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Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Will O'Brien
We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. We need to be building millions of underwater drones.
John Collison
Saltwater and the ocean is a very hostile environment, so that's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean.
John Collison
Will O'Brien is the cofounder and president of Ulysses. The company started doing seagrass restoration and is now expanding into everything from mapping the seabed to keeping ports secure. O'Brien's larger ambition is to make ocean operations so cheap and routine to support entirely new industries.
John Collison
Before we get to Ulysses, we have lots to talk about, but just getting to Ireland's most innovative company, just explain the technical innovations for Chris.
Will O'Brien
The Guinness Company, a great example of business. Its growth largely derived from technical innovations. And you don't think of it, you think of just like a pint of Guinness, but the truth is they were starting an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s. And a research development team where you would just hire extremely smart people and just say, "Come in here and find a problem to work on." Much like—
John Collison
Wait, they had Xerox PARC in Guinness?
Will O'Brien
They did. As early as the 1890s.
John Collison
And it was undirected research?
Will O'Brien
Yeah, just do what you want. And there's many technical innovations that come from it. For example, anyone who's—I studied math in college, and one of the tests from that is the Student's t-test. This is how do you derive either the standard deviation if you know the mean, or the mean if you know the standard deviation from a small sample, less than 30. This was a problem in Guinness because one of the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness is the amount of lipids or fats in hops. So, they were having to take up like hundreds of hops to see is this a high... Is this a high-quality batch or not? And they were losing a few percent per batch. And that means a lot when you're in the high-volume, low-margin food-and-beverage industry. So William Sealy Gosset had to publish under a pseudonym, the Student. He couldn't publish his research that he was doing with Fisher, another famous statistician at the time in the early 1920s. He published in the first Journal of Mathematica, which is now a very famous mathematics journal, this innovation, this breakthrough he'd found of how to do small-sample statistics.
Will O'Brien
But he had to publish it—and that's why it's called the Student's t-test still to this day because they didn't want Anheuser-Busch or Heineken or other people to know that they were hiring these researchers to solve problems for them.
John Collison
Oh, so not associate them with Guinness?
Will O'Brien
Exactly. Didn't want their competitors to know. Yes. So they're getting better margins. So loads of innovation. There was a project, Project ACORN. ACORN standing for Advanced Cans of Rich Nectar, which was basically, how do we put can—how do we make a Guinness at-home version? It was the '80s, people were starting to drink less and drink more at home. The price of a pint was going from £1 to £1.50. People were up in arms, so they're drinking at home. So they're like, how do we do these things at home? Initially, the project was called Project Dynamite, but as you'd imagine in the 1980s, shipping parcels with the word dynamite on it between London and Dublin would cause them some concern.
John Collison
They'd get confused with all the other parcels.
Will O'Brien
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they stopped labeling them Project Dynamite, renamed it Project ACORN, and they developed the—
John Collison
The widget.
Will O'Brien
The widget. And the widget was voted above... Did you know it was voted above the internet in the 1990s top-100 inventions of the 20th century? Marketing is another place where Guinness was really, you know, the Guinness Institute—
John Collison
The Nigeria thing.
Will O'Brien
Nigeria, the movie, the film industry in Nigeria.
John Collison
They produced like the James Bond of Nigeria, and that's why, like, people know Guinness is very popular in Nigeria. It's one of the top markets, but it's because they just like made a movie where—
Will O'Brien
It's the top market, actually.
John Collison
Okay, yeah.
Will O'Brien
It's the number-one market.
John Collison
Was it part of the movie or something?
Will O'Brien
Yeah. But the marketing, I think, is really one of the areas where Guinness was most standout. I think 'Guinness is Good for You' is this iconic campaign. And the toucan, there's one up there. The toucan as well, the iconic Guinness toucan bird. They've won more Cannes Lion advertising awards than nearly any other company. I have the Guinness quality standards on my phone—
Chris Sacca
Why do you know all this stuff? I'm just curious.
Will O'Brien
I'm just a very passionate about the, uh—
Chris Sacca
Did you start it as... Because you're an entrepreneur and a founder and you're looking for examples of innovation and there happened to be one in your backyard?
Will O'Brien
Yeah, I think so—
Chris Sacca
Or is it you studied as much in the pubs as I did.
Will O'Brien
I think it was both. I think it was both. I think it was like... I felt like it was... I just thought it was, it's a very underrated company. These are the 7Cs of Guinness quality standards. Um, so this is like a PDF that I have printed.
John Collison
Is it a PDF that they make for bars or something?
Will O'Brien
Yeah, exactly. They have the 7... Okay, the quality standards, right? Crafted presentation, consistent freshness, counter visibility, correct gas, correct temperature, clean lines, clean glassware. So they're the things you need.
John Collison
This is a good system.
Chris Sacca
Yeah, that's overall life advice, honestly.
John Collison
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Sacca
Keep clean.
