The company building underwater drones for $50,000

We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. We need to build millions of underwater drones. Saltwater and the ocean is a very hostile environment. That's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean. Will O'Brien is the co-founder and president of Ulysses. The company started doing seagrass restoration and is now expanding into everything from mapping the seabed to keeping ports secure. O'Brien's larger ambition is to make ocean operations so cheap and routine to support entirely new industries. Before we get to Ulysses, we have a lot to talk about, but just getting to Ireland's most innovative company, just explain the technical innovations for Chris. The Guinness Company, a great example of a business, you know, its growth largely derived from technical innovations. And you don't think of it, you think of just like a pint of Guinness. But the truth is, you know, they were starting an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s. And you know, a research development team where you would just hire extremely smart people and just say, come in here and find a problem and work on it. Much like... Wait, they had Xerox PARC in Guinness? They did. As early as the 1890s. And it was undirected research? Yeah. Just do what you want. So, and there's many technical innovations that come from it. For example, anyone who's, I studied math in college and one of the tests from that is the student's t-test. This is a, how do you, you know, derive either the standard deviation if you know the mean or the mean if you know the standard deviation from a small sample, less than 30. This was a problem in Guinness because to, you know, one of the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness is the amount of lipids or fats in hops. So they were having to take up like hundreds of hops to see, you know, is this a high quality batch or not? And they were losing, you know, a few percent per batch. And that means a lot when you're in the high volume, you know, low margin food and beverage industry. So William Sealy Gossett had to publish under a pseudonym. He couldn't let, he couldn't publish his research that he was doing with Fisher, another famous statistician of the time in the early, about the 1920s. And he published in the first journal of Mathematica, which is now, you know, a very famous mathematics journal, this innovation, this breakthrough he'd found of how to do like small sample statistics. But he had to publish it. And that's why it's called the student's t-test still to this day, because they didn't want Anheuser-Busch or Heineken or other people to know that they were hiring these researchers to like solve problems for them. Oh, so not associate the advanced with Guinness? Exactly. They didn't want their competitors to know. So they're getting better margins. So loads of innovation. There was a project, Project Acorns, Acorns standing for Advanced Cans of Rich Nectar, which was the basically, how do we put, how do we make a Guinness at home version? It was the 80s. People were starting to drink less and drink more at home. The price of pints was going from a pound to a pound fifty. People were up in arms. So they're drinking at home. So they're like, how do we do these things at homes? Originally the project was called Project Dynamite. But as you'd imagine in the 1980s, shipping parcels with the word dynamite on it between London and Dublin would have caused them some concern. They got confused with all the other parcels. So they stopped labelling them Project Dynamite, they renamed it Project Acorn, and they developed the widget. And the widget was voted above, did you know it was voted above the internet in the 1990s top 100 inventions of the 20th century. Marketing is another place where Guinness was really, you know, the Guinness, the film industry in Nigeria. They produced like the Janus Bond of Nigeria and that's why people know Guinness is very popular in Nigeria. It's one of the top markets. But it's because they just like made a movie where, well, I guess, it's the top market actually. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's the top. Was it part of the movie or something? Yeah. Yeah. But the marketing, I think, is really one of the areas where Guinness was most stand out. I think Guinness is as good for you as this iconic campaign and the Toucan. There's one up there. Yeah. The Toucan as well. Sure. The iconic Guinness Toucan bird. Yeah. And they've won like more Can-Lion advertising awards than nearly any other company. Really? I didn't know that. I have the Guinness quality standards on my phone. Why do you know all this stuff? I'm just curious. I'm just like very passionate about the... No, but did you start it as because you're an entrepreneur and a founder and you're looking for examples of innovation and there happened to be one in your backyard? Or is it... Yeah. I think so. You studied as much in the clubs as I did. And... I think it was both. I think it was both. I think it was like... This is a... I felt like it was... I just thought it was... It's a very underrated company. These are the seven C's of Guinness quality standards. So this is like a PDF that I have preserved. Is it a PDF that they make for bars or something? Yeah. Exactly. They have the seven... Okay. The quality standards, right? Crafted presentation, consistent freshness, counter visibility, correct gas, correct temperature, clean lines, clean glassware. So they're the things you need. I'll send this to you, John. Good system. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. That's all life advice, honestly. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Keep clean lines, keep glassware and you're going places. I think for me, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's an entrepreneur. My mom had her own business. Both my granddads, one ran a pub, the other one was a farmer and had a few other businesses and a very classic Irish story. But I always grew up in a world of commerce and business and my mom and dad have siblings and none of the men, anyway, at least, or the Murphys or Bryans work for anybody else. They're all like God-fearing, disagreeable. So I grew up in a household where business was the talk of the table. It was revered. So I've just always been an appreciator of good businesses and it was so cool to meet a bit... I've always revered technology and revered companies like Stripe and others and whatever. But to see one that's homegrown like this, but that I don't think anybody really talks about was really cool and exciting. So speaking of entrepreneurship, I want to get to... We do have to, at some point, get to Ulysses. But do you