Three Startups Reinventing Critical Infrastructure

This week, a16z American Dynamism Films premiered three short documentaries highlighting companies tackling some of America's biggest industrial challenges: Ulysses, Mariana Materials, and Radiant. Before watching those films, we're revisiting conversations with the founders behind each company. You'll hear Will O'Brien explain why autonomous underwater robots could unlock a new era of ocean exploration and security, Turner Caldwell discuss rebuilding America's critical minerals supply chain and modernizing mining, and Doug Bernauer share why portable nuclear microreactors could transform how we generate power. Together, these conversations offer a look at the technologies—and the founders—working to rebuild the industrial foundations of the United States.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Last month, A16Z American Dynamism Films screened short films about three portfolio companies. Ulysses built mission-critical underwater robots. Mariana Minerals applies modern technologies to the critical mineral sector. And Radiant seeks to mass-produce nuclear microreactors. Now, all three films are available on A16Z's YouTube channel. Before we check them out, today's episode highlights previous appearances by all three company founders. First up, Ulysses' Will O'Brien joined MTS last April after their latest fundraise.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Super exciting. So for the audience, what exactly is Ulysses? And what do you do?

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Yes, at Ulysses, we're building the ocean company. Essentially, if you have a difficult or tough problem to solve in the surface or subsea domain, we build autonomous robots that solve that problem. You know, the platform is basically autonomous surface vehicles combined with autonomous underwater vehicles, built to be kind of cheap enough that you can kind of deploy them at scale over large swathes of the ocean, that they can work together autonomously to kind of solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Like, what kind of critical tasks?

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. We have three main verticals that we operate in. We actually began, you know, because we were very interested in problems in the world of kind of conservation and nature. And that was kind of the first use case. We built our autonomous underwater vehicle, Mako IV. So that is doing things like mapping, coral reefs mapping undersea ecosystems, using the vehicles to collect seeds and replant them in new locations. That was kind of like a first and early use case. Then, you know, after that, we got pulled into our second vertical, which is what we call the commercial vertical. The commercial vertical, you know, we're doing things like inspecting offshore wind platforms, inspecting subsea cables, doing repairs on undersea infrastructure. There's, you know, billions of dollars of kind of assets in their Earth's oceans owned

• 1:52Speaker 02

  by energy and telecoms companies. So just basically, you know, protecting them and that sort of thing and keeping them up to date. And then, you know, in actually as well, you know, we got, we got pulled into the world of defense by, by the US Navy. They came to us when they heard about our underwater vehicle. They were extremely impressed with some of the specs and very dissatisfied with a lot of the existing options given by the primes. You know, Mako, our underwater vehicle is truly like best in class for its form factor, the small to medium size. So for them, you know, they're interested in things like, how can we find and, and remove mines? How can we, you know, gather intelligence underwater? And yeah, how can we do, yeah, other relevant, important tasks like protecting ports, harbors,

• 2:36Speaker 02

  critical infrastructure, that sort of thing. So, yeah, all done off the kind of same core tech platform, but it's pretty, pretty valuable and can be used, used across each. Like, you know, one of the kind of similarities maybe to think about is like, people are building general purpose robotic form factors on land in the form of the humanoid. You can't just take a humanoid robot and throw it into the ocean. Like, it just doesn't work that way. You know, you have to have something that maybe looks a bit more like a fish or shark. And that's the kind of platform that we're, we're hoping to build for the ocean.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Cool. Have you ever played Subnautica?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  I haven't, but I have heard of it.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  That's incredible. It seems like Subnautica is like Ulysses, the game. I also haven't played it. I don't really play that many video games, but it's just like, it's a game where you, I believe, are a guy controlling a submarine that's going around an alien ocean and exploring things and solving technical problems and fighting sea monsters.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much the average day in the life for a Ulysses forward deployed engineer.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  What do you think about why there are so relatively few ocean companies? You know, there's a billion space companies, there's a billion satellite companies, there's a billion robot companies, but so few of them seem to be focused on the ocean. And is it just because space and land robots are like sexier somehow?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think part of it is, part of it is kind of a, a like narrative, there's like a different narrative for the ocean and it's not, you haven't, you haven't got this kind of like, you know, inspirational framing of like iconic images of like Apollo and SpaceX, you know, rockets launching again. And you haven't had a company like doing the kind of SpaceX version of like, let's make this domain sexy again for the ocean. But I think it's worth going back and looking at like history to understand that like this is an anomaly, a historic anomaly that we haven't been as obsessed with exploring the oceans. Since the dawn of time, mankind has like dreamed of, you know, sea creatures, expeditions at sea.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Moana.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was, it was the pinnacle of like frontier spirit and exploration for, for most of humanity's history. And then it seems around the kind of 60s and 70s, and we kind of forgot about it. But like, at that point in the 60s, when the US was, you were really kind of, you know, just so optimistic and so ambitious. Well, a lot of people fail to realize or actually, you know, forget is that the exploring of the Earth's oceans was a co-equal ambition as going, going to the moon. You know, at the 1964 World's Fair, the future, GM had this ride, Futurama 2, that, you know, 26 million people saw this. It was like a lunar base, you know, on one side of it. But then you also had, you had like a subsea hotel called Hotel Atlantis that had like

• 5:20Speaker 02

  ocean floor oil rigs and submarine trains bringing critical minerals to shore. And you had a resort down there where people could, you know, look around, JFK, you know, commissioned this plan that was effectively like the undersea equivalent for.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  They pulled us up on Stitcher?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  The, the undersea equivalent of a, of a, of kind of like the space program. And, and, you know, he like tripled funding like year over year to like explore the Earth's oceans. And then we had like people living on the seafloor. There was, the Navy had this program called SeaLab, right? And they, they were like sending people down to live at the bottom, at the bottom of the ocean. And then, very unfortunately, we had the death of one of the members, Barry Cannon, one of the explorers kind of down there. And that combined with the redirecting of a lot of the Navy's kind of budget and towards

• 6:15Speaker 02

  things like focusing on Vietnam and other kind of priorities led to neglecting funding and resources to go and look at the underwater domain. Also, the underwater domain in the Cold War became very heavily classified. There's been books kind of released in the kind of last like decade or two, talking about the, you know, the hunt for Red October, right? And these kind of like books that are kind of talking about like all these crazy things that US subs were doing in this era. That was all very classified stuff. They couldn't talk about it publicly, right? So you had this like insane engineering, the same, same exploration going on undersea, but it was totally classified and we couldn't speak about it publicly. And also like Jack Cousteau, the biggest cultural icon for it, he was real about exploration and then he kind of pivots more to like conservation.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So there's this cultural shift, there's this like classification. And as a result, 50 years later, we're still like working with the same tools in the ocean. And it's exactly this kind of like exploration spirit, this like desire to kind of conquer this great blue frontier that we're trying to reignite and be that like SpaceX for the ocean, that get like young kids dreaming about being, you know, aquanauts as well as like astronauts and then, and you know, going to these frontiers. Because when you get into the engineering of it, it's gnarly stuff. Like, it's really gnarly stuff to get to kind of make vehicles that can work in the deeps, work in the depths. It's like arguably more difficult than, than like a lot of the, like making a vehicle that can survive in space. And there's a lot more things trying to, trying to take you out down there.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, there's a cultural kind of and like military reasons why we don't really have a generation of kids thinking of building ocean companies.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  So this makes me wonder, like, what is China doing in oceans?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, this is, you know, kind of the longer part of it is the, in the undersea domain, it still remains a domain in which like the US can create a decisive advantage, right? It seems like on shipbuilding, like, you know, China is, you know, by far and away ahead, right? Building hundreds of ships per annum to the US building kind of single-digit ships. You know, in aerial drones, it's like they're producing tens of millions. The US is maybe making, you know, single-digit million, if, you know, if even. But in kind of the autonomous, like underwater vehicle, undersea drone space, and, you know, we're looking at like single-digit thousand autonomous underwater vehicles or underwater drones made every year. And, you know, hundreds of them are made in China and hundreds of them are made in the US.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  So it's not like a massive, like a total disparity here. We're like on the same kind of order of magnitude. So the undersea domain is definitely a domain in which like the US could create an advantage. Now, that being said, China is moving forward itself on a lot of like undersea initiatives. So they're building, like, they just released this kind of submarine-sized autonomous underwater vehicle that has a range that can extend 18,000 kilometers. So, you know, it could potentially reach the coastline of the United States. And that's, that's obviously a massive threat. They also have cable cutting tools and they can operate at like a depth of like 4,000. So this is a really serious like asymmetric threat that they have on the US now.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  There's, there's not many capabilities the US has in this kind of size variant. And in addition to that, they're also building what they call like an underwater great wall of sensors across the Indo-Pacific. And these would be sensors that you put down, pre-low power draw, and they can sense maybe submarines or other things moving and they're networked. And it gives them this kind of undersea kind of GPS or like navigating capability, which would obviously be very useful to them in the context of war. But it's, they're not like leaps and bounds ahead of where the US is. At least, you know, we're looking at opening a facility next year or beginning to kind of like break ground on it next year.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  That facility alone would, you know, two to three X like international supply of autonomous underwater vehicles. And, you know, obviously all of that will be built in the United States. So, you know, undersea dominance is definitely within reach for the US versus China.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Interesting. So especially in the last decade or so, there's been this idea of sea steadying, especially among libertarians, you know, Peter Thiel was really into this. I think Zuckerberg was into this. The idea of being, you know, if you can't create libertarian utopia in any existing country, and there's no frontier left because all the land is gone, you can build libertarian utopia in the middle of the ocean. Or, you know, just forgetting about the libertarian valence, just like having human habitation in the middle of the ocean. So do you think this is a good idea? Is it tractable at all?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's definitely a good idea. I think the intellectual merit of the idea is great. I think like, yeah, like Thiel kind of speaks about this, you know, The Sovereign Individual is probably one of the first books that really kind of coined, I think, a lot of these ideas back in the 90s. But yeah, in a world that is increasingly regulated and burdened, shackled, you know, man desires for the freedom and therefore he can go to sea and build these, you know, kind of habitations out there and be, you know, doesn't have to worry about regulation or red tape. It could be a great place to do some interesting things in biotech and longevity and other kind of forms of experimentation where people wanna, they wanna voluntarily like take maybe treatments or something like that, but the government here won't let them. So I think there's like a lot of merit

