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.
00:06:59 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[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. [00:07:05] S0: Yes. So, you know, the first... I mean, the first... When we started looking at, again, tasks that robots could do, that captivated us initially was just like this kind of... There's a whole spectrum of ocean conservation related tasks. One of my co founders was on... He was on a surf trip. He met a marine biologist, and she described her job, and her job was taking photos underwater. It was planting seeds. It was gathering water samples, all these like super manual tasks, and he'd been building like aerial drones for food delivery with MATA, and was like, I'm sure you could build like an underwater equivalent of like one of these aerial drones. You're going to do these sorts of tasks. So that's kind of what led us to... [00:07:47] S1: And what were the tasks? [00:07:48] S0: The task initially was the kind of full spectrum of ecosystem restoration, which was map the seabed, understand what's down there, then collect the seeds wherever their seeds are. We were looking at flowering plants at the time, seagrasses. Yeah. Then... And then take them and then plant them in areas that need to be restored. [00:08:08] S1: Adam, what causes... [00:08:09] S0: Really, really quick. [00:08:10] S2: I have to say, I used your one pole method. [00:08:13] S1: Oh, interesting. [00:08:14] S2: And I I hate to concede there's no appreciable difference between pints, but nothing sacred anymore. No, no. See. Yeah,
00:08:14 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:08:14] S2: And I I hate to concede there's no appreciable difference between pints, but nothing sacred anymore. No, no. See. Yeah, [00:08:21] S0: yeah. It's the ceremony. [00:08:22] S1: Is the one shot. The [00:08:25] S2: The one shot. [00:08:29] S1: So with seagrass, why does it need to be restored, period? Like, what's going on in the oceans? [00:08:34] S0: So a few reasons. If you take kind of current projections for maybe how fish stocks are going to do, Kind of in and around the 2040s, many of the kind of critical fish stocks in the ocean could just be totally wiped out. Basically, the population curves are not really looking good for many fish species. It's like billions of people rely on it as their primary source of protein or income every day. [00:08:59] S1: Overfishing in general. [00:09:01] S0: Overfishing, yes, and a big driver is also habitat loss. You have a lot of factors driving it, and basically the rate at which we restore these ecosystems is you know, 100 to a thousand times less the rate we lose them. [00:09:12] S1: Okay. So it's important to restore the seagrass. Yeah. And we've lost a lot of it. And you started with that as part of the need to restore the seagrass, ended up making underwater robots. Yeah. Which is how you got into underwater robot space?
00:09:26 · Will O'Brien
[00:09:26] S0: Yes, I mean, you know, we started solving the seagrass problem, but very quickly into solving that problem, like, was very clear, wow, there's a lot of other similarly shaped problems in the ocean. From first principles, if you want to build the ocean robot company, right, you need a few things. You need full x y z access on the ocean as a domain. Okay, so to do that you need a surface craft because there's less drag on the surface, so that's where you should be doing most of your transit, and then you drop an underwater vehicle to go down. So we developed this autonomous surface vehicle called a Vaithin, 2,000 nautical mile range, and that goes and drops the kids off to school, so to speak, to go do what they want, and underwater vehicle then is called Mako. It's launched into the water. That goes and finds the location where it needs to do the job. It goes scan something or robotically manipulate something, and then it gets... Leviathan will say, come home, and it goes in, and then that's the end of the mission. The state of underwater vehicles before we started building Mako were primarily to gather data and not to do robotics. The vehicle looks a lot different if you want to build something that can physically manipulate underwater, so there was a few design decisions we had to make there. Also, our underwater vehicle, you know, we wanted to build one kind of general purpose form factor that could solve a lot of different problems, so there was some pretty clear design decisions that we made at the start where our underwater vehicle Mako is made of these kind of Lego building blocks that make it up. So if you want to add, let's say, an extra 150 nautical miles of endurance and range, you just add extra battery packs because we knew some people would want that. Other people would want the vehicle to go faster, so you have a different rear thrust module. Some people want to take images underwater, so we have stereo cameras that can give you three d imaging. Some people want sonar, you know, bathymetric maps, so we have, like, a sonar front module.
00:11:18 · Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
So, yeah, there was a few very deliberate early design decisions which enabled us then when the US Navy comes knocking and says, hey, we've got some problems you'd like us to work on, or offshore energy companies that, Oh, well, because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, it was very easy for us to adapt. [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.
00:11:37 · 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.