Will O'Brien
Yeah, I think so. I think for me, you know, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's an entrepreneur, my mum had her own business, both my granddads, you know... One ran a pub, the other one was a farmer and had a few other businesses. And... A very classic Irish story. But I always grew up in a world of commerce and business. And my mum and dad have siblings, and none of them, none of the men anyway, at least, or the Murphys or Briens work for anybody else. They're all like entrepreneurial, a bit disagreeable. So I grew up in a household that business was the talk of the table. Like, it was revered. So I've just always been an appreciator of good businesses. And it was so cool to meet a bit... I've always revered technology and revered companies like Stripe and others and like whatever. But to see one that's like, homegrown like this, but I don't think anybody really talks about, was really cool and exciting.
John Collison
So speaking of entrepreneurship, I want to get to... We do have to at some point get to Ulysses. By the way, do you need another Guinness? I will note that it's 20 minutes in. I'm just belying Irish stereotypes. You can pour these ones, see how you do.
Chris Sacca
Absolutely. All right.
Will O'Brien
Thanks, Chris.
Will O'Brien
Wow, value-add. What a value-add investor.
Chris Sacca
You guys get started talking about this company. I'm only here for one reason.
John Collison
What does Ulysses actually do?
Will O'Brien
We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. That's the simple one-liner. I think we started the company three years ago under this kind of 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 cofounders were looking at potential domains to deploy robotic systems. And after a cursory look at air, land, sea—sea became very interesting. And then looking at surface, undersea—undersea became very, very interesting. And we could quickly identify a lot of very interesting jobs that frankly were not being done underwater or not being done at scale or were not affordable enough to do so. The idea for building underwater robots kind of came from that.
John Collison
You started with seagrass, right? Maybe describe why you started with seagrass and how you ended up pivoting to the robots.
Will O'Brien
Yes. So, you know, the first— I mean, the first— when we started looking at, again, tasks that robots could do... One that captivated us initially was just like this kind of... There's a whole spectrum of ocean conservation-related tasks. One of my cofounders 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 Manna and was like, you know, surely you could build like an underwater equivalent of like one of these aerial drones for me to do these sorts of tasks. So that's kind of what led us on.
John Collison
And what were the tasks?
Will O'Brien
The task initially was the, 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. Then, um, and then take them and then plant them in areas that need to be restored.
John Collison
And what caused it?
Chris Sacca
Really, really quick, I have to say, I used your one-pull method. Oh, interesting. And I, I hate to concede there's no appreciable difference between the pints, but yeah, nothing sacred anymore.
Will O'Brien
No, no, no, it's—yeah, yeah. It's the ceremony.
John Collison
This is the one shot.
Will O'Brien
Yeah.
Chris Sacca
The one shot.
John Collison
Okay, so, and with seagrass, why does it need to be restored, period? Like, what's going on in the oceans?
Will O'Brien
So, a few reasons. If you take current projections for maybe how fish stocks are going to do... Kind of in and around the 2040s... Many of the 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. So—
John Collison
Just overfishing in general?
Will O'Brien
Overfishing, yes. And a big driver as well 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 1,000 times less the rate we lose them.
John Collison
Okay, so it's important to restore the seagrass.
Will O'Brien
Yeah.
John Collison
And we've lost a lot of it. And you started with that as part of the need to restore the seagrass, you ended up making underwater robots, which is how you got into the underwater robot space?
Will O'Brien
Yes, exactly. I mean, we started solving the seagrass problem, but very quickly into solving that problem, it 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, you need a few things. You need full XYZ 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 Leviathan, 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.
Will O'Brien
The vehicle looks a lot different if you want to build something that can physically kind of manipulate underwater. So there was a few design decisions we had to make there. Also, our underwater vehicle, we wanted to build one kind of general-purpose form factor that could solve a lot of different problems. So there was some like 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 3D imaging. Some people want sonar, you know, bathymetric maps, so we have a sonar front module. 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 to work on, or offshore energy companies that...
Will O'Brien
Oh well, because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, It was very easy for us to adopt.
Chris Sacca
Let's... Can we dig into that for a second?
Will O'Brien
Sure.
Chris Sacca
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 carbon sequester compared to everything else out there.
Will O'Brien
Yeah, seagrass is, you know, it's like your rapper's favorite rapper or something like that. It's like the most, like, slept-on plant, I think, out there. It's zero attention. Coral, coral 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. Coral gets a lot of the funding, and seagrass is really this unsung hero of the ocean. It covers 2% of the seafloor but holds 20% of the ocean's carbon. It is the... 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. And so it's just very, very important, very important species. Doesn't really get that much attention. It grows on up and down the coastlines of Ireland, the UK, here in California, actually the same species in Ireland and 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 Great Barrier Reef. And—
John Collison
While you started the company to do seagrass restoration and you're now mostly focused on the robot. You still haven't left seagrass because you're now working on seagrass projects.
Will O'Brien
Yeah, fundamentally the tech platform we're building, again, because we made these early design decisions, mean that, well, it's like you build the technology once that does the seagrass restoration, and then it's just more of scaling that business is more of an operational problem. There's not any new net new R&D that 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 defense sector.
John Collison
What do you have to do to restore seagrass?