need another Guinness? I will note that it's 20 minutes in and I'm just belaying Irish start-ups. You can pour these ones. See how you do. Absolutely. All right. And... Thanks, Chris. Wow, value-add. Exactly. What a value-add investor. You guys get started talking about this company. Yeah. I'm only here for one reason. So what does Ulysses actually do? We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. That's the simple one-liner. I think we started the company three years ago under this general observation that it was very clear three years ago that autonomous systems, robotics were going to do an increasing share of the world's GDP, increasing share of the kind of critical work. And myself and my co-founders were looking at potential domains to deploy robotic systems. And after kind of a cursory look at air, land, sea, sea became very interesting. And then looking at surface, undersea, undersea became very, very interesting. And we could quickly identify a lot of very interesting jobs that, frankly, were not being done underwater or not being done on a scale or were not affordable enough to do. So the idea for building underwater robots kind of came from that. You started with seagrass, right? Yes. Maybe just clarify, you started with seagrass and how you ended up pivoting to the robots. Yes. So, you know, the first I mean, the first when we when we start looking at, again, tasks that robots could do, one that captivated us initially was just like this kind of there's a whole spectrum of ocean conservation related tasks. One of my co-founders was on he was on a surf trip. He met a marine biologist and she described her job and her job was was, you know, taking photos underwater. It was planting seeds. It was, you know, gathering water samples, all these like super manual tasks. And he'd been building like aerial drones for food delivery, whatever. And was like, yeah, sure, you could build like an underwater equivalent of like one of these aerial drones. You need to do these sorts of tasks. So that's kind of why it led us. And what were the tasks? The task initially was the kind of full spectrum of ecosystem restoration, which was map the seabed, understand what's down there, then collect the seeds wherever their seeds are. We were looking at flowering plants at the time, seagrasses. And then take them and then plant them in areas that need to be restored. Adam, what caused the seed? Really quick. I have to say, I used your one pole method. Oh, interesting. And I hate to concede there's no appreciable difference between the pints, but yeah, nothing sacred anymore. No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. So the ceremony. This is the one shot. Yeah. The one shot. OK, so with seagrass, why does it need to be restored, period? Like what's going on in the oceans? So a few reasons. If you take kind of current projections for maybe how fish stocks are going to do, kind of in and around the 2040s, many of the kind of critical fish stocks in the ocean could just be totally, totally wiped out. Basically, the population curves are not really looking good for many fish species. So it's like billions of people are relying on their primary source of protein or income every day. So just overfishing in general. Overfishing. Yeah. And a big driver as well is also habitat loss. Yeah. You have a lot of factors driving it. And basically, the rate at which we restore these ecosystems is, you know, 100 to 1,000 times less the rate we lose them. OK, so it's important to restore the seagrass. Yeah. And we've lost a lot of it. And you started with that as part of the need to restore the seagrass, you ended up making an underwater robot. Yeah. Which is how you got into underwater robot space. Yes, exactly. I mean, you know, we started solving the seagrass problem. But very quickly into solving that problem, it was like very clear, wow, there's a lot of other similarly shaped problems in the ocean. You know, from first principles, if you want to build like the ocean robot company, right, you need a few things. You need full XYZ access on the ocean as a domain. OK, so to do that, you need a surface craft because there's less drag on the surface. So that's where you should be doing most of your transit. And then you drop an underwater vehicle to go down. So we developed this autonomous service vehicle called Leviathan, 2,000 nautical mile range. And that goes and drops the kids off to school, so to speak, to go, you know, go do what they want. And underwater vehicle then is called Mako. It's launched into the water that goes and find location where it needs to do the job. It goes scan something or robotically manipulate something. And then it gets Leviathan will say, come on, and it goes in. And then that's the end of the mission. The state of underwater vehicles before we started building Mako were primarily to gather data and not to do robotics. The vehicle looks a lot different if you want to build something that can physically kind of manipulate underwater. So there was a few design decisions we had to make there. Also our underwater vehicle, you know, we wanted to build one kind of general purpose form factor that could solve a lot of different problems. So there was some like pretty like clear design decisions that we made at the start where our underwater vehicle Mako is made of these kind of Lego building blocks that make it up. So if you want to add, let's say, an extra 115 nautical miles of endurance and range, you just add extra battery packs because we knew some people would want that. Other people would want the vehicle to go faster, so you have a different thrust module. Some people want to take images underwater. So we have stereo cameras that can give you 3D imaging. Some people want sonar, you know, and bathymetric maps. So we have like a sonar front module. So yeah, there was a few very deliberate early design decisions which enabled us then when the US Navy comes knocking and says, hey, we've got some problems you'd like us to work on or offshore energy companies that, oh, well, because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, it was very easy for us to adopt. Let's say, can we dig into that for a second? Because like a few things. First of all, just for all the geeks, I'd love to hear why Seagrass and how it compares as a carbon sequester compared to everything else out there. Yeah, Seagrass is, you know, it's like your rapper's favorite rapper or something like that. It's like the most slept on plant, I think, out there. It's zero attention. Carl, you know, is the very good looking friend or something like that that gets all the attention. But Seagrass is really who you should be talking to. Carl gets a lot of the funding and