🎧🍌 The Ocean: Earth's $2.5 Trillion Last Frontier
Autonomous ocean robots, raising a Seed off cold emails, economics of the ocean, how to sell to governments, $10B sunken treasure, why Atlantis is real, and other believable conspiracy theories
Will O’Brien is the Co-founder and President of Ulysses, building autonomous, low cost robots for the ocean.
Will considers the ocean as humanity’s next great frontier. It makes up over $2.5 trillion of economic activity, which includes things like fishing, aquaculture, shipping, mining, communications infrastructure, and defense - - yet we know more about the surface of the moon’s of Saturn than we do the bottom of our own ocean.
We talk about Ulysses first product (restoring plant life in the ocean), their modular autonomous underwater robotics platform, advice for anyone selling to governments, crazy businesses that could eventually evolve in the ocean (floating cities, treasure hunting), and why the way we finance startups needs to change.
Will also loves conspiracy theories, and we talk about some of our favorites, and why he thinks people who believe them could make good startup founders.
Thanks to Will’s brother’s Jacob and Harry, and upcoming guest of the show Eoghan McCabe for helping brainstorm topics for Will🙏
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Timestamps to jump in:
4:03 Peace offering of Dubai Chocolate
5:30 Modern internet theory
7:40 The ocean is the last frontier
11:53 Ulysses: read/write layer of the ocean
13:35 The $2.5 trillion ocean economy
15:14 Current ocean unit economics
18:50 Starting with seagrass ecosystem restoration
24:13 Modular, underwater autonomous robots
27:31 Starting Ulysses with a group chat
29:51 Raising a Seed from Lowercarbon with no network, off one call on a cold calendar invite
32:24 Economic use cases for ocean robotics
36:07 Spiritual energy from the ocean
42:36 First Ramp podcast ad in Irish
43:21 Floating cities, sub tours, deep sea mining, iron fertilization
51:47 $10+ billion in shipwrecked treasure
53:18 Atlantis is real
59:46 Craziest alien conspiracy theories
1:01:28 Sinking the titanic to create the Fed
1:04:19 Conspiracy theory believers are good founders
1:07:55 How to sell to the government
1:13:28 Writing a letter to an Irish billionaire
1:16:00 Finding meaning after living with Monks in Nepal
1:27:10 Why financial innovation precludes economic dominance
1:44:01 The SPV peddler business model
1:46:35 Should we bring back SPAC’s?
Referenced:
Careers at Ulysses
Richat Structure in Mauritaniua
Jesse Michael’s YouTube
Find Will on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
👉 Stream on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Will, welcome to the show.
Will O’Brien:
Thank you for having me.
Turner Novak:
So we're going to talk about the ocean. That's probably the biggest thing to talk about. It's the next frontier.
Will O’Brien:
Yes. It is literally the biggest thing to talk about. It covers two thirds of the earth. It's a big deal.
Turner Novak:
And so I actually brought this peace offering to the ocean. It's ocean-branded Dubai chocolate.
Will O’Brien:
Oh. Wow. As a Gen Z, as a zoomer, I can't tell you how much this means to me. This is only second to a Labubu or matcha, maybe. I don't know.
Turner Novak:
Look at this. It's got a little, like something.
Will O’Brien:
Wow. I've never had it before.
Turner Novak:
Oh. You've never had it before?
Will O’Brien:
I've never had it before.
Turner Novak:
Oh. It's so good.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I was in Dubai recently for work, but I don't even know.Apparently, I heard someone saying it's like a marketing stunt or something like that.
Turner Novak:
Oh. For the country?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. In the same way you've got Irish coffee or something like that, you have Dubai chocolate now.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Ooh. This is slightly-
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. It's pretty good.
Turner Novak:
It's slightly warmer than you probably want it to be.
Will O’Brien:
No. I think you want chocolate a bit warmer than room temperature. I don't like cold chocolate.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. If no one's had Dubai chocolate before, how would you describe this?
Will O’Brien:
Pistachio, a bit crunchy in flavor. A bit crunchy inside. It's got this mousse inside it. Yeah. Pretty decent. Thank you.
Turner Novak:
You're welcome. Just ocean-branded Dubai chocolate.
Will O’Brien:
Was first time.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It's kind of funny that it became a thing, that Dubai chocolate is a thing that people care about.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
It's just funny.
Will O’Brien:
The internet, man.
Turner Novak:
It does actually taste very good. It's ridiculously overpriced, and I think that's the only reason I think it's interesting, is, why would you pay 30 bucks for a bar of chocolate or more in some cases?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. This is, I think, one of the interesting things about the internet now, is it's driving both mass convergence and mass divergence and that the fact that everyone maybe below the age of 26 or 27 knows what Dubai chocolate ... I don't even want to repeat some of these other ones, but like Crocodilo or Labubu, what the hell did these words you mean? But every young person knows what they are.
But then, also, at the same time, you got this divergence, where you have people with increasingly esoteric online interests going down increasingly weirder rabbit holes, more political polarization, and yeah. You're seeing a compression around the mean and median and an extension in and around the tails in a way that is interesting, also, maybe a little bit worrying. I'm not too sure.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It's maybe an extension of that, the thousand true fans. Have you ever heard of that theory before?
Will O’Brien:
Kevin Kelly. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It's like no matter what you're doing, you can find a thousand people in the world that are interested, and if you charge them, let's say it's like a hundred dollars a month or a year, whatever, you can make a living with those thousand true fans. So there's that element of the internet. Then, there's also like, what if that thing ... You thought you could sell Dubai chocolate online to a thousand people and make a living, but it's actually ... It became the current meta of the internet or like the narrative of the internet. So it's like that pushed all the way to the limit of a hundred million fans, like a hundred thousand million true fans instead of just a thousand fans.
Will O’Brien:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's insane.
Turner Novak:
So why do you think the ocean's so interesting?
Will O’Brien:
I think it's very ... Well, I grew up just with a personal connection to it. I grew up by the seaside in the southwest of Ireland in a place called Cork. So if I wasn't in the water, I was on the water, I was near it, fishing, surfing, swimming, rockpooling, whatever. My mom would just put me in a wetsuit as a kid, and just send me to the beach in the summers, and just be like, "Go."
Turner Novak:
That's like the opposite of the current millennial style. It's like, "Just go play in the ocean with sharks and like-"
Will O’Brien:
Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's Ireland, so there's no sharks-
Turner Novak:
Oh. Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
... or anything that can really ... I mean, there's some fish, like weever fish that can give you a bad sting, but ... So I think I had a very strong personal connection to it, and that's what drew me to it. Then, as I got older, I started diving. I did some spear fishing, as well, and got into it. So I just developed this personal connection. But I think why it's so interesting is because, well, I mean, it's just so interwoven with human life today. A billion people on earth rely on it as their primary source of income, 3 billion as their primary source of protein. Nearly every society has a founding myth that has some origin in a flood, or an ocean-related story, or a river.
I suppose why it's becoming interesting today is the next century, the ocean is the most strategically, one of the most strategically important domains for the next century. There's moments in history where we're defined by what's going on on land, and there's moments in history when we're defined by what's going on in the ocean. You have the age of exploration, the age of sail, where we were very ... and colonization, these kind of periods where humanity's capability was very tied to what we were doing on the ocean.
Then, you kind of come towards the 20th century, where all of the major wars were fought pretty much over land, barring a portion of World War II. They were fought in deserts, or in jungles, or in cities. From an economic point of view, economic well-being was generated in-
Turner Novak:
Yeah. We got factories, industrial production all on land.
Will O’Brien:
All on land. All on land, and now, for a variety of reasons, the focus is turning back towards the ocean, and whether it's in the defense. The world of defense, the next war will be fought over the ocean, over the Pacific, and the US is like wising up to that. 99% of the data that transmits around the world every day goes through, runs through submarine cables, and we're putting more and more data on the internet now every single day. That needs more and more cables.
These are also becoming a target for gray warfare interventions of that kind. So there's this data infrastructure that is going to have to be built out. Another key feature of this century is going to be the energy infrastructure build-out. Much of the world's energy supplies runs through the ocean. Also, energy is ... There is billions of dollars of energy still trapped in the ocean, and this is broadly across wind and some still in oil and gas.
If you look at minerals, there is billions, again, of minerals stored in the ocean, and that is going to be another critical. Then, you come to the climate question for the next century, and the ocean is the world's largest natural carbon sink. The ocean is the greatest source of biodiversity in the world. So if you look at what the next century is going to look like, it's going to be these raw materials, like minerals. Energy, data, climate, biodiversity, and all of these things have the ocean as its primary domain.
I think they're giving really strong tailwinds to that, "Okay. Now, this century, this is going to become a more important domain." That's kind of like, brings us to where we're doing, we're doing. We want to be this kind infrastructure layer for this oceanic century, and-
Turner Novak:
Okay. So can you explain that a little bit more? I've heard you describe it as the read and write layer of the ocean, which could sound ... It's one of those things where it sounds super slick and can be like, "Oh my God. This sounds incredible." But it also could be like, "What does that even mean?" So if I'm not familiar with any of this?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. In very simple terms, what we do at Ulysses is we're building this autonomy platform for the ocean, autonomous vehicles, autonomous robots to do the most critical tasks in the oceans, tasks that today are done too slowly, are too costly, or are just, in fact, just not being done at all. So to do this, we build an autonomous underwater vehicle called Mako. We use this as a platform to carry sensors or cameras on it, which is the kind of read aspect of what we do, these read-only kind of functions, where you're mapping seabed, where you're doing inspections on offshore infrastructure, these sorts of things.
Then, you have the write aspect, which is we carry, also, robotic payloads, as well, that do different physical interventions at the seabed level or other locations. So we're working on offshore infrastructure maintenance and seagrass ecosystem restoration, as well as a few other service lines that we're going to be entering over the next year. But yes, basically, we're selling the kind of picks and the shovels for the ocean economy, and yeah. That's a bit about what we do.
Turner Novak:
This sort of exists. There's kind of an ocean economy right now. What does it look like?
Will O’Brien:
Oh. Yeah. I mean, it's a $2.5 trillion economy right now in the ocean. Right?
Turner Novak:
So what is all that? What all goes into that 2.5 trillion?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. A large portion of that is in and around fisheries, aquaculture. That's a major component of it. Shipping and logistics, obviously, another massive aspect of it. You have infrastructure, which you can segment into energy, you can segment into data, and actual physical roads and infrastructure, as well, bridges and that sort of thing. Then, you have, yeah, also, the other more nascent industries. You have mining becoming more and more popular in the ocean, deep sea mining becoming more and more of interest, but still extremely nascent. Then, another massive category of spend in the ocean is defense and security. So Coast Guard, law enforcement, Navy-
Turner Novak:
The Navy. Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
... spending, yeah, billions of dollars per annum on different capital and operational expenditures for the ocean.