Will O'Brien
You have to collect this. First of all, you have to understand where to restore. So 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 you can see videos of this on the Ulysses' 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 habitat suitability model, and then you deposit them there, and then, all going well—
Chris Sacca
So, I want to dive into that a little bit, because what's... Sorry, Lower Carbon Capital, our firm has been involved with you since before the pre-seed—
Will O'Brien
The first investor, yeah.
Chris Sacca
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 a universal thing and 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, and I'm curious, is it... 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?
Will O'Brien
I think it's probably like some combination of all of them, but I think it was very much just like a passion thing to begin with. Like, I grew up by the seaside. I had very much like my mom would just put me in a wetsuit and like send me down to the beach, and that was like my babysitter in the summers. I'm very much like a very pro-growth environmentalist and a very like eco-pragmatist is maybe how I 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 like carbon removal is one of those core technologies that like I think enables that along with clean energy and other things. And then yeah, just like the ocean as this frontier is like a very true frontier is like, you know, we've mapped more of the surface of Mars than we have like the depths of our ocean and that, like, I just couldn't—when I heard that or meditated on that a little bit more, I was like, God, this is crazy, right?
Will O'Brien
Like, there's like a... There's a part of Earth that over 75% of it we have no eyes on and have no clue really what's down there. And, you know, less than maybe 100 people are thinking about this and working this on a daily basis. Like, for how long was all of 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 like, there's a fraction of people actually working on this day to day? I was like, this is crazy. This is like insane that like... Put the money aside and just think like humans need to explore and discover and learn.
John Collison
And part of your thesis is... If I understand this, just like SpaceX, 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?
Will O'Brien
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.
John Collison
There's a single high-value initial use case.
Will O'Brien
And then in space, it's defense reasons. You're putting satellites up there to watch the Russians. So there's this initial expedition period, and then you move from an expedition period to, "Okay, well, what happens if we spend more time here and get more precise?" And what happens when we not just like gather information from here, or singular things, but more things, and become more persistent in our settlement there. So then American West, you have the development of the railroad, and then like access becomes way more easy. You get all this development of places like California. Space, you get reusable launch. Maritime, it's like, okay, if you can actually go and have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things I think that you can do.
John Collison
If you want to go plant a bunch of seagrass, like, do you get approval from anyone on that, or is it just... Seagrass away?
Will O'Brien
Unfortunately, you know, I think this is kind of one of the saddest things about the environmental movement is you have this concept of like green tape, right? Like red tape and green tape. It's like, yeah, that is like the single biggest barrier. For example, like there is a certain very endangered location of seagrasses in Australia that we would love to do a project that we've been trying to do a project for a long time, and it would be probably the biggest seagrass restoration project in the world in a very important location, but kind of banging your head off the wall.
John Collison
How did you end up in the Chinese prison?
Chris Sacca
This is the topic.
Will O'Brien
I was in—
John Collison
I want to get back to the robots.
Will O'Brien
There was an interesting time in the 2010s where China's on this ascending path or whatever, and my mum was like, "Will, you've got to learn Mandarin." So I go to Shanghai, I'm about 16 years of age, 15 years of age, and I go there and we end up in like some night market and we were there a week before and we go back a week later and they falsely accuse us of shoplifting. And I think it was this kind of scam they had, like, they would bring these kind of white kids or something like in and then—
John Collison
The scam who had?
Will O'Brien
People in... The thing, because what would happen is when they accuse you of the crime—
John Collison
You have to pay a fine on the spot.
Will O'Brien
You have to pay... Well, you get brought to the prison station, the police station. And if you remember, this is the time before like instant money sending, right? Um, uh, you know, sorry, Marcus. Terrible. Yeah, crazy time. So we do Western Union the money, and like that takes... It's like China's like whatever, nine hours ahead of Ireland, and it's like 10 o'clock at night, so my mum's not awake. So, you know, you ring her whatever, three in the morning, or whatever, she's up. Or, you know, it's nine in the morning Ireland time, she's awake. So I'm like, Mommy, like, um, in this prison cell in Shanghai prison. Can you send, Western Union me the money and get me out? She's like, okay, all right. So they, you know, they—the value of the phones that we shoplifted.
John Collison
Of course nowadays they just write it off as a deepfake AI scam.
Chris Sacca
I was going to say, now that's an ElevenLabs call. That's an ElevenLabs call for sure. I've had to build a safe word with my family.
Will O'Brien
Send it to me in iTunes vouchers.
John Collison
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
John Collison
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Chris Sacca
As I look back, and I did, I looked back at the original pitch you came to us with, but as I look back at that and think about how you from day one were thinking about all of the ways this company could... All the markets it could address and what it could do. But at the core of it was making the vehicle.
Will O'Brien
Mm-hmm.
Chris Sacca
If you had come to a venture capitalist 10, 12 years ago, for some maybe six years ago, and said, "Hey, we are going to verticalize manufacturing, we are actually going to build things in the US, we're not going to outsource them to Foxconn or Shenzhen or whatever. And so, we're going to... And for those components that seem like the supply chain might be dicey, we will literally make them from scratch so that we control everything, the entire vertical stack of our device." That would get you shown to the parking lot.
John Collison
So how verticalized are you guys, and where'd you start? Where are you going to?
