← My First Million
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- [00:00]
Sam
That episode was a whirlwind.
- [00:02]
Sean
Yeah, we just recorded with our buddy Will O'Brien. This episode was like my favorite conversations living in San Francisco where you run into a weirdo who knows a lot about something you know very little about. And you get way smart in like 45 minutes. Your mind gets blown like five times and you just get smarter. So this is a get smarter episode for me.
- [00:19]
Sam
And it wasn't just about like the business and the ideas that he talked about, but the mindset and how he thought about just like the philosophy of life that I was inspired by.
- [00:28]
Sean
Yeah, exactly. So, okay, what are we talking about? We're talking about how the ocean is the new space. How there's companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, all these companies that are doing cool shit in space. He knows a lot about companies that are doing cool things in the ocean, which is something I honestly didn't know anything about going in. Now I'm pretty fascinated with. But then we talked about the conversation toward the end gets really fun. Conspiracy theories. Why conspiracy theorists make for great founders. His summer living with monks in Nepal and what he took out of that. It was the end is really good. So get there to the end. I promise you, you will enjoy this. Episod.
- [01:00]
Will O'Brien
I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road, let's travel never.
- [01:08]
Sean
All right, what's up? We got our friend Will O'Brien here and Will is an Irish guy who talks my ear off about the ocean. And I honestly wasn't thinking about the ocean at all until I saw maybe a tweet of yours which was basically saying the ocean is the new space. And how there's companies like SpaceX and others that have built huge hundred billion dollar plus companies about exploring space, about putting satellites in space, about reusable rockets, and that there's an opportunity for a similar wave of. Of disruption for startups in the ocean. And I love that idea. I honestly, I'm never going to do it. So I'll just put that up front. I'm never going to do something like that. I think 99.9% of people listening to this will also never go do that thing. But just from a. I don't know, just as a fan of the game, just as a founder, I kind of love the theory and the, the intellectual idea here of what is the opportunity. And then if you're one of the rare few hardcore founders that can go do this, you know, this is going to be right up your alley. So that's my interest in it. Sam, I'm curious, from your perspective, are you the same as me?
- [02:14]
Sam
Dude, I won't even go on a cruise ship. Like, like I was at a party the other day and the, the, like one liner or the icebreaker was what, something you're deathly afraid of? To me it's being in the ocean to where I can't see land. So like I'm not even going to be out there. But yeah, I agree with your premise.
- [02:34]
Sean
And Will, did I kind of frame your argument right as to like the potential that you see as far as, you know, the business opportunity of building startups that are focused on the ocean?
- [02:45]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The framing is like, you know, something like this. It's like, you know, you know, everyone is like here standing on Earth, like looking towards the stars and absolutely we should be doing that and we should be going like full pelt with trying to go interplanetary, trying to put a base on the moon and take the dark side of the moon and then go from there and use that as a landing coin to go to Mars. And we should be trying to fly supersonic as well. But then look, if you're trying to build a startup, you're always asking yourself, what is everyone else looking to do and where's everyone else going and where is underrated? And I suppose I grew up by the seaside in the southwest of Ireland. I've always been obsessed with the ocean. If I wasn't on it, in it or near it growing up, there was something wrong in the same way that you're afraid? Some of it, yeah. I'm kind of like when I'm away from it, I feel something wrong with me. So I've always been thinking about it and I mean, if you just look at it in fundamental terms, the ocean economy right now is already massive. It's not like the future space economy is going to be massive. The ocean economy is massive. It's like $3 trillion in annual spend in different ways. It covers 70% of the planet. Three billion people rely on it as their primary source of a billion as their primary source of income. And then while we have robots on Mars and these low cost drones going in our skies, the technology in our oceans still pales in comparison. You look at the ships that are out there today, much of the technology is very same and similar to what we had years ago. The unmanned underwater drones are pretty much the same as well. The key core technology stack supporting the the key pillars of the ocean, whether it be transport, fisheries, defense, energy, biodiversity, all these areas. It's just like it's the same old stagnant incumbents, large scale incumbents offering solutions that are running on ancient software and there's just very little innovation going on there. It's like you ask someone what is a sexy ocean startup? And it's like they're kind of scratching their heads for a bit. Whereas you ask them about space, it's like SpaceX straight away, it's like you know it straight away, it's like you ask them about aerospace, it's like, oh, boom. So, yeah, this is like the, kind of like the. The core of the thesis.
- [05:03]
Sam
Sean, you just wound him up really easily. This is going to be one of the. This is going to be one of those podcasts that we've had. We've only had maybe five of them ever, where at the end of the hour we are like, we're no longer podcasting, we're getting into the ocean business.
- [05:18]
Sean
Yeah.
- [05:22]
Sam
Like I.
- [05:24]
Will O'Brien
Let's go.
- [05:25]
Sean
So, Sam, he just said a bunch of stats, so which of those surprised you? So I'm just gonna rattle a couple back. He said, all right, this one probably doesn't surprise you. 70% of the Earth is covered in water. I think only 25% has ever been explored. He said a billion people rely on the ocean for the primary source of income.3 billion as their diet. Explain that. What's the diet and the jobs? 1 of the income 1.
- [05:50]
Will O'Brien
Oh, it's just like people like, you know, most of them. I mean, the human societies generally settle along coastlines. Like this is like a common trend.
- [05:58]
Sam
Yeah, but I'm in New York, but I don't eat fish every day.
- [06:01]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, but in developed countries it's not as we've developed logistics, which means you can go down the street and walk into some sushi bar and get bluefin tuna. Probably flew in last night from Japan. However, if you are in Mogadishu or Somalia or something like that, this might be a bit more difficult because the systems are not set up. And it's important to remember, most of the world does not live in developed countries. So, yeah, most humans just live along a coastline naturally. Then easiest source of food for them to get is fish.
- [06:34]
Sean
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- [07:02]
Sam
All right, so what were some other stats, Sean, that caught your eye?
- [07:04]
Sean
A billion people rely on it for their income. So what are the jobs that you're talking about here? So are you talking about fisheries, shipping? Is it like defense? Are those the big three? Or am I missing something big and obvious?
- [07:17]
Will O'Brien
The, the framing for me, how I think about like the ocean economy is like you generally kind of break it up into like three categories, right? Like you have like the biosphere, right, which is like your fisheries, it's your ecosystem restoration, it's like your environmental mapping, it's science in the ocean, it's like all around like biospher management. Then you have the kind of prosperity oriented part around it. This is the kind of commercial, this is like your energies, your infrastructure, it's your oil and gas, it's your data infrastructure, these sorts of things. It's your logistics, shipping. And then you have keeping the seas safe, which is like defense and security, border security, critical infrastructure protection, deploying ships in the South China Sea, these sorts of things.
- [07:58]
Sean
And so give me an example of a startup today that's doing really well, that's based on this kind of ocean economy that you're talking about.
- [08:05]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, I mean I think one player that's like interesting in the online systems place that's been around for, for a long time, I think over a decade now and was really kind of one of the first players to start doing interesting new things in the ocean is saildrone.
- [08:18]
Sean
What problem are they solving? What does Saildrone do?
- [08:20]
Will O'Brien
I suppose they are solving the kind of data gathering at scale in the ocean problem. They build these like autonomous sailboats, these huge vessels.
- [08:31]
Sam
They look amazing, they look awesome.
- [08:34]
Will O'Brien
They build these huge vessels, these massive sailboats that can basically stay at sea for many, many months at a time. You can put a load of fancy sensors on them that can take data from the water, that can gather video footage at the surface and these sorts of things and then relay them back to someone in the United States. It might be a government agency like NOAA who want to know how much fish is in the Alaskan, in the seas off Alaska. They could sell it to the US Navy to know how deep is the waters in and around Guam or Something like that. And then they sell these things as a service. But they're a very interesting founder there. Seems like a super sharp guy who's been obsessed with sailing for decades. Again, a lot of these ocean founders, you see, they're very obsessed with the ocean. It's the very thing people very often get obsessed about and then try to make a business out of it.
- [09:26]
Sam
What's your business do, Will? What's Ulysses, Ulysses or Ulysses?
- [09:30]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, yeah, Ulysses, Ulysses. Were building a general purpose autonomy platform for maritime operations.
- [09:37]
Sean
Say that like we're stupid.
- [09:38]
Sam
Just like just pretend, pretend that we're stupid.
- [09:41]
Sean
Yeah, yeah, I know it's hard to believe, but just go ahead and dumb that down for me.
- [09:46]
Will O'Brien
Autonomous robots for the ocean to do. To do important things.
- [09:49]
Sam
Okay, and what's one important thing that you would do? You would like, for example, you would go to a pipe in the ocean and determine if it's got a hole in it.
- [10:00]
Will O'Brien
That is something you could do. Our first business line has been working with this weird plant that you've probably never heard of. There's this plant in the ocean that's probably about 10 times more abundant than coral reefs. It is 35 times better than rainforest at removing carbon. It holds about 20% of the carbon in the ocean, supports about a quarter of the world's most critically important fish stocks. And it's called seagrass. It's basically just grass in the ocean. And this plant is dying off at an insane rate all around the world. But 7% loss per annum, if you follow these trends, we lose all our.