Seagrass is really this unsung hero of the ocean. It covers, you know, 2% of the seafloor, but holds 20% of the ocean's carbon. It is the ocean being the world's largest natural carbon sink anyway. So it's very important in that regard, but 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on Seagrass as a habitat. And so it's a very, very important, very important species, doesn't really get that much attention. It grows on up and down the coastlines of Ireland, the UK, here in California, actually the same species in Ireland and California, on the East Coast, in Australia. So yeah, we're working across, we've got projects in Virginia, in Southern Florida, in California now, in Sausalito, and a few other locations, also in Great Barrier Reef. Well, you started the company to do Seagrass restoration and you're now mostly focused on the robot. You haven't left Seagrass because you're now working on Seagrass projects. Yeah, like fundamentally the tech platform we're building, again, because we made these early design decisions, mean that like, well, you know, it's like, you kind of like, you build the technology once that does, that does like the Seagrass restoration. And then like, then it's just more of like scaling that business is more of like an operational problem. Like there's not any new net new R&D we have to do to serve new contracts in that. We've already built the underlying IP. It's just like, do you have enough operators that can go in the field and operate it? And the core platform of like under vehicle, sensing stack, nav stack, autonomy, and surface vehicle is like, you know, and it's something that can then go off and work with the folks in the energy sector or... What do you have to do to restore Seagrass? You have to collect this. First of all, you have to understand where to restore. So you have to map and understand where is their Seagrass, where is their not. On top of that, then you'd run a pretty rudimentary model called a habitat suitability model to say, well, based on the depth and the water clarity and these other features, we think these areas would be good for restoration. Then you identify where are the plants flowering and producing seeds. And you go and collect the seeds. And we see videos of this on the EOC's Twitter account. We just posted like a seed collection video just like yesterday. And then you bring the seeds then to the locations that need seeds that you've identified in the habitat suitability model, and then you deposit them there. And then all going well. So I want to dive into that a little bit because what's, sorry, as a lower carbon capital, our firm has been involved with you since before the pre-seed, etc. And so we should talk about that later and all the hustle that made that happen. But I can say with confidence that you've had from the beginning the vision of how do we build the universal thing, make it extensible to all of these applications, both interventions and the data you're gathering has been. literally in the original presentation, but how do you choose seagrass initially? And I'm curious, is it how much of that was mission-driven, how much of that is caring about the climate, how much of that is who you can recruit initially, and how much of it is like that's where the money was for the first contracts? I think it's probably like some combination of all of them, but I think it was very much just like a passion thing to begin with. Like, I grew up by the seaside. My mum would just put me in a wetsuit and send me down to the beach, and that was like my babysitter in the summers. I'm very much a very pro-growth environmentalist and a very eco-pragmatist, is maybe how I describe myself. A beautiful, flourishing future for humanity has an economy that's consistently growing, and a biosphere that supports that consistently growing economy, and carbon removal is one of those core technologies that I think enables that, along with clean energy and other things. And then, yeah, the ocean as this frontier, is a very true frontier. We've mapped more of the surface of Mars than we have the depths of our ocean. When I heard that or meditated on that a little bit more, I was like, God, this is crazy, right? There is a part of Earth that over 75% of it we have no eyes on and have no clue really what's down there, and less than maybe 100 people are thinking about this and working this on a daily basis. For how long was all of Western civilization focused on exploration, and now we're doing space, we have this whole other frontier here, and you're telling me there's a fraction of people actually working on this day-to-day? I was like, this is crazy. This is insane. And put the money aside, and just think humans need to explore and discover and learn. And part of your thesis is, if I understand this, just like SpaceX, if you lower the cost to orbit, then there's other things you can do. You can do Starlink if you can get things up into orbit cheaply. Similarly, you believe that you can unlock new technologies if you lower the cost of doing things in the ocean. Yes, I think there's this very kind of generalizable framework for how frontiers get developed. The American West is a good example of this. It's like you have this exploratory period where people go there and go back, and they typically go there and go back for some kind of very high-value reason, where the cost of going there is justified because you're recovering fur, or you're getting pelts or something like that. There's a single high-value initial use case. And then in space, it's defense reasons. You put satellites up there to watch the Russians. So there's this initial expedition period, and then you move from an expedition period to, okay, well, what happens if you spend more time here and get more things? And what happens when we not just gather information from here, or singular things, but more things, and become more persistent in our settlement there? So then in the American West, you have the development of the railroad, and then access becomes way more easy. You get all this development of places like California. Space, you get reusable launch. Maritime, it's like, okay, if you could actually go and have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things, I think, that you can do. If you want to go plant a bunch of seagrass, do you get approval from anyone on that, or is it just seagrass away? Unfortunately, I think this is one of the saddest things about the environmental movement is this concept of green tape, like red tape and green tape. It's like, yeah, that is the single biggest barrier. For example, there is a certain very endangered location of seagrasses in Australia that we would love to do a project, that we've