# The company building underwater drones for $50,000 - **Show:** Cheeky Pint - **Published:** 15 Oct 2026 - **Source:** https://share.transistor.fm/s/92078ce3 - **Transcript:** https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/cheeky-pint/the-company-building-underwater-drones-for-50-000-418427/ - **Provider:** OpenNash Podcasts (machine-generated) ## In brief Will O'Brien argues that ocean work is slow and costly because it depends on crewed ships. His company, Ulysses, builds a modular underwater robot called Mako and an autonomous surface vessel called Leviathan, and aims to cut the cost of ocean work by one to two orders of magnitude. If that works, the ocean could become a routine, persistent place for commerce, defense and conservation. The tension runs between a lofty mission and hard commercial detail. Ulysses began with seagrass restoration, an eco-pragmatist's passion project, but its revenue now leans on the Navy and offshore energy. These buyers are slow but sticky. The company is also pulling manufacturing in-house to reach millions of drones, while Sacca and Collison's side tangents on Guinness, faith and undersea cables show why this matters. ## Key insights 1. **Ulysses undercuts incumbents by roughly 100x on price** O'Brien says the base underwater vehicle sells for as little as $50,000, against about $5 million for the Navy's most common one. Adding advanced sensors and navigation narrows the gap to roughly one order of magnitude. 2. **Crewed ships make ocean work expensive** A support ship costs a few hundred thousand dollars a day, and round-the-clock work needs several shifts, a captain, cooks and a doctor. Autonomous vehicles controlled over Starlink remove most of that crew cost. 3. **Scale forces Ulysses to build its own components** There are only about 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones built each year, versus around 20 million aerial ones. One supplier makes only 100 to 200 of a key part a year, so Ulysses is pulling parts like navigation and sonar in-house and borrowing from electric-vehicle and consumer-electronics supply chains. 4. **Modular design lets one robot serve many customers** Mako is built from swappable modules such as batteries, thrusters, stereo cameras and sonar. The same platform therefore serves seagrass planting, Navy mine hunting and inspection of offshore wind cables. 5. **Government and energy buyers are slow but sticky** O'Brien says winning contracts means safety approvals, master services agreements and clearances. Once won, they are hard to lose, which suits venture-funded firms that can afford to wait. Sacca adds that defense buyers are sober and bankable. ## Questions this episode answers ### What does Ulysses actually build and sell? Ulysses builds a small underwater robot called Mako and a self-driving surface boat called Leviathan that carries Mako out and brings it home. O'Brien says it sells them to navies, and sells services such as seagrass restoration or cable inspection to others. ### Why did a company that started with seagrass end up making robots? Restoring seagrass meant mapping the seabed, collecting seeds and planting them, all tasks a robot could do. O'Brien says that building those robots showed that many other ocean jobs have the same shape. ### Why is seagrass considered so important? O'Brien says seagrass covers about 2% of the seafloor but holds about 20% of the ocean's carbon. About 20% of commercially important fish stocks also rely on it as habitat. ### How can the robots be so much cheaper than existing ones? O'Brien says Ulysses starts at $50,000 per vehicle against about $5 million for the Navy's common one. It uses modular design, off-the-shelf consumer and electric-vehicle supply chains, and in-house manufacturing, and it removes the crew and ship costs. ### Why are undersea cables a worry, and where does Ulysses fit? O'Brien says there are only about 200 undersea cables, mostly cut by accident by anchor drags, though deliberate attacks wouldn't be very hard. He says Ulysses has some work in this area, which he can't discuss, and advocates persistent robotic monitoring of choke points such as the cables off western Ireland. ## Facts - **Will O'Brien** [0:00:37]: "they were starting an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s" - **Will O'Brien** [0:02:11]: "that's why it's called the students t-test still to this day because they didn't want anheuser-busch or heineken or other people to know" - **Will O'Brien** [0:02:38]: "the project was called Project Dynamite. But as you'd imagine in the 1980s, shipping parcels with the word dynamite on it" - **Will O'Brien** [0:03:00]: "the widget was voted above, did you know it was voted above the internet in the 1990s top 100 inventions of the 20th century" - **Will O'Brien** [0:04:38]: "Crafted presentation, consistent freshness, counter visibility, correct gas, correct temperature, clean lines, clean glassware." - **Will O'Brien** [0:09:04]: "the rate at which we restore these ecosystems is 100 to 1 ,000 times less the rate we lose them" - **Will O'Brien** [0:11:52]: "It covers 2 % of the seafloor, but holds 20 % of the ocean's carbon." - **Will O'Brien** [0:12:21]: "About 20 % of commercially important fish stocks rely on seagrasses as a habitat." - **Will O'Brien** [0:09:53]: "we developed this autonomous surface vehicle called Levaithin, 2 ,000 nautical mile range." - **Will O'Brien** [0:10:55]: "if you want to add, let's say, an extra 150 nautical miles of endurance and range, you just add extra battery packs" - **Will O'Brien** [0:15:42]: "we've mapped more of the surface of mars than we have like our our the depths of our ocean" - **Will O'Brien** [0:22:16]: "the first vehicle has maybe, you know, 80 % pieces off the shelf and we're on like generation five now." - **Will O'Brien** [0:24:43]: "there's about 20 million aerial drones built every year. there's maybe 1 ,000 to 2 ,000 underwater drones." - **Will O'Brien** [0:25:20]: "We will open a facility next year that could be one of the largest by a number of units" - **Will O'Brien** [0:25:49]: "and they make like 100 to 200 per annum. There's no way that we're hoping to make a few hundred vehicles next year, maybe 1 ,000." - **Will O'Brien** [0:28:55]: "Yes, you can do like 10 kilobytes per second