- [10:36]
Sam
7% a year of this thing is going away.
- [10:39]
Sean
And why is it dying? Is it because pollution or what's the cost?
- [10:42]
Will O'Brien
There's a few things. I mean, water quality is like a very common, you know, cause for loss. Other things are just like construction, construction around like coastlines digging it up, dredging, changing ocean temperatures, changing like ocean currents. These sorts of things impact it. And basically the kind of context there is, there's a lot of governments in around all over the world really, really panicking around this. If they lose their seagrasses, they lose their fish stocks. If they lose their fish stocks. You have the 1 billion people who rely on it and 3 billion people who rely on it for food and the billion people for income. And they're in a tough situation. And basically restoring it that is bringing it back is currently a very manual process.
- [11:26]
Sam
And how are you guys doing that?
- [11:27]
Will O'Brien
We built autonomous robots to do it.
- [11:30]
Sam
And you're actually building the robots yourself or when you said you're building a platform. I thought that meant you're allowing other people to build it and use your technology to track them.
- [11:39]
Will O'Brien
Yeah. So for this first use case, we've built a kind of custom robotic payload. When you're starting and trying to do something new, it's kind of important to kind of get initial traction in a weird place. And I think if we just built something and hope that people would use it for something, if we just built the platform, which is like an underwater vehicle and a surface vehicle that dock together, we might have trouble getting traction. But we started off with this initial use case. We basically built these attachments that go onto our under order vehicle that do collecting seeds, planting seeds, measuring their growth to kind of get this initial traction. So in our first year we did a million dollars in revenue, just kind of like first year, five person team based here in San Francisco.
- [12:21]
Sam
Why would someone pay you to do this?
- [12:23]
Will O'Brien
So the reason people pass is because it's a critically important ocean ecosystem that if lost, has these very negative downstream impacts. That's one reason. Another reason is lots of governments now around the world have implemented laws that restrict your ability to damage this plant or if you damage it, you have to pay someone to plant it. So they're paying us to plant it. It's compliance driven restoration. So that's the kind of contract we have contract in Western Australia, we have a contract in Florida, we have contract in Virginia. And they're all kind of for these general reasons that their compliance Dr. Driven restoration or voluntary lead restoration.
- [13:01]
Sean
Sam, I put how important is seagrass into chatgpt. Here's what I said. Seagrass is wildly important to the world and it basically says it captures carbon 35 times faster than rainforest, which I think he said. And then it says it's like a baby crib for the ocean. The seagrass basically is where small fish, crabs, seahorses, and even endangered species and turtles, they're born and they live early on in their life. And if lost, then you would. It says lose the seagrass and entire marine ecosystems collapse.
- [13:33]
Will O'Brien
Yeah.
- [13:34]
Sam
Well, what's crazy is you okay the mission check, like on board. Amazing. You kind of skipped the headline, Sean. Did we. He, he built a robotics business set in the first year. You've only, I think you, I think you said you only raised $2 million or something like that. So with only 2 million in funding, in your first 18 months of business, you did a million in revenue, is that right?
- [13:56]
Sean
Yeah.
- [13:56]
Will O'Brien
And just five people as well.
- [13:58]
Sean
Is there something new about building like a robotics company? Today, that lets you do it way cheaper. Like, did something change? Like, oh, we all use whatever. You know, it's like when the Raspberry PI came out, then it's like, oh, we can now have this little computer for 35 bucks or whatever. Is there something that does that's made it a lot cheaper? Or maybe just there's more talent? What's changed?
- [14:19]
Will O'Brien
3D printers has been huge. That's just like a game changer. It means just like the speed of iteration has gone up massively. It's easier now to get parts overnight as well and just get sheet metal cod. And the cost of a lot of things has gone down massively as well. With the advent of electric vehicles, batteries kind of went down massively, and a lot of electronic components with drones, the motors went down massively in cost. For us as well, a critical enabler of what we do is Starlink. Because the way our system works is we have this autonomous boat. It's like a surface vehicle. This is our mother ship. And then we have a docking system that releases these daughter robots, these autonomous underwater vehicles, to do the actual critical activity in the ocean that you want to do. And we wouldn't be able to communicate with these assets without something like Starlink. You had iridium before, but the bandwidth on that wasn't that strong. So you have, like, other, like, kind of wine out features like that.
- [15:24]
Sean
And that company you were talking about, Saildrone, they've raised like, over $100 million. It looks like they're valued 500 to a billion dollars. That's. That's interesting. There's another one called Saronic. Sam, do you know Saronic?
- [15:35]
Sam
No. How do you spell it?
- [15:36]
Sean
S, A, R, O, N, I, C. And Will, you probably know a little bit more about this company than me. I think this Joe Lonsdale seeded this company, right?
- [15:44]
Will O'Brien
Yes. Yeah.
- [15:44]
Sam
God, this looks sick as well.
- [15:46]
Sean
So, like, when we had Joe on the podcast and I was at his house, he was telling me about this company. Should have just invested on the spot. But he was basically like, we're building drone, like, drones for the water and, you know, drones in the whip for defense. Just like Anduril's doing it for the sky. And. And, you know, modern warfare has turned into drone based. They're building these unmanned surface vehicles, USVs, for the ocean. And they talked about, how did you know this? Like, the US Navy. Sam, just take a guess how many ships are in the US Navy fleet.
- [16:19]
Will O'Brien
Just take a.
- [16:20]
Sean
What's the number?
- [16:21]
Sam
Oh, I don't know. 500? What? It's hard to even say 100.
- [16:26]
Sean
Okay, so you're a lot closer than I thought. I would have guessed that. We have thousands of ships. We have 300 ships in the Navy.
- [16:32]
Sam
Is a ship considered like an aircraft carrier? Because those are huge, right? Those are like cities.
- [16:36]
Sean
Sure, but.
- [16:37]
Sam
Oh my God.
- [16:38]
Sean
But only 300. That's just like a very small number to me. And we have 67 submarines.
- [16:44]
Sam
That's it.
- [16:45]
Sean
67, dude, I had more kids at my three year old's birthday party. That's insane to me. So we got 300 ships or whatever and basically every ship is like, I don't know the exact cost of it, but let me, let me pull. I think they're like, Will correct me if I'm wrong, but like the average cost of these is something like. Or maybe the average cost of these contracts, like $250 million every time you get contract to do one of these. And so you're a startup like Sironic and you're like, all you have to do is basically say, all right, we're going to come in, we're going to build the most innovative autonomous vehicles here and we're going to operate. You know, what Anduril did was, was remarkable. So what Anduril did was in Silicon Valley, the smartest tech people, nobody was working on defense. Google had famously shut down its defense project and defense was taboo. Like you're going to make weapons. That was not cool at the time. And it was. There was basically zero, zero weapons startups in San Francisco. And what they did was they said, we're going to do this. We're going to use the Silicon Valley method and talent to do this. We're going to change the cost structure. So all the big defense primes were operating on what's called cost plus model. And so their incentive really was to have really high cost operations because they were making 10% on top of whatever the cost was. Right. So the incentive model sort of screwed up. And that's how you get, you know, a single airplane that's like a billion dollars or something like that to get made. And so it was costing the government a lot. These guys had no incentive to innovate, no incentive to cut costs. And they were using talent that was not the smartest engineering talent in the world, which was all centered in Silicon Valley. And then Anduril comes out. Paul Malucki and Trey and others, they basically came out and what they said was, we believe this is important. We believe that America needs this and we believe we should Put the best talent in the world on this problem. And they've built now a $20 to $30 billion company doing this. And the reason I find this exciting is that I love these huge opportunities that are hidden in plain sight. I talked to a friend recently who knew Elon and I said, what was Elon like? Were you impressed with Elon? He goes, I was impressed with Elon, but not because he was the smartest guy in the room. You know, we would be at a party, there's 20 people, you couldn't say, oh my God, that's the guy. He goes, but the thing that Elon did better than everybody else was that Elon looked down at the ground and saw a trillion dollar opportunity that was just sitting there. You know, before Elon. It's not like there were a bunch of people trying to build, you know, rocket companies or electric car companies. It wasn't like they were trying and failed. And he succeeded. They weren't even trying. And he goes, the beautiful part about Elon is that he saw those and he didn't ignore it like the rest of us. And the idea of let's go to Mars was there, it was available to all of us and we were all blind to it. And so similarly, I think Anduril did that in the defense space. And now it looks like Saronic is basically doing that in the sort of ocean defense space where you have this combination of elite talent at robotics and AI and autonomy and you pair it with this old industry and I think you have a pretty unique window to build a very big company doing this.
