Cheeky Pint - The company building underwater drones for $50,000

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Will O'Brien, founder and CEO of Ulysses, joins John and Chris Sacca for a pint to discuss how underwater autonomous robots are scaling up to solve critical ocean challenges.They cover the technical history of Guinness (including the math breakthrough that created Student's t-test), why seagrass is an overlooked super-sequester of carbon, and the engineering required to operate robots thousands of meters beneath the surface. Will also breaks down Ulysses' vertical integration strategy, the reality of eco-pragmatism versus "green tape," and what it takes to sell hard tech to defense and offshore energy sectors.Timestamps(00:00:30) R&D at Guinness(00:05:43) Planting seagrass with robots(00:16:53) Lowering the cost of doing things in the ocean(00:19:00) Landing in a Chinese prison(00:27:53) Building robots to withstand saltwater(00:31:08) Live use cases for underwater robots(00:46:03) The undersea cable vulnerabilityResources:Guinness Quality Standards: https://www.guinnesscelebrate.com/our-quality/quality-standardsNo Great Stagnation in Guinness by Will O’Brien: https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/no-great-stagnation-in-guinness

We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. We need to build millions of water drones. Saltwater and the ocean is a very hostile environment. That's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean. Will O'Brien is the co-founder 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.

get to Ulysses, we have a lot to talk about, but just getting to Ireland's most innovative company. Just explain the technical innovations for Chris. The Guinness Company, a great example of a business, you know, 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, you know, they were starting an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s. And, you know, research development team where you would just hire extremely smart people and just say, come in here and find a problem and work on, much like, Wait, they had Xerox Park in Guinness?

They did. As early as the 1890... And it was undirected research. Yeah, just do what you want. So, 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 a... How do you, you know, 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 to... you know, one of the biggest predeterminance of the quality of a pint of Guinness is the, the amount of lipids or fats in hops. So they were having to take up like hundreds of hops to see, you know, is this a high, is this a high quality batch or not? And they were losing, you know, a few percent per batch. And that means a lot when you're in the high volume, you know, low margin from beverage industry. So William Sealy Gosser had to publish under a pseudonym, the student. He couldn't let, he couldn't publish his research that he was doing

with Fisher, another famous statistician of the time, the early, about the 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, but he had to publish, and that's why it's called the Students T-Sest still to this day, because they didn't want Anheuser-Busch or Heinekeen or other people to know that they were hiring these researchers to, like, solve problems for them. Oh, is to not associate the advanced with Guinness? Exactly.

Because we didn't want their competitors to know. Yes. So they're getting better margins. Loads of innovation. There was a project, project acorns. Acorn standing for advanced cans of rich nectar, which was the basically, 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 pint was going from a pound to a pound 50. People were up in arms, so they're drinking at home. So they're like, how do we do these things at homes? Initially, the project was called Project Dynamite, but as you'd imagine in the 1980s, shipping parcels with the word dynamite.

between London and Dublin would have caused them some concern. They got confused all the other parts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they stopped labelling the product jammer. They'd re-inued Project Acorn and they developed the widget. And the widget was voted above, did you know, it was voted above the internet in the 1990s, the top 100 inventions of the 20th century. Marketing is another place where Guinness was really, you know, the Guinness

The Nigeria thing. Nigeria, the movie, the film industry in Nigeria. They produced 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, well, I guess, was Guinness. It's the top market, actually. Okay, yeah, yeah. It was like, Guinness, the top, was a part of the movie or something? Yeah.

But the marketing, I think, is really one of the areas where Guinness was most standout. I think Guinness is most standard. And the Tooninx is this iconic campaign. And the toucan, there's one up there. The toucan as well, the iconic Guinness, Two Can Bird. And they've won, like, more. can line advertising wards than nearly any other company. I have to give us quality standards on my phone.

I'm just curious. I'm just like very passionate about the... Did you start it as because you're an entrepreneur and a founder and you're looking for examples of innovation and there happen to be one in your backyard? Or is it... Yeah, I think so. You studied as much in the clubs as I did.