• 11:35Speaker 02

  in a lot of that. And also like just the sheer kind of mass, if you know, if we're to get the most out of the ocean and the resources that it provides to us and also to bring some kind of order to it being a very disordered place. I think we do need to put habitations out there, like more of the important work is going to be done by robots in the future out there. But I think we will want to have humans out there and I think you could build some really nice settlements out there. But I think, so I think the idea of sea setting has its merit for sure. But I think what was wrong, what they didn't have at the time were the tools and technology to build it. It was like a good idea, but it was too early because the technological enablers weren't doing it, right? So what do you need if you want to build out at sea, right?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Okay, you definitely want internet, you know, okay, Starlink changes the game, right? Starlink, you know, for the first time ever, you can actually have a habitation out there that can be connected to the rest of the world through something like Starlink. Okay, you want to have like logistics freshened up, you know, pretty frequently. Again, trying to get a big container ship or someone like that to come out and stop off in your little location and drop something there, you know, maybe not that realistic. But again, if you have a Poseidon Aerospace autonomous cargo plane that can come out and refuel you every two weeks or week with new supplies, you know, that's great. Okay, you'd want to do maintenance on your floating rig, right? You're this floating rig right there, things are breaking, divers are super expensive.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Okay, that could like pretty much bankrupt you if things are breaking and you can't fix them in time. Okay, you have your Ulysses autonomous underwater robots that go in and like fix the cables underneath it and tie these things down or whatever. So you're starting to see the proliferation of tools now that I think that can actually reduce the cost of operation down such that the benefits do outweigh the costs in something like sea setting. You also need energy generation at sea. Solar has come on like leaps and bounds in the last few decades. And so that's possible. We're also seeing interesting advances in ocean geothermal or you're basically just like taking advantage of natural heat in the ocean to generate energy with pantalasa, generating wave energy. We have Carpower Ship who developed these modular kind

• 13:41Speaker 02

  of floating power stations that you can put on a ship so that it can be brought out to locations. So yeah, the power, the logistics, the data problem, the kind of like operators and maintenance, these are all problems that are now starting to be solved for the first time. So yeah, sea setting, I would love to see it come back.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Interesting. So we've had a lot of incidents in the last few years of oil pipelines and internet connectivity cables being cut, you know, often as an act of deliberate sabotage. How do you defend against these? It seems like you just have a lot of potential attack surface and it's tough to defend.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you need a combination of, you know, sensing, sensor nodes like placed along all this infrastructure and you need to make, they need to be really cheap. And that gives you like your kind of your eyes and ears, you can tell, but you need also to be able to intervene and actually protect. So that's where the robotics and like underwater drones like the Mako would come into it. And so you need those two kind of combination of those two things. And then you need the ability to kind of refill them at sea as well. So you need something like Leviathan, the autonomous surface vehicle that can like recover them, recharge them, connect them to the internet so they can relay that data back. So yeah, and then you need all of this tech to be made like super cheap such that you can deploy them over massive scale. And like, yeah, this is exactly

• 15:04Speaker 02

  the lens that we've brought to building these things, right? Like if you want to buy an autonomous underwater vehicle from one of the primes or something like that to do these interventions or protect your cables today, you're paying like in the order of millions of dollars. And they don't come with a launch and recovery system to recharge them. And they don't have native integration into sea bed sensors to protect the cables. So yeah, that's why we're kind of taking this full stack from sensors to surface to subsea approach. And yeah, these are all very much things that we're kind of thinking about.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Nice. So you are also, in addition to being the co-founder, CEO of Ulysses, the secretary of the Hamilton Society, which is one of my favorite things in SF, actually. I go to most or all of the Hamilton Society meetings. For the audience, it's this debate society they meet in this church in the Richmond like once a month. It's very formal. You are required to wear a suit and tie if you're a man and you know, black tie if you're a woman. If you are not wearing a suit and tie, they will just not let you in. And it's great. So it has this like real atmosphere of kind of professionalism and dignity and sort of old academia aesthetics. So how did that whole thing come about?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, a part of it was, you know, I moved to San Francisco and I came from Ireland where, you know, we love, you just drink pints, I guess. And like, that's our social, you know, we go to the pub, you know, we hang out, you know, groups and none of my friends worked in tech. So then like being, you know, dropped into San Francisco where nobody drank, everyone took off their shoes, you were in like, someone's like extremely brightly lit like living room. And then like everyone was talking about their stupid startup. I was like, this is like hell. I don't want to talk about these things. I don't want to be in this like environment. I want to have a drink. I want to have like, you know, fun. I want the room to be a bit darker, more dimly lit. And then like Hamilton was like the opposite of all the things. You don't talk about your startup. You keep your shoes on, you dress nicely and you talk about like an important problem of the day.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  And, and you know, so it was like, that was my own kind of personal motivation. And that was kind of like about the motivation to community that of co-founders that we started with. But in addition to that, there was this kind of bigger like belief that, you know, San Francisco is, yeah, in my opinion, you know, the most important city in the world. And but it doesn't have social institutions that match its ambitions in the material world. It doesn't have places where ideas are formed, where people can debate, you know, it's just really people shouting at each other on Twitter. And if you look at like any great moment of kind of immense, you know, wealth creation or otherwise, we've had these social institutions where people could network and connect and like converge on like what is truth of what this community should advance and seek

• 17:41Speaker 02

  to advance, you know, together. You know, the UK kind of had like Oxford Union and these set of like members clubs in places like London. The, you know, we had the Pacific Union Club, you have other kind of members clubs on the East Coast as well and places like New York from the Industrial Revolution. But you know, today, like, you know, this is this physical place instantiation of it does not exist. So Hamilton Society was kind of conceived in that vein as well. And yeah, looking to draw on the kind of heritage of places like Oxford Union, how they run their debates. So, yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  How much cultural impact do you think it has had so far?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  I think it is in its early days of kind of cultural impact. I think it has been good at like, you know, like I think one example is like the billionaire tax. Anybody who was at that debate has come away with it with an actually way more high fidelity understanding of like why a billionaire tax is like very bad, right? Beforehand, it was like the extent of which people really had seriously engaged in it was like, you know, maybe you were just like billionaires are good, you know, or something like that. You didn't understand why the mechanics of it or the mechanics of what they were actually proposing and why specifically those were bad. And what maybe an alternative might be if you still wanted to generate like tax revenue through like wealth. All these points, these kind of on the ladder that I was talking about are points that were brought up that night. And we literally had, you know, Trey Stevens or a real life billionaire, founder of Andoril,

• 19:00Speaker 02

  debating the two, the two guys who wrote the policy, right? And I think everyone came away with it like, oh, wow. Okay, we now understand specifically why it's bad such that the 600 people who attended and the 400 people who voted against a billionaire tax at that night's debate can now bring that into their own relevant communities when they meet people who are like, hey, why is it, you know, we should do billionaire tax. And they have like the talking points that they can go straight to right now. So it's probably that ripple down effect that when people go back to the communities, they have that now as well. Similarly, when we have debates on things like Christianity or religion or, you know, gender relations or other things, like people can like bring the talking points into their own life. So maybe, maybe difficult one to measure like specifically, oh, we'll be led to this. But I think it's only a matter of time that you start to see kind of concrete impacts and in the culture.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I hope you're right. I think it's definitely a good cultural institution. When have you scheduled the next debate yet?