- [19:53]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, they're building, I think of it like they're building the Humvees and we're building the Toyota Hiluxes, right? Like they're building like these like ultra fast, like defense focused like vehicles. And they're going to make the South China Sea a hellscape and make China now want to cross that ocean and keep Taiwan safe. If they keep going on the path they're doing, and they're doing like an incredible job at that. And then we have, we occupy a different niche where we just want every single day to day tasks that is done at sea. We want it done on our platform. So we want all the servicing done by Ulysses platforms and these sorts of things. There's a lot of things that are making the ocean very important in this century more than previous ones. Warfare is a good example. Every other single war we've fought in the last three decades until now has been in a desert. Now we're going to the Ocean that requires a complete retooling of the military, you know, and just even how we think about warfare fundamentally needs to change. Like the climate question is ultimately an ocean question. Like the ocean is like the world's largest natural carbon sink. It is like where most of the life on Earth lives. It is, you know, one of our biggest sources of like food. In a world where like a population is growing and food scarcity is always a question. Even just like you look at AI, right? Like the data infrastructure build out for AI is going to be like enormous, right? And basically that's going to require more data infrastructure that is like cables connecting different parts of the world transmitting data. We're going to need more data centers, we're going to need more energy. These are all things like we're already putting and testing, putting data centers in the ocean. The cooling costs go down massively, they become more efficient.
- [21:34]
Sean
So let's go back. So there's already pipes under the ocean that basically. Internet pipes under the ocean, correct?
- [21:40]
Will O'Brien
Yeah. I mean most of the information that tried our Internet connection now is most of that is like traveling through, is traveling underground.
- [21:49]
Sean
Who built that? Is that the government built that or Google built that? Who put those pipes in the ocean to do that?
- [21:55]
Will O'Brien
So a lot of the initial infrastructure build out for it in the ocean came from telecoms companies actually.
- [22:02]
Sam
Yeah, like in the 80s, Sean, there's a handful of telecom companies that were startups and they're some of the fastest growing companies in the world. So like imagine the AI companies today that are scaling to 100 million in revenue in a year. That was what they did they die or what happened. A lot of them are still running. And then there was some of the, you know, if you look at like one of the biggest frauds on earth, like it's like Bernie Madoff. And then like the third one is actually one of these telecom companies that was laying pipes in the, in the ocean. But a lot of them are still around. They're just like small b. They're not small, but they're B2B companies that you wouldn't even know. But they can be like a $10 billion a year company. But in the 80s, right? Well, maybe I don't know if you know this, but in the 80s that was like the birth of a lot of this, wasn't it?
- [22:46]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, yeah, yeah, massively. And now you're seeing a transition to the build out being coming from faang, from like big tech. And soon I think it'll be like the AI companies.
- [22:55]
Sean
So what you're saying Will now is that AI companies need these data centers. Just, you know, huge amounts of GPUs in a data center. And those data centers need cooling, they need power, they need tons of things. And they need to. Ideally they need to be close to places where people are using it. And what you're saying is that somebody's going to build a data center in the ocean or people are already building data centers in the ocean and who's doing that? Or is this a future idea? And why are they doing that? Why is that a good idea?
- [23:23]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, so I think the first experiment of this was a Microsoft project. They did it. There's a YC startup as well run by friends of mine, Sam Mendel, he's got a company called Network Ocean. They're building and operating, starting to building and operate these things.
- [23:38]
Sean
Are they actually underwater or are they on top of the water, just out in the ocean?
- [23:42]
Will O'Brien
The plan is for it to be subsea. And again, these are the sorts of businesses that Ulysses we want to be the kind of servicing partner for in the future when they need maintenance, when they need inspections done, when they like, it's like us, they're coming to and we're selling them like a kind of in the box solution to. I think the biggest opportunity in this like, you know, paradigm in the future where more and more data cables are being laid subsea is actually in the protection of them. Right. So I don't know if you guys are familiar what's going on in like the Baltic Sea in places, but like I think in the Last year about 11 cables have been caught by foreign actors and like, you know, basically the kind of.
- [24:16]
Sam
And these cables, by the way, they're like, it's like a human sized tunnel, right?
- [24:20]
Sean
Are they on the ocean floor or are they like floating in the ocean?
- [24:24]
Sam
Like to say cable, we're not talking like, like a rope that you're pulling it. It's like a, it's like a tunnel, right?
- [24:30]
Will O'Brien
And I'm like, okay, like literally the, like the Chinese are literally publicly advertising these cutters that they have these cable cutters, right? They're literally putting in the South China morning press. China unveils powerful deep sea cable cutter could reset the roller. They're not even fucking hiding this. Like they're cutting the cables. They're like, yeah, we're just look how big our cable cutter is. Like this is just like the new paradigm. And then like, you know, they send these like little like, you know, Taiwanese ships into the. Are these Chinese ships into the Baltic Sea on like fishing missions, right? Like, what the hell are they doing in the Baltic Sea on fishing missions? Like, they're clearly just cutting cables. And then like two days later, oh, cable cut. Dude.
- [25:08]
Sam
Calling, calling this a cable cutter is like calling a robo a ship. You know what I mean? Like, maybe technically it's, it's correct, but they need to rebrand this because what you're showing us is basically like a huge submarine, you know, like I'm thinking of like a clip, not scissors. Yeah. This is insane.
- [25:28]
Sean
So they're going down and they're cutting this. And what does that do? Like, does a country lose Internet or is it just like, I mean, damage it?
- [25:35]
Will O'Brien
Okay, I'll give you this vision, right? So these cables run between like military bases as well, right. And okay, let's say there's like a hot war breaks out in like the South China Sea. Right. First target then is going to be like a military base in like the Pacific somewhere like Guam. Right. One, if you, if you want to like completely scramble what, you know, their understanding of and situational awareness of what is going on, you are going to be laying, sending these subsea drones down there to go and cut the cables. That is giving them like comms, that's giving them energy and you're going to be like scrambling their airwaves with like, you know, electromagnetic interference. And that's how you're going to like just completely prevent like American military responses in the Pacific.
- [26:12]
Sam
Right, but how many cables, like you're talking to two dummies. How many cables does America rely on?
- [26:20]
Will O'Brien
There's like, not actually that many. Right, like as in like there's like an insane amount of data that goes over them, but there's only about like 600 active.
- [26:28]
Sean
I'm so impressed that you knew that number. That's insane to me. So there's not a lot of redundancy you're saying?
- [26:33]
Will O'Brien
No, no, not at all. Like, they're, they're very difficult to lay. Right. And you need to respond quickly. So yeah, like, I mean there's like many critical things that rely on them.
- [26:41]
Sean
But like, yeah, you're way better off defending them with unmanned water drones than trying to lay back a pipes down there and leave them undefended.
- [26:50]
Will O'Brien
You need to be persistently out at sea, like century style. In the same way that Anduril started with these border systems to see what was coming in and over the land border. We need the exact same type of systems out at sea permanently just sitting there on top of them. They need to be cheap so that you can deploy them massively at scale. The ocean is huge, so they need to be cheap to be scalable. You need to be able to see what's going on at the surface and you need to be able to see what's going on subsurface. And fundamentally that's like the platform that we've developed. We have this surface vehicle with a docking system that can drop an underwater vehicle. And we've made it all about 10 times cheaper than anyone else. So that's. Seagrass is a nice place where we started.
- [27:33]
Sean
How deep do your vehicles go? Do they go to the bottom of the ocean where these pipes are?
- [27:37]
Will O'Brien
So for the Baltic Sea, I mean, it's one of the shallower seas and this is the major kind of activity area of activity where this is going right now. So our vehicle works in that sea at all depth profiles in that SE sea. So for the Baltic Sea, part of works when you get into like gnarlier parts of the ocean, like some of the Pacific where you're getting down to like 8,000 meters, right, like Mount Everest, you know, levels of depth, we can't go there yet. It just starts getting difficult. But like, yeah, we will be adding future vehicles to the fleet that can do.
- [28:11]
Sam
How old are you, Will?
- [28:12]
Will O'Brien
I'm 27, Sean.
- [28:14]
Sam
So when you and I moved to San Francisco in. Well, I moved there in 12 and we're about the same age. It was the sharing economy that was the thing. So it was Airbn and Uber and Lift were the winners. And then there was a bunch of derivative things like Airbnb for garages or, you know, or for storage. A few years later it was AI or Crypto. So like Bitcoin and Coinbase were winners and there was a bunch of like silly things. Right now this is so strange to me, it's AI, but it's also. Well, it's whatever category you guys would go in, you're not quite defense tech. But it's like wild to me that this shift has happened because 10 years ago I would have told you, like, you know, that was when Boom Supersonic was starting and a few other things I would say, this is, this is foolish. What are you guys doing? We're technology. This is a technology city. Why don't you do like, software? It's. To hear you say this, it's so foreign to me. It's also so interesting.
- [29:03]
Will O'Brien
For me, it's like a no brainer. I mean, like, you know, the low hanging fruit of software has been eaten, right? You guys, like, you know, it's like.
- [29:11]
Sean
Yeah, we ate it.
- [29:13]
Sam
Like, how many more CRMs are there?
