This Week in Startups - LK-99 breakthrough with Varda’s Delian Asparouhov & Andrew McCalip | E1788

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. TWiST listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at openphone.com/twist Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world, and Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist Superside. Design and creative are crucial for growth. Tech companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Meta have found the perfect solution: Superside. Get $2000 off with Superside's Startup Accelerator package superside.com/TWIST * Today’s show: Varda CEO Delian Asparouhov and R&D head Andrew McCalip join Jason to break down their recent experiment in replicating the LK-99 room-temp superconductor (4:19), the current state of material science (18;52), what the world would look like if this works (26:34), and more. Then, Krepling’s Liam Gerada joins Jason for an update on his business! (40:46) * Time stamps: (00:00) Varda CEO Delian Asparouhov and R&D head Andrew McCalip join Jason (1:21) The LK-99 superconductor and how Varda is involved (4:19) Varda’s latest achievements in replicating the LK-99 superconductor (8:05) Is this the real deal or just a strong diamagnetic effect (11:00) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://openphone.com/twist (12:30) Securing the material needed to run these experiments (14:06) The increased interest in Varda and feedback from the community (18:52) The culture shift in the tech industry (25:06) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist (26:34) Brute force science: How innovation emerges and receives funding (30:17) How the venture model has continued to evolve (34:28) Superside - Go to https://superside.com/twist to get $2000 off with Superside's Startup Accelerator package (36:00) Questions from the live audience (40:46) Krepling’s Liam Gerada joins Jason for an update on his business! * Check out Varda: https://varda.com Follow Delian: https://twitter.com/zebulgar Follow Andrew: https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

The one liner that we always use is we take ourselves, not particularly seriously, but we take our work very seriously. You know, we want to be pushing at the frontier. I think Andrew in some ways is like the true embodiment of that culture at Varda, and it's great to see the world, you know, sort of finally recognize, you know, that. And I think you'll continue to see us basically talk about, you know, even more so than before, basically, the very interesting type of engineering that VARTA is going through on a day-by-day basis. That isn't just the floating rocks, but all of the very interesting things that are necessary for us to bring, basically, space drugs to the market. This weekend startups is brought to you by OpenFone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere.

Get 20% off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. CrowdBotics. Great ideas can change the world. And crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. And SuperSide, design and creative are crucial for growth. Tech companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Meta have found the perfect solution.

SuperSide. Get $2,000 off with SuperSide Startup Accelerator package at superside.com slash twist. All right, everybody, in case you've been living under a rock, LK99 experiments have completely taken over the dialogue on X, formerly known as Twitter. For those non-scientists in the audience, LK99 is a claim method of creating the first ever room temperature superconductor. If you want to have Maglev trains or maybe reduce the amount of friction and lost energy

when you're sending electricity over cables, man, if you could have a room temperature superconductor, that could possibly 5 or 10x the efficiency of energy as it moves around the planet from what I've heard. This paper was released about 10 days ago by a group of South Korean researchers. It's called LK99 because the scientists, Lee and Kim, who performed this experiment in research, did it back in 1999. Here we are, almost 25 years later. paper was released on a website called Archive or a pre-release. Apparently people are kind of racing for their Nobel Peace Prizes or whatever you'd get for this reportedly. So one of the interesting things is that a team that we all know well, Varda, which is a company that's building factories and space, backed by the folks at Founders Fund, our friends over there, full disclosure, I'm an LP and a couple of their funds.

They decided that they would work on this. And so, Delian, welcome to the program. And Andrew McAllup, welcome to the program. How are you doing, boys? Thanks, Jason. This has been an absolutely wild ride. This started about, like you said, eight days ago, just reading a paper in my spare time in the evening.

And here we are a week later. And it's absolutely blown up into probably the most wholesome trend on Twitter or X that we've seen in years. So it's been super exciting. And Delian,

I take it, Andrew works for you. He's the head of R&D at your company. He reads his paper and says, hey boss, instead of hitting our milestones to get these factories up and running in space, can I work on this at night? And he came to you with this proposal

to put some resources to work. Yeah. Andrew's always working on, you know, sort of crazy stuff at night. I think he's shut off some tweets. So he made this, like, massive Doge Starship Gridfin and was trying to convince Elon to fly that as his first payload on Starship. So I think it's, you know, Andrew's going to work on crazy shit on nights and weekends,

you know, either way. This one is going to, you know, be a good recruiting event since it's, you know, a bunch of cool material scientists will be following along. And that's basically the exact type of talent that we need to recruit. And by the way, we have, like, all of the equipment and expertise in our lab already to go replicate this and, you know, 500 bucks of, like, materials. So yeah, no-brainer. So this has been eight days of this.

And last night you achieved the replication of this, I guess, recipe is what people are calling it. So explain where you're at right now as of, I think, 9 or 10 p.m. last night. Yeah, you're right. So this is a replication attempt. So we are taking their procedure as described in the papers and patents. and we are trying to replicate that. This is the classic scientific process.