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Not yet. We have some exciting potential speakers in the lineup. We're always trying to, you know, go one level up and quality is better than quantity for us. So we have some interesting ones in the work and we'll be sharing more on, on kind of Twitter in the coming weeks.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Cool. So back to Ulysses, what is sort of the ultimate like vision for the company? What do you hope to discover in the ocean?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, the mission of the company is to, you know, drive abundance through ocean stewardship, better stewarding our oceans, right? And advance kind of human flourishing by enabling humans to better interact and steward the high seas. In actuality, that means, you know, healthy, safe and prosperous oceans, right? Healthy oceans where like, we're not worried about the coral reefs dying off, right? We're not worried about overfishing. We're not worried about like illegal Chinese fishermen anymore. You know, that there's like health and like vibrance in the ecology of the oceans. The safe one is like, the oceans remain to be this place where most of human trafficking happens, where, you know, hundreds of people are, are, are subject

• 20:59Speaker 02

  to either, you know, violent abuse, sexual abuse, or in some cases murder on the high seas today. Again, because it's literally is the wild west, nobody instruments it anymore. That is just like over. And then prosperous, the ocean can be this like actual engine for like economic growth and, and driving human flourishing, right? So we've got the, the ocean is like fully instrumented with subsea cables that we need to drive AI to the next level. We are, you know, responsibly, you know, extracting things like critical minerals to support the advancement of robotics, AI, other things. We're also, you know, capturing much more energy from the earth's oceans. It's the biggest source of energy on earth and we're still capturing like a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of that energy every day. And so we're, you know, we're driving more energy through that.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  And, you know, it continues to be a place for logistics that we're not worried about the strator of her moves closing down anymore, right? And you can drive forward. So that's, I think, the type of world we want to create. What that looks like as a company itself, it means we would have a network of autonomous vehicles wrapped around the earth's oceans, like Starlink has satellites, you know, covering, covering space and, and rockets going out to, to kind of, to kind of service it. We have operation centers in North America, South America, Africa, EMEA, and another one over in Asia Pacific. And you have operators there, each controlling swarms of vehicles to solve various problems. And yeah, we have ocean, you know, sensors, vehicles up and down kind of earth's oceans, every coastline, and it

• 22:27Speaker 02

  just becomes a part of the infrastructure. In the same way that like Stripe just became a part of the internet, Ulysses just becomes a part of the ocean. And it's just there. They're just like these, like your robot friends kind of fixing things where you need, when they need to be fixed.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's a beautiful vision. Will O'Brien, congrats on the fundraise and stuff. And thank you so much for coming on MTS.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  No problem. Thank you very much for having me.

• 22:53Erik Torenberg?

  Next up, Marietta Minerals founder Turner Caldwell joined me, American Dynamism general partner Aaron Pricewright, and partner Ryan McEntush on the podcast.

• 23:04Erik Torenberg?

  So Turner, you're coming out of stealth with $85 million raise. Why don't we get into, what are critical minerals and why do they matter?

• 23:11Turner Caldwell?

  Critical minerals fundamentally underpin everything that we do every day. And that's why we're personally really excited about it. But it's not just aerospace, energy, renewable energy, battery, energy, storage systems, the massive growth in AI that's happened in the last, you know, 12, 18, 24 months, and defense, obviously. But it's also everything that we use every day, right? Like you have rare earths in your phone, you have rare earths in your AirPods, your screens, your laptops. And so it really does, it like crosses everything that we use. But where they're produced and how they're refined and how they're mined, that all happens in the background. And so it's something that really does need to be brought to the foreground, something that we need to support more and more of. You know, it's a long chain to go from digging something up to go all the way through to

• 23:56Turner Caldwell?

  something that can actually be deployed in an, in an end product. And so excited to talk about that.

• 24:02Erik Torenberg?

  Well, I want to get into, how do we turn rocks into batteries or magnets? And why is that so important?

• 24:07Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah. So it starts with mining, obviously. Well, it actually starts with exploration.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, you gotta find the rocks in the first place.

• 24:12Turner Caldwell?

  That's right. You gotta find the rocks in the first place, which, which is hard to do. And there's a lot of awesome companies that are working on trying to condense that timeline. But once you do find them, you have to get that asset or that resource permitted to extract. You develop a mining plan, you have to mine it. And when that rock, those rocks come to the surface, you have to separate ore from waste, which is something that is not as trivial as people might expect. And then you go through a concentration step. So the ores will come to the surface, they'll be, you know, less than 1%, definitely less than 5% concentration, unless you have this world-class deposit. And you'll typically go through a concentrating step. So that can be mechanical, it can be thermal, it can be chemical, and that gives you an intermediate product. And those, those intermediate products kind of move all over the world and typically go to refining, refining assets. The refining

• 24:55Turner Caldwell?

  operation effectively goes from anything that is like a 10% concentrate to a 50% intermediate product and turns into a high purity metal. And then you go into a specialty chemical. And so that's this intermediate product where you go through another chemical process to either make a metal sulfate or a metal hydroxide salt. And then you will convert that into an engineered material, which is the next step. And that, you know, in electrochemical systems and batteries, you'll have cathode materials, you have anode materials, and there the morphology and electrochemical performance in the system is really important. And then you're ready to deploy into a battery cell. And then you'll go into a module, and then you'll go into a pack, and then you'll go into a car, go into a stationary storage

• 25:39Turner Caldwell?

  product. And on the magnet side of things, you know, similarly, you'll get to a refined, a refined rare earth product. And, you know, it's a long list of rare earths that often get bundled into like one group, but it's important to kind of like break them out. And then the common way of making magnets, there's a few flow sheets, but you'll slurry it, you'll get the right blend of, of the different rare earths that you're trying to put in. You'll cast that, you'll center it. And then you'll go through a fairly intricate and like high-precision machining process to get the geometry that you want with the tolerances that you need, before you can deploy that into magnets and eventually into motors.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  How specific is it for a given site, given like concentration and other sort of waste products? Like how, how dynamic is it? Like, is one rare earth mine going to be similar process to another? Or is there going to be very sort of bespoke setup?

• 26:27Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, it's, it's very bespoke. And it's actually part of the problem and what makes kind of the minerals industry so complicated is that the flow sheet, which is ultimately how you go from the ore all the way through to the refined metal, is designed for that specific asset. You will have concentrations of impurities that you have to manage. The concentration, obviously, of the target metal is different. And there's like a library of metallurgical unit operations that are kind of all stitched, stitched together to build a refining operation or a processing operation. But how those are stitched together, that's bespoke for the individual unit operation. And tied to the kind of chemical metallurgist, process engineer that designed the circuit in the first place. So there's a lot of like human impact on what that flow sheet ultimately looks like. But yes.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  And I imagine very hard to change as the nature of the ore changes as you mine a site.

• 27:17Turner Caldwell?