I think it was both. I think it was both. I think it was like this is a... I felt like it was... I just thought it was... very underrated company. These are the seven Cs of Guinness Quality Standards. So this is like a PDF that I have preserved. This is a PDF that they make for bars. Yeah, exactly. They have the seven. Okay, the quality standards, right?

Crafted presentation, consistent, freshness, countervisibility, correct gas, correct temperature, clean lines, clean glassware. So they're the things you need. I'll send this huge John. A good system. Yeah, yeah. That's like all life advice. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Keep clean. Yeah, I think so. I think, I think, for me, you know, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's an entrepreneur. My mom had her own business.

Both my granddad's, you know, one ran a pub. Then everyone was a farmer and had a few other businesses. And, you know, very classic Irish story. But I always grew up in a world of commerce and business. And my mom has, like, and dad have siblings. And none of the men anyway, at least, or the Murphys or Brown's work for anybody else. They're all like, they're all like, 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 appreciators of good businesses and it was so cool to meet a bit I've always revered technology and Revere like Stripe and others and like whatever but like to see one that's like you know homegrown like this and but that I don't think anybody really talks about was really like cool and exciting so speaking of entrepreneurship I want to get to uh we do have to at some point to get to USA's but do you need another goodness I will note that it's 20 minutes in and sure yeah the lying irish startups you can pour these ones see I Absolutely. All right. Thanks, Chris. Wow, value ad. What a value ad investor. You guys get started talking about this company. I'm only here for one reason. So, you know, what does you want to say actually do? We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. That's the simple one-liner. I think, you know, we started the company three years ago under this kind of general observation that it was very, 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 co-founders were looking at potential domains to deploy robotic systems. And after a kind of a cursory look at air, land, sea, see, see became very interesting. And then, you know, looking out, you know, surface, under sea, 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 enough scale or were not affordable enough to do. So the idea for building underwater robots kind of came from that. You started with seagrass, right? Maybe just why you started with seagrass and how you ended up pivoting to the robots. Yes. So

you know, the first I mean the first, when we start looking at again tasks that robots could do one that captivated us initially was just like there's a whole spectrum of ocean conservation related tasks. One of my co-founder was on he was on a surf trip. He met a marine biologist and she described her job. And her job was,

was, you know, taking photos underwater. It was planting seeds. It was, you know, gathering water samples, all these like super manual tasks. And he'd been building like aerial drones for food delivery with Matta and was like, you know, sure you could build like an underwater equivalent of like one of these aerial drones you're needing to do these sorts of tasks. So that's kind of what it led us on. And what were the tasks? The task initially was the kind of full spectrum of ecosystem restoration, which was map the seabed, understand what's down there, then collect the seeds wherever there are. We were looking at flowering plants at the time sea grasses. Yeah. Then, and then take them and then plant them in areas that need to be restored.

I don't what causes... Really, really quick. I have to say, I used your one pole method. Oh, interesting. And I hate to concede there's no appreciable difference between the pints, but yeah, nothing's sacred anymore. No, no, no. I need. It's, yeah. Yeah, it's the ceremony. This is the one shot. Yeah, the one shot. Okay, so with seagrass, why does it need to be restored, period? Like, what's going on in the oceans?

So, a few reasons. If you take kind of current projections for maybe how fish stocks are going to do, kind of in around the 2040s, many of the kind of critical fish stocks in the ocean could just be totally wiped out. basically the population curves are not really looking good from any fish species. It's like billions of people rely on their primary source of protein or income every day. So just overfishing in general.

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, 100,000 times less the rate. We lose them. Okay, so it's important to restore the seagrass. Yeah. 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 an underwater robot, which is how you got into underwater robot space? Yes, exactly. I mean, yeah, we start solving the seagrass problem, but very quickly into solving that problem, like it was very clear, wow, there's a lot of other similarly shaped problems in the ocean. You know, from first, so from first principles,

if you want to build like the ocean robot company, right, 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 Levitin, 2,000-autical mile range,

and that goes and drops the kids off to school, so to speak, to go, you know, go do what they want, and underwater vehicle then is called Mako. It's launched into the water. That goes and find the location where it needs to do the job. It goes scan something or robotically manipulate something, and then it gets, Levitin will say, come home, and it goes in, and then that's,

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. 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 pretty clear design decisions that we made at the start where we made at the start where our underwater vehicle maker is made of these kind of Lego building blocks that make it up. So if you want to add, let's say, an extra 115 optical 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're a 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, and bathymetric map, so we have like a sonar front module.

