01:41:25 · Alex Hormozi, Josh Zoffer, John Coogan, Jordi Hays, John McElhone
[01:41:25] S3: Yeah. [01:41:25] S7: Is valuable and for all the reasons that we all know that the industrialization is important. [01:41:29] S0: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Actually, while the data center doesn't have that many people working inside of it, the supply chain is very deep and complex. So that makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. [01:41:40] S1: Yeah. Great to have you on, Josh. [01:41:41] S0: Have a great rest of your week. [01:41:42] S7: Thanks for having me, guys. [01:41:42] S0: Enjoy the We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Our next guest is John McElhone. Did I say that correctly? From American Turbines? You're close. McElhone. McElhone. To the show. How are you doing? First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company. [01:42:08] S5: My name is John McElhone. My company is called American Turbines. We build small turbines for rapid deploy energy generation. [01:42:17] S0: Okay. How small are we talking? How can I think about this? Help me help me place it in the in the world. How much energy is it generating? [01:42:25] S5: Yeah. So you could probably fit one in the back of your pickup truck. Few of them actually. [01:42:29] S1: I like that. [01:42:31] S3: Ours are
01:42:31 · Alex Hormozi, John McElhone, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:42:31] S3: Ours are [01:42:31] S5: about one megawatt in size, our first units. Yeah. And so you can think about a megawatt could probably power about just over a thousand homes Yeah. In the back of a pickup truck. So they're they're tiny, but, you know, they they they pack a big punch. They're they're quite power dense. [01:42:44] S0: Yeah. And then talk about the the the supply chain and the actual energy source. These run natural gas. What are the inputs to actually getting energy? [01:42:54] S5: Just natural gas. Okay. That's how we call American turbines because United States is very uniquely advantaged compared to the rest of the world. Best place in the world to use natural gas. We have such an amazing supply of it. Extremely cheap, and and we have a lot of resource that we haven't tapped yet. So this company just works well in The States. You know, it wouldn't work in Europe. It wouldn't work in Russia or China. It just works here. [01:43:17] S0: Yeah. So what does the team look like? What does the manufacturing look like? Are these, like, handmade at this point? I mean, it's a young company. Take us through a little bit of the history. I mean [01:43:25] S1: Handmade American turbine. [01:43:28] S0: I mean, I imagine that it's not fully lights out robotic factory yet, but maybe that's the vision in a few years. But where are you today? Yeah.
01:43:28 · John Coogan, John McElhone
[01:43:28] S0: I mean, I imagine that it's not fully lights out robotic factory yet, but maybe that's the vision in a few years. But where are you today? Yeah. [01:43:36] S5: We're pretty small. We're a small team. There's there's a few of us on board right now. We are hiring, so check out our website if you wanna roll. And but, yeah, we're right now, it's just handmade, but that the the goal here is really being able to make something you can mass manufacture. Like that's, that's the end goal. Everybody is more so worried about time to power. How quick can you get some energy generation in the grind? And the only way to really achieve that is figuring out automation at scale and how to make a product at scale. That's kind of where we've failed at turbines over the years as we've they're all kind of derived from aircraft and you have to kind of be stringent to the standards of the FAA and it has to be able to travel at 600 miles an hour. Sure. Sort of work background from back from these systems and understand how do we make this on the grind. Mhmm. But what we're trying to work out is, like, the opposite way. Like, just make it for the grind. Make something very simple. It doesn't have to be efficient. Doesn't have to last forever. You don't have to run this at 600 miles an hour, 30,000 feet in the air. And the problem that you're really solving is is really just energy generation at scale. [01:44:32] S0: Can you sorry, Jordy. Please.
01:44:32 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, John McElhone
[01:44:32] S0: Can you sorry, Jordy. Please. [01:44:34] S1: What what were you doing before this? How did you how did you kind of end up in in this category? And and what was the backstory on becoming a Teal fellow? [01:44:45] S5: What do I do before this? I did a company called CropSafe. We built farm tech software, you know, of all things. It's quite the pivot, I must say. But quite different and kind of how I fell into American Turbines and why I'm doing this now is, you know, I finished up that last company and I realized that all my free time I just spent, you know, mechanic and stuff. All the cars I've worked on and or have owned over the years have just been seventies cars. And they're very mechanical machines. My dad's a mechanic. Spent a lot of time working with him. Few plane I flew planes pretty young as a kid, so I'm quite familiar with how the turbine works, how it put together, what people we need to hire to make it happen. And so I figured, you know, my next company should be something that is fun and exciting and cool, I can scale, and I can work with hardware. Mhmm. And I think it's very hard to compete with finders that just, you know, just like this stuff. Like, the car behind me, can see. The k truck. That's my car. [01:45:36] S0: There you go. [01:45:36] S5: And it's got a I [01:45:38] S1: want one of those I want one of those trucks so bad. I every time I see a video of one, send it to [01:45:42] S0: my client. [01:45:43] S1: I'm like, we need one.
01:45:43 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[01:45:43] S1: I'm like, we need one. [01:45:45] S0: I love it. Can you get me up to speed on intellectual property in this category? Like, I imagine that there's a patent that existed maybe a long time ago on a turbine. Like, can you build on the shoulders of giants? Like, how do you actually create something that you can own that can't be disassembled and copied, or is it sort of a free for all?
01:46:07 · John McElhone, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:46:07] S5: Yeah. So there there's a bunch of patents. Same with any hard repeats. There's a bunch of patents. Yeah. But there are things with patents are very specialized. The turbine isn't actually very hard. It is hard to make, but it's not very complicated. Our system will probably have less than 40 parts on it. So that's that's quite small. And so it's not it's not crazy. The the product itself at American Turbines isn't I don't see it the turbine itself is like, we're gonna have a bunch of IP on this. We're gonna spend six years filing patents. We're gonna have this, like, specialized thing we're gonna have in a few years. That that sucks. That's what a lot of people are doing with, super critical stuff and Sure. A lot of specialized turbines. It it's just like you're waiting five years for what? So our our our product, I I I see in the future is is really just the manufacturing at scale, like our factory. Like, that's really what Henry Ford was able to do with the Model T. Yeah. Like, the product wasn't the car. It was kind of the the promise that with the process of manufacturing at scale and these assembly lines, we could create a whole new industry of transportation. And it worked worked for him. Yeah. And we kinda need the same for energy is we need to figure out how to produce that scale. And you can you can only do that in in kinda automated ways that that we're focusing on. [01:47:13] S0: Amazing. Well, congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest your day, and we'll talk to [01:47:19] S1: you back on soon.