you have to keep cool and gather information. Like, it sounds super boring, but, like, I try to understand the total information state as precisely as I possibly can. I really, you know, really hate people who do not tell you what is going on in extreme detail. I hate generalities. Know, people know this about me, like, I do not want a generic answer to any question. I want the most precise answer that you can possibly give. And if that takes you thirty seconds to give me an answer to a one word question, that's okay. That's probably like one of the... That's not the only fireable offense, but it's one of the only fireable offenses of working with me is like giving non precise answers. If you don't have the detail, that's also a detail that I need. Right? It's like, I ask a question and you give a detail, or you say, I actually don't know the answer to that question. And so then we go together to ask a person, and we follow that chain all the way down to what the actual root truth is. I have a friend, Josh Steinmann, who actually today was... Now you'll know when we're recording this, but today was appointed to the Department of War's board of technologists. I don't remember the exact acronym. Great guy. And he likes to say nothing in the world takes more than fifteen minutes, it's just who's fifteen minutes. Awesome, awesome line, and this is really true about diagnosing problems, like there is somebody in the world who knows the problem and who knows what's wrong, and it will probably take fifteen minutes to fix, but you have to know who it is, and you have to be relentless in finding out who it is and getting to them. Know, going to war for us means like spending an inordinate amount of time getting to know the actual truth of the situation to the ground level of reality. And then, honestly, like, once you know the situation, you know what you have to what you have to do, like, it is being willing to do unreasonable things. We have done some unreasonable things on this site in the last couple of months.
00:49:02 · Ty Morse
[00:49:02] S0: What are the best examples?
00:49:03 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:49:03] S1: One example, you know, that I'll give is to credit my nuclear review team here, my nuclear licensing team. You know, this is a hard thing to do, like, going from a patch of dirt in September to a nuclear plant ready to make power sitting here in July is an enormous challenge, and it's and it's especially big because we actually have power operations that we're planning for here, and it's not a DOE. It didn't start as a DOE site, and so there's all these layers of complexity that have to come through. And a couple months ago, we realized that, know, again, I think it was like in a stand up, we started asking like, okay, what's critical back to this, what's critical back to that, and we started to realize that there's this area of our licensing process like nobody really had a good understanding of. And so we started to pull on that thread and pull on that thread, and within about an hour, we realized that there was a huge gaping hole in our our work product that was imminently due in order to stay on timeline. And so we called a war room. There is a a trailer just over there. So if you walk, like, 200 feet that way, there's, like, a construction trailer. And we said, clear out the trailer, set up chairs, set up a screen, and call in everybody who is not working on hardware critical path, people who have nothing to do with the nuclear operation, people who, you know, have nothing to do with engineering, people who are working in accounting, our photographer, like literally everybody, we are all going to sit in this room and we are just not going to stop working on this problem and asking the question of how do we solve the next problem until it is done. And the people who have no context on the plant, they're not gonna be able to answer the technical questions, they're gonna be able to coordinate, right, and they're going to be able to say, has this question been answered, have we really understood what the regulation is saying here, Can we find somebody who knows the answer to that question? And it was over a weekend. I made this call on a... I think it was a Friday morning, and the war room wrapped up on a Tuesday morning. So, yeah, it's it's a maniacal search of truth and then being willing to do unreasonable things to fix problems.
00:51:20 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:51:20] S0: This morning we were driving in your car and I was kind of talking with you about like urgency and timelines and being maniacally urgent. And I really believe that if you look at someone like Elon, he's effectively this injector of urgency in all of his companies. He like unfucks bottlenecks and injects urgency. [00:51:39] S1: Yep. [00:51:40] S0: So with this sort of thing, how are you thinking about like, injecting as much urgency as possible Yeah. In the right places?
00:51:47 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:51:47] S1: Yeah. Elon is, like, probably the greatest to ever do this. Right? Like, he he gets... He injects urgency into things that are not even his. Right? Like, when he just sort of gets into an industry or gets into an area, things just start moving faster because he's able to just, like, show people that you can move faster. I think that's one of the most useful talents in the world and one of the most useful skills in the world. Because the fact is, if you boil down the work of any project in every company, if you could attack every single one of those tasks, right, imagine this, you could list out every single piece of work that has to get done in order to go to the moon, let's say. And you could list those out, and you could attack each one with fresh urgency and fresh energy. You could compress timelines to a degree that I don't think most people really know or understand. Right? And so the goal is how do you, like, do you build an organization that does that naturally? And I think there's a certain extent to which no organization will do that perfectly, but honestly, it's just a lot of what we hire for, and it's a lot of, like, why people join Valar. Like, lot of people join Valar because they've been... They've they've loved nuclear for a long time. They think that nuclear is the right way to re industrialize The United States. They think that it's the only way that we're going to, you know, be able to get cheap power back in The US. Maybe they're doing it because they want to stop carbon emissions from continuing to raise the PPM level and they care about climate change, whatever the reason is for joining the company, they know that Valar is the place that they will be able to run as fast as they can, and that they'll be surrounded by people who are trying to move as fast as they can. This is one of the, I think, the least replicable and hardest to change aspects of a company's culture. You can fix many different things about a company culture, you can make the marketing better, you can even increase the talent of the engineering team, you can fix your finances, you can make your FP and A processes better. But pace is, I think, one of the only things that you can't change about a company, and or at least let's say that you can't improve about a company. You can certainly make it worse. You can take a high paced company and make it slow.
00:54:04 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
It's very, very hard to make a slow moving company fast. I would argue nine times out of 10, it's easier to start a whole new company than to try to take a slow moving company and make it fast. So it's just, you know, it's something that we take extraordinarily seriously. It's something that we hire for. It's a reason that people come to us. [00:54:24] S0: Is there anything specific on the kind of company level that enables the team to be designed in a way where they can, you know, move with extreme urgency and speed?