Mat Vogels (00:13)
Hey everybody, welcome to the very first episode of Pirates Only, a show where we invite three founders working in a similar space to all come in and discuss topics of the future.
And today we have a really exciting topic, one that I've wanted to do for a while. In fact, ever since ⁓ I heard Will, who's on this podcast, do it with Shaan Puri on My First Million. If you haven't heard that episode, it's fantastic. Episode of The same Name, believe as well on, on ocean being the new space. ⁓ It's a topic that I've thought a lot about even before hearing that. But then when hearing it, it kind of cemented to me that there's so much opportunity in the ocean and it just seems as though.
not that no one's paying attention, but some of the stats we'll get into fewer people are paying attention to it than, I believe should be. And I thought that bringing three founders that are actively building in the ocean, both above and below the surface is the right way to discuss this topic. So let's jump right in. Let's start with introductions. ⁓ Nelson, if you want to kick off, then we'll go David, then we'll give a little bit of introduction about yourself, what you're working on and a little bit about the company.
Nelson Mills (01:22)
Yeah, I'm Nelson Mills, co-founder and CEO of Vatn Systems. My background, I actually grew up homeschooled on a sailboat. So I've always been really connected to the water, traveled all over the Caribbean. And when I started my career, was doing an academic career, getting a PhD in political theory, political science. And then I realized I really didn't want to be an academic. So I dropped out and got into the startup space, was building a software company.
⁓ wasn't that excited about it. So when and joined a electric boating startup building, yeah, a couple of different electric boats out in Seattle, was in that space for awhile. And then, I got my MBA, got into investing was in, in DC for three years. ⁓ and then I was like, I really need to start my own company and do my own thing. And I was working on a couple different maritime ideas.
And then I met this fund called Decise the Point and they're like, hey, you should look at the underwater defense space. And started digging in with them, talking to a few customers. And that is the genesis of Vatn. So Vatn is all about building low cost, autonomous underwater vehicles that can carry a variety of payloads, be built at a large scale and are a true force multiplier. providing me swarming and collaborative autonomy architecture. So one person or a small number of people can deploy tens, hundreds of vehicles.
Mat Vogels (02:46)
Amazing. Love it. David, how about you?
David Zagaynov (02:50)
So yeah, howdy. My name's David Zagaynov. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Poseidon Aerospace. ⁓
Outside we're building unmanned sea gliders for cargo logistics and other defense use cases, ⁓ such as ISR and like potential kinetic platforms. So ⁓ sea gliders are also known as like ground effect vehicles or chronoplans as they started out in the Soviet Union. Were first built like the 60s and 70s ⁓ and they are vehicles that are essentially flying boats. They fly very close to the surface of the water. ⁓
and in aerodynamic phenomena known as ground effect, the air compresses, get increased lift, decreased drag, and you can carry a lot more. And the tech has been really, it really has stopped getting developed with the fall of the Soviet Union, ⁓ and we are bringing it back. And so, yeah, that's the side mission. We're gonna move a lot of things in the oceans.
Mat Vogels (03:52)
I'm excited to talk about more about that. That's gonna be, that's great. Will, last but not least.
Will O'Brien (03:57)
Awesome. Cheers, Mat. And yeah, so I'm Will, one of the founders of Ulysses. And yeah, like a bit of background for myself. I'm born and raised in a place called Cork in Ireland, South West Grubb by the seaside. ⁓ Yeah, if I wasn't in the water, I was on it or near it. ⁓
My babysitter was our local lifeguard. My mom would just put me in the wetsuit and send me down to the beach and put some sun cream on. And that was pretty much my summers. ⁓ So ⁓ summers and summers, I was always pining to get back to that. How can I get paid to be on a boat? How can I get paid to be near the water? How can I get back to this in some way, shape, or form? ⁓
went to college in Dublin and after college started working straight in startups and always felt like very compelled to be kind of working at the intersection of kind of like public goods, public services and technology. I was on the founding team of one of the kind of first scooter sharing startups in Europe and we kind of led our kind of government affairs growth and we scaled across Europe, became top three operator in the UK and were eventually acquired by a larger operator. So had a nice exit there and then
took some time out to consult for other startups on how to sell to government, how to work with government. I always thought it's much more rewarding to go see a product put into the hands of a government worker in this kind of world because who the hell really needs another payroll software? Not many people, right? I think it's much more interesting to build these kind of physical goods, solving the critical problems out there. Naturally, cogs were always just turning about the ocean. What is the rate limit factor on taking advantage of our oceans fully?
You know, it's this like tremendous resource that we're going to talk about a lot today. You know, $3 trillion like ocean economy. Like what are like the limiting factors here? What are the hair on fire problems in it? And you know, one thing like we, me and kind of some co-founders who had been coming from a background, one worked for the Red Bull Formula One team, another one building satellites, another one building aerial drones and self-driving cars. We kind of like, we're, you know, ideating on the space. We initially became very, very interested in the world of ocean conservation as a very clear hair on fire problem
know, ⁓ billions of people rely on this every day for their food.