So we're not trying to improve it. We're simply trying to show that it's a real physical effect and validate that the work is indeed valid. And so we take their steps and run through all the processes. It's a multiple step reaction. So we've been posting updates on reaction one, reaction two, reaction three. and we just got through the third reaction late last night. I think we might be the first ones in the United States

to at least acknowledge that we've gotten all the way through, which is super exciting. I can't believe that we're the first ones to talk about it. And so we've got some material that matches some of the properties that have been reported online. So obviously the entire world is racing to replicate this result because the implications are absolutely huge. And so we've got some weird and interesting first results.

And so now we're going to try to put those into the hands of the scientists. And we're not qualified to make judgment calls on that. That's the big PSA. We're some enthusiastic engineers, not the subject matter experts. But it's actually been really cool to pull together spaces and collaborate with all of these people in the fields. That's kind of the most interesting part to me is that when you started putting the steps out, Dellian's got a big following, he started retweeting it.

All of a sudden you had material scientists, chemists, I suppose, people who've procured different chemicals that might be used for various products in the world, some of which might not be legal in most parts of the world. And you go on this incredible Indiana Jones for nerds adventure of trying to do this, And I guess we should pull up the video here of what you published six hours ago. And you could tell us what we're seeing here in the laboratory because you had some amount of materials in a test tube and you broke it open.

And then you took those materials and put them on this platform. I don't know what the platform is made out of. But tell us what we're seeing here. Yeah. So this is a very small sliver of material that we extracted from one of the test tubes last night. this was showing some magnetic response. This material is more like a ceramic and shouldn't show any magnetic response

unless it's superconducting or possibly some other novel magnetic phenomena. And so this is just us on the microscope trying to get a good view of this little sliver. So we've got a magnet underneath the platform and we are putting the magnet underneath and removing it, showing that it is indeed responding to this magnetic field.

this has been one of the demonstrations that people ask for that has been shown in some of the replication attempts and visually it's pretty intriguing we don't have the the equipment to really characterize it like some of the material labs do

we want to put the material into the hands of the scientists but this is sort of what we can do is the first pass quick and dirty yeah and so when we look at this replication that you've done, attempted, succeeded to some extent.

You obviously have to test all this. And we see other people replicating it. What is your take now, Delian, about, and Andrew, just is this, is there legitimately something going on here? Or is, as some people have sort of said, yeah, maybe this is just some other magnetic property, or is it just too soon to tell? I think it's like opened up a like class of new superconductor research that is closer to like shaken bay chemistry and alchemy that I think almost certainly will lead to some very interesting materials like is the you know sort of small fleck of metal like you know I think one thing to help

you just understand is Andrew probably you know created Andrew correctly if I'm wrong but on the order of like 400 grams or so of this material of the amount that actually had these actual sort of of you know properties was like you know maybe one or two milligrams and so our yield is obviously super super low to date. And so you could not like transfer this into, hey, we're now going to immediately in a year make massive maglev trains. There's clearly like a lot of work for even this material where you'd have to make yield improvements. And there's also been some papers in China where they've showed that by doping it with gold rather than copper, they've been able to achieve potentially higher performances. So I think what I'd say is the material is definitely exhibiting even in

our lab, I think some interesting properties. Whether it's a super reductor, definitely you to send it to like, you know, a real scientific lab, you know, to validate. But I think irrespective of sort of where any of these results land, I think it's just very clear to me. that even if this is like an extremely off-the-chart strong diamagnetic effect, I still think this is like the path to eventual mass scale sort of room, you know, room temperature superconductors. And so I know the manifold markets are this very like, you know, binary thing that they're betting on is like, is the LK99 paper a room temperature superconductor?

It's like, my still answer would be like, maybe, probably not. But is this like a field that is going to lead to room temperature superconductors over the next decade? I feel pretty confident at this point saying for everything that I've read, it's like 90 plus percent chance that this is a field that will lead to that path. You're nodding in agreement there, Andrew. You think that this is a path to a new, maybe not discipline, but a new path to this outcome. Yeah, yeah, Delian absolutely nailed it.

The superconductors typically occur in families of materials. There's been six or seven families discovered over the years. And so this is absolutely not the formulation that's going to get us to a commercialized product, but it is in the ballpark. And so with the renewed interest, with this huge swelling of attention that this is getting, we're going to make discoveries very, very quickly. You know, it took the original authors decades of work

and thousands of experiments. Now, we'll run through those same amount of iterations in the next month, now that everybody is looking at this. So this is probably not the thing, but it is certainly going to put us on a path to realizing some really interesting new, physics. Are you still using your personal phone number for your startup in 2023? Is your sales team?