Will O'Brien
It's this iterative process that we've kind of, you know, the first vehicle has maybe 80% pieces off the shelf, and we're on like generation five now. And the next generation, particularly over the course of the next year, we're going to bring a lot of it in-house. So to make an underwater drone, you can kind of break it up into the mech, the elec, and the software. The software, all of that is pretty much from scratch in-house. We're not really building on top of any other primitives. We've kind of built it up from the ground up because we're building a very different type of vehicle. The modularity requires a lot of interesting things. So then, you—
John Collison
Presumably there's hardware actuation frameworks that you use, like?
Will O'Brien
Uh, yeah. Like there is things, but frankly we've kind of just like eschewed a lot of them. Um, there, you know, there's things you can be—there's like OpenRAWs and there's other like, there's like a... Yeah, there's a few different ones. But yeah, we're eschewing a lot of them and kind of building a lot from the ground up because our vehicle looks a lot different to a lot of other underwater robots. And then there's the elec. So in that, you've got sensors, and then the internals of the vehicle. So a lot of the... If we talk about the sensors and that sort of thing, there's how do you perceive... It's like you're typically using a sonar system of some description. Again, right now, that's off—we're buying them off the shelf, our sonar systems. But we're kind of just hiring and building up our acoustics team now to start building them in-house for next year. Then the navigation stack, as a part of this kind of like... Part of the vehicle. There's inertial navigation systems. Again, right now we buy them off the shelf, but we've got internal prototypes that we're going to start building in-house ourselves and replace these existing suppliers.
John Collison
It seems very hard to build an inertial navigation system in-house. Explain how an inertial navigation system works and then—
Will O'Brien
There's different ways of building them. You've got fiber optic gyros, which use—which is one way. You've got MEMs—sensors which are in your iPhone or whatever that are kind of like accelerometers that you can use as well. And, so I won't go into the how we're building ours, but yes, initial prototypes, initial prototypes. And our initial one is put it at a fraction of the price of the very expensive long lead time supplier that we're using right now and building on a supply chain that we could scale.
John Collison
Well, but I'm curious, Why build your own inertial navigation? Is it cost? Is it lead time? Is it like ultimately you need to get the device—
Will O'Brien
Scale. For us, it's scale, lead time. There's about 20 million aerial drones built every year. There's maybe 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones. For us to really fully manifest our vision, we need to be building millions of underwater drones. Therefore, we look at supply chains and we're like, "Can we build on that supply chain?" So insofar as we can, we try to build as much on top of electronic vehicle supply chains, drone supply chains, where you have to buy from somewhere else, or consumer electronics supply chains where things are made in the order of millions, and not maritime supply chains.
John Collison
So you're building at small scale with an eye towards a very large scale, and everything needs to have a production line in order to do that?
Will O'Brien
Yeah, well, I mean, we will open a facility next year that could be one of the largest by number of units underwater drone factories in the world. And I think there's a decent... Like, right now, where our company is right now, our main problem is building things. We are saying no to contracts. We have more demand than we can supply. The things that we think about on a daily basis right now are not like, how do we sell more? It's, how do we build a factory? And how do we vertically integrate some of these parts of the stack that, for example, there is one part of our supply chain that we like baited out of the supplier how many of these components they make per year right now, and they make like 100 to 200 per annum. I mean, like, that's, you know, like, there's no way that we're hoping to make a few hundred vehicles next year, maybe 1,000. So it's like, we can't build on top of that.
Chris Sacca
We find this all the time, both with our companies and our own investment thesis, is that as you start diving in, somebody brings you a cool idea, somebody brings you a cool prototype, they go ahead and it's cobbled together in the same way that Elon was getting components from Mercedes and shit like that to put the first one together. But then as you start scaling, you start to notice bottlenecks, whether they're intrinsic to the way you're building something or to rolling it out, etc. And then with each of those bottlenecks, you now know there's an opportunity to resolve that. It's not unlike what you guys have done with Stripe. So, we've done that in our own investing thesis where we start to see grid resiliency is a thing. And then you start to see like, "Oh shit, you know what there's a shortage of? It's transformers." And so we've got these guys, Giga, who taught themselves how to build transformers in their backyard using YouTube videos. Somehow nobody died. And now they... And then they went to China to see how China manufactures them and brought that back.
Chris Sacca
I love fucking—and now they make transformers in a way that's not all hand-spun.
Will O'Brien
We definitely haven't done that either.
Chris Sacca
And so, I love this path, and it's something that I know your audience will love, is that we have now started to see companies like this really get to be supply chain experts and see what's standing in the way of their 100x from today. And it really is a religion that came out of SpaceX and Tesla. Yeah—
Will O'Brien
My cofounder, literally all he works on is manufacturing. We have four cofounders. Colm, all he does is pretty much manufacturing. Anduril is the same. One cofounder is pretty much all on manufacturing. I think it's just kind of default state.
John Collison
Saltwater and the ocean is a very hostile environment. What's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean?