Turner Novak:
How does it mostly work today? If I'm thinking of the average deep sea exploration or deep open water commercial mission, is it ... What's the average thing that's out there look like, and the setup of a team, and the business that's kind of operating, and the products they're using?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Honestly, the world of maritime operations, which is the world we inhabit, doing things in the ocean, doing activities, the kind of services layer in the ocean, it can be broadly characterized as you have some expensive manned surface vessel. These can have operating ... So let's say you want to do the inspection of a sub sea cable off the coast of California. You're going out. You go out with this very expensive chartered surface vessel that needs to carry a doctor, that needs to carry five divers. It needs to carry two unmanned system operators, needs to carry a ship, a captain and his first mate. It needs to carry kitchen staff. Ends up becoming like a 15-person crew, and the vessel itself costs tens of millions of dollars and-
Turner Novak:
Just to purchase and get it in the first place?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. So you end up, basically, with a daily running cost of like 50K to like 100K for some of these larger vessels to go out and do ... Let's say you want to go and do a subsea inspection. So then, you go out. It takes two days to get there, and, because it's a big vessel, you spend a ton of money on fuel. Then, you throw your underwater vehicle over the edge and maybe send some divers down, as well, with it. You go down. You do the inspection. You come back up. You can only work maybe four to six hours a day because of sunlight or other kind of constraints, and labor laws, and these sorts of things.
You come up, and then you read the data. You go down the next day. You do this three days in a row or whatever. So you basically have the surface asset. You have the people on the vessel. You have these expensive unmanned systems from these legacy providers that cost on the order of like 1 million all the way up to tens of millions of dollars to buy these remote-operated or underwater vehicles. Maybe you might have some aerial assets and support, as well, occasionally.
Turner Novak:
Really? Okay.Helicopter flying or-
Will O’Brien:
Not for this mission, but for other missions. Let's say you're doing something like border security in San Diego. You've got a P-3 Orion giving overwatch there. Again, super expensive capital, requires human operation. So basically, what ... We characterize this as like the heavy tech bottleneck, is you have this bottleneck around maritime operations, because you have surface vessels that are extremely expensive. Then, you have unmanned systems that are similarly super expensive, and all of it relies on humans.
The Ulysses platform is totally autonomous, can be operated from anywhere on earth. It revolves around our autonomous surface vehicle pressure, which departs from port carrying our underwater vehicles on board. It'll go out to the location. It'll drop off the underwater vehicles. We can control it over SATCOM links, or Starlink, or something like that. Drops off the underwater vehicles. They go do their mission. They come back. We have this autonomous launch and recovery system that can pick them up, put them on the bed, wirelessly recharge them, send the data back to shore, retask them, send them back out.
Can do that for multiple days on end. It can work 24/7. You don't have any humans on board. The vehicle itself is much smaller, so it cost a fraction of the cost of any surface ... other surface asset. And yeah. You can just basically do all of these subsea tasks quicker, better, faster, and cheaper.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. And so what's the first thing you're kind of doing? Because I know deep technology company, you're doing a lot of R&D. You can raise money to fund it, but it's probably nice to bring some cash coming in. So what are you doing to start to actually make money?
Will O’Brien:
Well, the nice thing about Ulysses is we actually make money, which is a very unique position to be in in San Francisco. In fact, we've nearly made more money than we've actually spent so far to date.
Turner Novak:
Oh. Nice. So you're-
Will O’Brien:
Millions of dollars of revenue this year. A million dollar of revenue last year. Yeah. We're about $2.3 million in revenue so far this year, probably on track for 3, 3.5. So we began this company solving a very random weird problem that most people have never heard of, but is a good place to start a business. One of my co-founders was on a surf trip and met a marine biologist who told him about her job, how manual it was, how she was manually taking photos and then sketching out what these subsea ecosystems looked like. She was taking, manually collecting water samples, and she was doing this thing called seagrass ecosystem restoration, which is collecting seeds and planting seeds.
This really kind of piqued my co-founder's ear, because he was like, "Oh. Wait. There's people paying humans lots of money to do this. Yes, and they're covering how much area per day?" They would cover four hectares in any a year, and he was running the math, "What would this do in underwater vehicle? You could plant five hectares a day. So you could ..." All of a sudden, you've realize, "Okay. There's people paying money for this service," and then you start learning about the benefits of seagrass. Seagrass is 35 times better than rainforests at removing carbon. It supports about 20% of all fish life in the ocean.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. It's anchor species for the ocean. It's kind of the ugly duckling. Nobody really knows about it. It wasn't in Finding Nemo. So people don't realize it exists, and it's dying all across the world. People can't plant it back quick enough, and governments are panicked about it. Because their fish stocks rely on it. They've got biodiversity targets. They've got carbon targets. So the idea to begin with was like, "Okay. Well, let's plant this better, faster, cheaper, and let's do that at scale. And we can build a nice business doing that."
And that was a great business. Last year, we did a million dollars in revenue, and we are supporting the scale up of some of the biggest restoration projects in the world. It's a great story to tell. But in doing that and solving that problem, we built our underwater vehicle, Mako, and we built some robotic payloads to go onto our system to do these activities. But we realized, "Oh. Wow. There's an open goal here in building next-generation autonomous underwater and surface vehicles for the ocean," and that basically, the people who are building these vehicles today, the incumbents, are the same companies that were building them in 1960, 1970.
It's like there is this crop of incumbents. Some of them go back, date back to World War II, former shipbuilders, and all of these breakthroughs that have been informing the design of drones going into places like Ukraine or doing delivery drones here in the US, or the innovations going into autonomous vehicles, from a compute perspective, none of these ideas have been ported over to the subsea and surface domain for our-
Turner Novak:
Are these things even connected to the internet?
Will O’Brien:
Well, basically, one of the technical challenges in building in the subsea domain is that water is a buffer that does not allow comms through it pretty easily. So you can't get Wi-Fi down there. You can't get Bluetooth down there. You can't get cell service. So everything has to operate in the dark. So you actually do need a lot of compute on board. Actually-
Turner Novak:
So you need a true brain, self-driving capabilities.
Will O’Brien:
Exactly. Yeah, and we have the world's most compute-capable underwater vehicle to do that. We've crammed a ton of compute into a very small area, and we can run pretty much any ... We can't get models big enough to actually push our, open source models big enough to push our system to the limit yet. But that's going to change, obviously, as open source and models generating better, get better.
Turner Novak:
What kind of model work are you doing? Is a lot of computer vision?
Will O’Brien:
Vision is the main one that we're doing right now.
Turner Novak:
So you guys are using Roboflow?
Will O’Brien:
We are not using Roboflow.
Turner Novak:
You should be. Have you tried them?
Will O’Brien:
No.
Turner Novak:
You haven't even looked? Have you heard of Roboflow?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I have heard of them. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Have you looked into it yet?
Will O’Brien:
I haven't looked into it.
Turner Novak:
Oh. You guys got to try Roboflow. Joseph, the founder, is a prior guest and also listener of the show.
Will O’Brien:
Nice. Let's check it out.
Turner Novak:
I'm going to tell him after this. You guys have got to talk. Try it out. So does it work?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. It does. Yeah. We've run multiple successful missions across the US and Australia at this point. We have customers ... Just last week, we were out in the Great Barrier Reef doing restoration there. Last year, we were in Perth in Western Australia. We're going out there again soon. We've been working in Virginia. We're going back out to Florida again in a few weeks time. So yeah. We're running concurrent operations across two continents right now.
We are scaling up operations here in America with some new contracts, as well, beginning, kind of beginning work on that later this year in two new domains. So we started in this world of seagrass. Now, we're beginning to broaden out into other industries, taking the exact same core technology and serving new needs across offshore infrastructure and defense.
Turner Novak:
How's it modular? So you use the same rough kind of system and structure for seagrass restoration as you would for a deep sea cable? Actually, how does that play out?
Will O’Brien:
So we don't go deep sea yet. Our system doesn't go as deep as you would need, but we can go to like a thousand feet. But the modular, one of the kind of key differentiators of our system is it's pretty much like LEGOs. Right? I could lay out a table here with all the different gadgets that we've developed. You could put them together in any configuration you want, and you could customize it for your mission type. So if you want to run a 72-hour-long subsea cable inspection, you just take two of our longest battery tubes. You would put them together. Oh. Because it's long, that means you need an internal thruster. You put the internal thrust module in there for stability.
You put a brain on here, and then, you put our nose cone. Then, you put our rear thrusters, and it's like, "Oh. You actually want to go really fast? Okay. Then, let's swap out that regular standard rear thrust module for a faster one." You can swap that on. Oh. Let's say you want to carry a payload that is a hundred pounds. Maybe, the typical torpedo-style AUV configuration is not good for that. So you actually can just take the same pieces and configure it to be kind like two meters, two-meter-wide AUV. So the software, when you click the modules together, the software reads what configuration I'm in, where's my ... infers, then, where is center of gravity, how do I do the thrust profile for that size and shape? Yeah. So this is really good when you're at sea, because if you're at sea for multiple days on end, you have-
Turner Novak:
You might want to swap something out.
Will O’Brien:
You will have different mission profiles for different needs, and one vehicle, you can do them all. Also, it makes maintenance really nice, because you have this Ship of Theseus, where like, "Oh. Well, one of my thrusters, I've been pushing them to the limit, they're gone."
Turner Novak:
Swap it out. Put on a new one.
Will O’Brien:
Swap it out. Swap it out. So you just buy the pieces, and it's also really good from a manufacturing perspective, as well. Because then, we're ... Well, for manufacturing and also the rate at which we can upgrade systems, because we can be ... We don't need ... It's like software. You can just push and update to one part of the system, and you don't have to wait until September, when we're launching V2 of the vehicle. You could be iterating the way your brain works, that thing, way quicker than ... Mechanical innovation takes a lot longer. So your thrusters might have six-month innovation kind of cycles.
Turner Novak:
Windows or cycles. Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
But this might ... You could update this every two months or something like that.
Turner Novak:
I mean, every day, probably, I'm assuming, you're updating the models.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Exactly. Well, you can push that over the edge anyway, over the air, but so it's really nice from a keeping the system fresh and keeping innovation going. But also, just from a manufacturing point of view, you're just pushing out small little widgets, and it makes the, yeah, the manufacturing line really nice and clean, as well.
Turner Novak:
You said your ... is Jamie?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. My co-founder. One of my co-founders. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So he came across the idea for seagrass restoration. Wait. So it kind of sounds like you're doing rainforest forest management almost in the ocean, like the equivalent in the ocean in a way.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Will O’Brien:
That's part of it.
Turner Novak:
And so he came up with this idea. Were you guys all kind of working on a company together? Were you friends? How did it kind of become a company?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. So one of my co-founders, Akhil, was kind of like the central node for the team, and he lit the beacon, so to speak, for all of us to come together. He had worked in a drone delivery startup in Europe called Manna, and he worked there very closely with Jamie. They were two of the first engineers there and built out their kind of R&D team together. That's where Jamie came from, and-
Turner Novak:
Akhil worked on Hyperloop or Neuralink or something?
Will O’Brien:
So how I met Akhil was Akhil led the Irish student Hyperloop team and the team did really well.