- [29:15]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, exactly. The boomers got cheap real estate. You guys got like B2B SaaS, right? Like, it's like, that's like. And now it's like on us to do like something where like the next frontier is, which is like fundamental hardware. And then like, also it's like, it's like a no brainer. You look at like the top 10 most valuable companies in the world right now. It's like seven out of 10 of them have like a hardware, like an extreme like hardware component, right? Like the biggest companies being built today are hardware companies. And also in a world where you can just like vibe code overnight, like a CRM or a, a Salesforce or not Salesforce, but like a calendly competitor, it's like, okay, well, is there really a moat in like these sorts of things anymore?
- [29:50]
Sam
It's like, yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. And I think it's so fascinating because. So when Sean and I lived in San Francisco, if, if someone who looked like you, so you look, you're wearing a Ford Bronco shirt, I bet you you're wearing cowboy boots and you got a little bit of swag to you and you like, if you were to, if you were to talk about what you're talking about, it would have been like, you're, you're so out of touch. You're out of touch for the, for the, for the YC group, about to touch people. Like, it's just so interesting to me and I think it's great.
- [30:18]
Sean
So there's a, I did a podcast with James Crier and he has this thing about technology windows. Sam, did you ever see this part?
- [30:24]
Sam
No.
- [30:25]
Sean
Technology windows. So he basically says, all right, there's a reason, there's a, there's a, almost like a scientific reason why, why what you just described happens, happens. And so he basically says, like, when a wave of startups comes out, it's because of a technology change. So, you know, for example, an inflection. So when we. You're right. When we first moved to San Francisco, I moved in 2012 and the mobile window was open and that's when Instagram, Uber, Snapchat, like a bunch of companies got built that relied on you having a computer with you at all times that had Internet connection, that had an accelerometer, that had a map GPS feature in it. And then all these companies could get built. But that window opens for a very, like a Fixed amount of time. And basically like you said, the low hanging fruit all gets eaten. And so he, he went back all the way to the railroads and he's like, the railroad technology window was open for 40 years. And like if you just look, there was not another successful railroad company after that 40 year period. And because all the opportunities basically got eaten, automobiles was 25 years. And so in a 25 year window, you got Buick, Dodge, Ford, Cadillac, GM, Chevrolet, Lincoln, Chrysler, all of it within a very short window. And then you had nothing for another about 80 years. And then the window reopened because of battery technology and you got Tesla and Rivian. And so that was almost a new technology window around automobiles because the tech had changed again around batteries. And so he was basically saying like B2B SaaS has had a 20 year window and now AI software, AI starting in 2016. And that's like the current window that we're in. And I would say, you know, what Will is doing and what a lot of, of smart entrepreneurs are doing right now is they're in the technology window of AI, robotics and 3D printing. And basically those three technologies have, have opened up the door to build new things that couldn't have been built 10, 15, 20 years ago. So this is what a technology window looks like. Just check this out. If you're on, if you're on audio, you have to be on YouTube to see this, but I'm sharing my screen here. So it basically says like step one, the technology is invented and only the hobbyists are playing with it out of interest and creativity. Right? And then two is the status moment. One of the hobbyists achieves status and wealth using the tech. So, you know, for example, so this is like, you know, Marc Andreessen on the, on the COVID of Time barefoot, because the hobbyist Internet guy became rich by building, you know, the browser. And then this happened again with social networking. This happened again with Elon and Palmer Luckey and all those guys right now who've, who've had their status moment where, you know, Palmer was like literally like living in a RV, building VR headsets for like 90 bucks using spare parts. He was a hobbyist. And then the hobbyist got the wealth, the status moment, when he sold to Facebook for $3 billion. And then, you know, same thing with Elon. Elon was building in relative obscurity. Both OpenAI. OpenAI was a nonprofit. It was relatively obscure for the first five years that it was out that they were doing their thing. But now Sam Altman and Elon and Palmer again With Andrew have had a new status moment. And then there's what he calls knowledge diffusion, which is suddenly there's conferences, there's podcasts like this, there's newsletters, there's Twitter, where people are sharing ideas about how to do this, what's going on, and you get this explosion of stuff. And then competition floods and then the new incumbents are born, and then the new incumbent regime takes over due to their defensibility. Like they build something that is defensible, maybe because it's hardware, maybe because it's. It requires scale, maybe it has a network effect. And the technology window closed is 90% closed. And you'll only have a few exceptions from there on out. All right, let's take a quick break because as you know, we are on the HubSpot podcast network, but we're not the only ones. There's other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you like them, maybe you should check them out. One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew. And whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make, the new habits you could do, the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference, that's what that podcast is all about. Check it out. It's called Nudge. And you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.
- [34:32]
Sam
It's so funny, Sean. And to meet Will, who's like in the thick of actually what you're describing.
- [34:38]
Sean
Yeah, Will, when did you start, Were you like, were you a hobbyist? And when did you start with doing what? Doing what you're doing. Like when were you messing around with drones or ocean tech?
- [34:47]
Will O'Brien
So, yeah, I mean, like I, like, as I said, I've been like in the ocean, on the ocean, near the ocean, since I was a kid, diving, surfing, whatever, wakeboarding, all these sorts of things growing up, but never had built in it really before this kind of scooter sharing startup thing popped off. I was working in that my co founders all kind of had been tinkering and these sorts of things. But again, none of us had ever actually really done anything in the ocean, which, which I actually think is a massive benefit because none of us came in with these preconceived notions for how subsea drones should work. Two of my co founders were building aerial drones in a drone delivery startup before. So they took a lot of the primitives from that. One of them had worked on self driving cars, took some of the ideas from that. But again, I think there's definitely this idea that. I agree with, that to really actually shake up an industry. It's probably good if you don't come from it, because we came to it and we thought initially that we were going to be maybe using someone else's platform and repurposing it. But we looked at all of the subsea drones on the market and they were crap. They cost like, they were like one of the ones we were looking at which actually had the specs that would have met what we wanted to do, cost like 500 grand. That's like a quarter of our pre seed to do what we want. And then our cto Jamie, he just went into a cave for a few days and just came back with a design for a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle. And then we tested and we were like, oh shit, this works. Oh shit. It's like 10, 20 times cheaper than anything we could have bought. So it's like sometimes you just need a new idea and an artist to go into a cave and then you can change things.
- [36:32]
Sam
That's how all the great things, that's how all the biggest problems have been solved.
- [36:36]
Will O'Brien
This is like, I mean all religions, like Muhammad went into the cave, like Jesus went into the desert. You know, like all these like prophets, like they go off into the old and they come back with like this like secret. And then, you know, someone else spreads the word for them. Right. Like it's like, yeah, St. Peter does it in like the Catholic Church. And like. Well, there's. So yes, this is a common archetype that. And yeah, that does work. Yes.
- [36:57]
Sean
You, you said something earlier about how a billion people rely on the sea for their food. Has anybody done, you know, food or like tuna or salmon in a way? Are they doing anything interesting there with like whether it's like lab grown or, or something innovative?
- [37:14]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, yeah. My friend's got a very, very interesting startup called Wild Type, which is like sustainable sushi grade salmon. So basically that's like cultivated seafood. So their first product, like their.
- [37:27]
Sean
What is, what do you mean by cultivated?
- [37:29]
Will O'Brien
It's grown. It's grown. It's not like farmed in or caught.
- [37:32]
Sean
At sea, like grown in a lab or grown.
- [37:34]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, like in a. Yeah, exactly. In this like industrial process. Yeah, they can basically grow cells and then put them together in such a way that it tastes like sashimi grade salmon. So you know, in the same way that Elon started off with like a, a sports car, right, they're starting off with like your sashimi grade salmon, the highest end salmon to get. And I've tried it. It's great.
- [37:55]
Sean
This is in San Francisco. It looks like a brewery.
- [37:58]
Will O'Brien
Yes, exactly. It's like similar ideas. I mean, look, breweries are like where so much of the best kind of biotech innovation has come from. People building mass industrial processes for cultivating food for a very long period of time, in fact.
- [38:17]
Sam
So you're telling me that someone is growing salmon that I can go eat right now?
- [38:23]
Sean
Yeah, yeah.
- [38:24]
Will O'Brien
I mean, I got it through my friend. I don't know if they're in stores yet. They're still undergoing FDA approval. But like. Yeah, no, none of these nasty heavy metals or microplastics in them, you know, it's reducing pressure on fish stocks. You know, this is, this is good stuff. It doesn't have any of the nasty like parasites that you get in some of this, like farm salmon as well.
- [38:48]
Sam
So.
- [38:49]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, definitely. I think things like this will be, will be important.
- [38:53]
Sam
Holy shit.
- [38:55]
Sean
Crazy to me.
- [38:55]
Sam
This is crazy.
- [38:56]
Sean
Is it, Is it like the lab grown meats where it's like $10,000 an ounce. It's like, it tastes. We can. We made. You either pick. You either have the cheap thing like beyond meat or impossible foods, but it doesn't taste great, or it's not good for you, it's made with a bunch of chemicals, or you have the real thing, but it's super expensive and so nobody can afford it.