We're on track for like a fishery collapse around like, you know, roughly 2050. That's, know, you don't need to be genius to realize that's not good. You know, one of the key drivers of this is the loss of marine habitats. And essentially the rate of restoration is not matching the rate of loss. And you have kind of governments around the world kind of panicking about this. So we're like, okay, why don't we just build like some autonomous robots to go and do these ecosystem restoration tasks? So essentially the work, you know, the underwater vehicle, the combined integrated surface vehicle. ⁓
these are deployed and do tasks that divers would basically do. this is kind of like, this was the Genesis, the origins of Ulysses. And this is more generally what we want to do is be this automation layer for critical tasks in the oceans. not just this kind of seagrass and kelp and coral problem, but there's a lot of problems in the ocean that we just don't functionally have enough hands for. And I think that's where autonomy can be a pretty helpful tool. So yeah, we're based here in San Francisco.
Team of 10 and that's a about us.
Mat Vogels (07:11)
Love that. I appreciate it. Thanks guys. So is a quick round up here too. ⁓ Will David, you guys are both in San Francisco. Nelson, you're in Rhode Island. Is that correct? Do you feel like it a high level is there are there hubs for what you call? I don't know. Here's maybe another question that's maybe a dumb one is ocean tech a thing? Is that a phrase that you guys use internally? Is that like a maritime tech or what's the what's the right phrase that people was that? Blue tech.
Nelson Mills (07:19)
Yeah, that's correct.
Blue tech, blue tech, yeah, ocean tech.
think, yeah, pick your poison. ⁓
Mat Vogels (07:40)
Yep.
Yeah. What are the hubs do feel like? I love that Rhode Island being one that I wouldn't think of top of mind, but obviously there's there's there's a lot going on over there. Yeah.
Nelson Mills (07:50)
Yeah.
Yeah. mean, within, you know, a 30 mile radius of us, there are a ton of underwater robotic startups, there's surface vehicle startups, there's sea glider startups. ⁓ So I would say Rhode Island, know, it's a plug, plug the ocean state. ⁓ We're, we have a really burgeoning community here of technology, ⁓ ocean technology, and it's not a recent or new thing, really. It's ⁓
Something that goes back to the 1800s, right? The first torpedoes in the US were all developed in Rhode Island. A lot of the kind of first submarines too. We still build submarines here. We still build components of torpedoes and a lot of underwater vehicles here. We have the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, the Naval War College, a lot of defense contractors building undersea vehicles. We're near Woods Hole Institute. So this whole kind of
Rhode Island mass area is definitely a center of concentration for underwater technology and surface technology.
Mat Vogels (08:52)
Yeah, that's awesome. feel like the San Francisco, you could argue is the best destination right now for AI and a lot of compute and chip companies, semiconductor companies. I think it's making a comeback and I'm kind of curious to hear what David and we'll have to say for deep tech and as it relates to defense and you look at even some of the latest Y Combinator batches and Y Combinator does a good job of keeping a lot of those founders in that ecosystem after they go through.
Do you feel as though there's a shift going in the Bay Area as well for you two gentlemen on the deep tech side?
David Zagaynov (09:23)
Yeah, definitely for sure. And I think that like San Francisco in the Bay Area does have quite a large heritage in terms of like deep tech companies out here. have like Joby, Archer, Pica, Sail Drone in the blue space. And so there are a lot of companies that have like grown pretty large in terms of their R &D and manufacturing just out here. ⁓ And yeah, like specifically in San Francisco and like the...
like Petrero, Neighborhoods. There's been a bunch of startups moving in here, between both Ocean Tech and some other deep tech, hard tech companies. What were your thoughts?
Will O'Brien (10:05)
Yai.
I
think for me, because we started the company in Dublin and then moved out here last year. I think the biggest thing I've noticed coming from Dublin is just like, actually, I think one of the strongest kind of wins in the sales of San Francisco is the culture here. It's like a very ambitious culture. You hear people just talking about things and talking about their, I ⁓ met with this founder in particular, I met him recently now. Some people might say this comes across cocky, but I just thought it was interesting. He was like, yeah,
about a startup you know we just hit a million users we're on track to hit a billion you know in the next like two or three years and like this is a startup you'd all like know the name of probably ⁓ and I was just like but you know like just even just talking about a billion users like you never get that in a month to Sundays in Dublin so like you know so it's kind of like interesting I think this is like one of the things at my ambition level has gone up for sure since I coming here our ambition level and
Yeah, I think that's like one of the kind of big wins here. There's this kind of like healthy competition, you me and David go for beers and we talk about what we're doing and he's like, I'm like, that's a good idea. I'm going to do that in my domain. you know, there's this, I think there's this like nice, this kind of nice dynamic to San Francisco that I really appreciate.
Mat Vogels (11:16)
Yeah,
I think a little bit of San Francisco and California kind of has that as well. In fact, one of the things, in fact, I think everybody here was on the Black Flag 100 list. So congratulations, which was really exciting. And that's how we all first got connected to when we were doing that. We had I looked at the tallies the other day. We ended up getting close to 700 total founder votes that had voted through the whole the whole process.
And what was interesting was seeing how much of a camaraderie there was in the Bay Area, ⁓ El Segundo too, and even going down south, was ⁓ more than likely there was more founders willing to share from the Bay Area, other companies, even competing companies, ⁓ than most other places that we were looking at. So I can definitely feel that shared camaraderie that you get in the Bay Area too. But ⁓ let's jump into another topic here, or at least
the core of kind of what I was kind of leaning with in the discussion. I was doing a little bit of research. I showed this to the guys before. I did it multiple times in ChatGP and Gemini and all these other ones to kind of verify it. And then it finished minutes before this in the new Gemini 2.5 Pro and the results came back the same. And that was that you look at 2024 and you look at early stage venture funding towards space tech and blue tech.