been trying to do a project for a long time, and it would be probably the biggest seagrass restoration project in the world in a very important location, but kind of banging your head off the wall. How did you end up in the Chinese prison? This is the topic. I want to go back to the robots. There was an interesting time in the 2010s where China's on this ascending path or whatever, and my mom was like, well, you've got to learn rather. So I go to Shanghai. I'm about 16 years of age, 15 years of age, and I go there, and we end up in some night market, and we were there a week before, and we go back a week later, and they falsely accuse us of shoplifting. I think it was this kind of scam they had. They would bring these kind of white kids or something like that in. The scam who had? People in the thing, because what would happen is when they accuse you of the crime, you have to pay off. Well, you get brought to the prison station or the police station, and you remember this is the time before instant money sending, right? Historian of the market. Yeah, crazy time. So we do Western Union, the money, and that takes, you know, it's like China's nine hours ahead of Ireland, and it's like 10 o'clock at night, so my mom's not awake. So I ring her at three in the morning, or whatever, she's up. Or it's nine in the morning Ireland time, she's awake. So I'm like, mom, I'm in this prison, Shanghai prison, can you send Western Union me the money and get me out? She's like, okay, all right. So the value of the phones that we shoplifted. Of course, nowadays, they just write it off as a deepfake AI scam. I was going to say, now that's an 11 laps call. That's an 11 laps call for sure. I've had to build a safe word with my family. Send it to me in iTunes. One of my favorite parts of Stripe is Works in Progress, our magazine dedicated to new ideas driving economic and technological progress. Take the latest issue landing on doorsteps right now. It covers how China's different cities compete to grow their local economies, why regulations are holding up ways to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases, how hedge funds make millions predicting the outcomes of drug trials, and about 130 pages of other fascinating stuff you're unlikely to read elsewhere. And we want the Works in Progress to be as beautiful to look at and hold as it is interesting to read. And call me biased, but I think it's the most beautiful magazine in print today. To read Works in Progress online or to get the print edition delivered to your door, head to worksinprogress.co. As I look back, and I did, I looked back at the original pitch you came to us with. But as I look back at that and think about how you from day one were thinking about all of the ways this company could, all the markets it could address and what it could do, but at the core of it was making the vehicle. If you had come to a venture capitalist 10, 12 years ago, for some maybe six years ago, and said, hey, we are going to verticalize manufacturing. We are actually going to build things in the US. We are not going to outsource them to Foxconn or Shenzhen or whatever. And so we're going to, and for those components that seem like the supply chain might be dicey, we will literally make them from scratch so that we control everything, the entire vertical stack of our device. That would get you shown to the parking lot. So how verticalized are you guys and where do you start, where are you going to? It's this kind of iterative process that we've kind of, the first vehicle has maybe 80% pieces off the shelf and we're on like generation five now. And the next generation, particularly over the course of the next year, we're going to bring a lot of it in house. So to make an underwater drone, you can kind of break it up into the mech, the elect and the software. The software, all of that is pretty much from scratch in-house. We're not really building on top of any other primitives. We've kind of built it up from the ground up because we're building a very different type of vehicle. The modularity requires a lot of interesting things. But presumably there's hardware actuation frameworks that you use. Yeah, like there is things, but frankly, we've kind of just like eschewed a lot of them. There's things you can, there's like OpenRAS and there's other like, there's like, yeah, there's a few different ones, but yeah, we're eschewing a lot of them and kind of building a lot of it from the ground up because our vehicle looks a lot different to a lot of other underwater robots. And then there's the elect, so like in that, like you've got like sensors and then the internals in the vehicle. So a lot of the, you know, if we talk about the sensors and that sort of thing, there's, you know, how do you perceive, you know, it's like, you're typically using like a sonar system of some description. Again, right now, that's off, we're buying them off the shelf, our sonar systems, but we're kind of just hiring and building up our acoustics team now to start building them in-house and sell from next year. Then the navigation stack as a part of this kind of like, part of the vehicle, there's a, you know, inertial navigation systems. Again, right now we buy them off the shelf, but we've got like internal prototypes that, that we're going to start building in-house ourselves and replace these existing suppliers. It seems very hard to build an inertial navigation system in-house. Explain how an inertial navigation system works and then. There's different ways of building them. You know, you've got like fiber optic gyros, which use, which is like one way. You've got MEMS sensors, which are, you know, in your iPhone or whatever that, that are kind of like accelerometers that you can, you can use as well. And we're, so I won't go into the, how we're building ours, but yes, initial prototypes, initial prototypes on our initial one is put it at a fraction of the price of the very expensive long lead time supplier that we're using right now. And building on a supply chain that we could scale. Well, but I'm curious why build your own inertial navigation? Is it cost? Is it lead time? Is it like ultimately you need to get the device? Scale. For us it's, for us it's scale, lead time, you know, right. There's about 20 million aerial drones built every year. There's maybe 1000 to 2000 underwater drones for us to really fully manifest our vision. We need to build millions of underwater drones. Therefore, I need to, we look at supply chains and like, can we build on that supply chain? So insofar as we can, we try to build as much on top of electronic vehicle supply chains, drone supply chains, where we have to buy from somewhere else or consumer electronics supply