So, yeah, there was a few very deliberate early design decisions, which enabled us then when the U.S. Navy comes knocking and says, hey, we've got some problems you'd like just work on or offshore energy companies that, oh, well, because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, it's very easy for us to adapt. Let's, can we dig into that for a second? Sure. 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, as a, as a, a carbon sequester compared to everything else out there. 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 like plant, I think, out there. It's zero attention. Carl, you know, is the very like a good looking friend or something like that that gets all the attention. But seagrass is really who you should be talking to.

Carl gets a lot of the funding and seagrass is really this unsung hero of the ocean. It covers, you know, 2% of the seafloor, but holes at, 20% of the ocean's carbon. It is 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 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 Salisito, and a few other locations, also in Great Bay Reef. Well, you start the companies use seagrass restoration and you're now mostly focused on the robot. You haven't left seagrass because you're now working on seagrass projects. Yeah, like fundamentally the tech platform we're building again because we made these early

design decisions mean that like, well, you know, it's like you kind of like, you build the technology once that does, that does like the seagrass restoration and then like, then It's just more of like, scaling that business is more of like an operational problem. Like there's not in any new net, new or indeed 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, you know, under vehicle, sensing stack, nav stack, autonomy, and surface vehicle is like, you know, and it's something that can then go off and work at the folks in the energy sector or defense sector.

What do you have to do to restore seagrass? You have to collect this. First of all, you've to understand where to restore. So you have to map and understand where is there, where is sea grats, 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 we see videos this on the EOC's 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 drop, you deposit them there.

And then all going well. So I want to dive into that a little bit because what's, so sorry, as lower carbon capital, our firm has been involved with you since before the, for the, before the precede. First of the preseed, etc. And so we should talk about that later and all the host. so 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, 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 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, much of it is like that's where the money was for the first contracts. I think it's probably like, you know, some combination of all of them, but I think it was very much just like a passion thing, you know, to begin with. Like I grew up by the seaside,

I had very, you know, 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, you know, like a very pro-growth environmentalist and a very like eco-pragmatist is maybe how I described myself. A beautiful flourishing future for humanity has an econiocon. that's a consistently growing and a biosphere that supports that consistently growing economy and like carbon removal is like one of those core technologies that like I think enables that along with clean energy and other other things and then yeah just like the the ocean has this like frontier is a very true frontier is like you know we've mapped more of the surface of Mars than we have like our our depth of our ocean and like

that like I just couldn't when I like heard that and it really meditated on that a little bit more I was like god this is crazy right like there is there is like a there is a part of earth that over 75% of it, we have no eyes on and have no clue really what's down there. And like, 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 insane that like, like, put the money aside, you know, like, and just think, like, humans need to explore and discover and learn. And part of your thesis is, if I understand it, just like SpaceX, you know, 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.

Yes, I think there's this like very kind of generalizable framework for how kind of frontiers. get developed. The American West is a good example of this. 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. There's a single high value initial use case. And in space it's defense reasons. It's 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 you spend more time here and get more...

And what happens when we not just gather information from here or singular things, but more things, and become more persistent in our settlement there. So then in American West, you have the development of the railroad, and then 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 could actually go and like have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things I think that you can do. 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?

Unfortunately, you know, I think this is like the kind of one of the saddest things about the environmental movement is this concept of green tape, right? Like red tape and green tape. It's like, yeah, it's like that is like the single biggest barrier. For example, there is a certain, very endangered location of sea grasses 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, a very important location. But kind of, you know, banging your head off the wall. How did you end up in the Chinese prison?

This is the topic. I was in a... I want to get back to the robots. You know, in... You know, there was an interesting time in the 2010s where China is on this, like... ascending path or whatever. And my mom was like, well, you got to learn about it. 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, you know, they were bringing these kind of white kids or something like in and it. The scam who had? People in the thing. Because what would happen is when they accuse you of the crime. You have to pay fine on the spot. You have to pay, well, you get brought to the prison station, or the police station. And you remember, this is the time before, like, instant money sending, right? You know, historian of the, markets would notice. Well, yeah, crazy time.