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cost, head to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20% off. Just to go back to this, you know, I remember in day two or three, you were trying to get a certain chemical or a certain compound. People said, hey, that's in limited supply because it might be used in meth, the street drug meth, but you could get some matches and maybe you could boil the tips off, or you could get it from, you know, some other locations that was part of the wired story tracking your progress and I saw it on Twitter. Talk about just the securing of the chemicals for this and the securing of the equipment. How difficult was it? Yeah, this is this is the problem with soliciting advice from the internet. So you're right. One of the materials was very

difficult. And so what we did is we partnered with a third party laboratory, somebody in town that had the proper licensing and expertise to actually handle all those materials. So they performed one of the reaction steps for us. So we've performed two reactions. They've performed the third. And so that allowed us to not have to bring any of that material under our roof and made it a lot easier. We also pursued a parallel path where we actually 30 minutes after I read the paper,

I was scouring the internet trying to find the product that the regulated material turns into. So got some from Poland and thought this is a nice, easy, shortcut. That actually came in and that's what we made the first batch with. So that was really nice that we didn't have to deal with some of the more dangerous side of the chemicals. And we just got to do the two reactions. So that worked out really, really well. In terms of recruiting, you know, this as a modest marketing and time consuming event, I know Varda is, you know, researching building factories and space and what, you know, the impact of that would be. What is the impact been on people wanting to come work with you? When they see you

doing this kind of fun stuff, staying up all night, you know, there's obviously a contingent of people in the world who would want to know if they got overtime and, oh my God, how much suffering and pain did those poor people who were thrilled to work through the night on something compelling and that they're interested and passionate about. So I'm sure you're going to get some of the haters coming at you for working past 6 p.m. But what about the, you know, the inbound of intent people from around the world who were inspired that your company chose to do this. Oh, yeah. That's going to be one of the biggest wins in this whole effort. The outpouring of support, like I said, has been the most wholesome thing that I have seen on the internet. My inbox is

full of literally hundreds of messages from scientists all around the world. The most interesting people in the world are reaching out and saying, you know, no matter how this ends, we love and support what you're doing. And so we've already seen a huge influx of resumes. It's been great for recruiting. And it's exciting for me because these are the people that I want to be hanging out with online as well and just having those really interesting talks. And so now I think we're at 60,000 followers.

And 60,000 of the type of people that will stay up until 3 a.m. watching a live stream of, you know, magnets or a furnace running. It's incredible. How much did they're, go ahead, Delian, you're going to add? I was going to say, I think a part of what is going to make Varda successful in the long term is, you know, just this, you know, combination of just like top tier engineers, top tier material scientists, top tier aerospace. and combining that all under one roof is, I think, actually, like, a very unique place where you actually don't typically see, like, aerospace plus material science really ever mixing together, even that most, you know, aerospace companies aren't trying to build, you know, sort of drugs in space. And I think just, like, showing that we have this, you know, culture here where, you know,

the one liner that we always use is we take ourselves, not particularly seriously, but we take our work very seriously. It's the fact that we're able to, like, you know, after 6 p.m., stay until 3 a.m., and, like, you know, have a ton of work. And then I saw one of the engineers that I know was at the lab until 3 a.m., responding to like a space factory, like, you know, alert at 9 a.m. this morning and was like, you know, going back to his, you know, sort of regular, you know, regular work, you know, immediately. I think it just shows this culture of like, you know, we want to be pushing

at the frontier. I think Andrew in some ways is like the true embodiment of that culture, you know, at Varda. And it's great to see the world, you know, sort of finally recognize, you know, that. And I think you'll continue to see us basically talk about, you know, even more so than before, basically, the very interesting type of engineering that VARTA is going through on a day by day basis that isn't just the floating rocks, but all of the very interesting things that are necessary for us to bring basically space drugs to the market. And based on the collaboration, how much faster did this go for you, Andrew, running through all this? Because I saw people giving you a lot of detailed feedback on how to do each step. So would you have been able to do this without

X.com and the community that sort of grew out of, you know, this trending topic? Or would this have taken you 80 days and you know, you just wouldn't have been able to complete it this quickly and effectively without the crowdsourced nature of it? I think I probably would have run through it equally fast. Like I was going to do this when I

had 600 followers, but I definitely wouldn't have done it as well. The support and the theory and the sort of collaborative critical thinking around the problem has been great. I put some questions up this morning about, hey,

how should I feel about this and that? I've got a spreadsheet going where people can throw in ideas for, here's the next set of settings that we want to run. I probably have to wrap this up fairly soon because we do have, you know, spacecraft to get back to. And now that we finally, we've got the national labs on board. And I know that, like, Argonne is working on it.

I heard that they were very supportive of our effort, which is, you know, strange to have the national labs. a lab cheering you on and, you know, effectively your garage. So we've really, we've done what we set out to do and we brought a lot of attention to it. And now we're probably going to like off-ramp this to the real scientists now that it's become this sort of phenomena that everyone is just rallying around. It feels Delian like there's a little bit of a culture shift going on here as well. Oppenheimer comes out.

People are like, wow, science, cool. At the same time, this drops. I can't separate the two happening in the same moment in the simulation. It almost feels like, yeah, nerds doing science projects have a big impact on the world. Obviously, pluses and minuses to nuclear power and weapons, obviously. But here, I think this is inspiring a bunch of people to maybe uncloke and to maybe say, hey, I am into this. And maybe you could speak to that.