chains, where things are made in the order of millions and not maritime. So you're building on a small scale with an eye towards a very large scale and everything needs to have a plan for how you operate. We will open a facility next year that could be like one of the largest by number of units, like underwater drone facility, like factories in the world. So like, and I think there's a decent, like right now, where our company is right now, our main problem is building things. We are saying no to contracts. We have more demand than we can supply. The things that we think about on a daily basis right now are not like, how do we sell more? It's how do we build a factory? And how do we vertically integrate some of these parts of the stack that, like, for example, there is one part of our supply chain that we kind of like baited out of the supplier, how many of these components they make per year right now, and they make like 100 to 200 per annum. I mean, like that's, you know, like there's no way that we're hoping to make a few hundred vehicles next year, maybe 1,000. So it's like, we kind of build on top of that. We find this all the time. It's both with our companies and our own investment thesis is that, like, as you start diving in, somebody brings you a cool idea, somebody brings you a cool prototype, they go ahead and it's cobbled together in the same way that Elon was getting components from Mercedes and shit like that to put the first one together. But then as you start scaling, you start to notice bottlenecks, whether they're intrinsic to the way you're building something or to rolling it out, etc. And then with each of those bottlenecks, you now know there's an opportunity to resolve that. It's not unlike what you guys have done with Stripe. So we've done that in our own investing thesis where we start to see, you know, grid resiliency as a thing, and then you start to see, like, oh shit, you know what there's a shortage of? It's Transformers. And so we've got these guys, Giga, who taught themselves how to build Transformers in their backyard using YouTube videos. Somehow nobody died. And then they went to China to see how China manufactures them and brought that back. I love fucking... And now they make Transformers in a way that's not all hand spun. We definitely haven't done that either. I can't comment. So I love this path, and it's something that I know your audience will love, is that we have now started to see companies like this really get to be supply chain experts and see what's standing in the way of their 100x from today. And it really is a religion that came out of SpaceX and Tesla. My co-founders, literally all he works on is manufacturing. We have four co-founders. Colm, all he does is pretty much manufacturing. Andrew is the same. One co-founder is pretty much all on manufacturing. I think it's just kind of default state. Saltwater and the ocean is a very hostile environment. What's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean? Corrosion and pressure are huge external forces. But corrosion you can get around it by coating. You're doing like anodizing the surface of the metal, which gives it some resistance. Pressure, again, you can mitigate. Going very deep sea, which would be 6,000 meters, is what we call full ocean depth. The ocean goes to about 10,000 meters in its deepest parts, but full ocean depth in a technical term is 6,000. That's very difficult. We operate currently in 1,500 up to 1,500 meters. We've been crush tested to 2,200 meters, but we're typically operating in that 1,500 meter range, which is where most of the important economic activity today happens. In the future, I think much more will happen in the DC predicting critical minerals, but today a lot of the economic activity happens there. So pressure is one problem. I think the biggest problem, though, is comms underwater. I was going to ask that. So how do you communicate with the MAKO? A lot of it has to run locally. You have to do a lot of sense because you can acoustically... Because communications are very low bandwidth. Yes. You can do like 10 kilobytes per second over like five kilometers. Over like HF or what? Acoustically ping, like a dial-up modem. And then just like being far away from anything is very difficult. Being far from someone that can repair you or connect and recharge you. So that's why the surface vehicle is such an important part of our stack because you pick it up, you put it on deck, it wirelessly charges underwater vehicles, and then connects us to the internet so that we can get a live diagnostic on the vehicle, what's working, what's not working. And then if someone needs to come in and do an intervention. I mean, in the future, the surface craft will actually be able to repair the vehicle and have like replacement modules and kind of vending machine style. Surface vehicles autonomous too. Yeah. And it's connected then to Starlink so we can see. And Starlink is a huge enabling technology for us. That's one part of it. That's why we go for the surface vehicle. Another thing is like... Yeah, we have around 100 times more on-board compute than any other autonomous underwater vehicle. We run a full NVIDIA 1590 on-board with an Intel CPU, and that's very important to our autonomy stack. Because, again, if you want to do anything intelligent robotically underwater, you need to be able to sense make to a large degree. Okay, so basically, if it's doing some mapping or whatever, do you send it down with a fully built plan and program, and it's basically, it is running the full loop of sensing and deciding locally on the GPUs on the device? Yeah, like right now, the autonomy is like relatively rudimentary. We haven't got into like very complex kind of like autonomy behaviors just yet, but not many of our tasks were recorded just yet, but yes. But they think that it is autonomous, it is fully locally autonomous. Yeah, exactly. It's like, it will be like, draw a polygon that's like map this area. Auto generates a lawnmower track, and then it'll have some rudimentary, okay, well, if I see a rock, let me just go above that, or if I see something else, go around it. Yeah. And then, what applications are you having most success with, with the robot right now? What are you selling the robot for? Right now, I mean, there's kind of two domains in which we've had a lot of success in the last year. So, nature was kind of what we did and focused on kind of first year, last year, you know, this being the second year of the business, we kind of like started to look at other use cases. So, last year, we got our first contract with the US Navy, and we got our first contract with an offshore wind developer as well. So, US Navy was actually, you know, we