Turner Novak:
I think it was a picture of him online-
Will O’Brien:
With Elon.
Turner Novak:
... showing something to Elon or something.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Exactly. They won an award for Elon like most innovative approach pretty much.
Turner Novak:
Oh, that's cool.
Will O’Brien:
One or two of the parameters, they were just overclocked. One or two of the parameters took a pretty batshit approach to solving the problem and beat some of these Stanford, Caltech.
Turner Novak:
And they were in high school at the time, right?
Will O’Brien:
College.
Turner Novak:
Oh, in college. Okay.
Will O’Brien:
And that's where I met Akhil and I was very impressed with his capabilities. So then he went on. He worked on self-driving cars for a bit. He did some work on software and he was working then in this drone delivery company and they were based in the same shared office space as I was when I was working at a e-scooter sharing startup. I was the first employee at Ireland's first shared scooter company, shared bike company. So we were all in the same office, me and those two guys. And then Colm, which is one of Akhil's best friends from secondary school and primary school, they were good friends and they were in a coding bootcamp together.
He was working at Red Bull on the Formula One team at the time and had just won a second championship at Red Bull, but had one eye on what he wanted to do next. So then, yeah, a group chat was made. We all started talking about it in a bit more detail. We're like, "Yeah. This is a really good idea." And yeah, came over here a few months later to raise or precede to that with Lowercarbon and a few other folks and that was two years ago now. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So how'd you make that happen? Because You were just a bunch of kids from Ireland.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. It was-
Turner Novak:
And you probably didn't know a lot of people in San Francisco.
Will O’Brien:
We didn't know anybody. So the Lowercarbon investment was interesting, because they were our first call of the fundraise and they agreed to lead it on the first call and it was our first ever call with a VC, so I'm definitely not the standard like, "I spoke to 100 people and none of them would fund it." And honestly, yeah, so fundraising, yeah, has been a nice process for us. So we had basically somehow found someone to introduce us to Lowercarbon. Then that lead went dry and then we just put a meeting in their diary and we didn’t even have an intro.
Turner Novak:
You sent a calendar invite to-
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. We didn't even have this partner's personal email. He was replying to us off leads at the lowercarboncapital.com. And we just were like, "Okay. Fuck it. Let's just put a meeting in the diary." And we're just not expecting him to turn up and then he turns up and he's just like, "I love the attitude and also, I love the approach." And yeah, I think they had seen companies being built like this in the terrestrial domain and DroneSeed and other people trying to build technology for reforestation.
And they thought that would work in the ocean as well and that was, I think, what got them excited, so we did that. We got that wrapped up pretty quickly then with them. But yeah, that was how things started and yeah, we just hired one engineer a few months later and we're five people pretty much for a year and a half at the company. We kept it really lean, did our million dollar in revenue last year off a five person team and only this year have started to scale up the team a bit. About 15 people now.
Turner Novak:
Was that intentional, or do you suck at hiring and no one would join you? What was the...
Will O’Brien:
Well, part of it was the fact that we were in Dublin and we were, since we started the business, going to move over here to San Francisco. So there's only some many people you want to hire when you know you're going to be moving out of Dublin. But it was also just a good forcing function and honestly, the one person we hired, Dylan, he's a complete tank, complete beast and probably the output of 10 engineers. Yeah. And it was good and then we moved here and heard two to three people initially, but now we're up to about 15. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
You talked about a couple ways to potentially make money in the ocean. What do you think makes the most sense for Ulysses short, medium term-ish? Obviously, there's seagrass restoration. I don't know how big that can be, but is there a second act that's coming up?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I think that domain has been very good to us. As I said, a million in our first year. On track for two to three this year off that alone, as well as other businesses we've started to get into. But I think in the long run, two of the main areas where unmanned systems are purchased right now, or at least they're leveraged for services, are the world of offshore infrastructure. So again, that's data, that's-
Turner Novak:
Oil-related, mining, natural resources.
Will O’Brien:
So yeah, it breaks up into data infrastructure, so submarine cables and the monitoring, maintenance, protection of those. Then there's energy infrastructure, which is wind, which is oil and gas mainly. And then yeah, they're, I think, two of the main ones in the offshore infrastructure space and then the world of defense and these are both two markets now where we have customers in and we're working with them on a variety of different kind of use cases there, but with the same core platform that we built for seagrass.
So it's the idea that we've built something that, again, can be adapted for nearly any situation. It's a very general purpose vehicle. And I suppose part of our approach is a lot of it as well is focused on the right capabilities, the ability to physically manipulate the environment and the ocean. It's only so much to just sense in the ocean. You need to be able to do physical manipulation to do some of these more harder, frontier tasks in the ocean that current systems are just not good at. They don't have enough degrees of freedom, they're not nimble enough. And then the people who are building general purpose robotic platforms like your humanoid folks on land, you will not be able to throw a humanoid robot in the ocean. There is still-
Turner Novak:
You don't think so?
Will O’Brien:
It would break.
Turner Novak:
Take a tanker out. Just have 10,000 humanoids jumping in-
Will O’Brien:
None of them are waterproof.
Turner Novak:
... swimming down to the bottom.
Will O’Brien:
And also, humans are evolved for land where they're not evolved, so the form factor, there's no benefit it conveys. So you need to be something that's more like a dolphin or more like a shark or whatever and that is where we want to go in the long run, is being this general purpose form factor for the ocean. Just generalizable platform that can do any task in the ocean.
Turner Novak:
Do you need arms to come out and manipulate, move things?
Will O’Brien:
Depends on the task. Depends on the task. But yeah, another factor about what we've built as well is we've built this underwater vehicle to the same spec that you might buy a vehicle for 250K to a million. We can sell our base model at 25K and make money.
Turner Novak:
Better product too, would you say?
Will O’Brien:
Way better product. And the purpose of that is people would be like, "Wow. You're leaving all this margin on the table." It's like, "No. We're actually not leaving that much margin on the table, but we're playing a volume game." We want to be churning out millions of these units every year. So there's trade-offs we make from a design perspective and that our vehicles maybe don't have a 10-year life cycle, but you don't want a 10-year life cycle when the tech is advancing this quickly. And also, if you have something modular, well, if you want to just replace something, you can replace it pretty easily. So we've just taken a very different approach with building underwater vehicles than pretty much everybody else out there.
Turner Novak:
I think it's interesting just thinking about the ocean as the... You think of space as this unexplored frontier, but I'm pretty sure this is true. I don't know if we have the percentage, but we know more about space than we know about the ocean or whatever. I'm sure you've-
Will O’Brien:
We've mapped more of the surface of the Moon and Mars than we've mapped of our subsea domain. So there is hidden archaeological treasures, there are species of fish and other subsea creatures that we do not know about yet.
Turner Novak:
Probably some hidden materials. There's probably new periodic table-
Will O’Brien:
Elements.
Turner Novak:
... discoveries down there. Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
There's new biological compounds that could lead to cures for any disease on Earth. There's minerals.
Turner Novak:
Like a mythical energy source or something.
Will O’Brien:
That would be cool. That would be cool.
Turner Novak:
There's a hidden crystal in the ocean that could-
Will O’Brien:
Kryptonite.
Turner Novak:
It's like the power of the sun, but it's in a little crystal packed in the bottom of the ocean.
Will O’Brien:
Well, that's atomic energy I suppose, so yeah, maybe there is radioactive contents in there. But one thing that we say is there is billions, if not trillions of economic value trapped in our oceans. There's the equivalent in cultural value and scientific value and we just need tools to get it out.
Turner Novak:
Is there a spiritual connection with the ocean, either humanity or for you personally?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. For sure.
Turner Novak:
There's a question from Owen at Intercom and Fin.
Will O’Brien:
Oh, yeah.
Turner Novak:
He wanted me to ask you about this.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I think for sure. I think anyone who has closed their eyes and lied back on a soft body of water with the sun on their eyes I think will say-
Turner Novak:
You feel that heat.
Will O’Brien:
... you can feel it and you're just there.
Turner Novak:
You hear the waves. You can feel the waves crashing.
Will O’Brien:
And the water you're touching just there is the same water some kid in the Indian Ocean on the other side of the world is touching. The same water that someone on the South African coast. The same ocean that an oil rig worker in the Gulf of America is touching. It's all connected.
Turner Novak:
With the first humans who walk the Earth also touched this water. Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
It's like the exact same. It goes up, it comes down, it freezes, it melts. It's all the same and yeah, I think for me, there's definitely aspects about my job that match my faith. I'm Catholic and this is, I think, a connection I started developing when we started working on the seagrass stuff is Genesis opens with Christ, or God creating Earth for us and he gives mankind dominion over the seas and the skies and the birds and the fishes and gives us dominion. But with that, He also asks us and commands to steward it. It's not ours. It's His. We're just minding it for him. And all religions have this aspect of stewardship. You don't own it. You're just carrying it on for the next generation kind of thing. It takes different forms and that is something that I've very much resonated with.
And our team, our mission statement is stewarding the ocean for an abundant future, building these vehicles that can steward and command the oceans and the high seas and bring an element of order to a very disordered world, so that we can move forward. So yeah, I think that's my command from God is to build these machines for stewardship in the ocean and stewardship in my opinion means that they're healthy, so that's like the seagrass side of the business. They're safe. That's the defense side of business, that there's no pirates or people doing funny business out at sea, no illegal fishing, that kind of thing and prosperous, that we are able to extract the value that they provide. But not in a extractive, let's take all the fish out. I mean like a stewardship aspect that we extract, but we give back as well and we're diligently stewarding it. So that would be, I think, yeah, my more spiritual connection to it. I think it's a very human substrate. I think everyone has this intuitive connection to it and it also has a relationship to my faith. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So I don't really even know if this is a good question to ask you, but I'm curious if you thought about this. So the ocean is so big. If you just go to a random spot in the Pacific in the middle of nowhere, the furthest you can get from any piece of land, are there tons of fish and sea life there and maybe it's super deep, it's super dark. Is most of the ocean not filled with life, or is it pretty dense no matter where you go, or are there areas where-
Will O’Brien:
No. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
... there's nothing really happening?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I think the more remote you go, generally, the more biodiverse and stuff it gets.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Well, there's less stressors on it. The main driver of biodiversity loss has been stressors like-
Turner Novak:
Or like the humans.
Will O’Brien:
... water pollution. Yeah. And water pollution, the main one.
Turner Novak:
So if I go like the exact midpoint between Hawaii and California, I'm assuming that's a pretty remote spot in the Pacific and I just go down, there's just tons of sharks in there and plankton.
Will O’Brien:
No. No. No. Nah.
Turner Novak:
No.
Will O’Brien:
They agglomerate in hubs. So yeah, when you have that deep, they're spread out over a lot of area. But yeah, shallower areas are typically quite biodiverse per unit area.
Turner Novak:
But as you get deeper, it gets harder for life to sustain. Is it a heat thing, a light thing?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. It's a function of energy. So the deeper you are, the less light there is. The less light there is, the less things that are at the bottom of the food chain can grow. It's all a function of energy really. Energy. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So a lot of the ocean is just big emptiness really. A decent chunk of it.