And aerospace was one of the leaders. was close to biotech was leading away. But ⁓ right up there was ⁓ was Space Tech and aerospace at about eight billion dollars in in venture funding. And then you go to Bluetech, which was harder to get. And I had to do a little bit of manual effort to try to put in some companies there. And I even included Seronic, which obviously raised earlier this year. So not quite in twenty twenty four, but even including Seronic's big raise.
you're looking at close to maybe a billion in funding towards blue tech companies, early stage blue tech companies in 2024. a multiple, whether or not those numbers are a hundred percent accurate, my guess is that it probably is close to at least feeling five to eight times more funding going into aerospace than ocean tech. Maybe David, let's start with you just because not that yours is more similar, but I think having that aerospace kind of title in there, how do you feel?
I guess why do you think more venture is going into space than the ocean?
David Zagaynov (13:33)
Yeah, so obviously we are an aerospace company as well as a blue tech company. We're operating in and above the oceans. And so I guess it's something that I probably think about a little bit less. ⁓ But yeah, I don't know. They're like...
There I think one of the big headwinds with a lot of these like space companies There's been like a lot of like very well-funded launch providers is like the success of SpaceX And how that's become like a massive massive private company and so they've like very much like shaped
the expectations for the possible market size here. ⁓ And I don't think that we've really had one of those recently in any way, the ocean tech space. And so that's probably one of the contributing factors. ⁓ I'm sure the guys have other thoughts on what the other ones are.
Will O'Brien (14:31)
Yeah, I think there's probably historical reasons for this. I think there's definitely a geopolitical angle to this. think with the Cold War, we had the space race and we saw this insane investment as a percentage of GDP into the space race. And it literally pulled forward the technology timelines like 50 years. We did in less than 10 years what people thought we'd do by the turn of the century. And then we kind of took the foot off the pedal for 50 years and we're kind of starting to get back to it now. ⁓
definitely
a part of it. And I think when you have like that pull forward of technology, then therefore you get like that you had to have NASA to have SpaceX, right? Like, but like, you know, you do not see Noah getting the same amount of money as a percentage of GDP that like NASA is getting, right? Like I think like, you know, Noah's ocean exploration team gets something like, it's like $50 million for FY25 to do like ocean exploration. It's like NASA has like a $25 billion budget, right?
There's just like complete order of magnitude differences and like the money going to these domains. And I think this is important because government is typically kind of like an anchor customer to pull forwards in these like deep tech technologies. And I think, know. ⁓
We're seeing a transition in this century towards, you're probably familiar with Carl Schmitt and Nelson, he's got the theory of land and sea and we have some periods in time that are defined by land and this century we're moving into a century that is defined by the sea. The last black wars were fought in jungles and deserts, the next wars be fought over oceans. And I think this is gonna position now, DoD is one of these anchor customers ⁓ for companies like the three of ours,
fund like these early stage R &D to get these kind of technologies pulled up the technology readiness scale and I think that that will start to pull this forward and you see this already with like companies like Sironic. Sironic is like maybe the closest thing we have to like SpaceX in the space obviously it's you know probably like 10 years behind where SpaceX is but
you know, fast. I think that's one part of it. I think one thing the ocean struggles with as well is like the kind of narrative piece, right? The ocean story is a bit diffuse, right? It's like shipping, fisheries, climate, defense, whereas, you know, space is like we're going to the moon, or we're going to Mars, right? It's like a very unifying, very like simple story that like can get people excited. I actually think this is like very underappreciated for like the development of technologies, like how do you tell the story about a space? So I think...
You know, like the ocean maybe needs a creative director or something like that to like, you know, really catalyze people around it. I think defense can be that, you know, for some people, I think the climate aspect of it as well, which we're working like pretty heavily on is like another one for different folks. But I think the kind of story can kind of can improve there. ⁓ You know, another factor in this as well is just like, it's it's really fucking hard to build in the ocean, right? Like it's like it's like from an engineering perspective, like it is difficult. Like you have like
salt water that wants to eat everything it can, you have to like make things like not leak, coms underwater is like very difficult, you know it's like a very changeable environment where the space is kind of different. Now that's not to say space is easy right but I'm just saying that like it's an it's like non-trivial to engineer this domain as well so there's like a few things I would add to it.
Mat Vogels (17:47)
No.
I mean, what I heard there is that you said that going in the ocean is harder than going to space. We'll make sure we make that the title of that segment there. ⁓ Now, I want to get your opinion on that, because Will mentioned something that I think is important is that you look at space and I think that space had certainly a big pull because of some of the military relationships as it goes to it. And I think that the ocean, I think, is going to be having that pull here.
Will O'Brien (17:56)
Okay.
Mat Vogels (18:14)
with your company, you're closer probably, especially working directly with some of those customers right now. Do you feel that momentum? And do you think that that's going to be maybe an indicator of pulling Blue Tech into that world more?
Nelson Mills (18:27)
Yeah, I mean, I think Will stated it really well, right? The last 20 years, the United States and much of the world is focused on desert wars, right? Not to quote, you know, doom, but now we're going from doing the opposite of doom. We don't need desert power now. need water power, right? need naval power. future ocean power, yeah, future conflicts are going to take place in the Pacific. And ⁓ we have let a lot of
Mat Vogels (18:47)
Now the ocean power.
