No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:43:57 · S0, Isaiah Taylor
[00:43:57] S0: This is another really good example of makes what makes Valor unique. This is our control skin. These three boxes right there are basically a analog to digital electronics box. So [00:44:12] S1: if you [00:44:13] S0: know anything about electronic circuitry, it's pretty simple stuff. You've got some signal amplifiers. You have some basic rectifiers in there. And and basically we take some analog signals from [00:44:24] S1: our our detectors and we
00:44:24 · Isaiah Taylor, S0
[00:44:24] S1: our our detectors and we [00:44:26] S0: send them to the control room. Each one of those boxes cost $450,000. This is when it when anyone talks to you about like cost and nuclear like oh nuclear is expensive. They are talking about ridiculous things like this. Right? And this is really where Valor's gonna win. That we accepted the $450,000 cost on this one because we're moving really fast, you know, and spending a million and a half dollars for these three boxes was more worthwhile to us than taking a couple months of delay. But this box over here, totally different story. This one, it was fit out at $5,000,000. They told us that it was gonna cost $5,000,000 to buy that box right there. That is our, what's called reactor protection system, RPS. This is basically the brain of the reactor. This system right here is super unique. It has no human input. It's basically a self deterministic machine that decides whether or not the plant is in a safe state. So it has three different sections of boat against itself to say is the plant in a safe state or not. And if two of them boat that the plant is not in a safe state, it shuts down. And we were quoted about $5,000,000, and we were told it would take it would take about two and a [00:45:39] S1: half years to build.
00:45:39 · Isaiah Taylor, S0
[00:45:39] S1: half years to build. [00:45:42] S0: And so we said, well, alright. Maybe I'd be willing to pay $5,000,000, but I'm certainly not gonna wait two and a half years. And so after having haggled with this vendor for about two months trying to convince him to go faster, we eventually got the team together and said, we're gonna have to build our own RPS. And we sat down with Joe, who runs instrumentation and control. Awesome guy. Brown dropout. Really, really good with electronics, and he brought together five team members and locked ourselves in the conference room. And six weeks later, we had a a working RPS, and we spent about $400,000 on it. Everywhere in nuclear is like this, there are totally fake costs from an industry that is just totally anemic. It doesn't know how to build anything anymore. By the way, the conclusion to that story is kind of unfortunate, which is that when the vendor realized that we're gonna do it ourselves because we just could not, you know, get our heads around a two year timeline, they freaked out and started telling everybody in the industry that we're an unsafe company that's gonna kill people because we would dare to to do something ourselves that, you know, is there a special sauce that they're charging the market $5,000,000 for? And if you go to I don't know if you guys use any of these, like, investor search platforms where you can, like, go look up a company and people have done, like, expert calls. They contacted all of those expert calls companies and volunteered to do an expert call on Valor where their CTO
00:45:42 · S0, Sarah Guo
[00:45:42] S0: And so we said, well, alright. Maybe I'd be willing to pay $5,000,000, but I'm certainly not gonna wait two and a half years. And so after having haggled with this vendor for about two months trying to convince him to go faster, we eventually got the team together and said, we're gonna have to build our own RPS. And we sat down with Joe, who runs instrumentation and control. Awesome guy. Brown dropout. Really, really good with electronics, and he brought together five team members and locked ourselves in the conference room. And six weeks later, we had a a working RPS, and we spent about $400,000 on it. Everywhere in nuclear is like this, there are totally fake costs from an industry that is just totally anemic. It doesn't know how to build anything anymore. By the way, the conclusion to that story is kind of unfortunate, which is that when the vendor realized that we're gonna do it ourselves because we just could not, you know, get our heads around a two year timeline, they freaked out and started telling everybody in the industry that we're an unsafe company that's gonna kill people because we would dare to to do something ourselves that, you know, is there a special sauce that they're charging the market $5,000,000 for? And if you go to I don't know if you guys use any of these, like, investor search platforms where you can, like, go look up a company and people have done, like, expert calls. They contacted all of those expert calls companies and volunteered to do an expert call on Valor where their CTO [00:47:11] S2: shitty.
00:47:11 · Sarah Guo, S0, Isaiah Taylor
[00:47:11] S2: shitty. [00:47:12] S0: Yeah. Their CTO basically went and, like, ranted about how we're the worst company on earth because this is a massive, massive threat to them. The fact that their $5,000,000 system, we can just make for a couple $100 with a team of five engineers. But the more that you look at a nuclear, the more it's like this. Everywhere you look, it's a fake industry that has not been building anything for forty years, and a little bit that they have been building, they're charging up 100 x margin on. But if you just take it from first principles and you have smart people in the room and you're willing to build it yourself, you end up with this, and the plant is running. [00:47:46] S2: There is something very inspiring about the idea of, like, given the physics work Yeah. It should be possible. Absolutely. And if it is possible to do faster here, the best people will come and the capital will come. [00:47:58] S1: Exactly. [00:48:00] S2: This is an expensive project as far as I can tell. How do you think about the fact that the you're an equity finance venture backed company today. How how do you think about the fact that the, like, debt vehicles, project financing, operational proof of this doesn't really exist in the ecosystem to, you know, perhaps support as much scale as you'd like, as quickly as you'd like?
00:48:00 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:48:00] S2: This is an expensive project as far as I can tell. How do you think about the fact that the you're an equity finance venture backed company today. How how do you think about the fact that the, like, debt vehicles, project financing, operational proof of this doesn't really exist in the ecosystem to, you know, perhaps support as much scale as you'd like, as quickly as you'd like? [00:48:22] S1: Yeah. So this is actually one of the things that I noticed years before starting the company. The the sort of traditional plan for nuclear startup is you try to do some engineering and some design and some customer LOIs, MOUs, and you try to assemble this package. And it's a it's essentially paper. Right? But it's a package that's attractive enough to get somebody to come and fund the project. Right? That's the essential plan of all nuclear startups. They want to convince a debt financer or a project financer or something like that to fund their nice paper package of designs and partnerships. I went into this company believing that and by the way, I believe that that was possible, like, ten years ago. [00:49:04] S2: Mhmm.