over like five kilometers." - **Will O'Brien** [0:29:51]: "we have around 100 times more onboard compute than any other autonomous underwater vehicle. We run a full like NVIDIA 5090 on board with like an Intel CPU." - **Will O'Brien** [0:31:14]: "we got our first contract with the U .S. Navy and we got our first contract with an offshore wind developer as well." - **Will O'Brien** [0:31:57]: "you put these power cables in the water, they attract abandoned fishing lines. The fishing lines then are what catch dolphins and whales" - **Will O'Brien** [0:38:51]: "we can sell them for the cheapest $50 ,000. For contrast, the most common like autonomous underwater vehicle that the U .S. Navy is buying today is like somewhere on the order of maybe $5 million." - **Will O'Brien** [0:40:54]: "my my first startup was um kind of the first scooter sharing startup in the uk and ireland" - **Will O'Brien** [0:48:44]: "we have about 200 undersea cables today. And they typically only get taken out by anchor drags accidental for the most part." - **Chris Sacca** [0:47:15]: "I used to co-lead the team at Google that built all the data centers." ## Transcript **[0:00:00] John Collison:** 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. **[0:00:29] John Collison:** 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. **[0:00:37] Will O'Brien:** 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 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. **[0:00:59] John Collison:** Wait, they had Xerox PARC in Guinness? **[0:01:01] Will O'Brien:** They did. As early as the 1890s. **[0:01:03] John Collison:** And it was undirected research. Yeah, just do what you want. **[0:01:07] Will O'Brien:** 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 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 one of the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness is the amount of lipids or fats in hops. **[0:01:35] Will O'Brien:** So they were having to take up like hundreds of hops to see, is this a high quality batch or not? And they were losing a few percent per batch. And that means a lot when you're in the high volume, low margin food and beverage industry. So William Sealy Gossett to publish under a pseudonym the student he couldn't let he couldn't publish his research and that he was doing with fisher famously another famous statistician of the time the early uh about the 1920s and he published in the first journal of mathematica um which is now you know very famous mathematics journal um uh this this innovation this breakthrough he'd found of how to do like small sample statistics but he had **[0:02:11] Will O'Brien:** to publish and that's why it's called the students 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 solve problems for them. Oh, so not associate the advance with Guinness? Didn't want their competitors to know. So they're getting better margins. Loads of innovation. There was a project, Project Acorns. Acorns standing for Advanced Cans of Rich Nectar, which was basically how do we make a Guinness at home version? **[0:02:38] Will O'Brien:** It was the 80s, people were starting to drink less and drink more at home. The price of a pint was going from a pound to a pound 50. People were up in arms, so they're drinking at home. So they're like, how do we do these things at homes? Initially, the project was called Project Dynamite. But as you'd imagine in the 1980s, shipping parcels with the word dynamite on it between London and Dublin would have caused some concern. **[0:02:58] John Collison:** They got confused all the other parcels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. **[0:03:00] Will O'Brien:** So they stopped labelling the project. They renewed 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... The Nigeria thing. Nigeria, the film industry in Nigeria. **[0:03:24] John Collison:** They produced the James Bond of Nigeria, and people know Guinness is very popular in Nigeria. It's one of the top markets, but it's because they just made a movie where... It's the top market, actually. Okay, yeah. It was like Guinness, the top... Was it part of the movie or something? Yeah. **[0:03:39] Will O'Brien:** But the marketing, I think, is really one of the areas where Guinness was most standout. I think Guinness is good for you is this iconic campaign. And the Toucan, there's one up there. The Toucan as well, the iconic Guinness Toucan Bird. They've won more Cannes Lion advertising awards than nearly any other company. Yeah, I'm not. I have the Guinness quality standards on my phone. Why do you know all this stuff? I'm just curious. I'm just very passionate about the... **[0:04:04] Chris Sacca:** started 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 you studied as much **[0:04:13] Will O'Brien:** in the clubs as i did i and i think it was both i think it was both i think it was like this is a i felt like it was um i just i just thought it was it's a very underrated company these are the seven c's of guinness quality standards um so this is like a pdf that i have this is a pdf that they make for bars? Yeah, exactly. They have the seven, okay, the quality standards, right? **[0:04:38] Will O'Brien:** 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. **[0:04:49] Chris Sacca:** Good system. Yeah, yeah. That's all life advice, honestly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Keep clean lines. Yeah, I think so. I think glassware and you're going places. **[0:04:56] Will O'Brien:** I think for me, you know, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's an entrepreneur. My mom had her own business both my granddads you know one um ran a pub then one was a farmer and and had a few other businesses and um a very classic Irish story but I always grew up in a world of commerce and business and my mum has like and dad have siblings and none of them none of the men anyway at least or the Murphys or Brions work for anybody else they're all like they're all like disagreeable so I grew up in a household that business was the talk of the table like it was revered so I've just always been appreciators **[0:05:25] Will O'Brien:** 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, it was really cool and exciting. **[0:05:42] John Collison:** So speaking of entrepreneurship, I