Nelson Mills (18:57)
that technology kind of a trophy, we just haven't really focused on it, right? And a lot of things like underwater vehicles are significantly behind in tech compared to air vehicles and land robots and stuff like that. So there's a lot of progress to be made. And I think it will help energize the larger ocean tech segment. I do think too, like,
Space for a long time has, I think, been this big, wide open market, right? And there were a lot of inefficiencies in launches that like SpaceX identified was able to really reduce that. I think the big players and big markets in the ocean space, like shipping, for example, or shipbuilding or, you know, fishing, a lot of those are actually hyper efficient industries, right? Not necessarily in terms of their effect on the climate. There's a huge gap there and I think that's...
you know, that needs addressing. And, but when you look at like the actual, like, can you make, you know, better ships that trade goods cheaper, faster than what existing industries do? I think it's a much tougher prospect to find some of those, those inefficiencies and, and build ⁓ tech startups that can attack that. And the defense space and in the underwater space, I think there, there is a lot of those opportunities. And I think also in the climate space, there's a ton of opportunities on.
And it's like, yeah, we can do a lot better. We can build these cheaper. We can build these at scale. ⁓ And we can do it with modern technology stacks and modern autonomy. just even like, you know, think of how many companies are doing, you know, visual based ATR and working on that problem. And then you look at like sonar based ATR. I mean, they almost know them, right? Like the investment in lot of this technology is...
has been pretty, pretty bad. That's starting to change and a lot of that funding is coming through the DOD and the Navy. But it's still like we have a lot of work to do.
Mat Vogels (21:04)
Do you think that as a collective here, because I mentioned, Will, one of the things I was thinking of was, you know, ocean hasn't necessarily had its unlock the way that SpaceX seemed to unlock so many businesses. And we're to go break in here shortly on what makes building in the ocean so hard. What made building in space so hard for so long was that just getting to space was was just so expensive that it eliminated so much of the opportunity there. Is there a similar unlock to
the ocean or is it less that there's an unlock in a problem that needs to be solved in order to make it happen versus an unlock in ⁓ potential benefit? you know, an obvious example, at least for me, is that, you know, the ocean floor has 20 trillion dollars worth of materials on it. And eventually we get to a point where we can extract those at a certain cost. And now all of a sudden there's a massive pull of demand to start building in the ocean, ⁓ you know, and we'll solve all the problems that go into it.
Maybe David kind of back to you, is there like an idea of a technology that you think needs to happen to build in the ocean, like an unlock like SpaceX had, or do you think it's more of a demand trigger that needs to somehow happen where all of a sudden, and this even maybe more relates on the Poseidon side, where all of a sudden there's just gonna be a huge demand or an understanding of either transporting goods ⁓ or anything like that that triggers this momentum and urgency to start building in the ocean.
David Zagaynov (22:34)
Yeah, I think like looking at the SpaceX example, like it's, I don't think as demand driven, ⁓ because if we look at the space companies, there's a lot of like launch providers that are at least attempting to do launch or to launch. But in terms of like actual like Bible commercial business models up there, ⁓ I think like the one big one that we've seen is like internet providers. have like Starlink is incredibly successful. ⁓
Amazon lunch and Kuiper a couple other companies trying to do similar things but aside from that like I don't think space has Necessarily figured out like what the other markets are like we're gonna go to the moon. We're gonna go to Mars incredibly exciting and I think like on a Like overall scope like aside from like internet providers. ⁓ I think like the big thing in space is like defense ⁓
And then going over what is in the ocean, Poseidon is very much a dual use company. On the defense side, ⁓ we're targeting the really big problem of contest logistics. The Pacific is ginormous. So much of the Earth is covered in water. And getting things to and from in any sort of conflict scenario, especially when airports are the first things to generally go.
is a really big problem. And so I think between a lot of us on the call, the defense thing is probably one of the biggest pulls forward in terms of demand. But on the commercial side, what we're doing is we're creating product that's essentially a middle ground between ⁓
like air freight and cargo shipping, like cargo boats, like cargo boats being very cheap, but very slow, air freight being like 10x the cost, but ⁓ much faster. And so like the way we're looking at it is like the ocean ⁓ is an environment where we can offer like a third middle ground product for like coastal and like island transportation.
Mat Vogels (24:45)
I love that. Let's let's kind of use that as a little bit of a momentum to go into something you touched on earlier, Will, with why it's so hard to build in the ocean. You know, lot of founders listening to this that are that are not building in the ocean, they're building in very nice controlled environments outside of the water. Maybe starting with you, Nelson, what do you think would you say is like the hardest part about building in the ocean, especially with robotics in the ocean?
Nelson Mills (25:14)
Yeah, mean, the hardest part about underwater robotics, I would say, is probably navigation, right? Once you go under, you can't have GPS, even a little bit of water millimeter on your GPS antennas. Yeah, totally, exactly. So you have to figure out how you are going to navigate, You use inertial navigation in some form with that, and then you have to figure out how to eat it and how to do that cost effectively.
Mat Vogels (25:26)
Really? So that's all it takes. Like you get that far down and all of sudden you're flying blind basically. Wow.
Nelson Mills (25:42)
It's not an easy problem. It's extremely difficult. And then you add on to that, you have a comms degradation, Acoustic comms are pretty low performance. a bunch of other factors like visuals, cameras don't work very well down there. Sonar data is a lot worse than radar data. And you can kind of see how it becomes really hard to navigate and avoid objects. And ⁓ the good thing is though, there are
less objects to hit than driving around with your car on a highway.