So we're to Western Union, the money. And, like, that takes, like, you know, it's like, China's, like, whatever, nine hours ahead of Ireland. And it's, like, 10 o'clock at night so my mom's not awake. So, you know, you know, you're, you know, you're, whatever, three in the morning. Or, you know, whatever, she's up. Or, you know, it's night in the morning, Ireland time. She's awake. because I'm like, well, I mean, like, I'm in this prison cell at a Shanghai prison.

Can you like send Western Union me the money and get me out? She's like, okay, all right. So they, you know, the value of the phones that we shoplifted. Of course, nowadays they just ride it off as a deep fake AI scam. I was going to say, now that's an 11 labs call. That's an 11 laps call for sure. I've had to build a safe word with my family. Send it to me in iTunes, very true.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. One of my favorite parts of Stripe is Works and Progress. our magazine dedicated to new ideas driving economic and technological progress. Take the latest issue landing on doorsteps right now. It covers how China's different cities compete to grow their local economies, why regulations are holding up ways to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases, how hedge funds make millions predicting the outcomes of drug trials, and out 130 pages of other fascinating stuff you're unlikely to read elsewhere.

And we want a works in progress to be as beautiful to look at and hold as it is interesting to read. And call me biased, but I think it's the most beautiful magazine in print today. To read Works in Progress online or to get the print edition delivered to your door, head to worksinprogress.co. As I look back, and I did, I looked back at the original pitch he 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. 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're actually going to build things in the U.S. We are not going to outsource them to Foxcon 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. So how verticalized are you guys, and where do you start, where you're going to?

It's this kind of iterative process that we've kind of, you know, the first vehicle has maybe, you know, 80% pieces off the shelf, and we're on like Generation 5 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, you know, to make an underwater drone, you can kind of break it up into the mech, the Alec and the software. The software, all of that is pretty much from scratch and 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... But presumably those hardware actuation frameworks that you use. Yeah, like there is things, but frankly, we've kind of just issued a lot of them. There's things you can be... There's like open raws and there's other like...

There's a few different ones, but... So, yeah, we're sharing a lot of them and kind of building a lot from the ground up, because our vehicle looks a lot different, a lot of other underwater robots. And then there's the elect. So in that, like, you've got, like, sensors, and then the internals in the vehicle. So a lot of the, you know, if we talk about, like, the sensors and that sort of thing, there's a, you know, how do you perceive, you know, it's like you're typically using, like, a son air system of some description.

Again, right now, that's off, that's, we're buying them off the shelf of our sonar systems. but we're kind of just hiring and building up our acoustics team now to start building them in-house and sell from next year. Then the navigation stack, as a part of this kind of a part of the vehicle, there's inertial navigation systems. Again, right now we buy them off the shelf, but we've got like internal prototypes that we're going to start building in-house ourselves and replace these existing suppliers. It seems very hard to build an inertial navigation system in-house. Explain how an inertial navigation system works and then... There's different ways of building them.

You know, you've got like fiber optic gyros. which use 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 we're, so I won't go into how we're building ours, but yes, initial prototypes, initial prototypes on 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 our supply chain that we could scale.

could scale. 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? Scale. For us, it's scale, lead time. You know, right, 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 on millions of underwater drones. Therefore, I need to, 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 we 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. So you're building a small scale with an eye towards a very large scale and everything

needs to have a plan for how you operate. We will open a facility next year that could be like one of the largest by a number of units like underwater drone facility like factories in the world. So like, 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 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 tell

more it's how do we build a factory? And how do we vertically integrate some of these parts of the stack that, like, for example, there is one part of our supply chain that we kind of like abated out of the supplier, how many of these components they make per year right now, and they make like 100 to 200 per atom. 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 a thousand. So it's like, we kind of build on top of that.

