00:11:37 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:11:37] S2: Can we dig into that for a second? Sure. Because, like, a few things. First of all, just for all the geeks, I'd love to hear why Seagrass and, like, how it compares as a as a carbon sequester compared to everything else out there. [00:11:52] S0: Yeah. Seagrass is, you know, it's like your rapper's favorite rapper or something like that. It's the most slept on plant, I think, out there. It's zero attention. Carl is the very good looking friend or something like that that gets all the attention, but Seagrass is really who you should be talking to. Carl gets a lot of the funding, and seagrass is really this unsung hero of the ocean. It covers 2% of the sea floor but holds 20% of the ocean's carbon. It is the ocean being the world's largest natural carbon sink anyway, so it's very important in that regard. About 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on seagrasses as a habitat, so just very important. Brain sporent species doesn't really get that much attention. It grows up and down the coastlines of Ireland, The UK, here in California, actually the same species in Ireland down to California, on the East Coast, in Australia. So, yeah, we're working across... We've got projects in Virginia, in Southern Florida, in California now, in Sausalito, and a few other locations, also in [00:12:55] S1: Well, Great Barrier Reef you started the company to do seagrass restoration, and you're now mostly focused on the robot. You haven't left seagrass because you're now working on seagrass project.
00:12:55 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:12:55] S1: Well, Great Barrier Reef you started the company to do seagrass restoration, and you're now mostly focused on the robot. You haven't left seagrass because you're now working on seagrass project. [00:13:04] S0: Yeah. Fundamentally, the tech platform we're building, again, because we made these early design decisions, mean that... Well, you build the technology once that does the seagrass restoration, and scaling that business is more of an operational problem. There's not any net new R and D we have to do to serve new contracts in that. We've already built the underlying IP. It's just like, do you have enough operators that can go in the field and operate it? And the core platform of under vehicle sensing stack, nav stack, autonomy, and surface vehicle is something that can then go off and work with the folks in the energy sector or... [00:13:40] S1: What do you have to do to restore seagrass? You have to collect this.
00:13:40 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:13:40] S1: What do you have to do to restore seagrass? You have to collect this. [00:13:44] S0: First of all, you have to understand where to restore. You have to map and understand where is there seagrass, where is there not. On top of that, then you'd run a pretty rudimentary model called a habitat suitability model to say, well, based on the depth and the water clarity and these other features, we think these areas would be good for restoration. Then you identify where are the plants flowering and producing seeds, and you go and collect the seeds, and can see videos of this on the OCs Twitter account. We just posted, like, a seed collection video just like yesterday. And then you bring the seeds then to the locations that need seeds, that you've identified in the Hubdot suitability model, and then you drop... You deposit them there. And then
00:13:44 · Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:13:44] S0: First of all, you have to understand where to restore. You have to map and understand where is there seagrass, where is there not. On top of that, then you'd run a pretty rudimentary model called a habitat suitability model to say, well, based on the depth and the water clarity and these other features, we think these areas would be good for restoration. Then you identify where are the plants flowering and producing seeds, and you go and collect the seeds, and can see videos of this on the OCs Twitter account. We just posted, like, a seed collection video just like yesterday. And then you bring the seeds then to the locations that need seeds, that you've identified in the Hubdot suitability model, and then you drop... You deposit them there. And then [00:14:30] S2: all going well. I want to dive into that a little bit because... Sorry. As Lower Carbon Capital, our firm has been involved with you since before the pre seed. First of pre seed, And so we should talk about that later and all the hustle that made that happen. But I can say with confidence that you've had from the beginning the vision of how do we build the universal thing, make it extensible to all of these applications, both interventions and the data you're gathering, has been literally in the original presentation. But how do you choose Seagrass initially? And I'm curious, how much of that was mission driven? How much of that is caring about the climate? How much of that is who you can recruit initially? And how much of it is like that's where the money was for the first contracts?
00:15:19 · Will O'Brien
[00:15:19] S0: I think it's probably like, you know, some combination of all of them, but I think it was very much just like a passion thing, you know, to begin with. Like, I grew up by the seaside. Had very much... My mom would just put me in a wetsuit and send me down to the beach, that was my babysitter in the summers. I'm very much a very pro growth environmentalist and a very eco pragmatist is maybe how I'd describe myself. A beautiful flourishing future for humanity has an economy that's consistently growing and a biosphere that supports that consistently growing economy, and carbon removal is one of those core technologies that I think enables that along with clean energy and other things. Then, yeah, just the ocean as this frontier, as a very true frontier. We've mapped more of the surface of Mars than we have the depths of our ocean. When I heard that and meditated on that a little bit more, I was like, God, this is crazy, right? Like, there is there is, like, a there is a part of Earth that over 75% of it, have no eyes on and have no clue really what's down there. And, like, you know, less than maybe a 100 people are thinking about this and working this on a daily basis. Like, for how long was all of, like, Western civilization focused on exploration? And now, like, okay, we're doing space. We have this whole other frontier here, and you're telling me, there's a fraction of people actually working on this day to day. I was like, this is crazy. This is insane that like... And put the money aside, you know, and just think like humans need to explore and discover and learn.
00:16:52 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:16:52] S1: And part part of your thesis is, if I understand this, just like SpaceX, you know, if you lower the cost to orbit, then there's other things you can do. You can do Starlink if you can get things up into orbit cheaply. Similarly, you believe that you can unlock new technologies if you lower the cost of doing things in the ocean. [00:17:10] S0: Yes. I think there's this very generalizable framework for how frontiers get developed. The American West is a good example of this. It's like you have this exploratory period where people go there and go back, and they typically go there and go back for some kind of very high value reason where the cost of going there is justified because you're recovering fur or you're getting pelts or something like that. [00:17:36] S1: There's a single high value initial use case. In And