Will O’Brien:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
It's like space in that sense. Just there's just nothing for a long time.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Do you know Irish?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Can you say something?
Will O’Brien:
What would you like me to say? Thank you Ramp for-
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Say thank you, Ramp, for sponsoring.
Will O’Brien:
Go raibh maith agat, Ramp dan podcast show. Go raibh maith agat dan airgead. Thank you for the money. Thank you for the cash. Go raibh maith agat, Ramp. That was the first podcast call-out in Irish.
Turner Novak:
We literally broke a world record. Made history.
Will O’Brien:
A world-first… Ramp used in a sentence in Irish. Go raibh maith agat, Ramp.
Turner Novak:
I wonder if they have any Irish customers. Is Irish a-
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. We were using them when we were based in Ireland.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really? There you go. Okay. Well, that's good to know that they have a global presence. We were talking a little bit earlier about ways that actually currently people are making money in the ocean. What are some interesting ways... A little bit more esoteric, but actually somewhat semi-realistic ways that people might actually make money in the ocean economy?
Will O’Brien:
I think, again, you said esoteric, so I'm going to take that as free-range to get wacky. One idea that was popular in Silicon Valley in the tech community in the 2000s, which has fallen off a little bit, was the idea of seasteading, that you could build communities at sea.
Turner Novak:
Like a city.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. And be outside the jurisdiction of regulations pretty much.
Turner Novak:
Biology would probably love this. Floating nation states in the ocean.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. So I think when you have better support infrastructure, you can do more of that, so I still think that one has legs and I think I could feasibly see that being done in the future.
Turner Novak:
What's the cost? Is it actually cheaper or more expensive to probably do this?
Will O’Brien:
Oh, more expensive to do build at sea.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So why would you it then?
Will O’Brien:
Because the upside is greater. If you can do R&D and sell real... Would you not, rather to have lab space in an area where you don't have to report to the FDA? You know what I mean? Where you don't have to follow regulations-
Turner Novak:
Oh, interesting.
Will O’Brien:
... so you're selling office space. It's commercial real estate.
Turner Novak:
So it's like crypto where it's like you don't have to quite follow the law if you do crypto.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like crypto.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Interesting.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Yeah. I know there's a whole institute dedicated to the stuff and so I think I'm a personal fan of that. And another one is everyone who was hating on Oceangate and every-
Turner Novak:
What was Oceangate?
Will O’Brien:
Remember the guy who went down to the Titanic and the thing exploded?
Turner Novak:
Oh, the billionaire.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Multiple billionaires, I think.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. That dude was retarded. I hope I can say that. He was retarded. I actually know people who personally knew him and were telling him, "The way you've done the carbon fiber layer up here, there's a fucking hole in it." There's basically a air bubble in it. That is going to pop. That is not going to go down well. And people were attacking. Yeah. So that guy himself, but I think more broadly, this case, this business of doing recreation recreational industries in the ocean, going subsea, I would love to see a submarine like a adventure.
Turner Novak:
Like a tour business. Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
Where you're just going from continent to continent with a glass topped submarine or something like that and you're just going subsea for a few weeks.
Turner Novak:
There's sharks above you, manatees, coral reefs.
Will O’Brien:
Yes. All that shit. Or a subsea hotel. These exist in some countries. You can't go to hotels on the ocean, so I think that stuff-
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Dubai, didn't they make just a artificial, half the city is in the ocean or something?
Will O’Brien:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.
Turner Novak:
This is a big Dubai episode.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I think, yeah, deep sea mining is going to be very big.
Turner Novak:
Deep sea mining.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. That's going to be big. I think it just needs to be done right. I think the obvious concerns people have are we know so little about this subsea system that if you do extraction there, you don't even know what you're taking away and that could have ramifications on, yeah, basically the rest of the ocean ecosystem. We don't know how far it ripples up.
Turner Novak:
So you extract a bunch of iron ore.
Will O’Brien:
So it's not iron ore, but it's basically you have these metallic nodules with rare-earth minerals in them, formed typically in this one area called the Clarion-Clipperton zone in the Pacific Ocean and there's companies now sniffing around like the metals companies, others that want to go in and extract that and take out these nodules and bring them back to the surface and extract the minerals from them.
Turner Novak:
So it's like hunks of rare-earth minerals.
Will O’Brien:
They're like that size. The size of a fist and bigger and they're created around these vents where you have the mineral coming out of the ocean and then high temperatures and then they cool on the outside and you have these reactions. You've got these nodules. So the concern of people in ocean conservation, which is extremely valid and I agree with them on in cases like you need to understand what's down there first. There's two ways they're looking at doing extraction and I think if they do pick and place rather than this vacuum system that they were initially looking at, which is we're just going to vacuum up, but that could take up anything else at the bottom and it would just kill it. The other option is using the robotic implement. Just pick it up. Put it in the-
Turner Novak:
Literally pick up the stone.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. And pick it up and put it in your basket and go up. And honestly, even just from a engineering perspective, it's much more efficient to do the latter, because think about if you're going 6,000, 8,000 feet up, think about the amount of energy it's going to take to move something 6,000... Against gravity with the down pressure of water on it. It makes a lot more sense to move something physical, something solid and you don't have this 80% of waste to transport and you're not causing this biodiversity damage. And I think you can do that safely when you start quantifying water's on the outside of the nodule and what, because there is good research to show that actually on the outside of these modules, you have some fungi population and bacteria populations that could be the basis for the food chain of other things going around there. So I think once we've quantified that and we understand what's going on there, then we can say maybe, yeah, per annum, you can take 1% of the modules in an area or something like that, or 2%. Whatever-
Turner Novak:
Yeah. If you take too much, the fungi die to the extent-
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Whatever.
Turner Novak:
.. the rest of the food chain collapses around it and yeah. Okay.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. So I think if we can quantify it, I think it's much better to be taking it from there than to be making Central African children go into these mines and take it there for the sake of well-being point of view.
Turner Novak:
And that's what's happening right now?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. The supply chain of rare metals is deplorable, to be honest. Yeah. It's pretty bleak, so yeah. So I think it's worth exploration. There's, again, billions of dollars to be made there. There's other more esoteric things that I find interesting like ocean iron fertilization. So there's this banger quote from this crazy Canadian billionaire called Russ George and he says-
Turner Novak:
Oh, I've seen this quote. Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. He's like, "Yeah. Give me a tanker of iron filings and I'll give you an ice age." Basically, the idea is that there's many parts of the ocean which are iron deficient. If you add iron there, you stimulate phytoplankton growth. Plankton, when it grows, draws in carbon from the atmosphere. If you can draw in enough carbon, you could actually change the weather on Earth and it's a geoengineering technique pretty much. Now, you don't want to actually change weather patterns, but you do want to probably draw excess carbon out of the atmosphere, so that the economy can still continue to grow. But also, in a very interesting aspect of this, he did an experiment off the coast of Vancouver one year and they used an area owned by Native Americans, did an experiment there, put some iron filings in. That year, that part of Canada had its greatest salmon take ever.
And what this and other aspects of intervention in the ocean coupled with restoration, it's an idea I'm very interested in, which is closed loop, full stack ocean stewardship, where if I was sitting down with someone in Indonesia like a minister who was struggling with fish populations or something like that, I could send out a legion of Ulysses surface vehicles to go and patrol for illegal fishing and keep the Chinese out of their waters and then send underwater vehicles to do seagrass restoration with maybe some other intervention techniques that are adding minerals into fishing areas. But this general idea that we're taking the stewardship mandate really seriously and yet building businesses on it. Not too dissimilar to how Augustus wants to create rain. It's like this idea that you can do these things in a safe way, so you should probably be doing it. So they're, yeah, some of my-
Turner Novak:
What about treasure hunting? Isn't there tens of billions of dollars of treasure that's just down there?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. There's one wreck off the coast of Columbia. It's like billions of gold and emerald. Yeah. Again, another use case Ulysses is uniquely tailored to solve, because we don't have the cost, we can increase the area of the search, because we're an order of magnitude cheaper, because you don't need any humans. You could send all of our service vehicles from port. No humans would need to go out. You could do weeks on end of continual mapping, quantification, doubling down on areas of interest, going down, maybe using jets to blow sand off areas, because a lot of this stuff is buried, so you need a sub-bottom profiler to see what's down there first and then you want to go down and dig, so yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Interesting. So there's an interesting question of do you guys have to do anything else or do you just have to figure-
Will O’Brien:
No. Yeah. There's a lot. So basically, the rightful owners of that treasure is the flag state. So I think the one in Columbia was a Spanish ship that went off the coast, so Spain has claimed to that.
Turner Novak:
So if somebody finds it-
Will O’Brien:
You have to say it to Spain. You have to get permission from them, first of all, to recover it. They'll want probably most of the proceeds, but they might give you a sliver, which could be a billion. So it's a negotiation thing. There's no set process for it. But yeah, honestly, I'm more interested probably in the archeological finds as well.
Turner Novak:
Just interesting learnings of history that come from this or-
Will O’Brien:
Find Atlantis.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Is Atlantis real?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
You think it's real?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Why do you say that?
Will O’Brien:
Are you familiar with Graham Hancock and this idea of lost civilizations? And there was potentially advanced civilizations before modern time. We commonly believe that modern civilizations began around 11,500 years ago, but you have two things. You have a lot of structures that are older than that like you go to Easter Island and these huge heads. You look at some of these megalithic structures in other parts of the world like the pyramids that are indicative of knowledge that just people didn't have at that time. Just really complex. Again, we still don't really have convincing answers on how they built the pyramids and these sort of things.
Turner Novak:
Aliens I think is what they say. UFOs. The most convincing one I've seen is the water levels where you're using-
Will O’Brien:
And push it in and-
Turner Novak:
... water pressure to push things up. I don't know. I don't know how real that all is.
Will O’Brien:
That's one way, but the question that doesn't answer still is some of that granite that they used there came from 150, 200 miles away. You think they dug a canal that long, 200 miles?
Turner Novak:
I think that's what I've seen in the YouTube videos, is they floated down the river, they float down the Nile. The Nile changed levels over time… it's hard to know. You're right. It could have been made 100,000 years ago.
Will O’Brien:
And then around the time, you have these cataclysm stories, which are the foundational myths for a lot of-
Turner Novak:
Different religions.
Will O’Brien:
... different cultures and so Noah is the standard flood myth in the West. But the Incas, the Aztecs, or the Mesopotamians, others have these foundational stories originated in a flood. So there's one theory, the Younger Dryas impact theory, which states that there was a comet that crashed on Earth that led to massive tsunamis and floods and near all these major population centers and the best description we have of Atlantis is Plato, he's the first person we have that describes Atlantis and he says that he spoke to someone in Egypt and he says the Egyptians claim to be the inheritors of Atlantis and that there was someone in Egypt who told him about Atlantis when he went there.