We find this all the time. It's both with our companies and our own investment thesis, is that, like, 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, and the same way that Elon was getting components from Mercedes and 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, et cetera. 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 in Stripe. So we've done that in our own investing thesis, where we start to see grid resiliency as a thing. And then you start to see like, oh shit, you know what? 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. I love fucking. And now they make transformers in a way that's not all hand spun. It's amazing. We definitely haven't done that either. And so, yeah. 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, it is a religion that came out of SpaceX and Tesla. My co-founders literally all he works on is manufacturing. We have four co-founders, Cullum, all he does is pretty much manufacturing. And real is the same. One co-founder is pretty much all on manufacturing. I think it's just kind of default state.

Salt water 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? You know, corrosion is like, and pressure are like, huge, like, external forces. But, you know, corrosion, you can get around it by coating. You're doing, like, anodizing the surface of the metal, which gives it, like, some resistance, pressure. Again, you can mitigate, I mean, you know, 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 and its deepest parts, but full ocean depth in a technical term is the 6,000. That's very difficult.

Well, we operate currently in like the 1,500, up to 1,500 meters. I mean, we've been crushed tested to 2,200 meters, but we're typically operating that 1,500 meter range, which is where most of the important economic activity today happens. Yes. In the future, I think much more will happen in the D.C., predicting 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. I was going to ask that. Yeah, yeah. So how do you communicate with the maker? A lot of it has to run locally. You have to do a lot of sense because you can acoustically... Because communications are very low bandwidth. Yes, you can, but do like 10 kilobytes per second over like five kilometers.

Over like HF or what? Acoustically. Ping. Like a dial-up modem. And then just like being far away from... Being far away from anything, you know, like you're... It is very difficult, like, you know, being far from someone that can repair you or connect... recharge you.

So that's why the surface vehicle is such an important part of our stock, because you pick it up, you put it on deck, it wirelessly charges Leviathan who charges our water 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, you know, if someone needs to come in and do an intervention, I mean, future of the surface craft will actually be able to repair the vehicle and have, like, replacement modules and kind of vending machine style. The surface vehicle is autonomous too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool.

Yeah, and it's connected then to Starlink, so we can. can see, and starting is a huge enabling technology for us. So that's one part of it. That's why we go for the surface vehicle. Another thing is like, yeah, we have like, you know, around 100 times more onboard compute than any other autonomous underwater vehicle. We run a full, like, the Vdia 1590 on board

with like an Intel CPU. And that's been 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 like a large degree. Okay, so, but basically just the maker, you know, 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? Yeah, like right now the autonomy is like, relatively rudimentary. We haven't got into like very complex kind of like autonomy behaviors just yet, but not many of our tasks will court just yet, but yes. But they think that it is autonomous,

it's fully locally autonomous. Yeah, exactly. It's like it will be like, draw a polygon that's like map this area. Okay, auto generates a lawn more track. And then it'll have some like rudimentary, okay, if I see a rock, let me just like go above that. Or if I see like something else, go around it.

And then what applications are you having most success with with the robot right now? Like what are you selling the robot for? Right now, I mean, there's kind of two domains in which we've had like 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, you know, this being the second year of the business, we kind of like 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, you know, we were doing mine countermeasures, finding mines and hunting mines before it was cool. Before the Straits of Removes popped off. So we were working on some work related to that. And then the offshore wind... I haven't heard Straits of Hermo's popped off.

That's pretty sweet. Way to appeal to his younger listeners. And then the offshore wind contract was, you know, where, actually there's this problem in California where they're trying to build a 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.

Yeah, 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 cut 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. I'm sorry, why are the offshore wind turbines getting cut up in lines, the problem? Basically, when you build a flowing offshore wind terminal and then you have like the cable running up, that cable's in the water.

I see. It's the power cable that's feeding the power reactor. And then you might just have like a fishing there floating through the water that that is like has fallen off some Japanese, you know, fishing line like a thousand miles. It's debris. Can you get caught in that? Can you, bring that over? Excellent.

Okay, good. We'll give you guys. So it's so weird. I didn't mean to set you up, but when we talk about craft and beauty. Oh. Are you doing a product placement right here? This is, man. This is a tequila that we make actually.

Wow. And it's the only 100-point tequila in history. You're drinking with two Irishmen and you didn't bring whiskey. You're in an Irish-R-R-R-FAR. It's because... This is... And you bring your own... I am an American and we are imperialist.

