No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:49:05 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:49:05] S1: And after watching this fail over and over and over in other startups, I came into this company knowing we're not gonna do that. One of the unique advantages that The United States has is a risk on equity capital environment. Right? And the type of risk that we are asking investors to take is we know the physics works. We know that there's infinite demand, and how we go from here to there is technology execution. And guess what? Venture capital in The United States is the best at underwriting tech risk of anywhere in the world. Right? That is how Silicon Valley has come to be what it is. That is how venture capital has come to, you know, eat as much of of finance as it has is that venture capitalists know how to underwrite technical risk. And it's execution and it's you know, when we say tech, we're not talking about physics. We're not talking about science. We're talking about mechanical engineering. We're talking about thermal hydraulics. We're talking about instrumentation, right, manufacturing methods. These are it's complicated. It's nuclear, but it's, like, significantly less complicated than a rocket engine, for example. So, you know, I think this is one of our our fundamental edges and advantages is that we're risk on about this, and we have a cap table that's that's risk on about this. We are willing to go build reactors on equity balance sheet because that's going to allow us to prove it years ahead of anybody else. Right? Where where our competitors are still trying to convince, you know, fundamentally risk averse, you know, financers to to finance a project, we will be on our fifth reactor. Right? And after five reactors well, actually, now project finance is an option. Right? Now debt is an option, but it's an only an option once those early backers have put the capital in the ground, demonstrated it, and that becomes an enormous moat that's frankly gonna be impossible to beat.
00:50:50 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:50:50] S2: One of the more different things that you've decided to do here is, you know, try to build your own plant independently and bring customers to it as, you know, at much scale as possible in a gigasite. Right? And, you know, part of the belief there is like, well, if I can provide power at scale and especially cheap power, like the load will come to me. Yes. Many things. You know, can you describe like the rationale behind that strategy? [00:51:22] S1: Yeah. Yeah. It comes from a very similar argument that I was making before where I'd watched startups try to get that deal right for a very long time. And frankly, there are just too many parties. Right? There are, like, too many people and too many parties And [00:51:37] S2: how's your speed to be like, well, let's negotiate about this site and this permit?
00:51:40 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:51:40] S1: Exactly. Like, yes. In theory, could we go to know, hyperscaler who wants a gigawatt of power in a place? Like, yes. And and certainly, we will at some point. But we can also just put a gigawatt on the ground. Right? And we can do that on our own timing at our own pace, and that pace is going to be faster than anyone else in the world. And and the question flips around, which is if I have, you know, a gigawatt of power with land and fiber, is someone gonna put a data center there? It's like, yes. Absolutely. Right? And so, yeah, I think, like, in the long term, we'll maybe start to do some of these deals where a dedicated customer wants their own giga site for their hyper cluster or something like that, but it'll be driven by speed even in that case. Right? We'll go to the customers who say, you know, and we want it delivered in a year. Right? Not the customers who say, oh, we're thinking about this in three to four years. So really speed and scale. If you honestly, if you ask me any question and you keep digging back, you will find speed and scale. Like, that really is what nuclear is missing. It's missing its its Ford moment. It's Toyota moment. It's SpaceX moment where you have a company that realizes that the actual thing that nuclear is missing is scale deployment. And and that's really what we care about. And so the Giga site and we've got a site here. We're gonna build more reactors here. We have a a planned Giga site nearby. We get to go with conviction, build power. And, I'm absolutely confident that load will follow.
00:53:10 · Sarah Guo, S0, Isaiah Taylor
[00:53:10] S2: How do you if you just think of your primary objectives as speed and scale [00:53:14] S0: Yes. [00:53:15] S2: Given safety. Right? How do you, like, drive that personally as CEO? What do you wake up every day and, like, think about problems to solve or what to focus on? [00:53:24] S1: Yeah. This is one of those things that I think is the probably the most irreplaceable attribute of a company is its internal pace. We call it tick rate. [00:53:33] S2: Mhmm.
00:53:33 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:53:33] S2: Mhmm. [00:53:33] S1: That's a sort of a metric that we've designed around going critical in in new systems, but you could probably translate that to any industry. You know, in software, it's probably something like, you know, new, continuous integration builds per hour or something like that. But, I think it's the hardest thing to replicate. You have to start it from the first day of the company. It has to come from the CEO, and the first five team members have to have it deep in their bones. The first 20 team members have to have it deep in their bones. They have to be trained that when they hire people, they're looking for that in their you know, in those people's bones. And that's also not enough. Also, once you're in that setup, I have to constantly and I this is really what I do, go around the organization and speed things up. Right? You know, continuously ask. My two step's laughing over here because she's seen this happen many times. You know, I go I go war mode on things. Right? So, like, look around and, like, okay. That's going slow. And we will we will set up a a literal war room, and I guess not literal war room, but we'll set up a physical war room, and we will say, how do we turn a six month timeline into a four week timeline? Right? And maybe we'll hit eight weeks. Right? But it's not six months. And I I think I've realized, like, there is no autopilot for that. There's no automatic mode that makes a company faster inherently. There are lots of things you can do to set it up for success. But [00:55:00] S2: But you have to push.
00:55:00 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:55:00] S2: But you have to push. [00:55:01] S1: You will always I will always have to push, and I will always push. And it's because I know that the physics are here. Right? I know that energy will be a thousand times cheaper than it is today. I know that nuclear fission will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. Somebody will do that. And it's really up to us as a team whether or not that's gonna be in the future decades or the future centuries because that time is up to us. Right? It's up to us how quickly we go down that path, how quickly we make energy more abundant, and that feeds into everything else. So it's it's highly motivating for us, and we are are tackling it as fast as we can. [00:55:36] S2: People in their daily lives thinking about what happens for them if this works and get very cheap abundant nuclear energy. Like, imagine that future for us.