- [39:17]
Will O'Brien
Well, I think, given that like my friend shared it with me, that it's not that expensive, but it's.
- [39:24]
Sean
You're not that good of friends.
- [39:25]
Will O'Brien
Exactly. Yeah. But I think this stuff is like sooner than we think. It's around the corner. Wow.
- [39:30]
Sean
These guys did $100 million Series B in 2022. That's pretty crazy.
- [39:34]
Sam
What. What else is cool? Will, tell me everything. What the guys like you are into, like some more ocean.
- [39:41]
Will O'Brien
Some crazy ones.
- [39:43]
Sam
Yes.
- [39:43]
Sean
Yeah.
- [39:44]
Will O'Brien
Okay. All right. This one is. Is wild, right? Buckle up. Okay. Ocean treasure hunting, right? So there is actually hundreds of wrecks out there in the ocean today that potentially have more than a billion dollars on them. Gold bullions that the Spanish were bringing back from their conquests and then they got hit by a storm or these sorts of things and there's probably thousands that have millions of dollars of funds in them. So governments, the source, governments, the Spaniards, the Portuguese still have claim on these things. However, there is precedent in history for you to do these kind of profit shar agreements where it's like if we find that and we restore, we give you back all your artifacts, we give you back everything. But you know, we sell some of them. We get to, we get. Can we, can we keep some? You can do this, right?
- [40:32]
Sean
It's like these models where. It's like these SaaS. Negotiation companies are like, hey, if we go and save you money on your vendors, we keep 20%. It's that. Except for you go to the Spanish royal government and you're like, hey, there are. If we find any hidden treasures in the ocean, can we keep a couple bars for ourselves?
- [40:50]
Will O'Brien
Exactly. Ram for piracy. Who's building this?
- [40:53]
Sam
So my friend used to do this. His name's Chip Forsyth. And he would be like, hey, I'm going off the coast of whatever to.
- [40:59]
Sean
Go, bro, you did not have a friend that used to do this. That's insane.
- [41:03]
Sam
Chip Forsyth, you know, he went, he.
- [41:05]
Sean
Went off the coast and just what, scuba dived for? What was he doing?
- [41:08]
Sam
It was Chip and AJ Forsyth, who I think you've met. Aj he's crazy. His brother Chip, they basically, the way it works now is it's kind of like a movie. Like you have these crazy people and you get other people to finance it and you say, if we find this treasure, you know, here's the agreement on how we split it. And they would go off the coat, they would somehow narrow in on where they think it is. They would spend a week trying to find it. And most of the time you don't find it, but occasionally you hit the lottery. Is that, I mean, is that right, Will, how it works now?
- [41:33]
Will O'Brien
Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. So there's like fundamentally two parts of like a mission. It's like, or three parts is like there's like, you know, the pre mission, you know, negotiating like, you know, looking through historical records to see like where we think it could be, you know, kind of scoping it out and also getting permission so that when you do the recovery, you have like some chance of being able to hold onto it it. Then there's this kind of scouting where you're actually on site and you're doing scouting and you're basically using sonar to scan this EMED and understand what's there. And then there's recovery where you're bringing out these gnarly JCB style ROVs and remote operated vehicles that go down and just dig it all up and bring it back up.
- [42:11]
Sean
And you have your party and Is anybody doing this? Do you know someone who's made $10 million finding treasures in the ocean?
- [42:20]
Will O'Brien
I know some people working on this that haven't shared their plans publicly yet, so I won't share it. But there is some exciting, exciting developments coming in this space that we may or may not be helping with.
- [42:29]
Sean
Did you say there's 3 million shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean?
- [42:34]
Will O'Brien
So I'm not sure specifically on a total amount of shipwrecks. I wouldn't be surprised if there's that many shipwrecks, but there's hundreds that potentially have billions on them. Wow.
- [42:44]
Sam
Okay, that's insane. What else?
- [42:48]
Will O'Brien
Okay, I'll give you a banger quote where I there's this Canadian billionaire called Ross who had this quote a few years ago. He said, give me a tanker of iron filings and I will give you an ice age. Right. What he meant by that is you can actually alter the kind of weather of the earth by dunking iron into the ocean. Basically many parts of the ocean are low in iron, they need more iron. And if you add iron to these parts of the ocean, you stimulate like algae growing at the surface. Algae then draws down carbon and then the fish eat it and then the fish die and they fall to the bottom of the sea and then so the carbon goes from the air into the bottom of the ocean. Right. So this is generally good because we have too much carbon in the atmosphere. We also want more fish. But you need to balance it because you don't want to put too much in and then just like there's too much salmon and then there's like salmon take over a certain ecosystem which is maybe not good or something like that. Or there's a. Basically when you're doing stuff with ecosystems, it's very difficult to predict how things are going to pan out. You need to be careful. So this dude didn't do it that carefully. It went out off the coast of Vancouver, partnered up with these Native Americans and just did this experiment where he just basically dumped off a load of iron filings removed through his quantifications thousands of tons of carbon off the coast there that year. They had the biggest take of salmon ever as a result. But the kind of decile authorities did not like his experimentation. And the Canadians equivalent like the CIA busted his home and he got a warrant and he got in a lot of trouble. So people haven't really done it since then because he kind of got like he was the kind of first crazy, maybe the first hobbyist to do something like this at scale. But I think there is going to be a billion dollar company built in like marine geoengineering of some description. So I'm Catholic, so it's like there's this. A lot of my beliefs around environmentalism and stuff like that comes from this Christian notion of stewardship, that we should look after our lands and our seas because it's our duty to. And I think this is kind of where we're going with how we manage the climate. Climate used to be this kind of let's avoid the worst case scenario. And it was just very kind of like, let's stop emitting carbon. But I think there's a more interesting idea of this stewardship, I think of environmentalism, where we actually just control. We steward the planet, we take control, we get involved. Someone like Augustus, a rainmaker, can make it rain when we want it to rain. Someone like Ulysses can come in and bring back the seagrasses when we need the seagrasses. Someone could, when we want to draw down carbon, can do or increase free fish stock somewhere. We could just do a bit of this. I think we're going to have to build these tools because we need these in tandem with growing the size of the economic pie. If we want to keep doing that, we don't want to just shut down the economy. We don't want to just stop doing emissions altogether. It's important for us to have these other compensatory mechanisms. And I think marine geoengineering is an interesting and underexplored space. I think main things we need to get right there are science, better science on it, better technology and governance. The governance about it, because the ocean is like a public space. It's like, you know, you just need to get the governance power right.
- [46:11]
Sam
Have you seen Sean, have you seen this guy? Augustus, the founder of Rainmaker?
- [46:18]
Sean
Incredible mullet.
- [46:19]
Sam
Oh my God. There's this whole cohort of people of which will appears to be one of the like, you know, class president, where there's this like, they're very strange, they don't fit this stereotype. When you think of a tech entrepreneur, they're like kind of manly men or they're like, they're not the. They're not like this engineer, like typical thing that you and I grew up with, Sean. Like there's something about them that is different. And I can't tell if you guys are going to take over the world to be billionaires or if you're going to go broke, but it's only going to be one of the two. Do you, do you understand Sean? Like this, this new genre that I'm trying to describe. I don't, I don't know exactly what I'm. What I'm saying, Will. Maybe you can like, put words to it, but there's this new like, breed.
- [47:03]
Sean
That, that Austin and San Francisco had a baby. You get the, the stash and the mullet of Austin and then you get the insane ambition and tech. Tech chops of Silicon Valley. And that's what's happening.
- [47:14]
Sam
For example, this guy, Augustus, I think his name is. He had. He's on the COVID I think a Forbes or something, and he's sitting on a. On a bench press like a, like with like a, like a working out. That is not something that Brian Chesky or, you know, Travis Kalanick would have done in 2012.
- [47:32]
Will O'Brien
I think it's emblematic of like, of kind of the evolution of the technology industry though. I think like, you know, we. We began like, as this kind of like hippies that found computers with people like Steve Jobs who were like, actualizing on like the axis of like, the spiritual realm. And then it was like you had people like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg who were just nerds, actualizing on the sense of mind. They were smart and nerdy. And now you have people who are openly flexing on. We're actualizing on the sense of the body. We're becoming strong. And you have this full integration of mind, body and spirit. And it's like, no wonder that this tech becoming fully actualized on all of the axis that a human needs to develop on is happening at the exact same time where you have Elon, who is like chief tech bro in the fucking White House, right? Like these things. This is like no coincidence to me. It's like tech has like, found its voice. It's like found itself. It's like self confident and it's like ready to like, actually change the world now because it's like, it's, you know, it's like spiritually, like, aligned. It's like mentally they're, you know, we're smart and like, we're like now like a strong group of people as well who are taking health and fitness seriously. And it's like, yeah, so this is why I think like, we're at like, like the most interesting time in technology right now.
- [48:41]
Sean
I like that. Poetic. You know, Last night I watched a clip of the final scene of Ratatouille. You seen that, Sam?
- [48:48]
Sam
No.