Will O'Brien
Corrosion and pressure are huge external forces. But corrosion, you can get around it by coating, doing anodizing the surface of the metal, which gives it some resistance. Pressure. Again, you can mitigate... I mean, going very deep sea, which would be 6,000 meters, is what we call full ocean depth. I mean, the ocean goes to about 10,000 meters in its deepest parts, but full ocean depth in a technical term is the 6,000. That's very difficult. We operate currently in, like, the 1,500... Up to 1,500 meters. I mean, we've been crush-tested to 2,200 meters, but we're typically operating in that 1,500-meter range, which is where most of the important economic activity today happens. In the future, I think much more will happen in the deep sea, particularly in critical minerals. But today, a lot of the economic activity happens there. So, pressure is one problem. I think the biggest problem, though, is comms underwater.
John Collison
I was going to ask that.
Will O'Brien
Yeah, yeah.
John Collison
So how do you communicate with the vehicle?
Will O'Brien
A lot of it has to run locally. You have to do a lot of sense... Because you can acoustically—
John Collison
Because communications are very low bandwidth?
Will O'Brien
Yes. You can do like 10 kilobytes per second. Over like five kilometers.
John Collison
Over like HF or what?
Will O'Brien
Acoustically. Ping. Like a dial-up modem. And then just like being far away from anything is very difficult. Being far from someone that can repair you or recharge you. So that's why the surface vehicle is such an important part of our stack. Because you pick it up, you put it on deck, it wirelessly charges. Leviathan wirelessly charges underwater vehicles and then connects us to the internet so that we can get a live diagnostic on the vehicle. What's working, what's not working. And then if someone needs to come in and do an intervention... I mean, in future, the surface craft will actually be able to repair the vehicle and have replacement modules and kind of vending machine style—
Chris Sacca
The surface vehicle is autonomous too.
Will O'Brien
Yeah, and it's connected then to Starlink so we can see. And Starlink is a huge enabling technology for us. That's one part of it. That's why we go for the surface vehicle. Another thing is... We have around 100 times more onboard compute than any other autonomous underwater vehicle. We run a full NVIDIA 5090 onboard with like an Intel CPU. And that's very important to our autonomy stack. Because again, if you want to do anything intelligent robotically underwater, you need to have like a lot... You need to be able to sense-make to a large degree.
John Collison
Okay. So, but basically, does the Mako, if it's doing some mapping or whatever, do you send it down with a fully built plan and program? And it's basically... It is running the full loop of sensing and deciding, locally, on the GPUs on the device?
Will O'Brien
Yeah, like right now the autonomy is like relatively rudimentary. We haven't got into like very complex autonomy behaviors just yet, but not many of our tasks require it just yet. But yes.
John Collison
But to the extent that it is autonomous, it is fully locally autonomous.
Will O'Brien
Yeah, exactly. It's like, it will be like draw a polygon. Let's like map this area. Okay.
John Collison
Yeah.
Will O'Brien
Auto-generates a lawnmower track, and then it'll have some like rudimentary, okay, well, if I see a rock, let me just go above that. Or if I see something else, go around it.
John Collison
And then what applications are you having most success with, with the robot right now? What are you selling the robot for?
Will O'Brien
Right now, I mean, there's kind of two domains in which we've had a lot of success in the last year. So, nature was kind of what we did and focused on kind of first year. Last year, this being the second year of the business, we kind of started to look at other use cases. So last year, we got our first contract with the US Navy, and we got our first contract with an offshore wind developer as well. So US Navy was, actually, we were doing mine countermeasures, finding mines and hunting mines before it was cool, before the Strait of Hormuz popped off. So we were working on some work related to that. And then the offshore wind—
Chris Sacca
I haven't heard Strait of Hormuz popped off. That's pretty sweet. Way to appeal to his younger listeners.
Will O'Brien
And then the offshore wind contract was, you know, where... Actually, there's this problem in California where they're trying to build floating offshore wind, where they need to— one of the objections to the floating offshore wind is that you put these power cables in the water, they attract abandoned fishing lines, the fishing lines then are what catch dolphins and whales and these sorts of things, and that's one of the biggest obstructions to offshore wind in California. And so it's like, could you build... We're building this sensing system, like a surface underwater vehicle that will map these cables on a daily basis, look at their structural integrity, and see if they're in good condition, and also if they're getting lines caught on them. And if there is a line caught on them, we have a—we're building an implement that will cut the fishing lines off of the offshore floating offshore wind lines.
John Collison
And so why are the offshore wind turbines getting caught up in lines? What's the problem?
Will O'Brien
Basically, when you build a floating offshore wind terminal and then you have like the cable running up, that cable's in the water.
John Collison
I see.
Will O'Brien
And just, you just have like—
John Collison
It's the power cable that's feeding the power back to it.
Will O'Brien
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And then you might just have like a fishing net floating through the water that has fallen off some Japanese fishing line. It's debris. It's debris and it'll get caught in that.
Chris Sacca
Can you bring that over?
John Collison
Excellent. Actually, look at you guys.
Chris Sacca
So it's so weird. I didn't mean to set you up, but when we talk about craft and beauty—
John Collison
Are you doing a product placement right here?
Chris Sacca
This is, man. This is a tequila that we make, actually.
Will O'Brien
Wow.