And Atlantis is three concentric rings or with water in each ring and it was a seafaring civilization and the streets were paved with gold and they had in the middle of this three concentric rings with the center of Atlantis. Then there's this location that matches these descriptions in Mauritania and Africa. So Mauritania is in the Sahara Desert. What people don't know about Mauritania around 11,500 years ago before is that Sahara Desert actually used to be a lush rainforest. So it actually used to be a place where you conceivably have a civilization. Additionally, you have this structure in Mauritania has three concentric rings in it and salt deposits in each ring. And then you have, if you look from the west coast of Africa to Mauritania, you have these salt striations indicative of a huge flood all the way from there to Mauritania. Additionally, streets paved with gold. Richest person ever is a Mauritanian king.
Turner Novak:
Was it Timbuktu?
Will O’Brien:
Mura Masa.
Turner Novak:
Musa Musa.
Will O’Brien:
Musa Musa, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Mura Masa is a different king.
Will O’Brien:
A DJ.
Turner Novak:
A different rich guy.
Will O’Brien:
It's a DJ, I think. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Oh, I was thinking Masa like the Softbank guy-
Will O’Brien:
Oh yeah, that guy too. Yeah. Also GOATed. But yeah, this guy had more money than since he had gold, that's Mauritania.
Turner Novak:
So they're saying his wealth might have come from raiding Atlantis.
Will O’Brien:
Well, no, but there's huge gold deposits in Mauritania, so the streets paved with gold because you conceivably be there, literally paved with gold. Also, you have the Atlas Mountains, Atlantis, etymologically similar to the Atlas Mountains, which are just north of Mauritania. So there's one theory that seafaring civilization existed before was based there. That's where Egypt came from, potentially also the Celts came from this as well, the Irish Celts came from Atlantis. Yeah, so I would like to if I had, and then when you go out into the Western Atlantic and map a lot of that and see if we have good wrecks from that time.
Turner Novak:
So you think so? I was just looking at where Mauritania is.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
It's basically you think of the shape of Africa, it's in the middle of the top.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, the west,
Turner Novak:
The west coast.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, if you want to look it up, it's the Richat structure. R-I-C-H-A-T structure. And yeah, there's this guy, Jimmy Corsetti, who covers this quite well on YouTube.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. So the actual Atlantis, it is where the desert currently is or it is in the water?
Will O’Brien:
I think it was a society that stretched beyond that. But yeah, I think the center was there.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Will O’Brien:
We could do digs there. There hasn't been much archeology done on that site. So if there is a billionaire that would like to do that, we'd go and light our Atlantis, the Richat structure and see what's going on there.
Turner Novak:
If there's any billionaires listening, there actually are a couple I think that I know of, so maybe. If you're one of them.
Will O’Brien:
I know a guy.
Turner Novak:
If you're listening…
Will O’Brien:
I have a friend doing LIDAR drones for, or LIDARing archaeological sites right now in Mehran based in San Francisco. He's doing a lot of this in South and Central America. It's using LIDAR to find archaeological sites we didn't know about before.
Turner Novak:
They're hidden in the forest or something?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Kind of buried a little bit probably too.
Will O’Brien:
Like El Dorado.
Turner Novak:
You think El Dorado is real?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
What do you think El Dorado is?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, I think it's hidden somewhere in the Amazon. I don't know specifics about where it is, but ...
Turner Novak:
So it's just, it's a city that's made of gold?
Will O’Brien:
Mm-hmm.
Turner Novak:
Who probably ran it? The Aztecs? We don't know.
Will O’Brien:
Don't know.
Turner Novak:
Did the Spanish build it or did the-
Will O’Brien:
I think it was before that.
Turner Novak:
You think it was before that? Okay.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I think it was before that, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. I know you're a pretty big believer in conspiracy theories. What is your favorite conspiracy theory?
Will O’Brien:
One I love right now is, well, aliens are my favorite by far.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Just the aliens exist.
Will O’Brien:
But there's so many places you can go with that. Okay. How do aliens interface religion? Are there mummies in Nazca of aliens, tridactyl beings? Is the US government doing reverse engineering programs on craft? Are they in the ocean? Are they unidentified, are they subterranean? Are they future humans? Sometimes I call conspiracy theories like astrology for men. It's like this, it's this fun thing to think about. Not really sure how much of it's real, but it's fun to think about because the world is very uncertain and it gives us some element of certainty. But yeah, the alien one is by far the one I think about probably most frequently.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Do you think we're the most advanced life form in the universe?
Will O’Brien:
Define advanced. But on a technological basis?
Turner Novak:
Well, I think there's people out there that are just so advanced they're just monitoring us and they're making sure we're staying in line.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, yeah. I definitely don't think we're alone. I think there's probably some things that we seem like better than, that others might be interested in humans. But yeah, I think it's very likely that there's very advanced other life forms out there.
Turner Novak:
Have you ever heard the Titanic conspiracy theory? This is my favorite one.
Will O’Brien:
For insurance or something?
Turner Novak:
There's that. Well, there's two.
Will O’Brien:
The people on it were made- Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So my favorite conspiracy theory is that they sunk the Titanic to create the Fed. Have you heard this one? Okay, so there's one element of it is the guy who owns this other ship, it was called the Cornucopia, I believe was the name of it, it got some damage and he couldn't get insurance reimbursement. So he actually swapped it with the Titanic and then sunk this other ship so that he could get it paid out in his Titanic insurance policy.
Will O’Brien:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
And that's the one that's a little bit more well known. The other one that I just think is, it's so ridiculous but it actually could be true, I don't know. It's that when they wanted to create the Fed, there was basically three people who opposed it. It was basically the seven wealthiest men in the world that wanted to create this system and there was three people that opposed it and they were all on the Titanic when it sunk. And it was JP Morgan and this guy, I think it was Jacob-
Will O’Brien:
JP Morgan died on the Titanic?
Turner Novak:
He didn't. He was supposed to be on it, but it was like the day of the journey, I forget what happens. He didn't show up. And these other three guys, three of the wealthiest people in the world were on the ship, it sank, they died, and those were the people who opposed the creation of the Fed. And there was then no resistance to create this thing and control the world, control the world's money supply, basically.
Will O’Brien:
Interesting.
Turner Novak:
And so it's one of those experiences where you're like, it could be real, but there's no way to actually prove really at the end of the day that-
Will O’Brien:
Well, you know who runs the Federal Reserve?
Turner Novak:
The lizard people? The aliens?
Will O’Brien:
The Irish.
Turner Novak:
Oh, the Irish.
Will O’Brien:
Lucky Charms and the gold at the end of the rainbow, that's hidden messaging.
Turner Novak:
That's Fort Knox?
Will O’Brien:
Subliminal messaging. Leprechauns. They're Irish people. They're in Fort Knox. There's my favorite one, if you look up 4Chan Hibernian Conspiracy, it's this theory that the Irish run the world. And there's a whole section dedicated to the Irish control of the Federal Reserve. All these people have Irish ancestry running famous banks and being a part of the Federal Reserve's original board. So yeah, I mean, you know the last stop for the Titanic was in Ireland.
Turner Novak:
The last stop before it left for the US?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, Cobh, near where I grew up.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Will O’Brien:
The last stop, so maybe that was a part of it. A few Irish group guys got on board there and-
Turner Novak:
Or got off. The ones who wanted to create the Fed. They got off, they tricked everyone. Like, "Hey, guys, let's do this. Oh, by the way."
Will O’Brien:
One of them stayed on board and drove into the iceberg, man.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's true. They had one guy, it was like kamikaze Irish Fed creator. He was like, "You know what? My life's mission is to make sure this gets created."
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, he was a Leprechaun.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You know this other pretty interesting just general theory, you think that people who believe in conspiracy theories are better founders or could be good founders?
Will O’Brien:
I think so. I like it in the same way that I like a Sudoku or a New York Times Mini or Connections or something like that, because there's a lot of BS in this world, in this conspiracy world, there's a lot of crazies schizo. And you get really good at going to online forums or Reddit threads or 4Chan and parsing who here is autistic schizo genius that has seen through the trees? And who here is just the other side of the bell curve?
Turner Novak:
People can be like COVID, they can sort through 10 different crazy ideas and be like, "COVID lab leak."
Will O’Brien:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
That's rhe one that's actually real or something like that.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. People who can really just quickly, I think it helps you. One thing I go back to, because I didn't, you mentioned COVID there, because I didn't immediately see COVID coming. I didn't see it was going to have the effects that it did and I was pretty slow to be like, "Ah, pay concern to it." And then also I was pretty slow to realize how much of the measures around it were BS. That really made me realize I need to develop a better way of seeing the wood from the trees. Seeing when something's going to happen, like there's this weird thing going on in Wuhan. And I think some of the best people in technology can do this. Bology (phonetic) was on it like a rocket at the start of COVID January tweeting being like, "This is going to happen." Andreesen had a sign-up two weeks before everyone lost their shit and they were calling it on it.
Turner Novak:
People were making fun of them, the no handshakes, please, thing.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, this is how the skill is portable and transferable. And I think it's a skill, it's a trainable skill. So I think lurking in these worlds spending time, one of the ones I'm looking into recently is these Nazca mummies, these mummified aliens that they're claiming they're coming out of somewhere like Nazca.
Turner Novak:
Where's Nazca? Is that Latin America?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, Peru. Have you ever heard of the Nazca Lines as well?
Turner Novak:
I don't think so.
Will O’Brien:
These are formations in the ground made but white rocks that you can really only see from space and one of them looks like an astronaut, one of them looks like a bird, and they all have three fingers and these beings now have three fingers.
Turner Novak:
They think aliens made those things.
Will O’Brien:
They are aliens.
Turner Novak:
They are aliens?
Will O’Brien:
Oh, well they think that the lines are made by the people there who worshiped the aliens or had some relationship with them. Like it's art, but the beings then are ... So there's a really good video on this. Jesse Michaels my favorite YouTuber, really good guy, actually formerly investor as well. He was an investor at Thiel Capital and he now runs a podcast. He does investing as well, but he also does, he runs this podcast talking about a lot of alien-type topics.
But yeah, I think this ability to parse what's true and what's not, being able to think about things that are other people think are controversial or weird or taboo and not be ashamed about, I think they're transferable skills.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. And talking about skills, one of the things that's I think really hard for anyone doing anything related to government sales, like interacting, convincing government to make a purchase from you. I know you've sold a couple different government contracts. How do you approach that? If I'm somebody who I'm thinking about starting a company, maybe I did start a company, I'm like, man, "How do I get the state of New Zealand to purchase my commercial product?" How do you approach those situations?
Will O’Brien:
It depends. There's one playbook for doing things in a military domain, there's another one for local government, another one for national, another one for state agencies. These are all agency-type playbooks I've run before. So I think that's the first thing I think is figuring out which playbook to run.
I think the things that are consistent are making sure you are speaking with the right people. Again, there's a lot of these things that are just very similar to regular playbooks. A lot of people just don't have buying power in the government. There's actually in the US military it's warranted officers. Not everyone can do it. A common playbook is this, is that you find the end user, you get them passionate about it. You find then the person who has the buying authority, you get them to care about it, that you get them, your guy, your champion to speak with them and get them to want to give them budget to do their job. And then the third leg of it is going to the political folks at government level, like national level, and getting them to care about it, because they're the ones who send the money and they're the ones who set the priorities.