- [48:48]
Sean
It's a great movie. And the final scene of Ratatouille is the critic. The critic who's the most fearsome critic in all of the town, writes the review about the restaurant where the Rat has been cooking and he just gives us beautiful monologue. Maybe the, maybe the most beautiful four minutes in all of film is the last four minutes of Ratatouille here, the monologue. Will, I think you're up there with the last four minutes of Ratatouille there with your mind, body and spirit analogy for tech. I think that's kind of amazing. I've actually heard that before with just the technology part of it. So it's like you had the initial, you know, the bicycle for the mind. So you had Steve Jobs talking about how the, how computers will enable creativity. And then you had sort of AI and it's like, oh, we gave computers a brain and now they can think for themselves. And then with robotics and self driving cars, it's like we gave the computers a body so they can move around and pick up things and do things. And I like how you extended that to the entrepreneurial will has grown in that way.
- [49:49]
Will O'Brien
Look at Bezos and Zuckerberg. They're getting jacked. Like, they're doing trt. They look like, look like this is like, I think that's true. The spirit is in technology now. It's like you have the, like, you know, one of my favorite podcasts besides yours, you know, the tech bros and like, what Jordy and and John are doing there. It's like they're like, they're, you know, the technology brothers. They're like leaning into the fact that they're like tech bros. That used to be a slur, right? Now it's like, oh, I'm confident in it. I'm like, I'm owning it. And they're like doing these like hilarious promo videos of them, like, sipping Dom Perignon. Like, it's like there's like a confidence and an air of like, like, okay, let's do it now. You know, we're not like, we're not going to be like at like the events and functions anymore kind of lying about not neutered.
- [50:30]
Sam
Listen to this. I got an email from this guy named Jamie at the Wall Street Journal. So Jamie is a reporter for Wall Street Journals Style Team. And he listen to this. He goes, I'm writing a story about tech guys embracing western wear. So basically cowboy clothes in the past recent years. And I want to write about how the tech bro uniform has changed from quarter zips and all birds to denim shirts, cowboy boots. And like, when I saw this and he said tech bro, I was like, dude, that's amazing. I think, I don't think I could talk like, this is not Going to.
- [51:03]
Sean
Be also life win that he thinks you're the expert to go to, right?
- [51:08]
Sam
Yeah, life win. But I was like, I'm not exactly a tech, but that's amazing that you think that. I, like, like, I am a fashion influencer. Officially.
- [51:16]
Sean
No reply. Mission accomplished, dude. That's amazing. And you're right. Like, dude, is there any difference, you know the first time you saw Zuck doing mma, do you remember when that video came out? Is there any difference between that video and the first time you saw, like, a Boston Robotics or Boston Dynamics, like, robot dog getting kicked and, like, jumping around and, like, doing backflips and shit? Like, there's no difference between the two videos. That's the same video.
- [51:42]
Sam
It's one of those days that everyone remembers where they were when they saw it.
- [51:45]
Sean
It's like, wow, I didn't know the robots could do that. That's how I felt watching Zuck. That's how I felt watching Boston. The Boston Dynamics robot.
- [51:53]
Sam
Well, one lot of last questions. Can I invest?
- [51:57]
Will O'Brien
Yeah.
- [51:58]
Sean
Yeah.
- [51:59]
Sam
Great. Okay, cool. Because I think this is awesome. I. You guys are. You guys are insane, man. This energy is so wild. I'm not convinced that it's going to end. One like. Okay, so on one hand, it goes both ways. So on one hand, there's the hubris where, you know, you're like a. You know, in the case of Andrew, you're Boeing or you're one of these huge companies and you're like, you know, Parker or Palmer, you know nothing. You know, just go back to.
- [52:26]
Sean
It would be better if they called him Parker.
- [52:27]
Sam
Parker. More condescending little Parker.
- [52:30]
Sean
Listen, Parker.
- [52:31]
Sam
They would be like, palmer, you know, you know nothing. You know, you're just go back to making Facebook apps, you know, and like, like, probably 8 out of 10 times that idea is right, right where, like, there's an incumbent and, like, they fail because it's really hard and there's centuries of. Of hard work to go against and competition. And so that's the same with you. And I would have to imagine where you have these young, really smart people who have no experience, and is this the 10% of the time where you guys are just going to take over the world? Or is it this another time where someone's going to be like, look, this is exactly what you told you. It does not work.
- [53:08]
Sean
All right, listen, that guy John, that. That guy who said, give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age. Here's what I say, give me a 100 mullets and I'll give you a 10x portfolio. I just need. Will, I need Augustus. I need Palmer with a mullet. Right? Three mullets. I need 97 more mullets. And I'll give you a 10x return.
- [53:29]
Will O'Brien
Okay. Give, give me the fund. I'll find, I'll find the mullet for you.
- [53:32]
Sean
You find the mullet.
- [53:35]
Sam
Like, I can't. I don't know enough to know if this is. If this is achievable or not.
- [53:39]
Sean
I definitely understand that feeling. Yeah, for sure. I, I'm not qualified to judge the feasibility of something, but I think in general, it's not about any, you know, if nothing, if anybody, if anybody who's doing a startup like this thinks it's a sure thing or a sure bet, you're nuts. Right? Like you're going to have to perform a miracle. Right. And that's okay. The, the important thing is, oh, wow. We took a portion of our brain power that was otherwise going to be building X or working at Y company, you know, working at Facebook, optimizing, you know, ad clicks or starting a company that was going to be doing, you know, B2B HR, whatever software. And instead now we, we peeled off a portion of that talent and now we sent, you know, 100 mullets at these problems. And I think that, that that's the winning strategy is 100 or 1000 shots on goal like this, and then the winners will obviously emerge.
- [54:31]
Will O'Brien
Well, I can assure you what we're doing is, is very real. You wouldn't have a million dollars in our bank account without it. We wouldn't have done all the things we've done in the last five months. If you want to come here to San Francisco and see some real robots in ocean, the door is always open. Sam, same for you.
- [54:44]
Sean
Shan, I gotta ask you two quick questions. Number one, Seagrass seems so random. And if you started this company, you might have thought, I'll do drones, like for warfare. How did you arrive at the Seagrass thing? Was it instant? Was it. Was that the initial idea or did you do some discovery to figure out the initial idea?
- [55:00]
Will O'Brien
It was the initial idea. I came to one of my co founders, he was on a surf trip and he kind of the same ones who went into the cave and designed our AUV went, heard about Seagrass and went into a cave and like went deep on seagrass and came back to us and presented like, this is, this is a very interesting space. And we kind of.
- [55:14]
Sean
He heard about Seagrass on a surf trip from who?
- [55:16]
Will O'Brien
A Marine biologist friend of his who.
- [55:18]
Sam
Is working on a guy out in the wave.
- [55:22]
Sean
Yeah, dude, this co founder is absolutely carrying your company. Yeah, you've built the tech and figured out the go to market. I love it.
- [55:30]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, he's the. Well, well, yeah, he found the kind of. He was the one who brought seagrass to us. And then myself and my other co founders kind of put it together and were like, this is what the business probably should look like. But then, yeah, we kind of went out from there into other areas. And I think any brilliant company finds a local monopoly to build in first. Somewhere where there's nobody else doing stuff with technology, where it's a great time and nobody's ever heard of what you're even doing initially. And it's a pretty big market. You can, you know, bring cash into. Your business is like a lifeblood. And so it's been a great place for us to start. It's like the best place for us to start. Nobody's ever heard of it. So I think that's always a good place to start off on. And then, yes, we're going to use that as a kind of launching point to do other interesting things in the ocean.
- [56:13]
Sam
Who do you admire, Will? Who do you want to be like?
- [56:18]
Will O'Brien
Steve Irwin, probably. Dude.
- [56:20]
Sam
Motherfucker. I was going to say this earlier on. I go, you are Steve Irwin. I knew. I. You got C vibes hardcore, man. Do you got a khaki shorts on right now?
- [56:30]
Will O'Brien
Not right now, but we have a picture of him up on the wall here.
- [56:32]
Sam
Oh, I. You scream Steve Irwin. You have Steve Irwin vibes through and through.
- [56:38]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, yeah, I know he's. Yeah. I'm hopeful I can get the. The Irwin family on the Ulysses trainer at some point.
- [56:46]
Sam
We gotta, we gotta holler at Bindi. Bindi Irwin.
- [56:49]
Will O'Brien
That would be great, Robert.
- [56:51]
Sam
Fantastic. I love those guys.
- [56:52]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, Robert as well. Yeah. You know, look, Steve, I think is like. And it's so funny, you know, people say Steve on a podcast in the tech. It's like Steve Jobs. It's like, for me, it's like Steve Irwin.
- [57:03]
Sean
You should have just said Steve at the beginning and then let us fall into your track, dude.
- [57:07]
Sam
Sean, Sean. There's this famous video. I. I know you've seen this, Will. There's this famous video of. It's Steve Irwin and his wife. What's her name? I forget her name. And anyway, there's an interviewer who asked Steve, like, you know, you don't seem like you care.