And there seems to be a little meme or cult going on based on the effective altruism movement, which was like how to give money away effectively, how to give other people's money away, you know, in an optimal way, which sounds nice and delightful. But now there's effective accelerationism. Is that the word acceleration or accelerationism? I'm not sure exactly how they're doing this, but people are putting E slash ACC. So maybe you could talk a little bit about. The culture shift, you're pretty vocal on the Twitter. I wouldn't quite call you an ish poster, but it takes one to know what I suppose. You do like to mix it up. So maybe you could talk just culturally if it feels like something's changing. Yeah, I mean, it feels like in Silicon Valley, like the 2010s were basically the era of just like, you know, app, software, enterprise SaaS, you know, the light touchings of basically like AI. And it was also the era of like stagnation theory.

Everybody thought like, look, nothing's changing in the world. We're just building like, you know, bits that just like, you know, make people more addicted to their phone, but nothing's actually like improving people's, you know, sort of lives day to day. And I think like, you know, in some ways, sort of post-COVID, it's just been this like huge swing back basically where it's like real tech is back. We're having massive impact on the world. You know, it's everything from like, you know, orbital rockets landing every single day to space factories going up to like, you know, I think the breakthroughs in some ways in compute and AI are like far more interesting than any of the breakthroughs and

enterprise SaaS over the past decade. And I think in some ways it's just like breaking Silicon Valley out of the stupor of just not investing just in like boring software, but investing the things that like really have massive impact on the world. And I think in some ways, investors also recognizing like, this is actually where the true IRA is. Like, I'd always get these critiques in some ways, you know, over the past decade where I was like, why are you investing in all these things that are like hardware and low margin and this and that way you can just like, you know, make easy returns, just investing in like Stanford grads, you know, building like, you know, software for plumbers. And I think they're like, you know, resounding, you know, sort of results over the past,

you know, sort of two, three years in the markets have shown, actually, because software's not that defensible. Turns out it doesn't have as good of margins as you thought. And if you look at some the companies that are performing best in the public markets, it's like Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, these are all companies that are like very difficult hardware companies that are like having, you know, sort of long-term success in moats because they tackle these much more difficult problems. And I do think you're seeing this cultural shift to this like techno accelerationism that is like, this is back to Silicon Valley's roots. In the early days, we were building the transistor, we were building the chips. We were working with the defense industry hand in hand to

advance the industrial complex against the near peer adversaries of the Russians. and now people have recognized Russia's going to invade Ukraine, China is going to invade Taiwan. We have the responsibility of the people that are the most sophisticated in technology in the world, and technology is going to be what rules on that battlefield. We have a moral responsibility to contributing towards advancing technology in real ways, not just like, you know, whatever, you know, gunky photos trading on the internet. Well, I mean, a lot of roads lead back to Peter Thiel, but memetic theory, which he was kind of obsessed with at Stanford, it states basically people have a desire to be like each other

or be accepted into groups, it's tribalism, it's copying. And, you know, if you look at the success that occurred because of Google and Facebook, there was a little bit of, I think,

a generation said, oh, wow, apps, the internet has built this incredible platform. Let's build apps that delight people and make their lives better. Now, you know, getting a taxi faster,

getting food delivered to your house, sharing photos, all these things are great creature comforts, but I do think there's, it is fair to, look at it and say, yeah, did we take it too far? Did we exhaust it? And I think we exhausted it.

And that's, the VCs are, and the entrepreneurs are kind of in a dance, Andrew, I think, where, you know, oh, we made money on this. What's the next this plus one or this and this vertical? And I would always make a joke with people where I'd be like, on demand, you know, here's your X axis and here's your Y axis of like every topic in the world. On demand food, on demand this, on demand that, hotels, travel, whatever. you just go down the list. And that's, I think, getting broken out of that.

It feels like it'll be great because new platforms will emerge, huh? Yeah, absolutely. And to your previous point, we've, I feel like we've really tapped into something. There's something inside everybody that wants to believe. That's definitely come out in the last couple days is there's just this huge desire to believe in the magic. And the feeling that I got reading that paper for the first time was the, the, feeling that I had when I was using chat GPT for the first time, it was just this realization that,

like, oh my goodness, I feel like the world is possibly changing at this very moment. This is sort of the things that make humanity go exponential, that magic feeling that you get when it's just sort of this undescribable enthusiasm. And so I've had that feeling twice now in the last three months, you know, reading that paper and chat GPT for the first time. And so that, I feel like, is alive in so many people, and it's just not, not expressed. And so we're slowly bringing that to more of the public eye. Yeah, it does seem like when you, you know it when you see it. You know, when you might be too young, I'm not sure how old you are, but to remember the first time you got on the internet, or in my case, Bittnet and ARPANET. But it was kind of like, whoa, I've been on a dial-up

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Let me ask you about these, the authors of these papers. What's going on with? with these outside rogue people making this discovery, what can you take from that, Delian? If you look at it and the fact that they've been at this for like 25 years and to varying degrees, this thing went to bed, anything you can read from that and a broader thesis on how innovation is funded or emerges because you have academia, you have venture route,

then this seems to have fallen between the two. Yeah, I think it's always this discovery is, the like, you know, sort of pure antithetical thesis of what everybody was, you know, a proponent of over the past 10 years, which was just like centralization into like large institutions and everything's going to be software run. If you look at the type of chemistry they're doing, it's explicitly the opposite of what's been done in these types of superconductor experiments for the past 15 years where everything was, you know, sort of theoretically simulated model, et cetera, versus these types of like mesoscopic solid state crystallizations are effectively like impossible to predict via software.