Will O'Brien (26:15)
Yeah. ⁓
Mat Vogels (26:16)
Yeah.
Will O'Brien (26:17)
as well, as in like we've mapped 100 % of Mars and we have like high resolution data on like 20-ish percent of like the ocean floor. So it's like not even if you can like preload the maps there to be like, you know what you're looking out for because I mean, one storm comes long and the seabed is a very different place. So it's like if you're doing anything in or in that world, it's like maps as well. And then just like salt water as well and pressure, you know, like actual pressure on the vehicle. You really have to love O-rings if you're like working in this in the underwater domain. So
So yeah, and biofiling as well, if you're like leaving assets out there for like a long period of time, you have to get, yeah, to start thinking about that. So yeah, but again, it's exactly in these engineering difficulties is the opportunity, right? Like this is like exactly why it is like a fun space to work in because you're actually working with your team, solving teams for the first time. You're not like copying what like SpaceX did or Android or whatever. You're just like, you're like, just like.
So I'm like, dude, just being like, figure that out, you know? So I think it's actually very exciting for engineers, especially if they haven't worked in the domain before. think they, at least we found, it's just very exciting, very interesting because of the kind challenging nature of it.
Mat Vogels (27:31)
Yeah, I think the the piece that I think is a is so interesting is maybe there is an unlock. Like, would you say that AI obviously being the buzzword for most of the things that we use for like on our computers and Chatchit P and whatnot. Are there some unlocks on the AI side that are going to be helping in blue tech or in robotics or in being able to solve those problems that you just mentioned over the next five or so years? Like, is that an unlock that could potentially make all this a little bit easier?
Will O'Brien (28:00)
Yeah, for sure. think there's probably autonomy capabilities for now that we can just pull off like an open source GitHub that five years ago would have been the preserve of a team within Waymo or something like that developing some of these SLAM models. think there's probably some adjustments that we do. Nelson made the point that at least in the subsea domain, we need to adapt these things for maybe more acoustic data rather than visual data. And so there is some adaptation that needs to be done there. ⁓ But yeah, for sure, ⁓
It's like a tailwind that think companies in this space can build against.
David Zagaynov (28:35)
Yeah, and then in general, like on the engineering side, like being able to like use these tools, like really accelerates ⁓ the speed that which we can like build things like they're in industries where maybe a little bit more developed. There's a lot more like specialized software tools. ⁓ But for like stuff that we're doing where it's like.
could be an incredible niche problem that like we're one of the few people that are encountering, like being able to like quote vibe code, some sort of like really quick software, like script to like help analyze something where it would otherwise take like a few weeks is like incredibly useful. like pretty much all of our engineers like use it on a regular basis.
Mat Vogels (29:16)
Yeah, if anything, just because of the speed and being able to test and iterate because you're going to be working on these things on the fly. So being able to quickly get something up is great.
David Zagaynov (29:25)
Yeah, very much so.
Mat Vogels (29:26)
The one thing that's kind of
interesting that you mentioned, Will, was the salt in general. And I think that's something that people forget about. You think of water and you think, electronics and getting wet. ⁓ Obviously pressure being a big thing. But salt is like a whole other variable that if you're not like working in the ocean, you probably just don't even think about. And my guess is that even for you, David, you're not necessarily going underwater. But my guess is that you're still having to deal with creating materials or finding materials, sourcing them.
that can be cheap and light to take advantage of ⁓ the benefits that you were saying earlier with like the winds and everything from the ocean. But it has to also be able to withstand salt as it's on the water, landing in the water, but even just flying in those areas has got to be more difficult than even just flying in the middle of the desert, in the middle of land. ⁓
David Zagaynov (30:16)
Yeah, yeah. The sea is definitely a harsh mistress in Lake, whereas in the desert, if you're flying, you have to deal with some sand. The sea wants to corrode everything. And that really is a limiting factor in terms of material selection. You have to make sure that your components aren't rusting. Pretty much as much of it as we can ends up being composite and carbon fiber. ⁓
Nelson Mills (30:37)
Thanks.
David Zagaynov (30:44)
Which is really like tech that, like tech tree that's matured in the past decade. ⁓ And that's been like really great because not only is like carbon fiber incredibly strong and light, it's also non-corrosive. So yeah, our vehicles are carbon fiber for that reason in large.
Mat Vogels (31:01)
Maybe just to wrap up this kind of hard part of the ocean segment, is there any particular one that is either if you could say is the most difficult and maybe as an alternative answer, the most fun problem to solve? Maybe Nelson start and start with you the most difficult and or most fun one to challenge.
Nelson Mills (31:18)
⁓ I would still say navigation is probably the most difficult subsea, not necessarily on the surface. Most fun. Honestly, nav is also pretty fun. So you get to chase vehicles around going in the wrong directions. ⁓
Mat Vogels (31:35)
When you and maybe this is again, this is kind of ⁓ a question, a new question,
but when you're testing these, do you have to go and test them in the ocean? Do you guys have like facilities where you're testing these and like big fish tanks in the middle of your office or what is, what is it like a blue tech startup kind of look like or test these?