- [57:22]
Sean
Just look, just look, just look. What's on my screen. Just look what's on my screen right now.
- [57:26]
Sam
There it is. Thank you.
- [57:27]
Sean
Just look what I was pulling up, because I love that clip with you, brother.
- [57:30]
Sam
I love this clip. I love this clip. Play it. Play it.
- [57:33]
Will O'Brien
What good is a fast car flash house and a gold plate, a dunny to me? Absolutely no good at all. I've been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which, in essence, is going to help humanity. I want to have the purest oceans. I want to be able to drop drink water straight out of that creek. I want to stop the ozone layer. I want to save the world. And, you know, money. Money's great. I can't get enough money. And you know what I'm going to do with it? I'm going to buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation. And guess what, Charles? I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate. I'll use it and I'll spend it on buying land.
- [58:08]
Sam
This is how every man should be, by the way. Like, you're passionate about something that's good for others. And, like, his wife's just like. I know. And that's one of my favorite clips of all time.
- [58:16]
Will O'Brien
Yeah. So I think the traits in him that I'm wearing, just like. Like, raw passion. It's like this, like, unbridled passion. It's like this, like, nonsensical passion. It's like.
- [58:26]
Sean
You think I'm gonna have a conversation without a microphone? No. I'm gonna put a microphone there. I'm gonna record a podcast. I'm gonna record a podcast every day, and I don't give a rip who's listening, because you know what? I'm a podcaster, and I'm gonna podcast my ass off.
- [58:38]
Sam
It's a whole lot more lame. But you're not talking about, like, saving the earth. You know what I mean?
- [58:42]
Sean
Like, I tried. I tried.
- [58:44]
Sam
Like, when we're talking about, like, conversion rate optimization or B2B, dude. In fact, Will, we kind of my generation and the generation before me, we, we, you know, what do they say hard times create? Or does, like, we need hard men to create soft times? That's what I did for you. You know, we went and did the B2B software stuff so you guys could do this fun, amazing stuff. So, really, you're welcome.
- [59:10]
Will O'Brien
Thank you. Thank you.
- [59:14]
Sam
New York City founders. If you've listened to my first million before, you know, I've got this company called Hampton, and Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs a lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, I actually got it from people who I met in Hampton. We have this big community of a thousand plus people and it's amazing. But the main part is this eight person core group that becomes your board of advisors for your life and for your business. And it's life changing. Now to the folks in New York City, I'm building a in real life core group in New York City. And so if you meet one of the following criteria, your business either does 3 million in revenue or you've raised 3 million in funding, or you've started and sold a company for at least $10 million, then you are eligible to apply. So go to joinhampton.com and apply. I'm going to be reviewing all of the applications myself. So put that you heard about this on mfm so I know to give you a little extra love up. Now back to the show.
- [60:07]
Sean
Can we do just a quick happy hour of two topics that you had on this list that I, you know, Sam, if you gotta run or whatever, you feel free, but I just gotta ask you about these. So I want to do the fun one and then the spiritual one. The fun one is conspiracy theories. You're a big conspiracy. You're a fan of conspiracy theories, I believe. And you like people who like conspiracy theories. So can you just give me a rant on why conspiracy theories are underrated here?
- [60:30]
Will O'Brien
I think. Well, I think it's like, you know, a lot of the traits of like conspiracy theorists are like those of like a great founder. I think someone that believes in something that everyone else tells them is not real or that they shouldn't believe in, or people that are able to see patterns that others can't see and they just go down these rabbit holes. And I think just this contrarian spirit I think is very, very good. And I think it's just a very important. The default is doing things that other people do. So I think it's very important to cultivate an ability to see the world differently.
- [61:05]
Sam
I think.
- [61:06]
Sean
Isn't it funny how contrarian is this like really positive description and conspiracy theorist is like this negative description? You know what I mean? It's the same thing.
- [61:15]
Will O'Brien
I just think it's very important to have weird ideas to take them seriously. Right? Like if we just had heard the seagrass idea and just like rubbished it, you know, we wouldn't, I would like, I don't know what the hell I'd be doing today. You know, it's like you need to take something Weird and go with it. So, like, I don't believe, like, blindly believe every report of, of telepathy and non verbal autistic children, every late night UFO sighting, but I refuse to dismiss them outright. And I think history shows us that breakthroughs often happen at the edges where people are curious enough or foolhardy enough to investigate the unexplainable. So it's like, whether it's Christian mystics who swear by miraculous healings or physics experiments that challenge our understanding of space time, I think it's very important to lean into these weird things and ask what if? And yeah, I think conspiracy theories are just kind of fun as well. They're kind of like horoscopes for details, dudes. So they're like, if any. If not, if nothing else, like, they're just like. It's like, it's just like a fun thing to kind of like spend your, your time reading about.
- [62:10]
Sam
On here you talk about aliens. We are with Joe Gabbia recently who's like the 90th richest person in the world. And I was like, joe, look, you're worth like $10 billion. Like, if there's Illuminati, like, you are either in it or you're friends with the people in it. Tell me one thing that, like, you guys talk about. And he looked at me, he goes, aliens are real. And he went on, he went on a big. He had a big diatribe on his passion for, like, you know, UFOs and aliens and how he absolutely is on board with them.
- [62:40]
Sean
Is on board with them.
- [62:43]
Sam
He came off very passionately. Like, it is absolutely a thing.
- [62:46]
Sean
And the funny thing is, if you meet Joe, he's. He's a serious dude. Joe doesn't just say wild for wild shit's sake. You know, Joe's not like, oh, he's a kooky billionaire. No, no, know, Joe is like an extremely principled artist. He is a, A very serious individual. And so for him to say something like that, it's not like you, you don't discount it with the same discount rate you would if John McAfee was the guy saying it. You know what I mean?
- [63:11]
Will O'Brien
If, if, if your readers want to go down this rabbit hole, the best website I recommend going is a website a friend of mine runs uapevidence.com.
- [63:18]
Sean
Is there any other dope conspiracy that I should go look at a rabbit hole that would waste a nice five hours of my time?
- [63:25]
Will O'Brien
I think less of a conspiracy, more like wacky, weird rabbit hole you need to go down is you need to listen to the Telepathy tapes podcast I.
- [63:34]
Sean
Have, and I love that.
- [63:35]
Sam
What is this? Is this like I can read your mind?
- [63:39]
Will O'Brien
So basically there's this group of people that people have been calling crazy for like the last like two decades, right? It's basically the teachers and parents of children with non verbal autism because they've been convinced that their kids have been able to read their mind. And now for the first time with teaching kids how to spell on iPads and also getting researchers in to study them, they're actually verifying these telepathic capabilities. So a mother will go into one room and she'll be shown a random number generator and her son Akhil in the other room will hit the exact same three numbers 100% of the time, consistently in 10.
- [64:15]
Sam
That's awesome.
- [64:16]
Sean
Yes, it's like the serial podcast, but it's this woman investigating these claims and she's like, you know, like an npr, skeptical, let me call it. Right? So she comes in, she's like, this didn't make a ton of sense, but I'm open minded.
- [64:31]
Sam
And she turned.
- [64:32]
Sean
I didn't finish the whole thing. I listened to probably the first two or three, but I was listening to while I was going to sleep and I just had some like wild, wild nights there. So I decided, all right, I need to only listen to this, you know, not falling asleep if I'm going to do this. Right. Right. By the way, Will, did you walk away from that? You know, half convinced, three fourths convinced, totally convinced. What did you walk away?
- [64:49]
Will O'Brien
I was going into it already with some sort of like, priors that I thought that like consciousness, consciousness isn't local to the brain. Like we like to think that like our brain is this kind of like DVD player where like consciousness is playing and it's like being played to us. And that's how we experience things. I think we're more like. I always kind of thought and for different reasons that we're more like a radio antenna. You know, you have these stories of people like their son dies in an accident and they just know something's wrong. Right? They just like, know, right? Like there's like, you know, everyone, every family has these stories of death or something bad happened and they just knew. They woke up in the middle of the night and they're like, I couldn't sleep. Then after that, and then they wake up the next day, they hear about this awful accident or something like that. Or you have this knowingness and these other things just like telepathy, twins, telepathy and stuff. And there's this world of parapsychology which is like the study of these kind of psi phenomena. There's actually very reproducible experiments in it, like the Ganzfeld experiment, which if you allow me to go on this very short rabbit hole. But the most reproducible experiment in this field is basically you take two people, you put them in two separate rooms. These could be twins, these could be a husband, wife, they could be two artists, they could be two people who don't know each other, different settings. And basically you give me a picture and you're the receiver. Then in another room, and I'm in one room and I'm talking about this random picture I've been given. Let's say it's one in four different pictures. I get a picture of an elephant for five minutes. I talk about elephants. I saturate my brain with Africa and wild animals and Savannah. You're in the other room, you're listening to white noise and you're talking basically about what you're sensing, feeling that they could be about. And then at the end of the five minutes minutes, I stop and you get replayed while you were saying to yourself for five minutes and you get the four random images and you get to pick one of the four. And then you would assume if complete chance, you would 25% chance of getting it right. But pretty consistently you get 30% or above in this experiment. And then when there's twins, husband and wives or artists, they actually score more consistently. 35 in some instances, like 70% in some of these experiments. And so I've always kind of been primed to think that actually maybe we're more like we're touching into something. And like, that explains a lot of the spiritual and woo woo stuff. And then I see this and it's like very good experimental evidence and really well done. And I'm like, okay, no, that's 100% legit. Like, our brain is not like this like AI chip that like runs and just like tells us what to do. It's like an AI chip, but it's like it also has a radio antenna that can connect to other people, can maybe connect to God, spirits, other things we don't really know.