The only way we really know how to do it today is like effectively like mass experimentation, which is a very, like, unsexy version of science where do we really kind of understand what's going on? Not really. Like, you know, we're sort of backing into our theoretical. A little brute force? Yeah, it's just like brute force. It's back to the old days of like, yeah, decentralized. Like, you know, if you look at like, I mean, in some ways, I think Oppenheimer revealed this. Like, if you look at like the way that they, you know, sort of built the first bomb, you can't claim that there was like, you know, some super, you know, sort of fancy, you know, software simulations. They were just throwing together, seeing what stuck and just doing, like, true brute force science. And it's a return to those days. And it's some ways, I think like,

everything from like, you know, Starship is like truly like brute forcing an orbital, you know, single stage, fully reusable rocket to a lot of like the net new nuclear reactor companies that are like pushing through and, you know, making internet regulators aren't going to hold things up. It just feels like it's like, you know, the Korean paper is emblematic of this sort of like return to just like brute force science and engineering and full decentralization. Anybody can innovate and less and less sort of reliance on like we need to perfectly understand the world and perfectly simulate it. Andrew, you're that?

Yeah, to that point, there's always these two sort of, factions that are going forward. You've got the theorist and the experimentalist. And so if something is truly revolutionary, it is by definition advanced from the theory. We do not have a great grasp of how to describe something that's completely brand new. And so some things come about because, you know, theory, like Einstein, for example, described relativity. And it was only years later that it was experimentally confirmed.

The guy went down to Australia and measure the bending of the light rays. But other things are experimental first and the theory comes later because there are just that revolutionary. So this might be one of those examples where maybe somebody got lucky. You do get lucky. It's such a huge solution space. And so this happens all the time in physics. I believe nature was quoted a couple years ago saying that the next. superconductor breakthrough will probably meet made by accident with a graduate student in a university

that nobody's ever heard of. This is the nature of research in this field because humanity doesn't have a great grasp of these lower level quantum effects. We're just not there as a species right now. It's fascinating to think of this. It's like if you think about like food trucks, like people lowered the bench. You didn't have to go to like some culinary institute. You didn't have to have a bunch of millionaire friends to open up a restaurant. You just kind of get this old, you know, truck and you put two or three recipes together. You park somewhere. If people like the food, all of a sudden you got a crowd.

And people are going acoustic. They're testing things. And this feels like some sort of a new movement is, is there a way venture can participate in this? Or is it just, you know, because it's two or three decades to get there, it's not really something that venture can participate in. I think it's probably a little too early. I'm obviously highly interested.

This is the exact type of work that I love where it's like complex material science, like, you know, it's something where in order to refine these processes less, you're going to want to go to national labs. But eventually somebody's going to have to create the equivalent of like a semiconductor fab. People are going to have to create the first like superconductor fab and create tight process control, try a bunch of recipes, figure out to like mass manufacture this with super high quality and yield. I still think though it's more like, you know, minimum call it two years, probably more like

five years away from like the first venture investments making sense. and I think it'll be a combination of basically like infrastructure and people building those first superconductor fabs. And I think in some ways this is going to be more of it in the Clayton Christensen style, you know, sort of disruptive innovation where I don't think incumbents will necessarily know. Like I don't think it's going to be like the incumbent MRI machine companies that are going to really think through how do I make this now so that rather than

having to be inside of hospital systems and liquid nitrogen delivered every day, how do I instead just like send people home with like a MRI, you know, basically to their house. And so it'll probably be like, I don't know, like companies like eight sleep that like build MRIs into their like sleep pods basically are going to be the ones that like, like probably take advantage of this, you know, the most. Like, yeah, I mean, I came up with it on the fly. I'd probably go text Mateo and be like, yo, you should go make this. I mean, literally, if you think of it, like an eight sleep taking MRI of you every night, it'd be like, hey, we found

this like nodule, might become a, you know, this could become a tumor, but we're going to just monitor it every night you sleep and tell you, you know, at what point it's growing and what point you get, you know, it's prenuvo in your, in your house, right? It's pretty, pretty sick when you think about the possibilities. But again, this thing's been going on for 25 years, quarter, century. Another three, four, five years now that people have put a spotlight on it. That's 30. They're rounded up to about 30 years of work on and off. And then you probably get the 10-year venture cycle after that. And so this is where I think like, I don't know if you know Steve Jervison, but his future ventures, he just told his LPs 15 years. So, you know, that's a little bit to