were doing mine countermeasures, finding mines and hunting mines before it was cool, you know, before the Straits of Hormuz popped off. So, we were working on some work related to that. And then, the offshore wind... I haven't heard Straits of Hormuz popped off. That's pretty sweet. Way to appeal to his younger listeners. And then, the offshore wind contract was, you know, where, actually, there's this problem in California where they're trying to build a floating offshore wind where they need to, one of the objections to the floating offshore wind is that you put these power cables in the water, they attract abandoned fishing lines. The fishing lines then are what catch dolphins and whales and these sorts of things. And that thing is one of the biggest obstructions to offshore wind in California. And so, it's like, could you build... We're building this sensing system, like a surface underwater vehicle that will map these cables on a daily basis, look at their structural integrity and see if they're in good condition. And also, if they're getting lines cut on them, and if there is a line caught on them, we are building an implement that will cut the fishing lines off of the offshore, floating offshore wind lines. Sorry, why are the offshore wind turbines getting caught up in lines, the problem? Basically, when you build a floating offshore wind terminal and then you have, like, the cable running up, that cable's in the water. I see. And it's the power cable that's feeding the power back to it, yeah. And then, you might just have, like, a fishing net floating through the water that has fallen off some Japanese, you know, fishing line, like a thousand miles of debris and it'll get caught in that. Can you bring that over? Excellent. Actually, go ahead. We'll give you guys some... It's so weird. I didn't mean to set you up, but when we talk about craft and beauty... Are you doing a product placement right here? This is, man. This is a tequila that we make, actually. Wow. And it's the only 100-point tequila in history. You know, you're drinking with two Irishmen and you didn't bring whiskey. Well, you're in an Irish affair. It's because this is... I am an American and we are imperialists. You bring your own... This is your tequila? Yes. And so, this is Comos tequila. Do you not think, post the TV show Silicon Valley, it's a bit on the nose to make your own tequila? Yeah. Trace Comos. This is actually literally called Comos. But it's the only 100-point tequila in history. It's very unorthodox, but it's partly aged in wine barrels. And then, it also spends some time aerating. So, it's, like, the smoothest drinking tequila ever. But it makes no sense to do it this way. Nobody had done it before, but we care about that stuff. And so, I want to say cheers, but there is a weird tie-in to what you just said about design and beauty. That is the smoothest tequila in the world. One of the great cultural things about you and you is you guys both, I think, would identify as heterodox. But what is it about you guys who... Don't ask where I'm from. ...seem to be... No, no, but I think you're emblematic of the movement right now. What is it about you guys? What do you have in common? What's changed? I think the American difference is, you know, the founders look very different, right? It's like, I think you alluded to this earlier, it's like, they're kind of rah-rah, smoking, kind of, like, go to church on Sunday, a bit louder, working typically on hardware rather than software, no disrespect to White Combinator. But there's, you know, the make something people want moniker or something like that. And I think this group is way more like, make something the world needs. You know, it's like a different motivation. There is seemingly more of a kind of a spiritual or, you know, a kind of, like, reason to, like, White people start their businesses, I think, like, and that's definitely true for myself, or at least a motivation in it. I think, you know, I often think of there being, like, head and heart type founders, where, you know, Jeff Bezos is the canonical head-based founder, or head-oriented founder, where it's like, you know, the internet was growing at 30% per annum, and I saw that, oh, what would be the best thing to sell on the internet? Oh, books are good, because you can move them easily, and they don't go off. Dashboards, yeah. It's like, and then he starts Amazon. But, you know, and then, like, Steve Jobs being the canonical, like, heart-based founder or something, you know, the bicycle for the mind, the hippie on acid, you know, like, all this kind of, like, this kind of other way. And I think this, like, era of, like, higher tech founders are way more oriented on kind of the heart-based or something like that. And, yeah, there's, like, this interesting spiritual vibe. And I think there's, like, potentially interesting reasons for that. I mean, like, you know, a lot of us grow, we're, like, very, I think, impacted by something like COVID. Like, a lot of us are typically in our, like, later 20s now, but we're, like, in college or something like that, and it kind of made me feel a little bit cheated or something like that. Or we were forced to be in the digital world, so we, like, feel to cause impact in the physical world, perhaps. There's, you know, and maybe some potentially interesting reasons there. Or maybe we're just more of a product of the times that we're in, where people are going back to organized religion. And, like, or we grew up through maybe kind of crazy woke era stuff or something like that, and we're very colored by that. Or, yeah. I know you want to ask more about the robots, but do you want to talk about faith for a second? Because that's something that, I mean, that was something you would never talk about 20 years ago in Silicon Valley. But I'm curious about that. Like, that has been a real sea change. And how does that, do you think it matters? Where does that come from? I think it speaks to an underlying change in the world, I think. I think there's a, I mean, it's very important to me. It's how I've met, like, a lot of my closer, like, closest friends here in San Francisco have been through, like, church. I live with three other guys. All of them are Christian. All of them, like, run tech companies. And so, yeah, it has been, like, how I've kind of found my community here. And, yeah, it's definitely noticeable. And, like, yeah, all of my friends who, like, are typically Christian are also, like, building companies, like, in the real world or in some capacity. So using my, you know, small sample, you know, I might have to use students' t-test to see the reliability of this. But, like, there is definitely a correlation here with, like, guys