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?
00:54:34 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:54:34] S1: Yeah. So one of these things, again, we we have custom software for this, actually, that we've designed around giving the entire company visibility into what is the most important work at any given time. We have a screen up in our office that shows in big red letters what is the most important work in the company at every given time. Now, of course, all the work in in the company is important. This is, I think, one of one of the reasons that companies don't like talking about the critical path. They they fear that if you're always talking about the critical path, then all the other work will will get undone and people won't think it's as important. And, actually, the critical path changes so much that, like, that's not a big deal because people will be like, okay. Maybe I'm not critical path today, but I probably will be tomorrow because that team is gonna go fix that problem. They're gonna figure out how to move faster. So that's one big thing. The other thing is like we just culturally talk about it constantly. And I like to do this by thinking about the future state that I care about. Right? I want Valar to be in a position where we are turning on nuclear reactors every hour. Right? So I wanna turn on 24 reactors a day. And if I'm going to turn on 24 reactors a day, what needs to be true for that to happen, and what's stopping us? Right? And if you think about it that way, it starts to become clear what's stopping us. Right? Well, what's stopping us is like, we don't even know how to turn on one. Like, oh, okay, well, how do we turn on one? Well, we don't have a site. Okay, well we need to get a site. Right? We don't have a, you know, a reactor standing there in thermal testing. Okay, well we need to get a reactor in thermal testing as fast as we can. Well you need to get a reactor in thermal testing, well, I mean the hardest part of that's probably gonna be the circulation system and the pressure system and the control rod drive units. So we should probably go get that system designed and in fabrication as fast as we possibly can. Oh, the machine shops in LA take too long to go and make these parts? Well, you better have a $2,500,000 machine shop standing there in a month. Right? Okay. So there's the critical path to, you know, where we were about eighteen months ago. So, yeah, and like, a a huge part of this is it really is cultural.
00:56:39 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
The whole the whole team and the whole company has to think this way all the time, and it's very uncomfortable. It's weird to think this way. You wanna just think in in your own box. You wanna think in waterfalls, but you have to think holistically. Everyone has to think about the whole company and what is going to make us move the fastest. [00:56:57] S0: Initially, you were going to go to The Philippines and build some reactor out there, and then suddenly Trump gets elected, bring nuclear back to America. And then at the same time, data centers absolutely start ripping and AI takes off. What was it like kind of going through that transition inside the company? And how did you kind of like reset your own North Star in order to make sure that it was aligned?
00:57:19 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:57:19] S1: Yeah. I don't think we reset the North Star. The North Star is make energy 10 times cheaper. And The Philippines was originally the right place to go about that. And when these executive orders came out, the Department of Energy said, you know, we're open for business and we're gonna do this in a year, and that became the very obvious thing to do, and honestly, in a day we went from The Philippines is the plan to we're going to Utah. And, you know, it's just a huge credit to the team that they can roll like that because the... Again, because the North Star didn't change. Right? Because the North Star has always been we need to turn a reactor on and we need hardware experience and we need to get under pressure and we need to get at temperature and we need to be splitting atoms and we need to be making shielding and doing nuclear construction and all of these things, and so what's the fastest way to do that? That's always been the plan, and so when the conditions on the ground change, the team needs to know that you have to be able to pivot and move into whatever avenue is going to accomplish the goal the fastest. I'm sure things are gonna pivot in all sorts of unexpected ways for us right now. Right? But we will continue relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10 times cheaper.
00:58:32 · Ty Morse
[00:58:32] S0: The first time that I met you, I think I woke up. I was sleeping on top of, you know, Augustus' lab at Rainmaker. I woke up. I take off my sleep mask, and I see you walking across the floor on the phone hustling. And I'm like, this guy's crazy. And I went back to sleep, and then I woke up a little bit later, and suddenly you were going the other direction also on the phone. And I just remember that version of Isaiah, and you haven't honestly changed that much. You're still getting after it. But what has changed over the course of the last two and a half years? How has Isaiah evolved?