Chris Sacca
And it's the only 100-point tequila in history.
Will O'Brien
You're drinking with two Irishmen and you didn't bring whiskey. You're in an Irish bar.
Chris Sacca
It's because—
Will O'Brien
This is, uh... And you bring your own.
Chris Sacca
I am an American and we are imperialists.
Will O'Brien
You bring your own.
John Collison
This is your tequila?
Chris Sacca
Yes. And so this is Komos Tequila. Komos with a K.
John Collison
Do you not think post the TV show Silicon Valley, it's a bit on the nose to make your own tequila?
Chris Sacca
Yes. Yeah. Tres Comas. No. This is actually literally called Komos. Uh, K-O-M-O-S. But this is—it's the only 100% tequila in history. It's very unorthodox, but it's partly aged in wine barrels. And then it also spends some time aerating, so it's like the smoothest-drinking tequila ever. But it makes no sense to do it this way. Uh, nobody had done it before, but we care about that stuff. And so I want to say cheers, but I... There is a weird tie-in to what you just said about design and beauty. Cheers. That is the smoothest tequila in the world. One of the great cultural things about you and you is you guys both, I think, would identify as heterodox. But what is it about you guys who—
Will O'Brien
Don't ask where I'm from.
Chris Sacca
Seem to be... No, no, but I think you're emblematic of the movement right now. What is it about you guys? What do you have in common? What's, what's changed?
Will O'Brien
I think the market difference is, you know, the founders look very different, right? It's like, I think you alluded to this earlier, it's like, they're kind of rah-rah, smoking, go to church on Sunday... Very, maybe a bit louder, working typically on hardware rather than software. No disrespect to Y Combinator, but there's the 'make something people want' moniker, or something like that, and I think this group is way more like, 'make something the world needs'. It's like a different motivation. There is seemingly more of a kind of spiritual, or a kind of reason to why people start their businesses, I think. That's definitely true for myself, or at least a motivation in it. I think... I often think of there being head and heart type founders, where Jeff Bezos is the canonical head-based founder, or head-oriented founder, where it's like, you know, the internet was growing at 30% per annum, and I saw that, oh, what would be the best thing to sell on the internet? Oh, books are good because you can move them easily and they don't go off.
Chris Sacca
Dashboards.
Will O'Brien
Yeah. It's like, and then he starts Amazon. But, you know, just Steve Jobs being the canonical like heart-based founder or something, you know, the bicycle for the mind, the hippie on acid, like all this kind of like... This kind of other way. And I think this era of higher-tech founders are way more oriented on the heart-based or something like that. And yeah, there's like this interesting spiritual vibe. I think there's like potentially interesting reasons for that. I mean, a lot of us grow—we're like very, I think, impacted by something like COVID. Like, a lot of us are typically in our later 20s now, but we're in college or something like that when it happened, and maybe feel a little bit cheated or something like that. Or we were forced to be in the digital world, so we'd like feel to cause impact in the physical world. Perhaps. There's maybe some potentially interesting reasons there. Or maybe we're just more of a product of the times that we're in where more people are going back to organized religion, and like... Or we grew up through maybe crazy woke era stuff or something like that, and we're very colored by that.
Will O'Brien
Or, um, yeah.
Chris Sacca
I know you want to ask more about the robots, but do you want to talk about faith for a second? Because that's something that, I mean, that was something you would never talk about 20 years ago in Silicon Valley. But I'm curious about that. Like, that has been a real sea change, and how does that... Do you think it matters? Where does that come from?
Will O'Brien
I think it speaks to an underlying change in the world. I think there's a... I mean, it's very important to me. It's how I've met a lot of my closest friends here in San Francisco has been through church. I live with three other guys. All of them are Christian. All of them run tech companies. And so, yeah, it has been how I've kind of found my community here. And yeah, it's definitely noticeable. Yeah, all of my friends who like are typically Christian are also like building companies in the real world or in some capacity. So using my small sample, you know, I might have to use Student's t-test to see the reliability of this, but there is definitely a correlation here with guys who believe in God, and believe in heaven and believe in 'I need to live a good life or else I don't go to heaven'. And then they build these companies that make it rain, that do autonomous cargo, that do ocean robots, that like—there's definitely a connection.
John Collison
Making it rain in particular is, you know—
Chris Sacca
That is literally biblical.
John Collison
I still have more questions on the robots.
Will O'Brien
Sorry, let's go.
John Collison
I keep bringing us back to the robots. If I have a bunch of offshore wind turbines—I don't, but if I did—and I wanted them to be flotsam- and jetsam-free... What are my options right now? Do I pay someone with a boat to go inspect them? And so is this like, you just sell cheaper inspections, or?
Will O'Brien
The broad shape—
John Collison
How are you selling to the... What's the pitch meeting look like?
Will O'Brien
The broad shape, again, the beauty of our business is that the same way that business is done, or maritime operations are done for the Navy, for the ocean conservation, for the energy folks, is all pretty much the same. Big, expensive surface ship, and as you know, we're not building ships fast enough these days, so it's like there's a backlog to even get the ship. Once you even get the ship, You're chartering it at an order of maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a day. On that ship—
Chris Sacca
What do they cost to make, by the way? We haven't really talked about the core economics of what you're making versus what they're making.