want to get to, we do have to at some point get to USA's. By the way, do you need another Guinness? I will note that it's 20 minutes in. Sure, yeah. And it's just the line, Irish startup. You can pour these ones and see how you do. Absolutely. All right. **[0:05:55] Will O'Brien:** Thanks, Chris. **[0:05:56] Chris Sacca:** Wow, value-add. What a value-add investor. You guys get started talking about this company. **[0:06:01] John Collison:** I'm only here for one reason. So, what does Ulysses actually do? **[0:06:07] Will O'Brien:** 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. **[0:06:42] Will O'Brien:** And then looking out 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. **[0:06:59] John Collison:** You started with Seagrass right? Maybe describe why you started with Seagrass and how you ended up **[0:07:03] Will O'Brien:** 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, you know, taking photos underwater. It was planting seeds. **[0:07:32] Will O'Brien:** It was, you know, gathering water samples, all these like super manual tasks. And he'd been building like aerial drones for food delivery with Mata and was like, you know, surely you could build like an underwater equivalent of like one of these aerial drones you're going to do these sorts of tasks. So that's kind of what 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 there are seeds there. **[0:07:58] Will O'Brien:** We were looking at flowering plants at the time, seagrasses. Yeah. Then take them and then plant them in areas that need to be restored. Adam, what causes the seed? **[0:08:09] Chris Sacca:** Really quick. I have to say, I used your one-pull method. Oh, interesting. And I hate to concede there's no appreciable difference between the plants, But yeah, nothing's sacred anymore. No, no, no. Yeah, it's a ceremony. This is the one shot. Yeah, the one shot. **[0:08:28] John Collison:** Okay, so with seagrass, why does it need to be restored, period? Like what's going on in the oceans? So a few reasons. **[0:08:37] Will O'Brien:** 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 critical fish stocks in the ocean could just be totally wiped out. Basically, the population curves are not really looking good for many fish species. It's like billions of people rely on their primary source of protein or income every day. So just overfishing in general. Overfishing, yes. And a big driver as well is also habitat loss. **[0:09:04] Will O'Brien:** You have a lot of factors driving it. And basically, the rate at which we restore these ecosystems is 100 to 1 ,000 times less the rate we lose them. **[0:09:12] John Collison:** Okay, so it's important to restore the seagrass, and we've lost a lot of it. And you started with that as part of the need to restore the seagrass. You ended up making an underwater robot, which is how you got into underwater robot space. **[0:09:26] Will O'Brien:** Yes, exactly. I mean, yeah, we start solving the seagrass problem, but very quickly into solving that problem, it was 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. Okay, so to do that, you need a surface craft because there's less drag on the surface. **[0:09:53] Will O'Brien:** So that's where you should be doing most of your transit. And then you drop an underwater vehicle to go down. So we developed this autonomous surface vehicle called Levaithin, 2 ,000 nautical mile range. And that goes and drops the kids off to school, so to speak, to go do what they want. and underwater vehicle then is called Mako. It's launched into the water. That goes and finds the location where it needs to do the job. It goes scan something or robotically manipulate something, and then it gets, Leviathan will say, come home, and it goes in, and then that's the end of the mission. **[0:10:22] Will O'Brien:** 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 manipulate underwater. So there was a few design decisions we had to make there. And also our underwater vehicle, we wanted to build one kind of general purpose form factor that could solve a lot of different problems. So there was some pretty clear design decisions that we made at the start where our underwater vehicle Mako is made of these kind of Lego building blocks that make it up. **[0:10:55] Will O'Brien:** So if you want to add, let's say, an extra 150 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, bathymetric maps. So we have like a sonar front module. **[0:11:18] Will O'Brien:** So, yeah, there was a few very deliberate early design decisions, which enabled us then when the U .S. Navy comes knocking and says, hey, we've got some problems you'd like us to work on, or offshore energy companies that, oh, well, because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, it's very easy for us to adapt. **[0:11:36] Chris Sacca:** Can we dig into that for a second? Because 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. **[0:11:52] Will O'Brien:** Yeah, seagrass is your rapper's favorite rapper or something like that. It's the most slept-on plant, I think, out there. It's zero attention. Carl 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 2 % of the seafloor, but holds 20 % of the ocean's carbon. **[0:12:21] Will O'Brien:** It is the ocean being the world's largest natural carbon sink anyway. So it's very important in that regard. About 20 % of commercially important fish stocks rely on seagrasses as a habitat. And so it's just very important. Very important species doesn't really get that much attention. It grows 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. **[0:12:47] Will O'Brien:** We've got projects in Virginia, in Southern Florida, in California now, in Sausalito, and a few other locations also in Great Barrier Reef. **[0:12:56] John Collison:** 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. **[0:13:04] Will O'Brien:** Yeah, like fundamentally the tech platform we're building again because we made these early design decisions mean that like Well, you know, it's like you kind of like you build the technology once that does That does like the seagrass restoration and then like then it's just more of like scaling that business is more of like an operational problem Like there's not in any new net new or indeed we have to do to serve new contracts in that we've