  That, that's right. And so, you know, part of what we're working on and what we'll talk about a little bit later, I'm sure, is how do you, how do you define circuits or define, design circuits that have a little bit more flexibility to be able to process ore as it changes over, over time as you mine through the ore body? Because one mine does not actually have consistent ore coming out of it. The earth is heterogeneous, the ore grades are changing, the impurity concentrations are changing, there are different ore zones that have different properties and how they are floated, or how they're concentrated, how they perform in a leaching circuit. And all of those things are kind of custom-built for a specific asset.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  I mean, we've seen this from the, from the investor side, like we've, you know, there are a lot of really exciting new technologies being developed for mining and a lot of incredibly impressive startups that are building for, you know, various pieces of the mining lifecycle journey, whether it's autonomous vehicles, or drilling, or, you know, other various software and hardware tools for mining. But the challenge seems to be like, how do you get these kind of calcified, large incumbents who operate in a very decentralized way, have very low risk appetite, and, you know, not a strong internal culture affinity for tech? Like, how do you get them to adopt them quickly? Like, you're kind of, if you're a young startup, you're sort of at the back end call of this behemoth, and you have very

• 28:36Speaker 05

  little control over your own destiny, which I think has made it really hard for tech to kind of penetrate this market up until now. That's at least what we've observed on the VC side.

• 28:45Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, I mean, calcified is a good word. I think the, you know, the, the way that it's, there's, there's construction companies and, and mining companies, and really all a lot of big companies, is that the way that they'll identify and evaluate risk is, you know, fixing the status quo or making like a step change improvement in the status quo kind of requires doing like a thousand things. But you'll evaluate risk on each individual thing of that thousand things. And the downside of each individual thousand things is that the plant goes down, which is a multimillion dollar event. And so you're really not incentivized to change things. Like even small changes could result in multimillion dollars of loss. And, and you, you need to kind of like approach it of like, how do I do the thousand

• 29:29Turner Caldwell?

  things all at once so that I'm not stacking incremental returns on innovation with the same risk every single time? And that's where kind of like spot technical solutions are challenging to sell into the mining industry. And they'll do pilots, they'll definitely do a pilot. Like, there's no skin off their back to do kind of like a pilot. But you'll end up doing a lot of pilots. And because they don't build enough plants, kind of sequentially, like they'll build one big mine every five years, if that. And the, like, there aren't just, there just aren't a lot of opportunities to get into a commercial scale application. And if you don't time it perfectly, where like your pilot plant was five years before the commercial scale plant was planned for, like, you're not going to be in that one. So you'll be in the next one, which is five years later. And so the, just like the pace

• 30:14Turner Caldwell?

  at which the industry moves in terms of like deploying commercial scale infrastructure means that there just isn't a lot of opportunity to get new tech into commercial scale applications. And so there's a lot of folks that are doing like SaaS. SaaS products to, which is kind of the lowest cost way to get into, to like generate uplift in a, in a, in a mining project or a minerals refinery.

• 30:38Turner Caldwell?

  And the, the like barrier there is ultimately, how do you get the, get the operators to trust the recommendations from the, like this, this SaaS tool from this small company that is trying to kind of tell you how to run a plant? And you know, the culture is typically like, don't touch my things, don't touch my cash register and like, what do you, what do you all know about running a mine? And it, it does, it does stack up and it makes, you know, I've been calling it a death spiral for a lot of the, the, the folks that are trying to sell into the, the mining industry because it's hard.

• 31:10Speaker 06

  Just to like step back a little bit on the geopolitical context, like, you know, the stuff you're describing, I think very obviously true with a lot of the Western companies, but at the same time, a lot of Chinese companies that have sprouted over the last 20, 30 years have grown rapidly.

• 31:26Speaker 06

  Curious, why do you think that is?

• 31:28Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there's like a lot of top down and, and early recognition that critical minerals were going to be critical and needed to be supported. And so like shouldn't kind of like the everything around policy and everything around kind of like supporting companies to go and deploy both infrastructure domestically and infrastructure internationally to kind of like secure critical minerals, build infrastructure that secures a position like that has definitely happened. But I think that what people often don't talk about enough is that the talent pool is insane. Like it is not just a large talent pool, it is a large, skilled, experienced talent pool. I was in Indonesia in February and was kind of visiting one of the recent Chinese nickel refining operations.

• 32:13Turner Caldwell?

  And so they buy ore, they also have some mining operations.

• 32:18Turner Caldwell?

  But they, they had 13,000 people on site during construction and commissioning. And you know, if we were building a refinery in, in the US, which we did, it's hard to mobilize, you know, a 10th of that realistically. And when you have, it's not just about the number of people, it's about being able to iterate on every individual work front as fast as humanly possible. And we just don't have that label.

• 32:42Erik Torenberg?

  15 years ago or 20 years ago, would the, the same companies that were big now have been big then? Like where is kind of the evolution of the, of the space event?

• 32:51Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, I think that there's been like a clear splintering on kind of who does the exploration and who does the development. Like right now, the industry is set up where junior mining companies, which don't mine, they explore, go and they kind of, you know, they, they sometimes get, they'll get maybe a resource from a major mining company that's like held in their portfolio for a long time. But the, it's like a different risk reward profile than what the mining industry is ultimately, like the, the mining majors are ultimately looking for. And so you have this junior mining ecosystem that sometimes is well-funded and sometimes is competing with, for capital with like the cannabis industry in Canada. And, and you know, they're taking shots in the dark, basically trying to, and there's

• 33:33Turner Caldwell?

  a lot of work that's going into trying to make that exploration activity more intelligent, streamline it, drill less exploration holes while still being able to like interpolate or extrapolate what is in between those, those drill holes. But it's a, you're, you know, you're, you're going out in kind of the middle of nowhere. Either it's really far north in like the Arctic Circle or the Yukon, or it is, or it's overseas in Africa and you're doing exploration, or it's in Southeast Asia or in, or in South America.

• 34:03Turner Caldwell?

  And those folks, like they have one job, which is to define a resource and pump up its value sufficiently to flip it to a major.

• 34:11Turner Caldwell?

  And there's a lot of companies that aren't able to discover a resource that is either large enough, because the, the big mining companies, like they want to deploy large amounts of capital. We're talking about like multi, multi-billion dollar investments. And so they won't really look at projects that don't have the scale that kind of enable them to underwrite their own inefficiency. Like they, they want to build really large infrastructure that enables them to capture the economies of scale.

• 34:35Turner Caldwell?

  And so the, there's a whole bunch of, there's actually a really long tail of mining projects that don't have the scale that would justify getting acquired at a major premium. And so they'll go into this kind of orphan period is what it's called in the industry. And it's hard for them to break out of that orphan period. And that's kind of where we see our ability to kind of step in as a more efficient building, like builder and operator is kind of take these, what, you know, the industry calls subscale assets, but we see metal there and come in and like bring those into production as we kind of are building the platform and then eventually scale into the same scale that the big mining companies are, are operating at.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  Your thesis being that you can get the metal out and process it into a product that you can sell more efficiently than the majors, such that it's economically viable?

• 35:21Turner Caldwell?

  To offset the scale advantage.

• 35:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:23Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 05

  Well, maybe then, I think this might be a, a good opportunity then to talk a little bit more about like, what is Mariana's product? Like you said a few minutes ago, you're not a, you're not a SaaS product. You know, what does it mean to be a diversified metal and minerals company, technology-enabled mining company? Like give us, take us in a little bit more detail.

• 35:45Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah. So we're a vertically integrated software-first minerals project developer and operator. And so we focus on the backend of the minerals value chain, which is actually doing the detailed engineering, getting through the permitting, building, building the asset, commissioning the asset and then operating the asset. And going back to some of what we were talking about around the labor pool, like those labor pool shortages exist in construction and they exist in mining, like they're, they're felt very, very intensely. And so our fundamental thesis is that the, with a contracting labor pool, you know, you have to start with an awesome team. The table stakes is that you build an awesome team.

• 36:26Turner Caldwell?

  But how do you enable 200 people to do what 10,000 people are needed to do today? At least on the, on the like parent, parent co side of things. And that comes from leveraging the recent advances, advances in LLMs to automate workflows in the construction side of things and the engineering side of things and the procurement side of things, which take an insane amount of time. Like it's a, you're, you make a lot of lists and you fat finger a lot of data between databases.

• 36:53Turner Caldwell?

  And the, and, and that is all about reducing churn in construction. I think that there's churn, churn and latency. Latency is one thing that I think people sometimes don't appreciate from like status quo construction, like large scale mega projects is that what's happening in the field and what the, like the back office kind of sees, or what the executive team sees, or what the project director sees, there's like a three week lag generally for like really large construction projects where you are trying to aggregate data from all the different contractors, all of the different, and all the different parts of the facility into a consolidated, integrated schedule, which you can then make decisions off of, of like, how do I prioritize what I'm doing today?

• 37:33Turner Caldwell?