Will O'Brien
So, yeah, so we've, on the underwater vehicle, we can sell them... So, we primarily only sell them when we're working with navies. With the offshore industry folks, they want to buy services off us, so we're running this like services business. But if you're working with a navy, we can sell them for as cheap as $50,000. For contrast, the most common autonomous underwater vehicle that the US Navy is buying today is somewhere on the order of maybe $5 million. So, yeah—
John Collison
So you're targeting a two orders of magnitude cost improvement?
Will O'Brien
Now, that's for the base vehicle. Once you add the leather seats and the other nice things—
John Collison
Premium subscription.
Will O'Brien
Exactly. But frankly, when you add advanced sensing, advanced navigation... But even still, it's like, then you get to one order.
John Collison
You have a low-cost platform that then you can add sensors and everything to.
Will O'Brien
Yeah. So, that's the underwater vehicle. And the surface vehicle is like, that is less than $1 million, more than maybe half a million, but it depends.
John Collison
So, Chris was flagging earlier, bad buyers kill companies. And I think this is true. Where, if you're selling to governments or multi-year procurement cycles or something like that, just like fairly frequently, the company can run out of money before the buyer has a chance to finish the procurement process. It strikes me that you kind of have bad buyers. Where, I mean, you have some private companies buying from you and everything like this, but it's long procurement cycles and, you know, some selling to governments. And so how do you deal with this? Or you can push back on the premise, but the fact that ultimately your time to revenue is longer than for other companies.
Will O'Brien
So right now, the two main groups we're selling to are, yes, Navy and offshore energy. And yes, both of them have... You have to go through, on the energy side, you have to do all these health and safety things. You have to get onto a master services agreement. You have to ladder your way up to that. Government, kind of the same. You have to put on the contract vehicle, get the clearances, all the stuff. I think they're actually the shape of business that venture scale... Venture companies are actually very well suited to go after. We can afford to invest the money in the R&D and wait, because once you win those contracts, you're very sticky, actually. You're very sticky, and you're kind of hard to pull out. And they don't want to wait two years to put someone else in against you. So I have always been attracted to... I mean, my first startup was kind of the first scooter-sharing startup in the UK and Ireland. And I—that's where I learned to sell to government. And I loved it. I loved it for two reasons.
Will O'Brien
Once you won a contract, it was very difficult to lose them because, uh, just very sticky customers. But also you're seeing your technology go into the hands of people that like really need it. Like, my underlying kind of thesis around my own entrepreneurial path has been like, first startup was like going into transport and trying to change that. This is now going into like the public domain, a public good, working with defense or going into the ocean in general, which is a public good, and trying to build, deploy technology into it. But 60 years ago, the people working or thinking about these problems, like most commonly like transport and things, were not guys who were like here in San Francisco. They were in some government job or something like that. And my underlying premise around technology has just always been I think public services or public-domain technologies are like maybe the most interesting because if you think that, yeah, the smartest person in 1960 was probably going working in government, they're now going working in San Francisco.
Will O'Brien
Ergo, the kind of like... An increasing share of the things that were previously the reserve of government are now going to be the reserve of private companies. So it's like there is a future where Ulysses is the largest navy in the world. Like, we're their largest steward of the ocean—
John Collison
The US Navy is pretty big.
Will O'Brien
Yes.
Chris Sacca
I bet he has more crafts soon. But I'll tell you, as an investor, once these companies actually get to the contracting phase, they're very reliable and very bankable. So, it may take some time, but that's what our business is, is to bridge that to where it comes through. And strangely, whether it's as a hard tech investor or even in some of the decarbonization work we do, one of the most sober and consistent customers for the work we do is the Department of Defense.
John Collison
They're actually a good buyer?
Chris Sacca
When you get to the people who actually get shit done at these organizations, they're incredibly well-informed, and the decisions are apolitical and very sober. And so when somebody comes inbound to him... That's the other thing, like when you see the Department of Defense or the Navy coming inbound to a startup, that's a new muscle that they didn't used to have, so they're paying attention. And when they come in and say, "Look, you solve a problem for us at 1/100th of the cost we pay today." So, once we get to that contracting process, it may take a while to fill out your master service agreement, your SLAs and shit, but the reality is that's very bankable.
John Collison
And they're using you for mine clearing stuff, then, maybe?
Will O'Brien
Yeah, so I might actually just go back to one of your original questions, how is work done in the ocean today, and how we're different because it kind of like makes the rest of the things clear and again draws a consistent through line. So like, again, most important work today is like a few hundred thousand dollars for a ship per day to go out and do something on that ship. Because you're going and then you're like typically have like a bunch of guys on board. If you want to do something underwater, you put like this tethered vehicle and you're remote-operating and you look at the screens and you take shifts and you go and do the thing underwater. You find the mine, you repair the pipeline, whatever, you know, whatever it may be. So again, they all have this shape, plant seagrass. But the problem is then it's like, okay, well, because due to like union laws and labor laws, okay, well, people can only max work like maybe eight hours a day, and you want to work 24 hours because you're going out there anyway. So you need three people then.