Nelson Mills (31:50)
Yeah, I mean, you do a bit in simulation. You can do a tiny bit in tanks, like you can test motors and stuff like that, get your buoyancy and center of gravity right. But at the end of the day, like you got to get out there and test. mean, we test five to six days a week, our vehicles and like literally we put a new vehicle in the water and two months later we had 250 hours of testing on it, right? Like we tested insane amount at Boughton, but we're right on the water and we're able to.
iterate super quickly. I think testing and iteration is super important. One of the benefits, I think, of starting a hardware company now is just, you know, 3D printing and, and, you know, AI tools and all of this allow such rapid iteration of the product.
Mat Vogels (32:37)
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, what about you favorite and or hardest problem?
Will O'Brien (32:41)
I mean, if I to wave a magic wand for some physics research to be done, it would definitely be on the kind of subsea comms. If there's some, I don't know, black ops, anti-gravity research that we can just take out of black ops and just try and find a problem for this subsea communication problem. It's just like, it's nothing we will ever have an R &D budget to put towards, because it's just so early. But being able to get more than a few blips a second from an acoustic mode.
would be incredible. So that's the one I'd like to wave a magic wand on. ⁓
Mat Vogels (33:18)
Which is crazy.
wouldn't have guessed going into this ⁓ that that would have been kind of the problem. I would have thought that just like being in water and or the pressure or the salt or those things. But I didn't realize it. I didn't realize that it would just be so quick. Like it's like just below the surface and almost immediately becomes an issue. Not it like, you know, 100 feet ⁓ would be like a guess that I would have had or something like that.
Will O'Brien (33:40)
water is just so dense compared to air. So yeah, think at the surface for our surface vehicle, I think the difficult thing there is again, the water is cruel. You have to be ready for very variable sea states. The ocean is notoriously hard to predict from a weather perspective. It can just change like that. So you have to just have a system that is very, very robust. ⁓
gets a lot of shake testing. ⁓
Mat Vogels (34:12)
Anyone there David that ⁓ wasn't mentioned already for you being above the water?
David Zagaynov (34:17)
Yeah, I think the intersection of hydrodynamic to aerodynamic modeling ⁓ is a very hard problem. And there's very good SIM software that exists, but that specific interface ⁓ is stuff that we're going to have to, models that we're going to have to build ourselves. ⁓ But the fun one is, I think, like, ⁓
GPS denied like navigation above the water but in the ocean is a fun problem and like we get to Resort back to some of the methods that like the sailors used to use where you're literally looking at the stars to like like geoposition yourself the And during the day you're looking at like where the Sun is relative to the horizon And like right now we can get within like a few miles ⁓
Mat Vogels (34:56)
Wow. ⁓
David Zagaynov (35:06)
during the day and like a lot closer during the night, like being able to like operate environments where the GPS isn't available is like a very important problem to solve on the inside for sure. ⁓
Mat Vogels (35:17)
Yeah. Well, you
mentioned one of the graphics that ⁓ I'll pull up here ⁓ post recording is that view of the globe that shows where it's like it's just ocean. Like you turn it and it's like it's just the Pacific. There's nothing else there. And I can imagine that, being in the center of that is not going to be the easiest place to navigate.
David Zagaynov (35:37)
Yeah, one patch of water looks like any other patch of water for the most part.
Mat Vogels (35:39)
Yeah.
The other kind of difficulty that I'm kind of curious about, we have a lot of companies that we run into this with across the board in different sectors or industries is regulation like ecological or bureaucratic or anything like that. What are you running into that relates to that? And do see that being something that could prohibit or kill your startup? Maybe Nelson starting on your side, especially on the defense piece.
Nelson Mills (36:05)
Yeah, I mean, I think in general maritime is way less regulated than air, right? So if
Mat Vogels (36:12)
And I wouldn't have guessed that I would have
guessed the opposite just for whatever reason. I don't know why. Like save the whales type of thing, but
Nelson Mills (36:15)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
there's definitely some ecological restrictions, right? Like you can't, set, set your, your sonar above a certain noise level, right? It's like 190 kilohertz or the Hertz. don't know. But, ⁓ in general though, like, you know, we don't have to file flight plans with the, ⁓ the coast guard or things like that. Right. And you fly a particular flag and you go off and do things. There can be like restricted zones, but in general,
know, the regulatory burden is really, really low. And that's part of how you can iterate so quickly. I think certain states and countries might have higher regulatory burden than Rhode Island. ⁓ But in general, you know, it's relatively low. If you're doing some stuff with acoustics, can get challenging with marine mammal protections. But other than that, it's not bad.
Will O'Brien (37:08)
Yeah, think I could talk all day about this one. Yeah, like for me, ⁓ you know, one of the biggest blockers of doing anything like nature positive in the ocean is like green tape. It's not like we don't have the salt.
Mat Vogels (37:08)
about you well.
Which is crazy,
like you're trying to help the problem and it's like they're pushing you back.