who believe in God and believe in, like, heaven and believe in, like, I need to live a good life or else I don't go to heaven. And then they build these companies that make it rain, that do autonomous cargo, that do ocean robots, that, like, there's definitely a connection. Making it rain in particular is, you know. That is literally biblical. Still, I have more questions on the robots. Sorry, I keep bringing us back to the robots. If I have a bunch of offshore wind turbines, I don't, but if I did, and I wanted them to be flotsam and jetsam free, what are my options right now? Do I pay someone with a boast to go inspect them? And so is this, like, you just sell cheaper inspections? Or how are you selling to the, like, what's the pitch meeting look like? The broad shape, again, the beauty of our business is that, like, the same way that business is done, or operations, maritime operations are done for the Navy, for the ocean conservation, for the energy folks is all pretty much the same. Big, expensive surface ship. And as you know, we're not building ships fast enough these days. So it's like there's a backlog to even get the ship. Once you even get the ship, you're chartering it at, you know, an order of maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a day on that ship. What do they cost to make, by the way? We haven't really talked about the core economics of what you're making versus what they're making. So, yeah. So we've, on the underwater vehicle, we can sell them. So we primarily only sell them when we're working with navies, with the offshore industry folks that want to buy services off us, or running this, like, services business. But if you're working with a Navy, we can sell them for as cheap as $50,000. For contrast, the most common, like, autonomous underwater vehicle that the US Navy is buying today is, like, somewhere on the order of maybe $5 million. So, yeah. So you're targeting a two orders of magnitude cost improvement. Now, that's for the base vehicle. Once you add the leather seats and the other nice things, you know. Premium subscription. Exactly. But, frankly, when you add, like, advanced sensing, advanced navigation, but even still, it's, like, then you get to one order. You have a low-cost platform that then you can add sensors and everything. So that's, like, that's the underwater vehicle. And the surface vehicle is, like, you know, that is, like, less than a million dollars, more than maybe half a million, but it depends. So Chris was flagging earlier, bad buyers kill companies. And I think this is true, where if you're selling to governments or multi-year procurement cycles or something like that, it's just, like, fairly frequently the company can run out of money before the buyer has a chance to finish the procurement process. It strikes me that you kind of have bad buyers where, I mean, you have some private companies buying from you and everything like this, but it's long procurement cycles and, you know, some selling to governments. And so how do you deal with this? Or you can push back on the premise, but the fact that, ultimately, your time to revenue is longer than for other companies. You know, so right now, you know, the two main groups we're selling to are, yes, Navy and offshore energy. And, yes, both of them have, you have to go through on the energy side, you have to do all these health and safety things, you have to get onto a master services agreement, you have to ladder your way up to that. Government, kind of the same. You have to get on, put on a contract vehicle, get the clearances, all this stuff. I think they're, like, actually the shape of business that venture companies are actually very well suited to go after. Like, we can afford to kind of invest the money in the R&D and wait, because once you win those contracts, you're very sticky, actually. You're very sticky, and you're kind of hard to pull out, and they're, like, they don't want to wait two years to put someone else in against you. So I have always been attracted to, I mean, my first startup was kind of the first scooter sharing startup in the UK and Ireland, and that's where I, like, learned to kind of sell to government, and I loved it. I loved it for two reasons. I mean, once you won a contract, it was very difficult to lose them, because they're just very sticky customers. But also, you're, like, seeing your technology go into the hands of people that, like, really need it. Like, my underlying kind of thesis around my own entrepreneurial path has been, like, first startup was, like, you know, going into, you know, transport and trying to change that. This is now going into, like, the public domain, a public good, working with defense, or going into the ocean in general, which is a public good, and trying to, like, build, deploy technology into it. But, you know, 60 years ago, the people working are thinking about these problems, like, most commonly, like, transport and thing, were not guys who were, like, here in San Francisco. They were, like, in some, like, government job or something like that. And my underlying premise around technology has just always been, like, I think, like, public services or public domain technologies are, like, maybe the most interesting, because, you know, if you think that, like, yeah, the smartest person in 1960 was probably going working in government. Now they're going working in San Francisco. Ergo, the kind of, like, an increasing share of the things that were previously the reserve of government are now going to be the reserve of private companies. So it's, like, there is a future where, like, Ulysses is the largest navy in the world. And, you know, like, we're the largest, like, store in the ocean. The U.S. Navy is pretty big. Yes. I bet she has more craft soon. But I'll tell you, as an investor, once these companies actually get to the contracting phase, they're very reliable and very bankable. So it may take some time, but that's what our business is, is to bridge that to where it comes through. And strangely, whether it's as a hard tech investor or even in some of the decarbonization work we do, one of the most sober and consistent customers for the work we do is the Department of Defense. That they're actually a good buyer? When you get to the people who actually get shit done at these organizations, they're incredibly well-informed, and the decisions are apolitical and very sober. And so when somebody comes inbound to him, that's the other thing. When you see the Department of Defense or the Navy coming inbound to a startup, that's a new muscle that they didn't used to have. So they're paying attention. And when they come in and say, look, you solve a problem for us at one hundredth of the