swallow for people to get a return, even if that's what happens in reality for some venture firms. So you say 10, you maybe get it done in 15, say 15, maybe get it done in 20. It's interesting if the venture model could continue to evolve. I'm not sure if you guys have thoughts on that or how much runway you're being given at Varda. And what's the expectation there in terms of commercialization and revenue generation, six, seven, eight years out? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think in some ways that, you know, sort of founding of Varda was explicitly, you know, with that, you know, partially having venture capitalists as a co-founder was with that sort of seven to 10 year,

you know, entire timeframe, which is Varda basically needed to generate significant if you get revenues in year three, because if you're not by doing that by year three, then by default, you're never going to be able to return capital in like that seven to 10 year time frame. And we are basically now in year three. And you know, sort of generating significant revenues will probably end the year like nine to 10 million, you know, in revenue, which I think most deep tech companies obviously get nowhere near that at year three. But that's not to say that I don't think we're like tackling an unambitious, you know, project per se. I think it just requires you to think through the engineering of, you know,

in some ways the early days of, you know, sort of SpaceX were not Starlink and Starship. They had to go through the very boring days of like in some ways Falcon 1, disposable Falcon 9s. And so even if you are thinking on this like, you know, 15 to 20 year time frame, like how Elon thinks about, you know, companies and like he builds them, I still think some of the most successful companies, even if you have people like Gerbertsin willing to think in those timeframes, I think in some ways employees want to just feel like there's momentum and there's progress

being made and revenues obviously a significant, basically like indicator of that. And so I think you'll see some, you know, sort of bleed into longer and longer time frame thinking. But at the end of the day, like in order to attract the best talent, you need to be able to show them there's like this continuous. momentum. And I think revenue is basically the easiest way to do that. And so I always kind of keep this rule in my head anytime I'm evaluating like a deep tech investment is like, as much as I want to tackle really ambitious things, like, is this just something that can generate revenue at the

year three, year four mark? Otherwise, it's probably not quite a time. Like, I would love to invest in something like lunar ice mining or a supercductor fab today. It's just probably not quite the right time, maybe like five, six, seven years ago, you know, from now when VARDA is super successful and we're consuming tons and tons of water in our space factories every day. Great. Then lunar ice mining makes a ton of sense because we're the obvious customer for that versus today there's not that obvious customer. All right. If you are listening to this podcast, you care about innovation, obviously.

And one sector that really needed a shakeup was design. I'm always on and on and on about the beautiful design about apps we've invested in, but it's hard to do. In the past, you either had to hire this expensive old school agency, boom, all your startup funding burned. And then there were freelance marketplaces. It can get messy. Let's just leave it at that.

There's got to be a better way, right? Well, let me tell you about that better way. It's called Super Sign, Super S-I-D-E. It's a new way to get great design done quickly and consistently and at a high level. They call it Cass, creative as a service. I want you to remember Cass. It's a fully managed end-to-end service, and it's completely hassle-free. What you basically do is you subscribe to SuperSide, and then you get an amazing, dedicated design team that's built out specifically for you.

Brands like Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, and Shopify use SuperSyte, as well as a bunch of fast-growing startups like mine. And SuperSide only hires the top 1% of designers from around the world. Maybe you want to do a landing page. Maybe you've got ads you're putting up. Maybe you want to do motion design or custom illustrations. You get a range of skills. And that's all done in Superside, super fast, super consistent, and at a very high level. It is the best way for you to solve this problem.

And SuperSide has an exclusive offer for Twist listeners. Save 2000 a month with SuperSide's startup accelerator package at superside.com slash twist. That's superside.com slash twist for two grand off. Quick question from the audience that's watching live. What type class of superconductors do you think further research on LK99 would lead to, Andrew? What class or what particular applications? He asked for what type of class, but I'll go with applications as well. Yeah.

Okay. Applications, I mean, it's so many things. I it's probably the most useful thing is probably something we haven't thought of. I'm obsessed with anything to do with energy. So the ability to store energy more effectively. Can we do a superconducting battery system? Can we use superconductors as a solid state heat engine to extract energy from low temperature differentials?

Can we do something like that that is not well served by the current market? Can we do something that's not steam turbines? Can it help phase shift energy from solar production to the demand curves. That, I think, is the real game changer for humanity is getting something going in energy, whether it's the consuming, using the distribution of. It all comes down to energy at the end of the day. All right.

Two quick questions before I wrap here. Were the testing methods used in the LK paper malicious or non-professional? Why is the paper so controversial just because it's not pure reviewed? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, the paper is lacking some details. You know, it's, it's hard to critique it because, you know, we're not, we're engineers, we're not scientists. So we're kind of coming into this with a very different perspective. But it's a little bit light on details.

That doesn't mean it's wrong, but we should be, you know, be a little bit guarded in our expectations. And we should try to reproduce it. Delian, you're going to be on the pod in a week or so to talk about Varda and we'll tell that whole story then. But just your thoughts on the government supporting this. Another question came in from the live audience. Are we at the point where the government should quickly be able to look at innovations like this and deploy some capital into it? Because private markets probably won't, but clearly, or maybe private markets will. I don't know.