  And the way you run from on those, like in between those three weeks is people stand in circles every morning and they say, what are you doing today? What are you doing today? What are you doing today? And they go off and they do the thing, they'll send like a very brief kind of progress report back.

• 37:48Turner Caldwell?

  And it takes a long time to then take those progress reports and actually measure progress so that you can reevaluate priorities and understand kind of like how the project is trending. And so we're really trying to accelerate and democratize access to data fundamentally and run construction projects like manufacturing facilities. And it starts there. And the reason construction and mining are so kind of integrated, and some people might disagree with me, but like a mining project is a big civil construction project, it just never ends.

• 38:20Speaker 05

  Or you hope it never- It's more like a deconstruction project.

• 38:22Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, that's fair. You are, you are, well, you do, when you're-

• 38:25Speaker 05

  I guess you have to make-

• 38:25Turner Caldwell?

  You have to drill picks-

• 38:26Speaker 05

  You have to construct piles.

• 38:27Turner Caldwell?

  And you're building piles and-

• 38:28Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 38:29Turner Caldwell?

  The, but the, there's actually a lot of similarities in kind of like just moving the dirt for like site prep. And the, the same kind of like software stack that is enabling you to get feedback from the field live is the same thing that the mining industry struggles with. You know, there are, mining companies will lose equipment, like especially in underground mines that are like these like deep mazes and you know, the industry is getting better at having like actual location sensing on like where the equipment is. But losing equipment in the mine is like, it used to be a super common thing. Now, we start with construction and then, and then we start to get into the, you know, the second core software stack is what we're calling Plant OS. The construction stack is Capital Project OS.

• 39:12Turner Caldwell?

  And Plant OS is really aimed at removing humans from the loop and deciding how the chemical processing operations and the refining operations work. And these are like, big refineries are effectively big robots. You have the sensing and telemetry, you have the actuators to control how the plant operates. And you know, they're, you know, imagine like teleoperating humanoid robots like forever. Like that is what the refining industry and the processing industry has been. And there's obviously like PID control loops that kind of like maintain set points. So you can maintain temperature automatically, maintain pH automatically. But the thing that really matters is that the feed material to the processing facilities is constantly changing because the mine, like the ore body is changing over time.

• 39:58Turner Caldwell?

  And so the way that the industry manages that today is they will blend the feedstock to minimize variability that's going into the processing facilities. And that enables them to minimize the amount of change that has to happen on the processing facility. So we're trying to flip that and say, okay, if we build a hyper dynamic and highly flexible refining circuit, ideally without adding a whole bunch of costs, what does that do to optimizing the global operation from the mine to the refinery? But it's first aimed at reducing reagent consumption, reducing energy consumption. And you know, Google kind of proved this. They bought DeepMind in 2016, 2017. And one of the first things they did was throw the DeepMind team at automating and optimizing the data center thermal systems.

• 40:41Turner Caldwell?

  So air handler, chiller, cooling tower. And that's not a super complex system. You have weather, which is a factor. You have loads within the building, which is a factor, but you ultimately have like nine control variables between airflow rate, supplier temperature, the cooling water temperatures and flow rates, both in the chiller system and in the cooling tower system. And that, just in that relatively simple system, they were able to reduce energy consumption by 30, 40%.

• 41:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, like 40%.

• 41:11Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah. And it happened relatively quickly. And so that's the opportunity when you remove humans from making the decisions on how kind of like these process systems operate. Like that's the opportunity. And then when we look at kind of refining and processing facilities, that's like a thousand control variables. And it's no longer a single pass. Because what's really interesting about minerals refining is that you never want to lose the metal, right? Every piece of metal that you, or every atom that you lose kind of in the processing facility is another atom that you have to mine. So recovery in the refinery is actually like the biggest lever when it comes to cost. And so what that means is that the upstream unit operations, think of a refinery as like

• 41:51Turner Caldwell?

  20 unit operations kind of all in series, in a relatively simple refinery. The upstream operations-

• 41:58Speaker 05

  Relatively simple.

• 41:59Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, right. The upstream operations obviously impact the downstream operations because if you're changing the process conditions in the upstream operation, that changes what the downstream operation is seeing. But the downstream operations will recycle the reject stream back into the upstream operations. And so it's this big interconnected web where if you make a change in one part of the circuit, and it's a high latency web also, where if you make a change in one part of the circuit, you may not see that change cascade for another 24 or 48 hours. And when we're commissioning refineries like the world, that latency ends up being a major driver of kind of the time it takes to bring a refining operation to spec and eventually ramp it to throughput.

• 42:44Speaker 05

  So how long does it take to bring a refining, to commission a refinery today?

• 42:48Turner Caldwell?

  I mean, there are some refineries that were built recently that are still not commissioned. The, like, that were built in like three years ago. But it's like, the Chinese companies are doing it in like six months. And a lot of Western companies, it takes two to four years. And that stacks up where we need to build like an insane number of mines and refineries. And if you are kind of four times longer or five times longer every time you build a refinery-

• 43:17Speaker 05

  At every step of the process.

• 43:19Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah. And so we're trying to bring down the time that it takes to bring the refinery to spec, basically throughput and hitting the kind of like output requirements of the product that you're making. And then ultimately, you start this like historically very long haul of gradually bringing down the cost over time. And that's something that we think that reinforcement learning is going to do quickly, much, much faster, kind of like in line with what, in line with what Google demonstrated with the thermal systems and data centers, is achieve global optimal operating conditions on an order of magnitude faster at timescale.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  So how do you think about like, you're building a company that mines and refines a product. There's a lot of tech that you can interject at essentially every step of that process. Like, how are you deciding what to build, where to partner? What are you developing in-house versus where are you going to market?

• 44:19Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, I think we're, at the beginning, we're focused on how do we take kind of commercially demonstrated unit operations and be a better integrator and a better operator of that integrated circuit. And so focus on the software systems that enable you to kind of control the plant more optimally. And that's generally what project level financing parties want to see also. Like, it's hard to get project finance on a first of a kind facility where you're demonstrating a new unit operation for the first time. And so we think that as we're kind of entering the market, the right place to start is take commercially demonstrated individual unit operations that operate globally and try to achieve, go after the uplift that's available just by being a better integrated operator.

• 45:04Turner Caldwell?

  There's a whole bunch of bottlenecks in building these facilities that we will need to solve. I mean, the industrial supply base just for like manufacturing tanks is broken, like the kind of, there's-

• 45:16Speaker 05

  Oh, no. That's a new one.

• 45:18Turner Caldwell?

  It's just, like, things that we kind of take for granted just take a really long time. If you want to kind of not go to China for sourcing that equipment. And that has a big impact on the operating side of things too, where the supply chain for like a new pump in Australia could take, you know, 30 weeks. And getting that exact same pump, but with a mine in China, it shows up in a week or three days. And so like that entire industrial, like, equipment supply base, we're going to have to look at at some point. That's obviously a much bigger bite to go after like commodity equipment manufacturing.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  You're not going to vertically integrate to be a mining equipment manufacturing company, are you?

• 46:01Turner Caldwell?

  Mining equipment manufacturing company, I don't think so. I hope not.

• 46:04Speaker 05

  You'll let me know.

• 46:05Turner Caldwell?

  This is the, yeah, that's right. Well, this is the, this is the kind of like, what is the incentive structure of the partners and the suppliers and like, is it required or not? I think that there's a whole bunch of companies that are working on awesome, like, novel process technologies that have not quite gotten over the hump, trying to sell to the big mining companies. And we want to be the customer that helps accelerate commercial deployment and the partner that helps accelerate commercial deployment. And one of the big issues that is, that comes up when you're kind of like deploying new processing technologies, is that part of the reason why it takes a long time for it to get to the point where it's commercially viable, other than all the headwinds from the industry being conservative and process driven and all those things, is that they,

• 46:46Turner Caldwell?

  like, humans have actually never operated that process chemistry at scale before. And so you have all the, you'll learn a bunch of things at pilot scale, but pilot doesn't really tell you what's happening at commercial scale.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  And you have to train people-

• 46:58Turner Caldwell?

  You have to train the people to operate it. You have to, it's like new environmental things that might come up, depending on the chemical that you're using. And that like scale jump is actually something that we think that RL will enable with like a pretty meaningful pace adjustment, where you don't need the humans to kind of like fine tune the process conditions around a new process chemistry because the plant OS is doing it.

• 47:24Erik Torenberg?