already built the underlying IP It's just like do you have enough operators? **[0:13:27] Will O'Brien:** I can go in the field and operate it and the core platform under vehicle, sensing stack, nav stack, autonomy, and surface vehicle is something that can then go off and work with the folks in the energy sector or defense sector. What do you have to do to restore seagrass? You have to collect this. First of all, you have to understand where to restore. So you have to map and understand where is there seagrass, where is there not. **[0:13:50] Will O'Brien:** 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 ULCS Twitter account. We just posted 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. **[0:14:27] Will O'Brien:** And then you deposit them there. and then all going well. **[0:14:31] Chris Sacca:** So I want to dive into that a little bit because, sorry, as a lower carbon capital, our firm has been involved with you since before the pre-seed, et cetera. 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 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 **[0:15:14] Chris Sacca:** who you can recruit initially and how much of it is like that's where the money was for the first contracts **[0:15:19] Will O'Brien:** i think it's you know it's probably like you know some combination of all of them but i think it was very much just like a passion thing you know to begin with like I grew up by the seaside I had very you know very much like my mom would just put me in a wetsuit and like send me down to the beach and that was like my babysitter in the summers. I'm very much you know like a very pro-growth environmentalist and a very like eco-pragmatist is maybe how I describe myself. **[0:15:42] Will O'Brien:** A beautiful flourishing future for humanity has an economy that's consistently growing and you know a biosphere that supports that consistently growing economy and like carbon removal is like one of those core technologies that like I think enables that along with clean and energy and other other things and uh and then yeah just like the the ocean has this like frontier is a very true frontier is like you know we've mapped more of the surface of mars than we have like our our the depths of our ocean and like um that like i just couldn't when i like heard that or like meditated on that a little bit more i was like god this is crazy right like there's there is **[0:16:15] Will O'Brien:** like a there's a part of earth that over 75% of it we have no eyes on and have no clue really what's down there and like um you know less than maybe 100 people are thinking about this and working this on a daily basis like for how long was all of like western civilization focused on exploration and now like okay we're doing space we have this whole other frontier here and you're telling me there's like there's a fraction of people actually working on this day to day i was like this is crazy this is insane that like like and put the money aside you know like and just think like humans need to explore and discover and learn. **[0:16:52] John Collison:** And part of your thesis is, if I understand this, just like SpaceX, you know, if you lower the cost to orbit, then there's other things you can do. You can do Starlink if you can get things up into orbit cheaply. Similarly, you believe that you can unlock new technologies if you lower the cost of doing things in the ocean? **[0:17:10] Will O'Brien:** Yes, I think there's this like very kind of generalizable framework for how kind of frontiers get developed. You know, 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. **[0:17:36] John Collison:** There's a single high-value initial use case. **[0:17:39] Will O'Brien:** And 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 we spend more time here and get more persistent? And what happens when we not just, like, gather, like, information from here or singular things, but more things and become more persistent in our settlement there? So then in American West, you have the development of the railroad and then, like, access becomes way more easy. **[0:18:07] Will O'Brien:** You get all this, you know, development of places like California. Space, you get reusable launch. Maritime, it's like, okay, if you could actually go and, like, have persistent robotic systems out there. doing the important work then there's a lot of new things I think that you can you can do. **[0:18:22] John Collison:** If you want to go plant a bunch of seagrass like do you get approval from anyone on that or is just **[0:18:28] Will O'Brien:** seagrass away? Unfortunately you know I think this is like the kind of one of the saddest things about the environmental movement is you have this concept of green tape right like red tape and green tape it's like yeah it's like that is like the single biggest barrier for example like 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. **[0:18:52] Will O'Brien:** And it would be probably the biggest seagrass restoration project in the world, a very important location, but kind of banging your head off the wall. **[0:18:59] John Collison:** How did you end up in the Chinese prison? **[0:19:01] Will O'Brien:** This is the topic. I want to get back to the robots. You know, there was an interesting time in the 2010s where China's on this, like, ascendant path or whatever. And my mum was like, well, you've got to learn what I'm learning. So I go to Shanghai. I'm about 16 years of age, 15 years of age. And I go there. And we end up in, like, some night market. And we were there a week before. And we go back a week later. **[0:19:26] Will O'Brien:** And they falsely accuse us of shoplifting. And I think it was this kind of scam they had. Like, you know, they would bring these kind of white kids or something like in. **[0:19:35] John Collison:** This guy who had? **[0:19:36] Will O'Brien:** People in the thing. Because what would happen is when they accuse you of the crime... They have to pay a fine on the spot. 