We'll see if some lunatic billionaire gets frisky and just says, you know, this is worth a flyer. you do have that kind of weird behavior if the venture community won't do it. A high net worth individual might. But maybe you talk a little bit about the government support of this or because that process of getting grants and stuff like that is just so slow compared to how this is moving. Yeah, I would hope, you know, if you look at like the 2002-2003 timeframe, there was a similar sort of mass rush to basically, you know, industrial scale automation into solid state screening of pharmaceuticals that made it from this like, you know,

previously very manual pipetting individual x-ray crystallography process to something that like, obviously, you know, wasn't fully automated, but like largely automatable. You could see basically that exactly same analogy applying here where I would hope that like the NSF or, you know, some equivalent government agency is applying billion plus dollars of funding to effectively encourage roboticists, material scientists, metallurgists to basically take, you know, it is more complex. You're talking about basically, you know, much more, you know, let's say dangerous, you know, sort of or maybe equivalently dangerous, you know, chemicals, but these ones can potentially explode, much higher temperatures, much more sort of stringent, you know, problems.

process control that's going to be necessary for these types of superconductors. And I hope that basically encourage, you know, academic facilities to create the equivalent basically mass screening that you saw in pharmaceuticals in like the early 2000s, doing that equivalence in superconductors in order to rapidly advance this rather than like, you know, as awesome, it's been to, you know, have Andrew doing this for the past 10 days. It's still definitely like shake and bake, you know, sort of chemistry and, you know, people manually moving quartz tubes around. That should definitely be like super precise, you know, sort of robots.

Everything should be like fully automated so that you're getting really consistent results. All right. Listen, great job. A lot of fun. Congratulations on the tens of millions of views to your tweets. I saw this last night's tweet storm. It has millions and millions of views already. You can follow Varda Space.

Yeah, on Twitter, Varda Space. Andrew is Andrew McA-M-C-A-L-I-P. And Delian is Z-E-B-U-L-G-A-R on Twitter. Go follow them. And you can see all this crazy Mushugana and excitement. It's thrilling to watch you guys work, continue to success,

and Delian will talk all about Varda next week, and we'll see you all next time on this week and startups. Bye-bye. Thanks for having us. Next up, Jason interviews launch portfolio founder, Liam Gerada, the CEO and founder of Crepling, a startup that enables merchants

to build e-commerce websites from scratch using a drag-and-drop interface. Stick with us. A lot of you ask me, hey, Jason, what are you investing in? Well, I like to bring you once in a while the companies we've invested in or we're planning to invest more money in. And today we have Liam Gerarder on the program. He's the co-founder and CEO of Crepling.

He went through Launch Accelerator 23rd cohort. We're on our 28th cohort. If you don't know what the launch accelerator is, it's just like TechStars or Y Combinator. It's an accelerator. It's about 14, 15 weeks long. We help you raise money. We help you perfect your pitch. we help you get product market fit and scale your customers and generally accelerate the pace at which you're growing your startup.

We put $100,000 in for 6%, just similar to I think Ycombinator puts $125 in for 7%. It's pretty much a standard deal in Silicon Valley. And Crepling went through our program and has grown nicely since then. It's a no-code platform for creating e-commerce websites. Welcome to the program. Liam. Awesome. Thanks, Jason, for having me. So just give everybody a brief overview of what your idea for a startup was and how it's gone.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I think we started off originally as e-commerce merchants and found out that, you know, today merchants are maintaining increasingly complex ecosystems, using a huge number of integrations from across the entire e-commerce stack, such as multiple payment gateways, email tools, marketing platforms, shipping and shipping and logistics services, the list is really and truly endless. The problem is that the current world of e-commerce enablement is just simply not set up nor incentivized to allow merchants to use this modern stack to its full capabilities. E-commerce integrations we found were often tightly coupled to individual e-commerce services, which presented a huge problem for merchants and companies that were not engineer-focused or didn't have the ability to build out multi-year roadmap which is typically the ICP or the 90% of the modern mid-market e-commerce merchant.

And this is the exact problem we're solving. We built Krepling in a real and direct response to this problem. And simply put, as you said, it's a no-code platform that just allows merchants to unbundle and rebuild their own e-commerce stack from scratch without writing code to build the most beautiful e-commerce experiences their merchants and their customers have ever seen. and essentially, yeah, we're growing and we're looking just to solve that problem,

solve that shift, solve that issue within the mid-market e-commerce category. So if I'm understanding the problem correctly, I'm starting a commerce site, I'm just doing it for fun. Hey, it becomes a real business. I decided I would go with Magento. I decided I would go to Shopify,

whatever platform I chose. Now I'm kind of locked in, but I want to use different vendors or different tools for my e-commerce site, and I'm kind of stuck on my island, either the Shopify island or the Magento Island, is that correct? That's it. And the issue is, unfortunately,