cost we pay today. So once we get to that contracting process, it may take a while to fill out your master service agreement, your SLAs and shit. But the reality is that's very bankable. And they're using you for mind-clearing stuff, then, maybe? Yeah. So I might actually just go back to one of your original questions, how I was working on the ocean today, because it kind of makes the rest of the things clear and, again, draws a consistent through line. So again, most important work today is a few hundred thousand dollars for a ship per day to go out and do something. On that ship, you're going, and then you typically have a bunch of guys on board. If you want to do something underwater, you put this tethered vehicle, and you're remote operating, and you look at the screens, and you take shifts, and you go and do the thing underwater. You find the mine. You repair the pipeline, whatever it may be. Again, they all have this shape. Plants, seagrass. But then the problem is then it's like, OK, well, because due to union laws and labor laws, it's like, OK, well, people can only max work maybe eight hours a day, and you want to work 24 hours, because you're going out there anyway, so you need three people then. And then it's like, OK, each of those people has a manager, and then you have the ship captain, and then you have the second main, and then you have the guy who needs to cook the spaghetti, and then you have the doctor, because you've gone over the eight people, and you left from the US port. It's like, so you end up with this massive crew, hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, and that's a broad shape of all the tasks underwater. So then the idea is if you can do that autonomously, you don't have any. the labour cost, you control over Starlink, you need an ice refrigerator, you know. Can you work in worse sea conditions than... Yeah, exactly. And you can go fast as well. You can go fast with the water. Like when people are on board, you can't. You get seasick. Do you compete with the neoprines for some of these, like Ceronic or those kind of folks? Not, Ceronic don't have an underwater vehicle. They're building ships and they're just going to become a new shipyard. Got it. And I think where we're different, maybe from like an Underworld or otherwise, is like the thing we're thinking about is like, again, robots will do an increasing share of the work in the future. Who builds the underwater ones? A lot of the folks in the defence sector are thinking, how do we make things go boom? Frankly, that's not an interesting technical problem for us. Any nomads can put C4 on a vehicle and make it go boom. The very difficult, interesting technical question is like, how do you build a general purpose underwater robotic platform? And that's the thing that we think unlocks the ocean at scale. And that's the thing that like turns it from a three trillion dollar economy into a ten trillion plus place for commerce. The undersea cables, how worried should we be about? Absolutely, totally asymmetric. Jesus. Totally. I think this is like, yeah, this is like one of those. Do you guys have any undersea cable angle? Yeah, yeah, we have like we have one. We have some work in that domain. Yes. I can't talk about it too much. I can't talk about it too much. But yes, there is there is basically a need to create a, you know, again, you know, the kind of the advocate, what we're trying to advocate, the maritime domain to move away from is this like episodic singular campaign thing, more like we are creating permanent settlements there, like we're trying to do in space. And a part of that would be like a persistent defence network around. Yeah, like all like kind of critical waterways. So a very critical waterway is off the west coast of Ireland. All of the cables that run from the US into Europe, like pretty much like cross into Ireland. So that's like that's like one like area that you might highlight as a choke point. There's a number of these. There's a number of them in Asia, in the Middle East. All of these areas should just be like persistently monitored 24 seven, but it's much too expensive to do that manually. So, yes, that's that's a that's a massive. I mean, so a hundred years ago, I used to call you the team at Google that built all the data centers and we also did the trans-oceanic fiber. And so so data centers are fragile and fiber is even more fragile. And the way you take a data center offline is you bring a pair of fucking garden shears and you cut the fiber that goes and there's many fewer cables than people think. And by the way, like one in Oregon, no one used to publish their fiber maps. And so the way I would find them to figure out where I wanted to cite a data center is I would drive around the coast until I saw a call before you dig signs. And once in Oregon, I encountered some call before you dig signs. And I got the street was called five nines. What kind of only a fucking geek would name a street five nines. And I was like, yep, I got it now. And then we'd follow the call before you dig. And so but if you really want to take a data center line offline until we have Starlink and other diverse opportunity, you know, like diverse providers in that space, you literally snip the fiber and it's offline. Right. Yeah, I say this partly because partly we should be aware of this because we need to protect it partly also to other humans. In the event we do get to a full moment in A.I., we might just want to let people know we might have to all do our part to kill the data centers. That's funny. I'm sure I just put myself on the naughty list. Yeah, I'm saying that that's a bad fact to have in the pregame. But the reality is right now it is when you it is the Wild West. When you bring up the Wild West, therefore, for what you do, it really is that. And we do need protection of those resources out there. Yeah. So so we have about I think it's about 200 undersea cables today and they typically only get taken out by anchor dragging accidental for the most part, some of them not. But if you did want to do a targeted like demolition or whatever, like many of them and it's like not crazy hard. But I also don't know what like they get snooped. And so I get read in and they get snooped and as in taps. Yeah. Like it's not hard for China to go listen to those things. And so and read everything. It's actually the least fortified. Like it's hard for them to get into a hardened facility in downtown San Francisco. It's running all your traffic. But on 59th Street in Oregon. Yes. It's very easy for them to hang out and listen. And so we need patrols there for sure. We're going to leave it there. Good, Chris. Thank you. Yeah. Right on, man. Cheers, guys. Cheers.