So you have to push on a three different, there's three prongs to it. I think that ports across a lot of these fronts. So you have a bit of lobbying, you have a bit of low-level building up your champion, and then you have your other person, their boss basically that can control the money supply and you have to play all these three off of each other. But it starts again fundamentally with getting the end user, the person who is responsible for.
If you're selling an autonomous steamroller, the person who has their KPI is that. Then it's the person who owns that overarching marine biodiversity strategy or marine conservation strategy. And then it's like the politician who needs to get votes from the local fisherman and getting compassion about him, getting him to be like, "Yeah, you need to add a two-million dollars line item next year for sea grass."
Turner Novak:
You're going to get 3,000 votes if you support this thing.
Will O’Brien:
And so you have to run three different kind of things. Instead of just being like, "This is my end user, my buyer, and they just have to convince the CFO," there's more parts of it. And also it's a lot of it is not monetary. You're not convincing someone about ROI. You're thinking about what is the published strategy that the manager needs to meet, and/or requirements or whatever and convince them about that, votes and then just getting them excited about your product.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So it's probably, there's some parallels to selling a traditional software deal. You're a champion, owning the budget, perception around it, but it's maybe more from a-
Will O’Brien:
It's a three-sided deal, which is the unique part about it typically, is that it's ... And I found actually in my career, that's what I've become very good at is multi-sided deals.
Turner Novak:
What do you think when you say you've gotten good at it? Is there something that a lot of people get wrong on that? Do they forget about one of it?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, the people think you just have to sell to one person. And actually you can make deals move faster when you have multiple people on board because you can, let's say there's one person with the money and there's one person without the money but they have credibility. And then you're the person with the product, but you don't have any money, you don't have any credibility. That's the start-up. So you partner with the person with credibility and you say, "Hey, you want my product? You don't have money, I don't have money. But I have the product, you have credibility. Let's go talk to the person over here who has money." And then you have then product and credibility.
Turner Novak:
Credibility.
Will O’Brien:
You go there, you get the money. Three people are happy. That would not happen if I went to that person by myself, it would not happen to go into them. But because I was the person who brought everyone together, we got a deal done, win, win, win round the table and everyone gets what they want. They get credibility, you get money, they get a product. And these complex multi-sided deals, sometimes you have an independent arbitrator in there as well, I think that's where I've developed a bit of a niche. Most deals have typically been something like that.
Turner Novak:
And what's the go-to-market look like for that? Do you have to host a lot of events? Do you have to do a lot of podcasts? Do you have to write a lot? Do you have to make TikTok videos? How do you make that work?
Will O’Brien:
For us, it's been a lot of outbound. We're trying to, because the worlds we work in are not, they're pretty small. It's being conferences where all these people in the world who care about this problem are there and outbound and partners. Partners that can do intros to us, warm intros to us. And they have been the ones that have been most effective because they're typically small. So with a few good, with a small advisory board, you can probably access all the people you need to get.
Turner Novak:
I think one time you wrote a letter to an Irish billionaire. This is a while back. What's the story?
Will O’Brien:
That's how I got my first job. Well, first real job. I was always working in college in high school or secondary school. But yeah, there's this Irish billionaire called Dennis O'Brien, no relation unfortunately, but he got his first job by sending a letter to the founder of Ryanair, asking him to be his personal assistant. And I did the same. And I didn't get the personal assistant job, but he rang me up a few days later, I wrote him a letter because I was like, "That will strike a chord with him." And in fact, the strategy is very good writing letters to people. We got-
Turner Novak:
This is a literal physical-
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I wrote a letter.
Turner Novak:
... literally print out, or you write handwritten?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, and just send it. And in fact, we hired a brilliant intern at the start of this year who did this to me after hearing I did this on a podcast. He's very quickly was moved up to full-timer and is very, very good member of the team. His name's Jack. So this is a good strategy if you want to stand out in a world of slop.
Turner Novak:
AI slop.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
AI-generated emails with the three follow-ups.
Will O’Brien:
You need to be letter maxing.
Turner Novak:
Letter maxing.
Will O’Brien:
You need be with a quill and a wax seal.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, wax. You need to buy one of those. Actually I think we have one of those.
Will O’Brien:
The blood of an enemy.
Turner Novak:
I think our family has a-
Will O’Brien:
A family sealed?
Turner Novak:
A wax seal. My wife got it as kind of just a fun thing, but we have actually wax sealed things before.
Will O’Brien:
So I sent this letter to this guy. He rings me up on the phone a few days later, he's like, "You're not becoming my personal assistant, you're 19 and you need to finish college. And also I travel a lot and I don't need a 19-year old right now."
Turner Novak:
It's like, "You're going to probably be a big nuisance to have around."
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But he was nice enough to give me a job in his company. He has a large telecoms business across Asia and the Caribbean and he gave me a job in the Caribbean and I worked there in the Cayman Islands for a summer doing data science, business analytics for his company. And it was funny, first week there, they all thought I was his son because I had the same surname and I was Irish and I was given a job.
Turner Novak:
Just a nepo hire?
Will O’Brien:
Nepo hire. And the Friday they were like, "They're so nice to me." I was like, "They're all being so polite. I love Jamaica, I love Caymanian people." And they were like, "What's it like how Dennis is your dad?" And I was just like, "He's not my dad." They're like, "What?"
Turner Novak:
Yeah, Fuck you.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. That was the end and they went back to island time.
Turner Novak:
That's awesome. You also had another interesting, you've lived with monks in Nepal for a while? What's the story there?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, so my college had a year where you can do an internship and I worked at KPMG in consulting.
Turner Novak:
Oh, nice. That's a very, you know-
Will O’Brien:
No.
Turner Novak:
... well meaning, set yourself up to have a job. I'm sure your college counselor was happy you had that role.
Will O’Brien:
They were probably happy. I was like, "This is the most depressing and bleak environment I've ever been in my entire life." I think the life unlived is the biggest tragedy, and I was like ...
Turner Novak:
The life unlived.
Will O’Brien:
Unlived.
Turner Novak:
The missed opportunities.
Will O’Brien:
Not going whole hog, not going for it. I think that is infinitely more sad and tragic than at least trying something and failing. And you know what? It's fine for most people. You can do that. You can get your knife and they will be happy doing that. I will not. I was very unhappy and I was just so shocked that anyone could just have such a banal life and work on pointless work. Just complete shite.
Turner Novak:
And you could probably not exist. You could never show up for work and nothing would be affected.
Will O’Brien:
Bullshit jobs. Just fake laptop jobs that hopefully AI will automate and these people will find some meaningful work. But for me it was soul crushing, spirit crushing, and I was having a crisis. I was like, "I cannot be one of these people. They're just like the definition of NPC." And I might sound bad. These people are some good friends.
Turner Novak:
They're smart people, yeah.
Will O’Brien:
It works them. I just knew I couldn't do it. I could not do that. So I was like, "What is the most crazy thing I could do?" I was kind of interested in Eastern philosophy at the time and reading a lot about it. I was like, "Okay, let's just go to the middle of nowhere and just switch off for a summer."And it was like, "Where's the most ... Live with Buddhist monks in rural Nepal." I heard someone had done that before. So I taught myself how to teach English and applied for a job. Sent a few monasteries emails asking could I work there for a summer in return for bed and board and did that.
I learned a lot from them. I had some good takeaways from it. But also realized that Buddhism wasn't for me and that was, I think actually funnily, one of my first steps on coming back. I was raised Catholic but coming back to it then, because I went to the bottom of the glass and I just realized there's a few things there they just couldn't answer. But yeah, it was a cool time in Nepal. It's a beautiful country. I went to visit a lot of other Asia after that trip. And yeah, highly recommend anyone visit Nepal.
Turner Novak:
So what's it like living in a monastery like that for somebody who doesn't know? I've seen some TV shows, like White Lotus, she tries to live in a monastery.
Will O’Brien:
Oh, really?
Turner Novak:
I don't if you've seen that?
Will O’Brien:
I haven't seen White Lotus, no.
Turner Novak:
Season three, I think? The most recent one.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, I haven't watched any White Lotus.
Turner Novak:
Oh, man, great show. You've got to watch it.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, I have such a ... I mean, this is not good, but I do have an apprehension to watch something when everyone's talking about it. It just feels like I'm like, sometimes it's-
Turner Novak:
You're becoming a normie.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I feel a compulsion to avoid those things, which is not a good instinct. I think there's many things that are vanilla which are great, like some of these TV shows. But I've never seen Game of Thrones or I've never watched Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, or actually there's a lot of normal stuff that I have never been able to bring myself to watch.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like when it comes to pop culture or shared experiences with other humans, you want to do those more well-known things because imagine ... Have you watched Star Wars?
Will O’Brien:
No.
Turner Novak:
You haven't seen Star Wars?
Will O’Brien:
Or Lord of the Rings. Any Lord of the Rings.
Turner Novak:
So you're-
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Even when I was a kid, everyone was talking about it and I was just like, "Nah, I'm not watching it."
Turner Novak:
Do you know who Luke Skywalker is?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I know who he is? Yeah. "Luke, you're not my father." Whatever. Something like that.
Turner Novak:
"Luke, you're not my father."
Will O’Brien:
Or, "Luke, I am your father."
Turner Novak:
You don't even know the line.
Will O’Brien:
It’s about something like daddy issues.
Turner Novak:
This is an iconic, global film. Okay, so this is what I was going to say, it's like-
Will O’Brien:
I love Dune, though. This is thing, I love Dune. I love Dune and I watched Dune Prophecy the season. I thought it was great.
Turner Novak:
All right. That's fair.
Will O’Brien:
But I don't know, I don't know, it is weird. There's only a few of the ... I watched the old ones, I've watched Sopranos. I love Sopranos. I watched the older stuff after, they've kind of aged out a little bit. But I think maybe I was really just viciously this scared by my experience as an intern in strategy consulting in KPMG. I think I was-
Turner Novak:
Do not become an NPC.
Will O’Brien:
I was like, yeah, I was turbo normied. Now I have allergic reaction or something like that maybe. I don't know.
Turner Novak:
I mean, that is fair. I don't actually watch a lot of Netflix or movies or TV.
Will O’Brien:
I think it's good. I don't think it's bad, I just-
Turner Novak:
But I think it's like if there's something where I feel like it would be good to experience the shared social or cultural context, I try to-
Will O’Brien:
That's the nice thing about Twitter. I'm like I, while I may not be watching whatever these TV series, I consume-
Turner Novak:
Love Island?
Will O’Brien:
No. I consume a very healthy amount of Instagram Reels.
Turner Novak:
So you're like Reelified, brain rot, Gen Z brain rot, you know all that stuff?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true.
Turner Novak:
Wait, okay, so you basically ... Wait, what was I ... Oh, I asked you ...