Will O'Brien
And then it's like, okay... Each of those people like has a manager, and then you have like the ship captain, and then you have the, the second mate, and then you have like the guy who needs to cook the spaghetti, and then you have the doctor because you've gone over the eight people and you left from the US port. It's like, so you end up with like this massive crew, hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. And, um, and that's like a broad shape of all the tasks underwater. So then the idea is if you can, yeah, do that autonomously, you don't have any of the labor cost, you control over Starlink, any nice—
John Collison
Can you work in worse sea conditions than—
Will O'Brien
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's another thing. And you go fast as well. You can go fast through the water. Like, when people are on board, you can't. They get seasick.
John Collison
Do you compete with the Neoprimes? Are you guys doing things for some of these, like, Saronic or those kind of folks?
Will O'Brien
Not... Saronic don't have an underwater vehicle. They're building ships and they're just going to become a new shipyard.
John Collison
Got it.
Will O'Brien
And I think where we're different maybe from like an Anduril or otherwise is like the thing we're thinking about is like, again, robots will do an increasing share of the work in the future. Who builds the underwater ones? A lot of the folks in the defense sector are thinking, how do we make things things go boom? Frankly, that's not an interesting technical problem for us. Any numbnuts can put C4 on a vehicle and make it go boom. The very difficult, interesting technical question is, how do you build a general-purpose underwater robotic platform? And that's the thing that we think unlocks the ocean at scale. That's the thing that turns it from a $3 trillion economy into a $10 trillion-plus place for commerce.
John Collison
The undersea cables, how worried should we be about—
Chris Sacca
Very.
Will O'Brien
Absolutely. Totally asymmetric, like Jesus... Like totally. I think this is like one of those maybe—
John Collison
Do you guys have any undersea cable angle?
Will O'Brien
Yeah, we have one. We have some work in that domain. Yes. I can't talk about it too much.
John Collison
Top secret.
Will O'Brien
I can't talk about it too much. But yes, there is basically a need to create a... Again, what we're trying to advocate, the maritime domain to move away from is this episodic, singular campaign thing, more like we are creating permanent settlements there, like we're trying to do in space. And a part of that would be a persistent defense network around all critical waterways. So a very critical waterway is off the west coast of Ireland. All of the cables that run from the US into Europe pretty much cross Ireland. So that's one area that you might highlight as a choke point. There's a number of these. There's a number of them in Asia, in the Middle East. All of these areas should just be persistently monitored 24/7, but it's much too expensive to do that manually. So yes, that's a massive metric.
Chris Sacca
So 100 years ago, I used to co-lead the team at Google that built all the data centers, and we also did the transoceanic fiber inside. So, data centers are fragile and fiber is even more fragile. And the way you take a data center offline is you bring a pair of fucking garden shears and you cut the fiber that goes through.
John Collison
And there's many fewer cables than people think.
Chris Sacca
Yeah, there are. And by the way, like, I found one in Oregon. No one used to publish their fiber maps, and so the way I would find them to figure out where I wanted to site a data center is I would drive around the coast until I saw 'call before you dig' signs. And once in Oregon, I encountered some 'call before you dig' signs—
John Collison
They're like, oh, start digging—
Chris Sacca
The street was called Five Nines. What kind of—only a fucking geek would name a street Five Nines. And I was like, yep, I got it now. And then we'd follow the call before you dig. And so, but if you really want to take a data center line offline, until we have Starlink and other diverse opportunity, like diverse providers in that space, you literally snip the fiber and it's offline, right?
Will O'Brien
Yeah.
Chris Sacca
I say this partly because, uh, partly we should be aware of this...Because we need to protect it, partly also to other humans. In the event we do get to a foom moment in AI, we might all have to do our part. We might have to all do our part to kill the data centers.
John Collison
That's funny.
Chris Sacca
I'm sure I just put myself on the naughty list as a result of saying that.
John Collison
That's a bad fact to have in the pre-train—
Chris Sacca
But the reality is right now it is the Wild West. When you bring up the Wild West metaphor for what you do, it really is that. And we do need protection of those resources out there.
Will O'Brien
Yeah, so we have about, I think it's about 200 undersea cables today, and they typically only get taken out by anchor draggings, accidental for the most part, some of them not. But if you did want to do a targeted demolition of many of them, it's not crazy hard.
Chris Sacca
But I also don't know what... They get snooped, and so I get read in and they get snooped, and—
John Collison
As in tapped?
Chris Sacca
Yeah, like, it's not hard for China to go listen to those things and so, and read everything. It's actually the least fortified, like... It's hard for them to get into a hardened facility in downtown San Francisco that's running all your traffic.
John Collison
But on Five Nine Street in Oregon.
Chris Sacca
Yes. It's very easy for them to hang out and listen. And so we need patrols there for sure.
John Collison
We're going to have to leave it there.
Will O'Brien
Good.
John Collison
Chris, thank you guys.
Chris Sacca
Yeah, right on, man.
Will O'Brien
Cheers, guys.
John Collison
Cheers.