Will O'Brien (37:27)
I know one place where we have a customer that is willing to give us money and we...
do what would be one of the largest like seagrass restoration projects in history and there is a ⁓ unnamed public official getting in the way of it because of some you know stupid reason. So ⁓ like yeah this is like a global problem. mean you know in the world ecosystem restoration what we do like it's mainly focused on the seagrass ecosystems they're great for removing carbon and they support about 20 percent of the world's fish stocks and we basically just like automate all the stages of restoration collect seeds plant seeds map them that kind of thing.
and do it like two orders of magnitude cheaper than a human would do it for. So you can do it at like an insane scale then on like the same budget and you know in the same kind of length of time. And yeah like in this world it's not like the limiting factor is like is generally like green tape in lot of instances. Like sometimes it's like science in some regions and like there's ecological factors as well like they don't get seeds at this time of year or whatever. you know I think the general problem in this like world of like nature and the ocean is like
all our permitting structures are set up for extractive industries and not regenerative industries. like if you want to do something on the seabed, you have to get the same permits that a mining company has to get, right? So whereas if you're doing, you're actually kind of doing the government's job for them, right? You're helping them hit these biodiversity taxes, but they're still like, you still have to get, mean all these kind of environmental impact assessments. So I just think we're, the tides haven't shifted enough yet on kind of the regulatory side.
increasing push towards this. We're going to the, a delegate at the UN Ocean Conference next month and NICE will be speaking with different governments about this. There is more more governments thinking about how do we set up permitting structures for regenerative restoration activities and then how do they participate in the upside as well. Bahamas has announced in the last year or two about how they want to completely restore all of their lost seagrasses. They have one of the largest
seagrass meadows in the world. This is like at scale. If they like do restoration properly, if they can prove like net new carbon removal and sell those credits, that could be like a billion dollar ⁓ revenue opportunity for a small island, you know, developing state. There are other countries like looking at this as Vanity, Tahiti, French Polynesia, all these countries looking into it. So I think it's like something if they can, they can crack right and share the upside with developers. think, ⁓ you know, wow, what a beautiful outcome that would be to see like fish stocks
Nelson Mills (39:40)
Thanks
Will O'Brien (40:03)
restore it, see carbon being drawn down, see water clarity improved and seeing the local people participating in the upside as well. I think we've learned a lot from how to do these projects well, from some of the failings and how we've maybe dealt with permitting in extractive industries and how we've cut out local countries in some of these instances. ⁓ yeah, the things are moving there, it's still a long way off and still a lot to go. And yeah, the urgency just doesn't feel met by these people.
Mat Vogels (40:32)
Yeah.
Will O'Brien (40:33)
⁓ So, but yeah. ⁓
Mat Vogels (40:35)
Do you that changes almost generationally where it's like, I feel like lot of politics almost change in generations because it's just newer people coming in and then things getting removed or like people moving out. But in California is obviously, think, maybe one of the harder places to do those. that is that a fair assessment or maybe not?
Will O'Brien (40:53)
Yeah.
Yeah, is. mean, yeah, like it's kind of like what they're all saying, like science changes one funeral at a time. You probably said about this to me. I think it's like individual people as well. think people are like extremely high agency. Like I always go back to ⁓ Steve Irwin. ⁓ You know, he's like, you know, was my childhood hero and like very much have motivated me to kind of like work in this domain. And like he was like one person. Right. And he's like, right. And like I was at like this gala dinner for like celebrating his life like a few weekends ago.
Mat Vogels (40:58)
Yeah. Yeah.
Hahaha
Yeah.
Will O'Brien (41:23)
And it's just like thousands of people in the room donating like hundreds of thousands of dollars to ocean conservation and nature conservation causes because of this one person, right? And like you actually change some of the laws around conservation. So like again, like it's like Elon, the kind of great man theory of history is very much something I would like subscribe to. So I think it's, you know, very smart coordinated teams with like good resources can change these things.
Mat Vogels (41:33)
Mm-hmm.
Hello, Steve Irwin. I lived in Australia back when before he passed and yeah, everybody loved him. You either loved him or hated him. feel like in Australia, but ⁓ no, he was he was definitely very loved. ⁓ David, do you get the benefit of having both then? I guess. Do you get a little bit of like above and below the surface for regulation?
Nelson Mills (41:55)
Thank
Will O'Brien (41:56)
Yeah.
David Zagaynov (42:05)
Yeah, no, I'm ⁓ like incredibly grateful to be in the regulatory position that I'm in. like, we ground vehicles, ground effect vehicles, sea gliders, whatever you want to call them, are certified and regularly the Coast Guard and not the FAA. ⁓ And so like on a technical level, like what we're building is like crafts. And so there have been like billions and billions of dollars poured into like advanced urban mobility startups, EV tolls, whatever. And none of them have like
Mat Vogels (42:20)
No, well.
David Zagaynov (42:35)
flown commercial flights and a lot of them have like burned their billions and shut down in part because like getting through all the regulatory like like systems is like an impossible task and like I'm not gonna be wanting to say that like the FAA should
be easier to get certified by because if you are flying a plane and you're flying people over populated areas, I want that to be as safe as possible. And we saw, even with some of Boeing stuff, those standards exist for a reason. But our vehicles are fully unmanned and we're flying over water in not populated areas. And so we have the advantage of.
being certified by the Coast Guard there and so that's going to be a really big headwind in terms of it being able to enter the market and get moving as fast as possible.
Mat Vogels (43:24)
Yeah, I love it. We feel like we kind of went through, you know, 20 minutes of talking about the hard stuff. I love to finish it and kind of keep going a little bit on some of the cool stuff and the most exciting stuff, because I think there's a lot to be excited about. So maybe Nelson, starting with you, if we could, to Will's point, wave a magic wand and have all these problems solved and everything goes in your favor and everything works out over the next decade or so, where do you see?
your company evolving into and kind of what does that look like in the perfect world a decade or so from now?
Nelson Mills (43:57)
Yeah, I mean, our goal is to build an underwater autonomy prime. ⁓ We do commercial and defense, but we're pretty focused on defense. And for us, that means building a vertical stack of products through single agent, multi-agent autonomy, our navigation software algorithms, and the actual hardware ⁓ and build from there a suite of products that builds on each other. So we can start owning underwater collaboration and battle space management.