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. What's it like when you lived there?
Turner Novak:
So what's it like actually living in a monastery?
Will O’Brien:
It's very regimented. Sometimes they'll just randomly go on silent a retreat for a few days as well, or just not eat. So I just would do that. You would go three days, no talking. Because something would've happened or there was some holiday they were celebrating. You'd just wake up one morning and everyone, there's no classes and nobody gave you the heads up. And I did three day no talking and no food, so things like that would happen.
Honestly, though, the kids there that I was teaching English to, they were ages of eight to 13.
Turner Novak:
These are local children that want to learn English.
Will O’Brien:
They're local monks, trainee monks.
Turner Novak:
They're training to become monks? Wow.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. So their families will put them in there at a young age. A lot of them from poor families, this is how you can get your child a good education is you put them in to become a monk. Some of them actually don't want to become monks. They're there, but they secretly have a girlfriend outside the school and stuff.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's pretending to. I mean, that's actually common in every culture where it's you kind of do the thing that your parents-
Will O’Brien:
Especially if you're a kid and some people just know they're not made for the faith. I don't necessarily agree with this idea of putting them in there at a young age. That doesn't happen in Christianity. You don't get put on that path. It's a self-directed path. But the kids are just normal kids. They got their phones on a Sunday and they just wanted to play PUBG, like a free Fortnite equivalent. And they all love watching videos about Neymar and these other footballers, like Messi and stuff. And we just played a ton of soccer with them. And the older ones, I had conversations with them about philosophy and their faith and stuff like that.
Turner Novak:
And you were teaching them English?
Will O’Brien:
I was only teaching the younger eight to 12s. But there was also 13 to 18 as well there. 13 to 16. At 16 then you go into a university equivalent and you can pick a few different paths. You can become a craftsman or an artist, you can become an administrator, you can become a teacher, you can become an academic, or you can pick a life of hermit and you can go off into the mountains and just never speak to anyone again.
Turner Novak:
Wow. And so your biggest takeaway was understanding your desires and what you really wanted in life?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I was doing hiking ever SpaceCamp and I was thinking, reflecting a lot on my experiences there and I realized what was important in my life, I think. One of the things the Buddhists talk a lot about is you shouldn't desire for anything because when you desire for something, you create a contract of suffering until you have that thing. I'm like, "I'm thirsty, I'm not going to be happy until I have a drink." And then you're momentarily happy, but then you're thinking about the next drink. So they believe that you should actually not desire for anything. When you desire for nothing, that's one of the preconditions to achieve Nirvana or enlightenment.
Turner Novak:
You have no desires and you are always-
Will O’Brien:
No desires.
Turner Novak:
... always happy because you don't need anything.
Will O’Brien:
You just are.
Turner Novak:
You're just empty.
Will O’Brien:
You just exist. But that's the flip side of it then, right? He's like, "Are you just empty then?" But then they'd be like, "Well, no, there's life force running for you. You're not empty. You are the world." Anyway, I struggled to vibe with that and I was thinking about that particularly one day I was literally sitting down on a rock and I had this download experience where I was sitting down and I was like, I get it now though. Okay, you shouldn't want for many things. You shouldn't just want for nothing. I think there's a minimum viable number of desires, the minimum set of desires you should want for. I was like, "What is that?" My health, my wealth, my family, my friends, my craft. I was like, okay, if I have those things down, my good relationships with family and friends, I've got health, I've got some money and I've got a craft that I do every day that I give to the world, then I think I'm happy.
So if one of those is not going well, then that's enough to be annoyed and I should be annoyed about that. And this also is very visceral image of a rose bush came into my head and when you trim at that moment, there's only two times in my life where I've had an experience like this where I literally feel like something was pushed into my brain. But yeah, like, rose bushes, you just trim them back and you let the energy go back towards the flower and if you don't do that to a rose bush, basically they grow thorns and the flower doesn't fully develop. It doesn't get big, but if you do trim back, you do get something. So yeah, I came away with, that's one of my moral principles or frameworks that I use now going through life and I found it very helpful. And I developed it when I was over there.
Turner Novak:
I'm saying, I didn't know roses grew like that.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, you have to always be trimming them back. They require a lot of maintenance and care.
Turner Novak:
It’s usually a bush?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. There's a lot of different species of, or variants of roses, but yeah, you want to be cutting them back and just letting the energy redirect to one kind of the flowers.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Oh. So I know you have a note on your phone where you just dip a lot of stuff about finance, technology, what's kind of the contents of the note?
Will O’Brien:
I studied finance in ... I studied a math and economics degree and I studied a lot about quant finance and statistics and I developed a real appreciation for some of these ... For people like Jim Simmons who founded Renaissance Technologies and kind of pioneered algorithmic trading and then people like Citadel and other pioneers of more quant finance and high frequency trading and Dalio as well. And you go before that as well, just general pioneers in finance like Milken inventing the junk bond. Wow. I find that such a beautiful an instrument.
Turner Novak:
We basically have cable TV because of that guy and this podcast is an evolution of the talk show, which is because of cable TV.
Will O’Brien:
America is built on cable television.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Like the NFL sports like the backbone of America-
Will O’Brien:
American cultural dominance is built on the junk bonds.
Turner Novak:
It's built on the junk bond. Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
So I think you have Kravis and American economic dominance in the '80s through '90s built on the LBO, right? Just not built necessarily, but huge deals-
Turner Novak:
Consolidated on the LBO.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. So the degree to which financial innovation is a precursor for economic well-being dominance in-
Turner Novak:
And the mortgage. The mortgage is like the foundation of every American's retirement package package.
Will O’Brien:
The Roth IRA. My second favorite IRA. But-
Turner Novak:
If you don't know the Irish, the Irish-
Will O’Brien:
I just look up Irish Republican Army or the 401k, a good example of this. 401k is called the 401k because it's paragraph 401 item K snuck into some bill in the US in the '70s and it basically created the vessel for the one of the greatest developments of a middle class that humanity has ever seen. The craze in the American middle class is like an economic development miracle.
Turner Novak:
Social security, another one I would genuinely think that's a pyramid scheme, current social security model, but another enabled a class of retirees to exist and actually retire. People can retire now because of this stuff. Retirement wasn't a thing, you just work until you died.
Will O’Brien:
So financial innovation as you've evidenced from all these examples is incredible. It's beautiful, it's elegant. However, you have this group of people that coalesce around technology and finance. Some people call them VCs and some people have other words for them and they claim to be innovators of some description. And okay, what? The peak of their innovation is the YC safe with a 20% discount. That's the frontier. The people funding tomorrow the best they can come up with is, sorry, I'm getting excited, is like a YC safe with a 20% disc ... Wow. Hats off to you. You are wow, what a pioneer you are. You're incredible. The greats of finance are shaking in their boots looking at you and your massive brain.
Turner Novak:
You're not even getting real equity in the business. It's fake equity. It's like a simple agreement for future equity.
Will O’Brien:
Yes. So my conviction here is that there is a lot still left to shake out at the intersection of financing tomorrow and yeah, the intersection of technology and finance and financing tomorrow. And I think the retort to this would be something like, "Oh, well, financial complexity is, it's a bad sign when a company has financial complexity. It's like what are they trying to hide? The good companies shouldn't need that." I'm like, yes, but also it's like also, I don't know, I think that's like, what is the basis for that? What is your actual basis for that? Other than your pattern matching to other companies that have done it just because other companies have done.
So, anyway, long story short, I think there's something that there's more that can be done here, especially as we move into a world from where ... From a kind of a Bits world through an Atom's world. I think there's definitely going to be interesting questions to ask about how do we finance data center development? What does the business model look like for large language models? Okay, we're just going to do advertising again. Great. I mean it's a beautiful business model. Advertising is great and God knows I'm already using ChatGPT to buy a lot of things on the internet or so for sure-
Turner Novak:
We've got to give Sam Altman his take.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, for sure. Take it, find a flush. Thank you. Mr. AI and Tim Apple and all these people.
Turner Novak:
Mr. ChatGPT.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Tim Apple's my favorite.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. But I don't know, I think there's more to be done here and I've been thinking a lot about it.
Turner Novak:
So what would you do? If you were to propose a new financing structure of some kind for a innovative technology business? What's a different take on it?
Will O’Brien:
I think for sure, basically debt financing at earlier stages is becoming interesting. I even just saw a graph today that the biggest private equity firms in the world now are actually just private credit firms and the proliferation about credit in the last has been one of the dominant trends in finance the last 10, 20 years. It really hasn't come down though to the kind of startup level really. So I think there's interesting plays here that when we're deploying hundreds and thousands of these vehicles out there in the world, that we're working with a debt partner so that we're not paying for all of that with our thing up front and we're talking to some debt providers at the moment to tee that up. I think another interesting concept is the use of basically doing buyouts on traditional businesses-
Turner Novak:
Cash flowing business?
Will O’Brien:
Cash flowing businesses and juicing up margins with technology. So this would be us buying an offshore survey company running a 5%, 10% margin and juicing it up to a 25% margin with use of our technology and also the benefits of that as well are that we get revenue, which is very important to technology business. These aging business owners get an out for their business and again, I would use debt to finance that. I think there's a lot of hardware businesses that can do that. We're starting to see a little bit of it with software where these companies-
Turner Novak:
Accounting firms I've seen is pretty common while enrolling a lot of firms.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Slow Ventures has this really good thesis called the growth buyout, they've been running this playbook on some software businesses.
Turner Novak:
Parking software and then they're quitting parking lots.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Parking lot operator.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. But I think you can do the equivalent in hardware. I think that's really interesting. I think there's another interesting idea where I believe, I think it's Every, which is the media company did a round recently, but the round is like they're getting 5 million but it's a facility that they can draw down on as they need. It's not, they're not getting the 5 million today. It's like they get the ability to draw it on 5 million.
Turner Novak:
A line of credit.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. And I think that's really interesting. How many companies have been foie gras with capital and then their fucking liver burst, right? It's like this idea that you have to take all of the money and then use it. That doesn't make any sense to me.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So it would be you know that you have 5 million available to you, but you might only need to use 2 so you don't fully dilute yourself on the 5 million?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, exactly.
Turner Novak:
As an investor though, you want to deploy capital.
Will O’Brien:
That's the thing, that's the difficulty, so it would have to be come from an investor that believes they can get better deal flow higher upside from that by doing this.
Turner Novak:
From that innovative products.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Of basically saying, this is like massive TAM, incredible founder, great market, we know this is like a thousand X return from here upside and we will probably cut our returns in half because we only deploy half of ultimately what we think, but they might actually take it though too. They might actually end up using it. The worst would be you do this deal with someone, you find literally, let's say Cursor three years ago, I don't know what the first round is that, we'll just say it's like 10 million posts and now it's worth 10 billion. You gave them this line of credit of it's worth 5 million, they use none of it and you get no equity in that. That would be a real bummer.