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? You know, historian of the markets... Terminal times. Yeah, crazy time. So we had to Western Union, the money, and that takes... China is like, whatever, nine hours ahead of Ireland, and it's like 10 o 'clock at night, so my mum's not awake. **[0:20:03] Will O'Brien:** So you ring her, whatever, at 3 in the morning, or whatever, she's up. Or it's 9 in the morning, Ireland time, she's awake. So I'm like, well, I'm in this prison cell, a 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. **[0:20:21] John Collison:** Of course, nowadays, they just write it off as a deepfake AI scam. I was going to say, now that's an 11 labs call. That's an 11 labs call for sure. I've had to build a safe word with my family. **[0:20:31] Will O'Brien:** Send it to me in iTunes, very true. Yeah, exactly. **[0:20:37] John Collison:** 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. **[0:21:07] John Collison:** 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. **[0:21:18] Chris Sacca:** 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 um 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 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. **[0:21:50] Chris Sacca:** We're actually going to build things in the US. We're 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 **[0:22:12] John Collison:** parking lot. So how verticalized are you guys and where do you start? Where are you going to? **[0:22:16] Will O'Brien:** It's this kind of iterative process that we've kind of, you know, the first vehicle has maybe, you know, 80 % pieces off the shelf and we're on like generation 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, you know, to make an underwater drone, you can kind of break it up into the mech, the elec and the software. The software, all of that is pretty much from scratch in-house. **[0:22:41] Will O'Brien:** 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. **[0:22:51] John Collison:** Presumably, those hardware actuation frameworks that you use. **[0:22:54] Will O'Brien:** Yeah, there is things, but frankly, we've kind of just eschewed a lot of them. There's things you can be, there's like OpenRAWs, and there's a few different ones, but yeah, we're eschewing a lot of them and kind of building a lot of them 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. **[0:23:21] Will O'Brien:** So a lot of the, you know, if we talk about the sensors and that sort of thing, there's a, you know, how do you, how do you, how do you perceive, you know, it's like you're typically using like a sonar system of some description. And again, right now, we're buying them off the shelf versus on our systems, but we're kind of just hiring and building up our acoustic team now to start building them in-house for next year. **[0:23:40] Will O'Brien:** Then the navigation stack as a part of the vehicle, there's inertial navigation systems. Again, right now, we buy them off the shelf, but we've got internal prototypes that we're gonna start building in-house ourselves and replace these existing suppliers. **[0:23:55] John Collison:** It seems very hard to build an inertial navigation system in-house. **[0:23:57] Will O'Brien:** Explain how an initial navigation system works. There's different ways of building them. You've got fiber optic gyros, which is one way. You've got MEMS sensors, which are in your iPhone or whatever, that are kind of like accelerometers that you can use as well. And so I won't go into how we're building ours. But yes, initial prototypes, initial prototypes, and our initial one is put it at a fraction of the price of the very expensive long lead time supplier that we're using right now and building our supply chain that we could scale. **[0:24:34] John Collison:** 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? **[0:24:43] Will O'Brien:** Scale. For us it's scale, lead time. You know, there's about 20 million aerial drones built every year. there's maybe 1 ,000 to 2 ,000 underwater drones. For us to really fully manifest our vision, we need to be building millions of underwater drones. Therefore, we look at supply chains and we're like, can we build on that supply chain? So insofar as we can, we try to build as much on top of electronic vehicle supply chains, drone supply chains where we have to buy from somewhere else, or consumer electronics supply chains where things are made in the order of millions and not maritime supply chains. **[0:25:15] John Collison:** So you're building a small scale with an eye towards a very large scale and everything needs to have a plan for how you operate. **[0:25:20] Will O'Brien:** We will open a facility next year that could be one of the largest by a number of units, like underwater drone facilities, like factories in the world. 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? **[0:25:49] Will O'Brien:** It's how do we build a factory? and how do we vertically integrate some of these parts of the stack. For example, there is one part of our supply chain that we 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. There's no way that we're hoping to make a few hundred vehicles next year, maybe 1 ,000. So it's like we can't build on top of that. **[0:26:18] Chris Sacca:** 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. **[0:26:49] Chris Sacca:** So we've done that in our own investing thesis where we start to see grid resiliency as a thing. And then you start to see like, oh shit, you know what 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 taking. **[0:27:11] Chris Sacca:** I know they're making transformers. And now they make transformers in a way that's not all hand spun. We definitely haven't done that either. And so, yeah. 