  Brian and Aaron, how did we approach this industry? Is this a space that we spent a lot of time thinking about or think about opportunities in this space? Or how did we approach it?

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, we've wanted to do a mining investment for a long time. You know, when you think about venture capital, you know, we care about massive markets. And, you know, there's not that many massive markets left that have been sort of like largely untapped by technology. And mining sort of screams, one of the largest markets in the world, very little adoption of technology. So, you know, over many cycles, we've gone out and spent a lot of time meeting companies. And, you know, as I mentioned before, the challenge is, how do you sell a point solution

• 48:13Speaker 05

  or a point piece of technology into this industry that is, has very little incentive to adopt it and is also, like, has a very complicated geopolitical dynamic where you have a very large global player with their hand on the scale? We put out a piece a couple of weeks ago around our thesis in mining and why we think a vertical mining company is the answer. Because you actually, we actually do believe you have to control every single piece of the entire journey, the entire lifecycle of, you know, an atom of metal end to end to actually be able to build a tech company here. This is not about, you know, a point solution for one particular part of the process. In order to actually capture the gains in efficiency and build a feasible business, you really have to own the entire process end to end.

• 48:58Turner Caldwell?

  The only thing I'd add there is that this is the intersection of geopolitical urgency and tech. Like, stuff Turner's been talking about is like, now we have technology that can actually go and disrupt this. There also is a talent base, people coming from companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Anduril, other sort of hard tech companies, working in sort of dirty spaces, willing to go out in the fields-

• 49:17Speaker 05

  Roll up their sleeves.

• 49:18Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, roll up their sleeves, go out in the middle of the desert and work on this stuff. So now's the time to build this company.

• 49:22Speaker 05

  And the political, and the political tailwinds are there. There is, you know, even my, you know, my conservationist mother, who I think if like we had had this conversation five years ago, she would have clutched her pearls, she doesn't wear pearls, but she would have clutched her pearls at the idea of domestic US onshore mining. You know, I think broadly speaking, the American public and certainly the government has come around to the idea that metals are in every single thing we use as consumers. Our supply chains are highly reliant on China. It's a huge problem. We have to figure out how to address it. And that means investing in mining in the US again.

• 50:01Turner Caldwell?

  We talked a little about, we mentioned like rare earths, you mentioned lithium and things like that, but like, there are many different critical minerals. You talked about a little about in the very beginning, but specifically, like, what are the interesting ones for you? How does that, how does that map to sort of the, what people see on the headlines and what the business opportunities are?

• 50:21Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, I mean, we, you know, the, when we look at what needs to happen in the next 10 years and, you know, forecasted demand will only materialize if the supply is there. So we'll see if that forecasted demand materializes. The, the metals that actually need to grow the most by like mass flow rate are the, are like the big metals. Like, we need a lot of aluminum. We need an insane amount of copper. Um, we need more iron. We need more zinc.

• 50:42Speaker 06

  What are some of the things that these, these metals are?

• 50:45Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, sure thing. I mean, like, iron goes in everything that is infrastructure.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  We got iron. We're good with iron.

• 50:50Turner Caldwell?

  Zinc is, zinc is one that people sleep on because you actually have to galvanize a lot of that steel. Um, and so zinc oftentimes kind of pops up every once in a while as being something that we really do need to, to continue to focus on. Copper is the, is the workhorse of, you know, this push to electrify everything. Um, and, and to just grow the grid, um, to be able to supply AI, to be able to, you know, enable accelerated renewable penetration, free EV penetration to happen, like, you're gonna need a lot of copper. Aluminum is one that I think is underestimated. It's, uh, people underestimate kind of its importance. It's actually like the number one most consumed metal in defense applications. Uh, like, the grid is, you know, people talk a lot about copper, but there's a lot of

• 51:33Turner Caldwell?

  aluminum, like, conductors in the transmission lines that are, that are critical to actually growing the grid, the grid capacity. Um, and, and in automotive, obviously, aluminum's big. Magnesium has a whole bunch of defense applications, potentially could get more into, uh, automotive applications and like for lightweight, lightweight, uh, metals. Lithium, you know, needs to 4X in the next, in terms of production capacity in the next 10 years, roughly, in order for the, uh, batteries that we want to build to be built.

• 52:01Speaker 05

  Well, we're all, we're all about batteries.

• 52:03Turner Caldwell?

  Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Um, nickel is a, is a big one. I think that, um, what has happened in, in nickel in the last five years is Indonesian kind of like, uh, production capacity has scaled to the point where it's now something like 70% of global nickel comes out of Indonesia. And a lot of that was on the back of like meaningful investment from China to be able to, um, kind of expand production capacity in, in Indonesia and then also do more of the downstream processing in Indonesia. Um, and nickel goes in everything that is specialty alloys, anything that needs high temperature or corrosion resistance. Um, and also is like kind of the unsung hero of high-energy, um, batteries, where these, these lithiumated transition metal oxides, which are high nickel. Magnesium is important.

• 52:46Turner Caldwell?

  Magnesium goes into a lot of alloys and also goes into batteries. The uranium, if, if fission is gonna continue to grow and we're gonna continue to like deploy more nuclear capacity in the US, then uranium is going to happen, is going to be needed. It's a, it's a long list. And, uh, you know, the rare earths, you know, they, they're important, obviously. They, they, they are omnipresent in like everything that we use. Um, but they show up as like a relatively small, kind of like in, on a volume basis when you look at kind of the stack of metals that we need to mine. Um, and where, you know, the, definitely, we need a ton of, um, like, process innovation in, uh, how rares are refined. Solvent extraction circuits are kind of like the status quo.

• 53:30Turner Caldwell?

  Um, they, you know, the chemical intensity is high and the recoveries are relatively low. And the know-how is kind of like highly penetrated and, or highly concentrated in, in China. But we're, it's a, it is a, it is a little bit of a frothy market right now. And so we're, you know, being diverse, being a diversified minerals company kind of enables us to pick our spots in areas where it makes sense. Like, these things still do move on commodity cycles and, and you actually want to be building infrastructure at the bottom of commodity cycles, not at the top of commodity cycles. Um, you know, it's the Warren Buffett quote of, you know, invest when there's blood in the water. Um, like, you want to be coming into metals when they are at the, at like this trough, really, where no one is investing in them. They still have like a macro, long-term critical point.

• 54:14Turner Caldwell?

  Lithium is like exactly in this position right now. Um, and that's why we're focused on lithium. Copper, um, copper just has this like macro trend that is like pretty, uh, hard to ignore. Um, we're just gonna need an insane amount of copper. Copper grids are going down, uh, globally and, which means that, um, our ability to extract copper from those ores, um, is gonna get, it's gonna get harder and harder to extract copper from those ores. Um, and that's where, you know, the plant to us side of things, we have like a high degree of, um, of confidence that we'll be able to step in and kind of like optimize the refining circuits to still be able to extract copper from these lower-grade ores without seeing meaningful kind of cost increases.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  So, so everyone knows, you know, people here, it takes forever to, to get a mine started. I don't know how many new greenfield mines we've developed in the United States in the last decade.

• 54:58Turner Caldwell?

  Not, not many.

• 54:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. So like, and, and I know Australia and Canada have, have been able to do this faster, which is, which is interesting. Uh, you don't, you don't know Canada for, for moving quickly. What, what are some of like the, the bottlenecks there? What, what, what does America need to do to accelerate this? As, as one of these companies trying to not only mine, but also refine in the United States, like, what needs to be done?

• 55:19Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, I think one thing that, um, folks don't always see is actually the permitting requirements for exploration. So there is like, if you are exploring over, on federal land, if you're exploring over more than a five-acre parcel, you have to submit like a plan of record or plan of operations that, uh, needs to be approved by the BLM before you can start to expand, like, expand and explore over a larger piece of, of, of land. And so the, like, bringing down the permitting thresholds and the permitting burden associated with exploring, like, that is why we have such a small, like, relatively small rare earth resource. It's like, it's not because there isn't, like, the US has tons of natural resources. And the, like, the, the kind of like USGS estimate for US, like, the US Reserve on

• 56:04Turner Caldwell?

  rare earths, just picking on that, um, like, that is tied to a lack of exploration activity, not necessarily fundamentally like a lack of kind of like geo, geographic presence.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  We haven't looked for it.