most of the e-commerce players out there are trying to take you away from your island. You've built this amazing site. Now you're thinking, right, I want to use these cool and exciting tools. I want to create these new distribution channels. I want to allow customers from different parts of the world to interact with my store. I want to deploy different storefronts. How do I do that without having to graduate from? Shopify or grow into a headless or developer focus solution. And unfortunately, you're left with

two choices. You either forego the opportunity entirely or you suffer the pain and just move away from your island and essentially you're in this new realm of essentially technology enablement. You're no longer building an e-commerce store. You're building an e-commerce machine. And the thing we always say to merchants is, you know, even if you have the ability to create these sophisticated e-commerce channels, are you really prepared to invest the time and effort into building out multi-year roadmaps hiring engineers? And that's essentially the issue merchants are,

begin to face is they don't really have the capacity or the want to hire 60-8 engineers. They just want to sell their products and reach their customers better. So we really are trying to allow merchants to essentially create these astounding e-commerce experiences. The same way Nike or added us to doing without having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital into something that they shouldn't be investing into.

So are most of your customers already on Shopify and Magento and then they use you and you wind up replacing them or becoming the front end to them? Or are you just going after people who are the new merchants and trying to catch them before they make the decision to go with Shopify or Magenta? Yeah. We started off initially going off to those newer merchants. Obviously, you know, your startup, you don't necessarily have all the capital and the resources to handle the bigger brands.

We're already integrated with a very cool, intuitive solution. So we were after, of course, the hope, the up-and-coming brands, the first-time entrepreneurs were going to start at the new store and just hopefully they click on creppling and go, wow, this is really the right way to do it. It gave us initial traction,

and then we eventually started going after the larger, more established, mid-market brands. Brands not necessarily to the size of Nike who added us just yet. So they are smaller than the typical enterprise customer, but they are really, as you said, they're already set up on a Magenta or Shopify. Sometimes they've been set up on Headless, and we're just saying, look, you know, you're thinking about the next 10 years of your company, you're thinking about how e-commerce landscape is becoming

all the more evolved and there's now this so-called e-commerce stack you've got to think about. Why not just use a platform that can allow you to manage that and build that and win in your category without having to write code or remigrate. So, yeah, a bit of both, a bit of a split now. It definitely started off with the earlier guys, the first-time entrepreneurs we like to say. And how has this pitch been received by the venture community? You went for more Accelerator. I know you had some other investors in the company along the way.

How has it been building an e-commerce platform with the Shopify's and Magento's out there? And obviously, folks like Squarespace now support e-commerce. You've got just tons of competitors. How do you convince investors that you got something unique here and get them to invest? in the face of 800-pound gorillas everywhere? Yeah, no, I think, I think, without doubt, the Shopify's and the WooCommerces of the world are the best-of-breed solutions.

And I think for us, it's more so speaking to the complexity of the space as it is to date, as opposed to saying, look, we're not just going to come out with a unique twist and be the next Shopify. We're not just going to say, look, we're faster than Shopify. We create better-looking stores than Woo-commerce. we really are just looking to solve the merchant problem. We aren't necessarily saying, look, merchants need to make a full switch to

solve this problem. In fact, we're saying they don't. And that's initially our pitch. We are essentially after solving the merchant problem. You know, use a lot of players out there, as you said, very crowded space. A lot of players out there making noise and saying, look, we're headless, we decoupling the front end and the back end. We're giving you better faster-working websites.

We're allowing you to just make things easier, so on and so forth. we are just saying, look, this is what merchants are facing to date. This is where e-commerce is going. We're betting on the future of what the merchants, where the merchants are heading. And Krepling essentially is solving this problem of how do you manage a modern e-commerce stack. The space is going to become more crowded, is going to become more of a sort of wide ecosystem, similar to the way SaaS became just that. And we want to be sort of the AWS of e-commerce for the long run.

And yeah, I think, as you say- How is AI playing into all of this now? Yeah, I think, as you can imagine, as most industries are, it's having its toll. I think, you know, you look at the other sort of the spectrum, Shopify, thinking of the AI approach more as the chat-bought approach, how do we ensure our customers can maintain their stores, how can we sure customers find success? I think the long play, or the way we're thinking about it is, how can AI play a role to actually allow customers to deploy these multiple storefronts and tech stacks?

We're dabbing in the sense that most merchants have multiple customer data layers. They have millions of data points for their customers. How can you leverage AI to help merchants better reach their customers? I think that's the big choice and the big race in e-commerce now when it comes to AI. When does AI sort of take that toll on customer data? And I think, you know, e-commerce retailers have more data points than any of the industry to date. So how can the enablers sort of leverage that data to allow merchants to better talk with their customers? So I think that's where the gold race is within AI when it comes to commerce, the customer data.

Fantastic. So if you want to learn more or you want to come work for the company, we're investors, and we're big fans of the project and what you're working on, it's K-R-E-P-L-I-N-G.com, prepling.com. Thank you for coming on the show. Liam. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Jason.