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, it is a religion that came out of SpaceX and Tesla. **[0:27:38] Will O'Brien:** My co-founders literally all he works on is manufacturing. We have four co-founders. Call them all he does is pretty much manufacturing. And real is the same. One co-founder is pretty much all on manufacturing. I think it's just kind of default state. **[0:27:51] John Collison:** 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? **[0:27:58] Will O'Brien:** Corrosion and pressure are huge external forces. But corrosion, you can get around it by coating. You're doing 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. I mean, 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 like the 1 ,500, up to 1 ,500 meters. **[0:28:29] Will O'Brien:** I mean, 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 D .C., particularly in 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. **[0:28:52] John Collison:** So how do you communicate with the make-up? **[0:28:55] Will O'Brien:** 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, you know, like, is very difficult. Like, you know, being far from someone that can repair you or recharge you. **[0:29:25] Will O'Brien:** So that's why the Surface vehicle is such an important part of our stock, because you pick it up, you put it on deck, it wirelessly charges, Leviathan wirelessly charges our rewarder 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. In the future, the Surface craft will actually be able to repair the vehicle and have replacement modules and vending machine style. **[0:29:49] Chris Sacca:** The Surface vehicle is autonomous too. **[0:29:51] Will O'Brien:** 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 we have around 100 times more onboard compute than any other autonomous underwater vehicle. We run a full like NVIDIA 5090 on board with like an Intel CPU. And that's been very important to our autonomy stack. Because again, if you want to do anything intelligent robotically underwater, you need to have like a lot, you need to be able to sense MAKO to like a large degree. **[0:30:21] John Collison:** Okay, so basically does the MAKO, you know, if it's doing some mapping or whatever, do you send it down with a fully built plan and program? and it's basically, it is running the full loop of sensing and deciding locally on the GPUs on the device. **[0:30:36] Will O'Brien:** Yeah, like right now the autonomy is like relatively rudimentary. We haven't got into like very complex kind of like autonomy behaviors just yet, but not many of our tasks will require it just yet, but yes. **[0:30:48] John Collison:** But to the extent that it is autonomous, it is fully locally autonomous. **[0:30:51] Will O'Brien:** Yeah, exactly. It's like, it will be like draw a polygon that's like map this area. Okay, auto generates a lawnmower track. And then it'll have some rudimentary, okay, if I see a rock, let me just go above that. Or if I see something else, go around it. **[0:31:05] John Collison:** Yeah. And then, what applications are you having most success with with the robot right now? What are you selling the robot for? **[0:31:14] Will O'Brien:** 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 first year. Last year, 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 U .S. Navy and we got our first contract with an offshore wind developer as well. **[0:31:38] Will O'Brien:** So U .S. Navy was actually, you know, we were doing mine countermeasures, finding mines and hunting mines before it was cool, before the Straits of Hormuz popped off. So we were working on some work related to that. And then the offshore wind... **[0:31:51] Chris Sacca:** I haven't heard Straits of Hormuz popped off. That's pretty sweet. Way to appeal to his younger listeners. **[0:31:57] Will O'Brien:** And then the offshore wind contract was 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 of 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, one of the biggest obstructions to offshore wind in California. And so it was 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 **[0:32:34] Will O'Brien:** on them. And if there is a line cut on them, we're building an implement that will cut the fishing lines off of the offshore, floating offshore wind lines. **[0:32:42] John Collison:** I'm sorry, why are the offshore wind turbines getting caught up in lines a problem? **[0:32:47] Will O'Brien:** Basically, when you build a floating offshore wind terminal and then you have like the cable running up, I see. that cable's in the water. I see. **[0:32:52] John Collison:** And it's the power cable that's feeding the power back to it. **[0:32:55] Will O'Brien:** And then you might just have like a fishing net floating through the water that that is like has fallen off some Japanese You know fishing line like debris section Can I bring any look count in that can you we can you bring that over excellent? **[0:33:08] Chris Sacca:** Okay, good. We'll give you guys so it's so weird. I didn't mean to set you up, but when we talk about craft and beauty Oh Are you doing a product placement right here? This is man. This is a tequila that we make actually Wow And it's the only hundred point tequila **[0:33:22] Will O'Brien:** You know, you're drinking with two Irishmen and you didn't bring whiskey. You're not a good player. **[0:33:27] Chris Sacca:** It's because this is... And you bring your own... I am an American and we are imperialists. You bring your own... This is your tequila. Yes. And so this is Comos tequila. Comos was like... **[0:33:36] John Collison:** Do you not think post the TV show Silicon Valley, it's a bit on the nose to make your own tequila? **[0:33:40] Chris Sacca:** Yeah. Trace Comos. Yeah. This is actually literally called Comos. It's the only 100-point tequila in history. it's very unorthodox but it's partly aged in um wine barrels and so and then it also spent some time uh aerating so it's like the smoothest drinking tequila ever but it makes no sense to do it this way uh nobody had done it before but we care about that stuff and so i want to say cheers but i there is a weird tie-in to what you just said about design and beauty yeah That is the smoothest tequila in the world. **[0:34:19] Chris Sacca:** 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? **[0:34:38] Will O'Brien:** I think the market difference is... The founders look very different. 