• 56:13Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, we haven't, either we haven't looked for it, or it's, yeah, well, it's, it's hard to find in like high concentrations that are mineable, which we're trying to kind of like drop the percentage requirement, um, that makes something economical. Um, but it's also, there's just a lot of like, kind of like permitting burden to be able to actually go and deploy drill rigs to go and actually explore. Um, and then, um, there's definitely a, we, we, the, the government currently is doing a good job of kind of highlighting the importance of the minerals industry. And you're definitely seeing like a little bit of a tone shift over the last 20 years that is much more supportive. There's way more tailwinds when it comes to kind of like making mining, um, be viewed in a more positive light and a critical light.

• 56:54Turner Caldwell?

  Um, and that, that will help to solve some of the talent pool problem, um, where people, people that are, you know, awesome, they, they want to go build things. They don't want to go and like work on a project that kind of sits around for five years and maybe gets permitted and maybe doesn't. Like, they want to go work on hard problems that, where they can see the, like, the impact of the work that they're doing. Um, and so if we're getting in the way of, um, of enabling projects to get built, like, that is actually a major deterrent for talent because they won't actually see what they're, like, the, the like output of their, of their, of their work. Um, and then I, you know, I think the permitting requirements broadly for going from a discovery to a, to an operating asset, there, there's a, there's a big, there should be a big focus

• 57:39Turner Caldwell?

  on kind of efficiency in reviewing environmental permits. There should be a big focus on kind of like streamlining those workflows and the back and forth between kind of like field offices and state offices from the BLM, just focusing on the federal side of things. Because the way that projects get permitted right now is you'll throw a, you'll throw like your environmental assessment over the, over the table. And then they'll go and they'll divvy it up between a whole bunch of experts that they are like kind of consultants that they bring in to review the permit. Um, and they'll get back to you eventually at some point. Um, but there isn't a lot of visibility into like how they are progressing with reviewing the permit applications. Um, and, and discussions are getting more bilateral, like the, and again, there's been a little, uh, definitely a change with the new administration where there's a little

• 58:24Turner Caldwell?

  more accountability on the, like, the permitting offices. But there's tons of room for making those reviews more efficient. Um, and again, LLMs will make, make it more efficient. We just need to kind of like penetrate that side of the, the federal bureaucracy and like enable people to review things faster.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  What, what else? Aside from kind of permitting efficiency, um, what are other things that, if you, you know, if you could send a list of recommendations to the government for what they should do to support the US mining industry, what would be your top three?

• 58:53Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, I think supporting the demand side is probably like the biggest lever. Um, and if you want to mobilize kind of private capital into the sector, having some level of support on the demand side is, is major. Um, and so that's offtake agreements with floor pricing. And, you know, they did this just now with MP Materials. Um, and that, you know, ideally provides some stability on the revenue side of things so that investors, like, the, there's trillions of dollars of capital, kind of like dry powder just sitting around waiting to be deployed. It has historically kind of avoided the mining industry because of the, um, market price uncertainty. And so as soon as you provide, it's a commodity cycle and like, what if you're building at the wrong time? And, you know, the infrastructure funds are not the ones that are here to play, like, be intelligent about the commodity price cycle, like, they, they're looking for annuity-type returns.

• 59:35Turner Caldwell?

  Um, and so the, um, those folks, um, would, would mobilize if there were more demand-side support from the government, either providing price floors or fixed pricing for critical minerals that, you know, you're trying to incentivize more production of in the US. Um, you know, participating in the capital stack is, is important. I think lowering the hooks or the, the, um, uh, you know, the extra burden that comes in with receiving government funds, um, is important. And like some government agencies probably have more leeway to do that. Like, the DOD, obviously, again, just did this big deal with MP Materials.

• 1:00:13Turner Caldwell?

  And actually like went all the way to kind of participating in the cap table or as an equity holder. But when you receive federal funds from the DOE, or if you receive federal funds from like a, you know, the, the, on the debt side of things from XM, it comes with some like additional burden sometimes. Like if you are building on state land and you just need a state permit and then you bring in federal funds, you now bump your permitting requirement to a federal level permit.

• 1:00:44Turner Caldwell?

  And that's the NEPA process, which, you know, again, the NEPA process wouldn't be as burdensome if there was some more efficiency on the permitting side of things.

• 1:00:50Speaker 06

  Mineral deposits, specifically like high-grade mineral deposits, don't obey borders. Like, is there a broader international strategy here? I mean, I would love to think we can mine and refine everything in the United States, but, but obviously there, there's a lot. Australia, Canada, Latin America, curious sort of what Africa, underwater, seafloor. Like, what is the overall strategy in your mind?

• 1:01:11Turner Caldwell?

  Yeah, we're, we're starting in the US because it's closer to home and we're focused on developing a platform that we can scale off of. But at no point have we told ourselves that the US is kind of like the, the only, the sole focus. Like you have to be able to like bolster the company to be able to operate internationally. If you want to be able to scale beyond kind of like the resource base that the US has like available today. And so more exploration is going to happen in the US. We'll probably discover more resources and like that pool will grow over time of projects that we can build in the US. But yes, we are absolutely going to expand overseas and underwater, maybe.

• 1:01:49Erik Torenberg?

  When we look back a decade from now, what's the single clearest indicator that Mariana has achieved what it set out to do?

• 1:01:54Turner Caldwell?

  We won't be as worried about our ability to secure the critical minerals that we want to secure because we will have kind of rebuilt

• 1:02:04Turner Caldwell?

  and established like an entity ideally that is able to go across borders, to your point, and, and build these projects cost effectively, time effectively, and, and responsibly ultimately. And the reason that we are so panicked about it right now is because we have fundamentally lost the ability to build large-scale infrastructure. And we have lost the ability to like operate complex minerals plants. Like that's what we have lost. And we need to build that back. You know, we, we want to build 10 projects in 10 years. Those projects will be an increasing scale over time, but the work will not be done in 10 years. What I think will have demonstrated that the, you know, the 10-year mission will have been accomplished

• 1:02:47Turner Caldwell?

  other than building those 10 plants is that we will no longer be as worried about like our fundamental capability to go and build this complex, complex infrastructure. Like we will have unlocked it.

• 1:03:00Erik Torenberg?

  Last up, Doug Birdour, founder and CEO of Radiant, alongside Drew Baglino, founder and CEO of Heron, joined me and A16Z general partner, Aaron Price Wright, to discuss nuclear's role in rebuilding America's energy infrastructure.

• 1:03:15Erik Torenberg?

  Talk about the moment, the insight, the why now that led you to start your respective companies. Doug, let's start with you, Radiant.

• 1:03:20Speaker 07

  Oh, man, it's a fun story. So I was at SpaceX for 12 years. I joined in 2007, so I joined when they had two failed rockets, no successful rockets. And so I got to work on the first ones that worked.

• 1:03:31Speaker 05

  And you're like, this, this is the company to be at.

• 1:03:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I just wanted to work on an important mission and I really just cared. Can I like polish one stone of this like great big pyramid that is like some lifetime achievement for someone else even? Right? That's what I wanted. So I got joined, I did that, I did the first two Falcon 9s, did the ground system for it entirely, which involved all the permitting also. So this is like launching a rocket from a military base. There's a lot of like regulatory stuff there.

• 1:03:58Speaker 05

  Your first foray?

• 1:03:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 05

  Into the permitting wilderness?

• 1:04:01Speaker 07

  Totally. And not to eat up all the time, you know, I worked on like the first rocket with legs called Grasshopper back in 2011. It was a four-person team really designing, building the whole thing, the whole thing. And we were reporting directly to Elon, like just Elon to us four, and then building the whole thing. And it was awesome because we did really well. We got lucky a lot of times, but we made a rocket that flew and landed on legs. And then I did all the weird Elon side projects and ideas. So Hyperloop, when he got really serious, I got tapped into that and into The Boring Company. And then Mars Colony Design. And in doing the Mars Colony Design, I, I was looking at how do you take Starship there? Make fuel from what's on Mars, make, make fuel from the ice that's there. And if you do that, you need mega lots of power.

• 1:04:42Speaker 07

  And I was trying to do it with solar and getting totally stuck and showing Elon these plans that were like four miracles and we need on the single mission. And it was just ridiculous. And so Elon was like, you probably should look at nuclear. And that's really the jumping off point, right? I started to learn and then three years later I left to, to go run. I founded Radiant and left to go run it. And really trying to make mass producible, portable microreactors.

• 1:05:08Speaker 07

  Not for space, but you know, currently we're focused on a trailer-sized thing. But also.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Needed in space.