- [67:12]
Sam
Dude, I'm so bummed that I grew up in the B2B era of startups. Yeah, it's so bummed. Well, I wish, like, I Wish I was 10 years younger. You were 10. I wish we could have hung out.
- [67:23]
Will O'Brien
Dude, let's grab some beers.
- [67:26]
Sean
I went to a Bachelor party this weekend, and everybody on the. It was a. It was a bachelor party where the bachelors and the bachelorettes were both at doing it together, basically, as a. As a party together. And the bachelorette side was so cool. Like, every single one of them just. You know, those tattoos that aren't, like, filled in, they're just like. It almost looks like a pencil sketch. Just seven or eight of those. Some piercings, sense of style, off the charts, knowledge of beer and music way beyond my recognition. You know, sexuality was a total spectrum. You never knew who was. Who's dating who. Anybody could be dating anybody in the room who's insane. I just felt like. I literally felt like I came from a. I was a caveman and I was like. Or like, you know, like, I was the gingerbread man, actually. I wasn't even a real human being. That was a cookie cutter shape that was placed in this room.
- [68:18]
Sam
That's awesome. That is so funny.
- [68:20]
Will O'Brien
I think one universal law by technology is that it breeds variants, it creates skewed outcomes. And I think you probably see this in younger generations as well. You've got weird schizo people like me that will burn your ear off, conspiracy theories and go down these weird rabbit holes. But I think also maybe on the more negative end, that could send you down some pretty dark places, that maybe you wouldn't be a productive member of society if you go down into those very dark corners of the Internet or similarly, you have people who are doing great things. But then you also. I think there is a very interesting question that's posed in technology right now is where are the less than $25 billion company founders? This is an interesting question that I think is still not really. There's no satisfying answers around. Previous generations had the collisons pretty early. We had Alexander Wang, who's maybe a few years older than me, pretty early. Still doesn't seem clear why there isn't one in this generation. Maybe we have to wait another year or two for companies like Hewlett Season or Rainmaker or others to like to get there. But there is definitely like a. I think, a bigger skew in both the ideas that young people are interested in today. I think that's like, broadly just like, downstream of. Yeah, technology.
- [69:34]
Sam
Are you going to become an American?
- [69:36]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, I think I'm going to get. I'm on the green card path. Yeah.
- [69:40]
Sean
My last question was the spiritual one. You said you lived with Buddhist monks in Nepal, and for a summer. He learned a lot. And one thing I liked. You said I couldn't come around to their view, which states that zero desires leads to enlightenment. And so you. And then you said, like, you know, you wanted to be action oriented and do something with your life rather than sit and sort of renounce everything. And then you said something like, I came to explain my five desires or six desires. Can you just give me the quick story on your summer with the monks and then what you landed at?
- [70:12]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I just kind of want. I just had heard that you could do this, right? You can actually just, like, find a monastery to, like, basically put you up if you teach them English. So I did that, found a monastery in Nepal that would, like, put me up. It's pretty rural, a few hours outside Kamandu. Went there, through there, taught them. I taught myself to teach English before came over, was teaching them English and then, like, in the downtime, was, like, able to speak to some of the older monks who had, like, good English and, like, ask them about their idea.
- [70:40]
Sean
Because there's just a. There's just five monks with, like, a thick Irish accent speaking English out there. They're like, yeah, I learned from an expert.
- [70:48]
Will O'Brien
Wild, actual segue. I was out running in the middle of Nepal one day, and I bumped into a dude who was wearing a Galway Bay 5k T shirt. And I was like. I was like, sarah, now you might have, like, no English, but I was like, where did you get this, like, T shirt? Like, this is like, we're near where I'm from. And he was like. He was like, had, like, kind of like an Irish accent. He's like, oh, well, you know, I actually work with an Irish guy. He has, like, an orphanage and, like, a charity out here. And I was like, oh, wait, like, what's this, like, Irish guy's name? The Irish guy he named was like, the one Irish guy that my. My neighbor who's like, my mom's friend. My mom's friend was like, my mom was worried about me going to Nepal. She was like, well, you know, you need to have a contact in Nepal when you go over there, you know, I was like. And it's. My neighbor knew a guy who's in Nepal who had a charity out there. Anyway, like, this random guy I met in this, like, tiny village worked with him. So this is like, you know, there's like, AR people everywhere.
- [71:39]
Sam
Everyone just talking, like, kind of like all these monks are like, little.
- [71:42]
Will O'Brien
I boxed up.
- [71:43]
Sean
They're like, you'll do nothing.
- [71:44]
Sam
I box the bullocks off them.
- [71:46]
Sean
Yeah, you'll do nothing.
- [71:48]
Will O'Brien
Literally, there's People everywhere. We have, we have, we have people everywhere. That's like the kind of moral.
- [71:52]
Sam
Is that what the monks are saying? We didn't hear to come. We didn't come to take part. We came to take over.
- [71:58]
Sean
All right, so, so sorry. So you go there and you're.
- [72:03]
Will O'Brien
Yeah, I'm curious about the region. I'm asking them questions about it. But one thing I just couldn't get over was like, you know, they don't believe in desire. Like, they believe desire is like what leads to suffering. If you desire for something, then you're creating a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you have that thing. And I'm just like, dude, I'm very like American dream pilled. I'm like, you know, I should want for things. I should want for things. But I can see how that can go wrong as well, right? Because that leads to like, you know, keeping up with the Joneses type lifestyle or maybe like, you know, kind of like, you know, the fatties on the chair at Walmart kind of like thing, you know, like that's like probably like when it goes like, maybe too far.
- [72:36]
Sam
Hey, you better watch it, Will.
- [72:40]
Will O'Brien
That's our demo.
- [72:41]
Sam
You better watch what you're saying.
- [72:44]
Will O'Brien
You're not that fatsa. So anyway, so that's why I can see where I can go wrong, right? But I did think there was like an essence of truth in there where it's like, maybe you should actually try to trim down things as little as possible. And I had this bizarre experience where I went and did Everest Base Camp afterwards. And I was thinking a lot about the things that they were saying to me. And again, I feel like I had like a download, like one of these experiences where like something just came into my brain that I don't think I hadn't been thinking about it before. And I genuinely think it was a download from, you know, something spiritual that like gave me like some guidance on how I. I was literally. It sounds crazy, but I was sitting on a rock like just like on a break in the hike, this like 10 day hike up to a base camp. And I like, was like thinking through. It's like, okay, well if you have no desire, like, what do you do? It's like, oh, maybe you should have desire, but the minimum amount of them. Then I was like, what is important to me? And I was like, on my hand, I was like, oh, my family, my friends, my health, my wealth, my craft. And I was like, oh, shit, that's like five things. That's nice and clean and Then I had this idea at the same time of a rose bush. Rose bushes, if you leave them go unkept, they basically just grow briars. And they go thorns. And the flowers don't really grow. You have to cut them back to let the energy go back to the rose. And I was just like. I had this very clear vision of roses, and I was like, oh, okay, right. So this is it. Okay. So whenever I'm, like, down over something, it's like, if it's not one of these, like, five important things to me, then it's like, okay, just, like, let it go. Like, stop desiring for it. And I found that to be helpful.
- [74:18]
Sam
You got a girlfriend?
- [74:19]
Will O'Brien
No.
- [74:22]
Sean
That was your reaction to his story about the Buddhist monks and, like, realizing the meaning of life.
- [74:27]
Sam
You want to. Dude, you telling me an Irish guy with that in his Tinder profile, is he just going to destroy the whole city? Give me a break.
- [74:37]
Sean
Saving the world. Saving the world. Seagrass, former monk Sam's five desires. Family, health, wealth, fitness, and will. Those are Sam's five desires.
- [74:52]
Sam
This is so good, man. You're the best, Will.
- [74:54]
Sean
This is awesome. Some people should check you out. Where on Twitter. You're Willow. Brian. What's your. What's your handle?
- [74:58]
Will O'Brien
Illobry W I L O B R I.
- [75:01]
Sean
Okay, great. And good luck with the company, man.
- [75:04]
Will O'Brien
Thank you, dude. Thank you.
- [75:05]
Sam
All right, that's it. That's the pod. Thank you.
- [75:07]
Will O'Brien
I feel like I could rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on a road let's travel never looking back.