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, maybe a bit louder, working typically on hardware rather than software. No disrespect to Y Combinator, but there's the make something people want moniker or something like that. And I think this group is way more like make something the world needs. It's like a different motivation. **[0:35:07] Will O'Brien:** There is seemingly more of a kind of a spiritual or a kind of like reason to like why 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 where, you know, head oriented founder where it's like, you know, the internet was growing at 30 % per annum. **[0:35:31] Will O'Brien:** And I saw that, oh, what would be the best thing to sell on the internet? Oh, books are good because you can move them easily and they don't go off. And then he starts Amazon. But then just Steve Jobs being the canonical heart-based founder or something, the bicycle for the mind, the hippie on acid, all this kind of other way. And I think this era of heart-tech founders are way more oriented on the heart-based or something like that. **[0:35:57] Will O'Brien:** And yeah, there's this interesting spiritual vibe. I think there's potentially interesting reasons for that. I mean, a lot of us were very, I think, impacted by something like COVID. A lot of us are typically in our later 20s now, but we're in college or something like that one had and it kind of made me feel a little bit cheated or something. Or we were forced to be in the digital world, so we feel to cause impact in the physical world, perhaps. **[0:36:21] Will O'Brien:** There's maybe some potentially interesting reasons there. Or maybe we're just more of a product of the times that we're in, where people are going back to organized religion. and like, or we grew up through maybe kind of crazy, woke era stuff or something like that. We're very colored by that. Or, yeah, I know you want to ask more about the robots, but do you want to talk about **[0:36:38] Chris Sacca:** 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? **[0:36:54] Will O'Brien:** I think it speaks to an underlying change in the world. I think 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 I was being through like church I live with three other guys all of them are Christian all of them like we're on 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 in the real world in some capacity. **[0:37:25] Will O'Brien:** So using my small sample, I might have to use students' t-tests to see the reliability of this, but there is definitely a correlation here with guys who believe in God and believe in heaven and believe in, 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. There's definitely a connection. **[0:37:49] John Collison:** Making it rain in particular is... **[0:37:50] Will O'Brien:** That is literally biblical. **[0:37:52] John Collison:** So I have more questions on the robots. 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? The broad shape. What's the pitch meeting look like? **[0:38:17] Will O'Brien:** 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 shipping, 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 $100,000 a day on that ship. **[0:38:46] Chris Sacca:** 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. **[0:38:51] Will O'Brien:** 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 the cheapest $50 ,000. For contrast, the most common like autonomous underwater vehicle that the U .S. Navy is buying today is like somewhere on the order of maybe $5 million. **[0:39:17] Will O'Brien:** So, yeah. **[0:39:18] John Collison:** So you're targeting at two orders of magnitude costs. **[0:39:20] Will O'Brien:** 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 no and frankly when you add like advanced sensing advanced navigation yeah but even still it's like then you then you get to one order. You have a low-cost platform that then you can add sensors and everything to. Yeah so that's like that's the underwater vehicle and the surface vehicle is like you know that is like less than $1 million more than maybe half million but it depends. **[0:39:46] Will O'Brien:** So **[0:39:46] John Collison:** So Chris was flagging earlier, bad buyers kill companies. And I think this is true, where if you're selling to governments or multi-year procurement cycles or something like that, just like fairly frequently, the company can run out of money before the buyer has a chance to finish the procurement process. It strikes me that you kind of have bad buyers where, I mean, you have some private companies buying from you and everything like this, but it's long procurement cycles and some selling to governments. **[0:40:18] John Collison:** And so how do you deal with this fire? Or you can push back the premise, but the fact that ultimately your time to revenue is longer than for other companies. **[0:40:27] Will O'Brien:** You know, so right now, 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. **[0:40:54] Will O'Brien:** I think they're actually the shape of business that venture companies are actually very well suited to go after. We can afford to 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 to i mean my my first startup was um kind of the first scooter sharing startup in the uk and ireland and uh uh 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 **[0:41:30] Will O'Brien:** you won a contract it was very difficult to lose them because uh just a very sticky customers but also you're like seeing your technology go into the hands of people that really need it. My underlying thesis around my own entrepreneurial path has been first startup was going into transport and trying to change that. This is now going into the public domain, a public good, working with events, or going into the ocean in general, which is a public good, and trying to deploy technology into it. **[0:42:00] Will O'Brien:** But 60 years ago, the people working are thinking about these problems 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 or now they were going working in San Francisco. **[0:42:25] Will O'Brien:** 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 Ulysses is the largest navy in the world. We're the largest explorer of the ocean. The US Navy is pretty big. **[0:42:42] Chris Sacca:** 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. **[0:43:10] Chris Sacca:** 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. Like, when you see the Department of Defense or the Navy coming inbound to a startup, that's a new muscle that they didn't used to have. So they're paying attention. and when they come in and say, look, you solve a problem for us at one hundredth of the cost we pay today. **[0:43:37] Chris Sacca:** Yes. So once that 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. **[0:43:47] John Collison:** And they're using you for mine clearing stuff, then maybe? **[0:43:49] Will O'Brien:** Yeah. So I might actually just go back to one of your original questions, how it was working on the ocean today and how it was working, because it