Will O’Brien:
Well, I think the way you use it is you use it to win deals. In a world with ever crowded and people are trying to stand out with podcasts or other ways or media or these firms that are developing these platform teams and stuff like that. I do think that for me, helping a founder to try to minimize dilution of their business, I'm going to partner with that guy 10 days a week. If he's got a debt fund that he's going to or she is going to write nice terms for me and that will help you win the better deals.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like you'd have to package it with equity, like you do a 2 million equity check and it's like, you just, you make sure that you actually get to make the investment, but then we've got this line you can draw on anywhere from zero to 10 and you might take one, you might take the full 10, but even if you don't use it, we still did invest and we made sure that we got to participate in some way.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. You think you'd have to have ... That's what I mean it would be part of the equity and debt deal.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That's an interesting way to think about it.
Will O’Brien:
I do think, again, I think one of these stereotypes that Silicon Valley loves to shit on is the NBA, right? And it's the finance bro. And actually these people, again, are like, they're the backbone of a lot of American businesses. There's actual merits and these things and I think investment banking does have some incredibly smart people in there. And I think just bringing more complexity, I wonder would a startup, native investment bank do well here? If someone has to set up, hire some analysts and associates from the top, funds like Morgan Stanley TMT team or something like that and start bringing some of those ideas around financial innovation to startups here in the Valley. I wonder if that would ... I mean it's a beautiful business. I mean investment banking is you are speaking money into existence. It is just like you're getting paid for your advice. It's like beautiful, no assets, just I will sit and talk-
Turner Novak:
I charged you $10 million to convince Google to buy you.
Will O’Brien:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
Or to convince the public markets to take you.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. So I think it's a beautiful business investment bank. I think special situations as well as there was this team within Goldman for a decade just churning out not public info what their returns are, but I know a guy, we worked with him, like stuff that would make your eye water and they were just like these guys were the Navy SEALs of finance. They would go and they would like a Navy SEAL drop into any situation and run an investment. They could go into a debt deal, they could go into Pakistan, they could sell government debt, they could do a refinance of an offshore infrastructure deal, they could do anything and they got really good at quantifying returns and risk in generalizable terms and ran the strategy for 40 plus years. And some of them have left to do their own, but I think that in tech would go a long way.
I think there's a lot of balance sheet. I think there's a lot of zombie companies in San Francisco in general that you could chop up for parts and sell to people who'll actually use the assets and give some money back to investors. You could do refinance, you could get investors off the cap table to turn them to more. They're not going to be venture scale businesses, they just need to be cash flowing businesses. You could do a refi on that. So I think there's a lot of stuff there.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I think there's different lines to think about it as the cost of equity is pretty high. If you say, let's say you're, we'll say Cursor again as an example. Cursor sold probably 20% of their business in that first round. If that would've been debt that they had to pay back turning 2 million into 2 billion, what was the technical interest rate that they gave up on that equity? It was definitely three digits. So the interest rate that they were paying, the cost of the equity that they gave up was basically a payday loan, probably more, the most expensive financial capital versus let's say they funded it on a credit card where you pay 20% interest actually would've been way smarter technically. But then the trade-off is like it's debt and you do have to pay it back and-
Will O’Brien:
I think the debt stuff makes sense when you have line of sight on a cash flow.
Turner Novak:
Or a collateral.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And the class is worth something and you know how much it's worth.
Will O’Brien:
And it's going to appreciate and there's going to be ... But you have line of sight on the cash flows and yeah, you would need collateral as well, but I mean collateral is hand wavy as well. IP is collateral, you can technically have ... So I think it's more closely related to the cash flows. But yeah, I mean other things, I just think companies should be going public earlier.
I think Nvidia went public at 50 million market cap. Amazon went public at a $500 million market cap and maybe there's a way of putting a small amount of your float on the market early and having an appreciation that way and then you can potentially participate. Then you have a better sense of when things are really going to pop. I think it's a travesty that you have these tech companies going public and they get a three X pop on day one and so then you have these predatory hedge funds that will just take IPOs in New York.
And I know a guy used to work on one of these funds and they just get a call being like, "Hey, do you want to think of us going public tomorrow? Do you want 50 million?" And they just buy it and they just triple their money on the same day and there's whole funds with that strategy. And someone needs to eat their lunch, they should not exist. They're not working hard for their money, they should not exist. So I think that would be interesting as well. I mean dude, when Anduril goes public, Lord have mercy.
Turner Novak:
Meme stock of the century. It's going to make Palantir like a fucking-
Will O’Brien:
Look like a baby.
Jesus. It's 1 trillion, another $1 trillion to Anduril.
Turner Novak:
The one meme with like the SpongeBob dunking meme, another trillion to Anduril. You know that one?
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Oh my god. It's going to look like a tea party. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of companies that could be ... And I see the argument for not, there's scrutiny you get and other things, but I think people are leaving a lot of money on the table and I think in this world where you can have meme stocks and stuff like that. Another idea I have is that it seems there's just been so many insane moneymaking opportunities in the public markets for technology that I am not entirely convinced that venture is the best way to make insane returns. As an investor you had like Carvana do something like a 200 X.
Turner Novak:
It dropped 99% and then back up to the same-
Will O’Brien:
200 X.
Turner Novak:
... above the same price at one point.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, 200 X. You had AMD do a 40 X in the space of a few years.
Turner Novak:
You have performed basically every venture fund over the past years.
Will O’Brien:
Exactly. You have volunteer-
Turner Novak:
Sort of Facebook by the way. So did most.
Will O’Brien:
Volunteer all these companies and then again, situational awareness fund, they, Leopold and Nick, they're running a huge strategy there. Apparently like 40% year to date according to Wall Street Journal, 47% year to date performing every venture fund. So on a risk adjusted basis in particular, but more generally, I actually think maybe public markets is a better place to find alpha. You have more information. There's maybe less risk. For sure, 10 bagger plus opportunities there.
Turner Novak:
It's liquid.
Will O’Brien:
It's liquid.
Turner Novak:
It's more liquid. I feel like there's more secondary opportunities coming to the private markets. If you have a top 20 asset, there's probably 20 private pumping, maybe it's like 25, maybe it's 50, where if you just say, "Hey, I own stock in SpaceX or Anduril," there's a thousand willing buyers that will...
Will O’Brien:
I think there's, I think secondary. I think closely tied to this idea that companies should go public sooner if that does not happen. There's a business in doing secondaries really well.
Turner Novak:
I mean that's a big business model of a lot of funds is just giving out allocation into SPVs in late stage companies, whether it's directly on the cap table into someone else's SPV, into an SPV that's going into another SPV. That is a pretty significant business model in the private markets.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. I think as well, like crypto gets a lot of shit. I think there's still the fact that you can program money. I think there's definitely stuff you can do there with that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I could see that.
Will O’Brien:
Oh, yeah.
Turner Novak:
I think one of the issues with increasing public markets is if you're an asset management firm, you make money from management fees, you don't ... Like, carry is kind of like a sweetener, but you make your money on day-to-day from management fees and you can charge about 1% management fee in a public market fund and you can charge 2, 2 and a half. Some of these FPVs people charge 5% right up front in a private market.
Will O’Brien:
Wow.
Turner Novak:
SPV.
Will O’Brien:
I didn't know that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Will O’Brien:
5%.
Turner Novak:
That's why people ... That is why the private markets are so big and they're continuing to accumulate capital because if you're an asset manager it's more profitable. Why would you fuck around with 1% fees and 10% carry when you can charge 2 or 3 and 20 or 30? There's also because it's illiquid you can, let's say you invest so much in dogshit, bad investments. In the public markets, that is immediately-
Will O’Brien:
Apparent.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Not necessarily so in the private markets. You can also, in the public markets, you get paid your carry quarterly, so if you're good and you get paid faster, you don't get carried quite as much. Maybe carry is more of the business model if you think public markets. I think in private markets too, it's mostly insider trading and dark business arts and deals, which is like you can't really do that in the public markets, but in the private markets it's like Andrew is signing this massive customer, we're going to raise this round ahead of it. We do the round, they announce the customer and then there's massive interest and you can't do that in the public markets. Right? You can't trade inside information. But that is how startup financing and private market financing, like when you're an investor and you're pitching to your LPs, you're saying, "I have this edge, I have this access to information that no one else has. I insider trade" is basically what it is.
You can argue it both ways and it's kind of like there's different incentives for different people and it's like, I think the interesting with SPACs is you can relay information differently. If you do a traditional IPO, you have to be pretty careful what you say. With SPACs you can just be like, "Yeah, a couple of years we're going to get to a trillion in revenue." The TAM is a trillion dollars and we think this company will be worth one times TAM, whatever the crazy thing that people are saying, which gave them a bad rep, community adjustability. Yeah, you can literally just say whatever you want and there's not as much enforcement around it. So I think you need to ... And that's why some people benefited from SPACs and did a lot of them is because you can disclose things in different ways strategically. So I know you have an interesting ... You think we should be doing more SPACs?
Will O’Brien:
Well, I think for sure they're stupid in a lot of ways, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bath water at the same time. I think, yeah, there is a lot of idiots, some of them very well-known.
Turner Novak:
And they're back now.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, they're back.
Turner Novak:
They're going around to see-
Will O’Brien:
SPAC is back. But I think, again, well, I just want to see more public market access to the greatest investment opportunities of our time.
Turner Novak:
Do you know this guy, his name's Brad Jacobs, I think his name? He's founded like $8 billion companies.
Will O’Brien:
Oh.
Turner Novak:
His strategy, one of them is he started waste management, like rolled up garbage collection companies. Another one is ... What's it called? It's like a logistics trucking company. It was a third party freight forwarding business. It's publicly traded. I'm blanking on the name, but he started about eight companies that are worth over a billion and exited, he's cleared, it's like real economic value that was created, real companies.
I mean I think waste management is like a $30 or $40 billion public company, but anyways, he did a SPAC, but it was kind of like a private SPAC. I think it was sort of like an IPO, like you kind of had to get allocation in it. And I can't remember what was public, but I think it was public. I'm going to have to ... We are probably going to leave this in the episode, but we might trim it. I believe Mike Moritz was a big investor. I was just a friend who invested in it and he was basically, it was like this SPAC from this guy who is like a legend and I don't remember why he did a SPAC, but I think he wanted a liquid vehicle to work because-
Will O’Brien:
It's like the same idea as a search fund. You want to have negotiating power in advance of speaking to a business owner.
Turner Novak:
He reacquired a company. He did this thing and they immediately did an acquisition. And I think the strategy around, I think he's said this publicly, but he's just going to do a couple deals a week. Just his thesis and just generally his general model. He goes to an antiquated industry that literally does not have any technology. The people who run the companies don't use the internet. They print off their emails to read them or whatever. They still send faxes and you just use software and that's who you're competing against.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, I love them.
Turner Novak:
Same, it’s an interesting thesis. Will, this is a lot of fun.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. That was a lot of fun.
Turner Novak:
This is pretty fun. I feel like we went all over the map with, literally, figuratively got talked about the ocean, talked about Dubai chocolate, treasure hunting, conspiracy theories.
Will O’Brien:
Yeah, it was a good one.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
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