• 1:05:13Speaker 07

  Right, yeah, so I, I do eventually want to do products for space, but we got to have customers. We got to have funds that are actually there.

• 1:05:21Erik Torenberg?

  Doug, it seems like the tide turned on nuclear a few years ago in that, you know, more and more people started to realize the, the, you know, the boring criticality of it. What is sort of the progress that we've made as a, as an industry? What have we achieved and, and you know, what are the biggest bottlenecks remaining in terms of, you know, really making progress as a country?

• 1:05:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Speaker 07

  It's a good question. I think there's a bunch of fun ways to answer it. I mean, the, the one thing I like to say, it sounds a little sensationalist, is that there is no nuclear industry. But it's really true. You know, we're kind of, it's almost like we're getting excited about flight before Kitty Hawk. Right? To a certain degree, there's a really coming very soon deadline. A lot of companies, a lot of little nuclear startups have actually been given access to fuel and facilities. And just expedited support from the subject matter experts required to regulate to make sure that these are going to be safe tests. And so by July 4th, several companies will have reactors built that go critical that are fundamentally new designs, completely new and from scratch, but it hasn't happened yet.

• 1:06:26Speaker 07

  So it just feels like a little bit of cart before the horse.

• 1:06:29Speaker 05

  Are you, does that worry you at all?

• 1:06:32Speaker 07

  Not too much. You know, I've been doing nuclear, well, thinking about it since 2016, but I founded Radiant in 2019. And then for a year, just learned how to do reactor design and then raised money in 2020. And just, I, I'd never founded a company before, never intended to really do that. And I kind of slow-rolled into it. I could have tried to go much faster.

• 1:06:52Speaker 07

  But I've stayed totally committed to just building. And actually, the, the funny thing is like in 2020, I said in 2026, I will put a full-scale reactor and get it critical and get it up to full power. And we're on schedule to do that, which is kind of wild. And it's not like that was really the actual plan, but it was just, I was resilient to all the challenges that were put in the way. We are now the only reactor permitted to, of these new reactors to go to full power. So a lot of others are getting to critical, which doesn't mean you get to high temperatures or high power. And those things are very challenging on all the parts in the system. And they require careful consideration of the thermal gradients and the alloys, right? You need high-strength materials to do that. So that's really exciting, but we're like not quite there yet.

• 1:07:35Speaker 07

  And I think if we're doing the same discussion next year, it's going to be dramatically different because we're going to be able to point at all these different designs, what you could do with them. And I think the products, like nuclear reactors as products has never been seen before. All right, they're always usually these giant mega projects where you dig a huge hole in the ground and you take five to 10 years or up to 15 for the, the slower, the bad projects out there. But reactors that can just come, ours, you know, we're targeting one per week coming off of a production line from our Tennessee facility, which is an 80-acre site we just signed for in October, not even a year ago. But I want to tie back into the grid because I, I was just, I had some interesting thoughts. And we really, our product is for off the grid.

• 1:08:20Speaker 07

  All right, so megawatt reactor on a trailer and you can rebuild in our factory. We drive it or fly it to where the customer wants it to go. And then turn it on within like 48 hours. We go, it, you know, wheels stop moving and then we go to power on your site in that amount of time. And then it lasts five years, which is like a full oil tanker worth of diesel equivalent. It's 2 million gallon diesel equivalent. So it's sort of an unbelievable thing where you can grow the grid or put a, put a microgrid anywhere. But it's like a totally different problem, I think, from the grid itself is civilization, right? Electric power is civilization. If you go and there's sockets and you pop something into them and you just get power, that's very well developed. That's civilization and

• 1:09:03Speaker 07

  that's using electricity to do what you could otherwise only do with human muscle or animal muscle.

• 1:09:09Erik Torenberg?

  How should we think about how microreactors fit within the broader energy landscape? Do they compete with large centralized plants? Do they complement them? Are they serving the different categories of demand? How should we think about it?

• 1:09:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, so they're definitely an off-grid product. So they don't at all compete with larger reactors. Really, if you can build, if you have time to dig a big hole in the ground and put a reactor in in that way, then you can do a larger reactor, maybe five or 10 times as big as the one megawatt size that we're looking at, and it's going to win on economics. It definitely should. We're already using like one of the fanciest forms of fuel and that is so that we can set it up anywhere and have it not be a risk to people or facilities nearby. And so we don't compete at all with those things. One of the ways I like to talk about this is you could run a diesel generator or you can run a nuclear reactor and you're really deciding between those two things. And we don't beat

• 1:10:01Speaker 07

  like super cheap diesel. Like we beat diesel at like 650 a gallon, that kind of a number. So that's where our initial customers need to be. But if you go start looking at what people pay for diesel and what they pay on the edges, not on like the center of the bell curve, the average for like a country or an area, like you look at the tough regions, they're paying a lot. And so there's plenty of customers out there.

• 1:10:22Speaker 05

  Some examples, I think.

• 1:10:25Speaker 07

  Oh, like $10 gallon is the average in Hong Kong. I think like Iceland and Scandinavia, Northern Europe, those regions are like $7, $8, $9 per gallon for a whole country, actually. So like, it's very easy to see the market is massive. And islands. Yeah. Yeah, islands. Absolutely. I mean, Hawaii is Hawaii is pretty high electricity cost and it's, I think, 80% diesel powered, actually. It's got, it's got wind and solar that make up the remainder. But yeah, you could have a cleaner form of power, right? No emissions. The nuclear reactor operates and then Rainy takes it and we handle all the complexity. But the amount of power people need, right? They need in the gigawatts for

• 1:11:06Speaker 07

  the grid. And so we don't really do that. We have the niche customers on the edge and we don't want to make, right, thousands and thousands of reactors. At 50 a year, we'll have something in the range of like a thousand or two at the most. But we don't consider, we don't look at it and go, hey, could we make it work for 10,000? There's different products and we can do it at better economies. And there's a couple of ways to do it. But we're, Rainy doesn't want to dig a hole in the ground and solve that other miracle. It's too many miracles. I think it's important to be able to do it again, but it's not on us to fix it right away. Yeah, serious miracles. You don't want to have too many in a startup. Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 05

  You need some.

• 1:11:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, one miracle that leads to then a product and revenue and right, that's the way. And then you can, then you have time to think about another miracle.

• 1:11:53Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. So you mentioned that we're very early in the nuclear industry, you know, we're in pre the nuclear industry in some sense. So what is the milestone or the KPI or what would need to be true for us to say, we as a country, the nuclear industry is here and flourishing?

• 1:12:08Speaker 07

  I think a couple of things. So we could have access to nuclear fuel and enrichment that are like in completely competitive free markets where there are innovative startups fixing and solving those challenges. We should have a waste storage facility that's some centralized repository, which is way safer for the existing nuclear fleet that's operated since the 60s. That's an unsolved problem. And that would, those things alone would cause everything else to flourish because we already have this like middle layer of me and a bunch of other startups trying to get fuel and operate reactors. And then if we're able to, as a country, really have a better system to deal with nuclear waste,

• 1:12:53Speaker 07

  which actually Rainy doesn't need, like our uniquely at this really small size, we can just put it in the dry cask on about 10 acres of our 80 acre site. And that works for like 60 years worth of reactors and we can always expand and do more. And the, the nuclear waste has got high reactivity elements that last like 100 years. And after that, it's pretty benign. But we already have a waste isolation pilot plant in New Mexico, which is like this deep bore hole down inside of a salt structure. So it's like a salt dome. And this is where defense waste already goes. And they just said they were going to build it and they built it. And meanwhile, we struggle still on the DOE side to build a repository

• 1:13:34Speaker 07

  for, for big nuclear plants. And, you know, because of that, these gigawatt scale plants are operating, generating nuclear waste and they have to store it at the same site where they're making power. And California, this is like coastal regions that like are risky that where like you can have a tsunami or something instead of taking it and putting it in a salt dome structure in the high desert where there's no water, no risk of like certain natural disasters. So it's just a smarter, safer, better idea and we don't do it. Yeah. And actually it was a huge cost. It's a commitment as well. Like you gotta demonstrate that commitment.

• 1:14:07Speaker 05

  It's the, and it's also the NIMBY transition, that not in my backyard.

• 1:14:12Speaker 07

  Nuclear in my backyard.

• 1:14:13Speaker 05

  We are in my backyard.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.