kind of like makes the rest of the things clear and again, draws a consistent through line. So like again, most important work today is like, a few $100,000 for a ship per day to go out and do something on that ship because you're going and then you're like typically have like a bunch of guys on board if you want to do something on water you put like this tethered vehicle in your remote operating you look at the screens and you take shifts and you go and do the thing underwater **[0:44:16] Will O'Brien:** um you find the mine um you repair the pipeline whatever you know whatever it may be and so again they all have this shape um on sea grass um and uh but then the problem is then it's like okay well because due to like uh union laws and labor laws, it's like, okay, well, people can only max work like maybe eight hours a day, and you want to work 24 hours because you're going out there anyway, so you need three people then. **[0:44:37] Will O'Brien:** And then it's like, okay, each of those people like has a manager, and like, and then you have like the ship captain, and then you have the second main, and then you have like the guy who needs to cook the spaghetti, and then you have the doctor because you've gone over the eight people, and you left from the US port. It's like, so you end up with like this massive crew, hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. **[0:44:53] Will O'Brien:** And that's a broad shape of all the tasks underwater. So then the idea is if you can, yeah, do that autonomously, you don't have any of the labor cost, you can control over Starlink, any nice refri... **[0:45:03] John Collison:** Can you work in worse sea conditions than... **[0:45:05] Will O'Brien:** Yeah, exactly. And you go fast as well. You can go fast with water. Like when people have water, you can't... You get seasick. **[0:45:11] John Collison:** Do you compete with the neoprines for some of these, like Cerronic or those kind of folks? **[0:45:18] Will O'Brien:** Not... Cerronic don't have an underwater vehicle. They're building ships and they're just going to become a new shipyard. And I think where we're different maybe from like in Unreal or otherwise is like the thing we're thinking about is like, again, robots will do an increasing share of the work in the future. Who builds the underwater ones? A lot of the folks in the defense sector are thinking, how do I make things go boom? Frankly, that's not an interesting technical problem for us. **[0:45:42] Will O'Brien:** Any Numbnuts 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. That's the thing that like turns it from a $3 1 trillion economy into a $10 1 trillion plus place for commerce. **[0:46:00] John Collison:** The undersea cables, how worried should we be about... Very, very, very, totally asymmetric. **[0:46:05] Will O'Brien:** Jesus. Like totally. I think this is like, yeah, this is like one of those... **[0:46:11] John Collison:** Do you guys have any undersea cable angle? **[0:46:13] Will O'Brien:** Yeah, we have like, we have one. We have some work in that domain. Yes. I can't talk about it too much. No, no, no. I can't talk about it. But yes, there is basically a need to create a, again, what we're trying to advocate the maritime domain to move away from is this 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 a persistent defense network around Yeah, like all kind of critical waterways. **[0:46:50] Will O'Brien:** So very critical waterway is off the west coast of Ireland. All of the cables that run from the US into Europe pretty much cross into Ireland. So that's one 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 persistently monitored 24-7. But it's much too expensive to do that manually. So yes, that's a massive metric. **[0:47:15] Chris Sacca:** I mean, so 100 years ago, I used to co-lead the team at Google that built all the data centers. And we also did the trans-oceanic fiber and stuff. So data centers are fragile and fiber is even more fragile. And the way you take a data center offline is you bring a pair of fucking garden shears and you cut the fiber that goes through it. **[0:47:32] John Collison:** And there's many fewer cables than people think. **[0:47:35] Chris Sacca:** Yeah, and by the way, I found one in Oregon. No one used to publish their fiber maps. And so the way I would find them to figure out where I wanted to site a data center is I would drive around the coast until I saw call before you dig signs. And once in Oregon, I encountered some call before you dig signs. And the street was called five nines. Only a fucking geek would name a street five nines. **[0:47:59] Chris Sacca:** And I was like, yep, I got it now. And then we'd follow the call before you dig. But if you really want to take a data center offline, until we have Starlink and other diverse providers in that space, you literally snip the fiber and it's offline. I say this partly because 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 foom moment in AI, we might all have to do our part. **[0:48:26] Chris Sacca:** We might all have to do our part to kill the data centers. **[0:48:28] John Collison:** That's funny. I'm sure I put myself on the naughty list as a result of saying that. Yeah, that's a bad fact to have them to pre-train. **[0:48:35] Chris Sacca:** But the reality is right now it is the Wild West. When you bring up the Wild West for what you do, it really is that. And we do need protection of those resources out there. **[0:48:44] Will O'Brien:** Yeah, so we have about 200 undersea cables today. And they typically only get taken out by anchor drags accidental for the most part. Some of them not. But if you did want to do a targeted like demolition, like many of them, it's like not crazy hard. **[0:49:03] Chris Sacca:** But I also don't know what, like they get snooped. And so I get read in and they get snooped. 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. that's running all your traffic. **[0:49:23] John Collison:** But on 5 9th Street in Oregon. **[0:49:24] Chris Sacca:** Yes. It's very easy for them to hang out and listen. And so we need patrols there for sure. **[0:49:31] John Collison:** We're going to have to leave it there. Good. Chris, thank you guys. Yeah, right on, man. **[0:49:35] Chris Sacca:** Cheers, guys. Cheers.