You bring your own... This is your tequila. Yes. And so this is Comos tequila. Comeos was a cake. Do you not think post the TV show Silicon Valley, it's a bit on the nose to make your own tequila. Yes. Yeah.

Trace Comas. Yeah. This is actually literally called Comos. It's your own. It's the only 100 point tequila in history. It's very... 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. Nobody had done it before, but we care about that stuff. And so I want to say cheers, but there is a weird tie-in to what you just said about design and beauty. 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... Don't ask where I'm from.

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 changed? I think the American 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, kind of like go to church on Sunday, very, you know, maybe a bit louder. I'm working. typically on hardware rather than software, no disrespect to white 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. You know, it's like it's a different motivation.

There is seemingly more of a kind of a spiritual or, you know, a kind of like reason to like white people start their businesses, I think, like, and that's definitely true for for myself, or at least a motivation in it. I think, you know, I often think of there being like head and heart type founders where, you know, Jeff Bezos is the canonical head-based founder where, you know, head-oriented founder where it's like, you know, the internet was growing at 3% 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 and... Dashboards, yeah. It's like, it's like, and then he starts Amazon, but, you know,

and then like just Steve Jobs being the canonical, like, heart-based founder or something, you know, the bicycle for the mind, the hippion acid, you know, like all this kind of like, this kind of other way. And I think this like era of like hard tech founders, are way more oriented on kind of the heart-based or something like that. And yeah, there's like this interesting spiritual vibe. And I think there's potentially interesting reasons for that. I mean, like, you know, a lot of us grew up, were like very, I think, impacted by something like COVID. Like a lot of us are typically in our like later 20s now, but we're like in college or something like that one had

and kind of maybe feel a little bit cheated or something. Or we were forced to be in the digital world. So we like feel to cause impact in the physical world perhaps. There's a, you know, maybe some potentially. interesting reasons there. Or maybe we're just more of a product of the times that we're in where people are going back to organized religion and like, or we grew up through maybe kind of crazy woke era stuff or something like that. We're very colored by that. Yeah, 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? I think it speaks to an underlying change in the world. I think, 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 as being

through, like, church. I live with three other guys. All of them are Christian. All them, like, we're in tech companies. And so, yeah, it has been like how I've kind of found my community here. And yeah, it's definitely noticeable. And, like, yeah, all of my friends who

are typically Christian are also like building companies like in the real world or in some capacity. So using my, you know, small sample, you know, I might have to use students T-tests to see the reliability of this, but like there is definitely a correlation here with like guys who believe in God and believe in like heaven and believe in like 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... You're making it rain in particular is, you know, all that is literally a bit of

So I have more questions on the robots. Sorry, I keep you 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? The broad shape.

How are you selling to the, like, what's the pitch meeting look like? The broad shape, and again, the beauty of our business is that like, the same way that business is done, or operations, 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, you know, an order of maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a day. On that ship. What are 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.

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 that want to buy services office or running this like services business. But if you're working with a Navy, we can sell them for the cheapest $50,000. For contrast, the most common, like, autonomous underwater vehicle that the U.S. Navy is buying today is like somewhere on the order of maybe $5 million. So, yeah.

So you're targeting at two orders of magnitude costs. improvement. Now, that's for the base vehicle. Once you add the leather seats and the other nice things, you know. Premium subscription, yeah. Exactly. But no, frankly, when you add like advanced sensing, advanced navigation, but even still, it's like, then you get to one order. You have a low-cost platform that then you can add sensors and everything too. So, that's like, that's like, that's the underwater vehicle. And the surface vehicle is like, you know, that is like less than a million dollars more than maybe half a million, but it depends. 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 government, And so how do you deal with this fire? Or you can push back in the premise, but the fact that ultimately your time to revenue is longer than for other companies. You know, so right now, you know,

the two main groups we're saying 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 same.

