00:01:03 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:01:03] S1: And it was undirected research. [00:01:04] S0: Yeah, just do what you want. And there's many technical innovations that come from it. For example, anyone who's... I studied math in college, and one of the tests from that is the student's t test. This is a, how do you derive either the standard deviation if you know the mean or the mean if you know the standard deviation from a small sample, less than 30. This was a problem in Guinness because you know, one to, of the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness is amount of lipids or fats in hops. So they were having to take up like hundreds of hops to see, you know, is this a high quality batch or not? And they were losing a few percent per batch, and that means a lot when you're in the high volume, low margin food and beverage industry. So William C. Legosta had to publish under a pseudonym, the student. He publish his research that he was doing with Fisher, famously another famous statistician at the time, the early... About the 1920s. He published in the first journal of Mathematica, which is now a very famous mathematics journal, this innovation, this breakthrough he'd found of how to do small sample statistics, and that's why it's called the students' t test still to this day because they didn't want Hannaheuser Busch or Heineken or other people to know that they were hiring these researchers to, like, solve problems for them. [00:02:21] S1: Oh, so not associate the advance with
00:02:21 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:02:21] S1: Oh, so not associate the advance with [00:02:22] S0: Ginnett? Exactly. That's right. Didn't want their competitors to know. Yes. So they're getting better margins, so loads of innovation. There was a project, Project Acorns. Acorns standing for advanced cans of rich nectar, which was the basically how do we put can... How do we make a Guinness at home version. It was the eighties. People were starting to drink less and drink more at home. Price of... The price of a pint was going from a pound to a pound 50. People were up in arms, so they're drinking at home. So they're like, how do we do these things at homes? Initially, the project was called Project Dynamite, but as you'd imagine, in the nineteen eighties, shipping parcels with the word dynamite on it between London and Dublin would have caused some concern. [00:02:58] S1: They got confused all the other parcels. [00:03:00] S0: Yeah. So they stopped labeling the Project Dynamite, renoted Project Acorn, and they developed the widget. And the widget was voted above... Did you know it was voted above the Internet in the 1990s top 100 inventions of the twentieth century? Marketing is another place where Guinness was [00:03:19] S1: really... Know, the Guinness... The Nigeria thing. [00:03:21] S0: Nigeria, the movie... The film industry in Nigeria. Yeah. [00:03:24] S1: They produced, like, the Genius Bond of Nigeria, that's why... Like, people know Guinness is very popular in Nigeria. It's one of the top markets, but it's because they just, like, made a movie where... Well, I guess it was Guinness... The Top
00:03:24 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:03:24] S1: They produced, like, the Genius Bond of Nigeria, that's why... Like, people know Guinness is very popular in Nigeria. It's one of the top markets, but it's because they just, like, made a movie where... Well, I guess it was Guinness... The Top [00:03:34] S0: market, actually. [00:03:35] S1: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The number one was, like, Guinness, Top was was it part of the movie or something? Yeah. It was... [00:03:39] S0: Yeah. But the marketing, I think, really one of the areas where Guinness was most standout. I think Guinness is good for you is this iconic And the Toucan... No. Somewhere. Nah. There's one up there. Yeah. The Toucan as well, the iconic Guinness, Toucan Bird, and they've won more Cannes Lion advertising awards than nearly any other company. Really? Haven't given this quality time to my phone stuff. [00:04:02] S2: I'm just curious. I'm just very passionate about Did you start it as... Because you're an entrepreneur and a founder and you're looking for examples of innovation, and there happened to be one in backyard? Or is it... [00:04:12] S0: Yeah. I think so.... [00:04:13] S2: As much in the pubs as I did, and... [00:04:15] S0: I think it was both. I think it was both. I think it was like... This is a... I felt like it was... I just thought it was... It's very underrated company. These are the seven Cs of Guinness quality standards. So this is like a PDF that I [00:04:31] S1: have pre Is it a PDF that they make for bars
00:04:31 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:04:31] S1: have pre Is it a PDF that they make for bars [00:04:33] S0: or something? Yeah, exactly. Have the seven... Okay. Quality standards, right? Crafted presentation, consistent freshness, counter visibility, correct gas, correct temperature, clean lines, clean glassware. So they're the things you need else in this huge area. [00:04:50] S1: They're a good system. [00:04:50] S0: Yeah. That's a lot of life advice, honestly. [00:04:52] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. [00:04:53] S0: Just keep clean mind. I think so. Glassware. Think for me, you know, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's an entrepreneur. My mom had her own business. Both my granddads, you know, one ran a pub. The other one was a farmer and had a few other businesses, and a very classic Irish story. But I always grew up in a world of commerce and business, and my mom has like... And dad have siblings, and none of the none of the men anyway, at least, or the Murphys or Brains work for anybody else. They're all like... Yeah. They're all like entrepreneurial, disagreeable. So I grew up in a household where business was the talk of the table. Like, It was revered, so I've just always been appreciators of good businesses, and it was so cool to meet a bit... I've always revered technology revered companies like Stripe and others and whatever, but to see one that's you know, homegrown like this and... But that I don't think anybody really talks about was really, like, cool and exciting.
00:04:53 · Will O'Brien, John Collison, Chris Sacca
[00:04:53] S0: Just keep clean mind. I think so. Glassware. Think for me, you know, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's an entrepreneur. My mom had her own business. Both my granddads, you know, one ran a pub. The other one was a farmer and had a few other businesses, and a very classic Irish story. But I always grew up in a world of commerce and business, and my mom has like... And dad have siblings, and none of the none of the men anyway, at least, or the Murphys or Brains work for anybody else. They're all like... Yeah. They're all like entrepreneurial, disagreeable. So I grew up in a household where business was the talk of the table. Like, It was revered, so I've just always been appreciators of good businesses, and it was so cool to meet a bit... I've always revered technology revered companies like Stripe and others and whatever, but to see one that's you know, homegrown like this and... But that I don't think anybody really talks about was really, like, cool and exciting. [00:05:42] S1: So speaking of entrepreneurship, I wanna we get do have to, at some point, get to you today. But I do need another Guinness. I I will note that it's twenty minutes in. I'm just belying Irish shirt out. [00:05:51] S0: You can [00:05:51] S1: pour these ones and see [00:05:52] S2: how Absolutely you alright. [00:05:53] S0: Thanks, Chris. Wow, value add. [00:05:57] S2: What a You value add guys get started talking about this company. I'm only here for one reason. [00:06:03] S0: So, [00:06:05] S1: yeah, what does Ulysses actually do?
00:06:05 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:06:05] S1: yeah, what does Ulysses actually do? [00:06:07] S0: We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. That's the simple one liner. I think, you know, we started the company three years ago under this general observation that it was very clear three years ago that autonomous systems, robotics were going to do an increasing share of the world's GDP, increasing share of the kind of critical work, and myself and my co founders were looking at potential domains to deploy robotic systems, and, you know, after kind of a cursory look at air, land, sea, sea became very interesting, and then, you know, looking out, you know, surface, undersea, undersea became very, very interesting. We could quickly identify a lot of very interesting jobs that frankly were not being done underwater or not being done enough scale or were not formal enough to do, so the idea for building underwater robots kind of came from that. [00:06:59] S1: You started with seagrass, right? Maybe describe why you started with seagrass and how you ended up pivoting to the robots.