You have to get on, put on a contract vehicle, get the clearances, all the stuff. I think they're actually the shape of business that venture companies are actually very well suited to go after. We can afford to kind of 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're like 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 that's where I like learned to kind of sell to government. And I loved it. I loved it for two reasons. I mean, once you won a contract, it was very difficult to lose them because just a very sticky customers. But also you're like 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,

Like, first startup was like, you know, going into, you know, transport and trying to change that. This is now going into, like, the public domain, a public good working with events or going into the ocean in general, which is a public good, and trying to, like, build, deploy technology into it. But, you know, 60 years ago, the people working are thinking about these problems, like, most commonly, like, transport and thing where we're not guys who were, like, here in San Francisco, they were, like, in some, like, government job or something like that. And my underlying premise around technology has just always been, like, I think, like, public services or public domain.

technologies are like maybe the most interesting because you know if you think that like yeah the smartest person in 1960 was probably going working in government there and now they were going working in San Francisco ergo the 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 like Ulysses is the largest Navy in the world and you know like we're there that I just like steward of the ocean the US Navy is pretty big yes I bet so he has more craft soon but I'll I'll tell you, as an investor, once these companies actually get to the contracting phase, they're very

reliable and very 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. That they're actually a good buyer? 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 and 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 100th of the cost we pay today. Yes. So once that we get to that contracting process, it may take. take a while to fill out your master service agreement, your SLAs and shit. But the reality is that's very bankable. And they're using you for mind clearing stuff, then maybe?

Yeah. So I might actually just go back to one of your original questions, how it's worked on in the ocean today and how are you doing? Because it kind of like makes the rest of the things clear. And again, it 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 on sea grass. And but then the problem is then it's like, okay, well, because due to like union laws and labor laws, it's like, 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. And then it's like, okay, each of those people like has a manager and like and then you have like the ship captain and then you have the second maid 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 thousand dollars a day and and that's 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 the labor cost you can control over Starlink any nice refruit can you work in worse sea conditions than yeah exactly and you go fast as well you can go fast with the water like when people on board It gets seasick. Do you compete with the neoprines for some of these, like, Seronic or those kind of folks?

Not, the Seronica don't have an underwater vehicle. They're building ships and they're just going to become a new shipyard. And I think where we're different maybe from like an anandrel 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 go booze? Frankly, that's not an interesting technical problem for us. Any nomads can put C4 on a vehicle I make it go, boom. The very difficult, interesting technical question is, like,

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, like, turns it from a $3 trillion economy into a $10 trillion plus plays for commerce. The undersea cables, how worried should we be about... Very, absolutely. Very, totally asymmetric. Jesus. Like, totally.

I think this is like, yeah, this is like one of those movies. Do you guys have any undersea cable angle? Yeah, yeah, we have like, we have one. We have some work in that domain. Yes. I can't talk about it too much. No, no, no. I can't talk about too much.

But yes, there is basically a need to create a, you know, again, you know, the kind of, the advocate, what we're trying to advocate the maritime domain to move away from is this like 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 like a persistent defense network around, yeah, like all kind of critical waterways. So very critical watercay is off the west coast of Ireland, all of the cables that run from the US into Europe, like pretty much like cross into Ireland. So that's like, that's like one like area that you might highlight of the 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 like persistently monitored 24 But it's much too expensive to do that manually. So yes, that's a massive value. I mean, so a hundred years ago, I used to co-lead the team at Google that built all the data centers. We also did the trans-oceanic fiber and stuff. 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 to it. And there's many fewer cables than people think. Yeah. 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 cite 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. They're like, oh, start digging.

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 opportunities, you know, like diverse providers in that space, you literally snip the fiber and it's offline, right? Yeah. 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 fulm moment in

AI. We might all have to let people know. We might have to all do our part to kill the data centers. That's funny. I'm sure I just put myself on the naughty list. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a bad fact to having to pre-train for, but the reality is right now it is when you, it is, it is, it is, the Wild West. When you bring up the Wild West for what you do, it really is that, and we do need protection of those resources out there. Yeah, so we have about, I think it's about 200-100cables today, and they typically only get taken out by anchor dragging is accidental, for the most part, some of them not. But if you did want to do a targeted, like demolition, whatever, like many of them, it's like not crazy

hard. But I also don't know what, like they get snooped. And so I get red in and they get snooped and uh as in taps 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 very deep but on five nine street in Oregon yes it's very easy for them to hang out and listen yes and so um we need patrols there for sure we're gonna have to leave it there good chris thank you guys yeah right on man Cheers, guys. Cheers.