⁓ And then our vehicles can start doing commercial work. ⁓ We're going to start doing some stuff with undersea cable inspection and installation pretty soon. ⁓ then scale up to bigger vehicles. Big dreams of the first micro nuclear reactor powered XLEUV one day, right? There's a lot of fun stuff to do, but hopefully do it with respect and preservation of the ocean too, right? I think it is.
a huge issue and we want to be part of that journey too as much as we also build weapons.
Mat Vogels (45:02)
I love that. you think is there beyond even some of the defense side? What are some of the applications that you're most excited about ⁓ over the next decade or so?
Nelson Mills (45:13)
Yeah, I mean, I think more sensors in the ocean gathering data under better understanding what's happening is going to be super important. You know, if we're going to start mining the ocean and I have a lot of trepidation around that, but we're going to do it like we've got to figure out a safe way to do it, way in which we're monitoring exactly what's happening and the effects of that on the ocean.
Will O'Brien (45:22)
you
Nelson Mills (45:41)
I that's kind of where I would like to see us doing more work on that. ⁓ Yeah. And then, you know, there are oceans in space too. So I keep telling people, let's see now. ⁓ No, I actually, I wrote a, or sorry, I read a article in Popular Mechanics, I think when I was like 10 about.
Mat Vogels (45:52)
There we go. I love it. I didn't think about that.
Nelson Mills (46:04)
⁓ this idea of sending a mission to the moon of one of the moons of Jupiter, right? That's like got an ocean under ice. They're going to drill through it and like throw an underwater vehicle in there. And now I'm like, you know what? Maybe I should call it NASA and talk about that.
Will O'Brien (46:17)
Ha ha
Mat Vogels (46:19)
I didn't even think about that, now that that's a whole other episode we're gonna have to do eventually, maybe 10 years from now, we'll have another one where ocean is in space and then we'll do a whole thing on that. That'd be good.
Nelson Mills (46:27)
Yeah.
yes, yes. Space Oceans. Next market.
Mat Vogels (46:32)
space oceans.
Will, how about you? Predicting 10 years ahead, the perfect place that you'll see is, be like, what is the 10 year dream of not only what you build, but then what that unlocks maybe for the world? What can we all get excited about there?
Will O'Brien (46:47)
Oh yeah, I have lots of schizo ideas on what better technology in the ocean can unlock. Better first talk about Ulysses. Yeah, mean, look, for us, we want to build this infrastructure layer for the ocean, this enabling factor. Again, as I was saying at the top of this call, we're very firmly of the belief that the rate-limiting factor on doing beautiful and incredible things that inspire humanity with our oceans is we don't have enough hands. We don't have enough assets, we don't have enough people.
is absolutely massive and at any moment in time there's maybe thousands of people working on it whereas the earth is half the size and there's billions of people on it. There's a disparity here and if we want to really unlock this resource that means just a lot more robots, a lot more robots, lot more eyes, ears, So I think it's this like...
Yeah, that's the vision. It's more vehicles at surface, at subsurface. It's more like implements. It's like robotic hands. It's like all crazy stuff. In a few years, we're going to have chips that we can put into the size of my hand that has the intelligence of a human. Pop that into a funny looking underwater robot. And I'm sure there's a lot of things you can do across the world of nature, which is where we're very focused at beginning of it, like nature and climate. But then,
Another part of this is just like prosperous oceans. The next century is very much going to be one defined by...
artificial intelligence, the infrastructure that supports this build out, both on the energy and the data side, run across our oceans all over the world. We're seeing now as well, data centers are actually much more efficient when they're put in the ocean as well from a cooling and cost perspective. So I think you're just gonna have more of that. You need a service layer for that and for the various tasks involved with that. And then yeah, as mentioned as well, defense, natural, there's a lot of money gonna be going into this space. So across these three domains, think these will all need autonomous robots for different tasks. These are the kind of things that we want
to we want to give humanity full read and write access on the ocean. For the longest time we've had, we've just traversed the surface and then we started looking underneath it and mapping and Captain Cook was going around, still all very read-only access. We haven't been able to fully master it and take full dominion and steward it appropriately. So I think these are the sorts of technologies that we want to build at Ulysses. If I start thinking bigger picture about what are we doing with the ocean, think there's... ⁓
a few different areas like in the world of nature, one use case that like very much excites me is this ability to like speak with whales and dolphins. We're seeing like these like models coming out of Gemini right now trained on like massive sonar datasets. ⁓ And you know, I mean, the question I'm thinking is like, what do we say? Like, what's the first thing you say? You know, it's like, sorry, maybe. ⁓ I think something like that perhaps like, but this ability to communicate with animals, I think is like very interesting from just that. ⁓
Yeah, just like the advancement of mankind. just, I think about that a lot. ⁓ Some interesting defense use cases as well. If you could get the dolphins on your side, some interesting things you could do with that. ⁓
Mat Vogels (49:56)
Wow, who's the first one
it's just like from a Jurassic Park where they try to weaponize the Raptors we're gonna have dolphins running around smart intelligent dolphins. Yeah
Will O'Brien (50:00)
you
Nelson Mills (50:01)
Yeah.
Will O'Brien (50:04)
Yeah, so I think, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, exactly. you could just.
Nelson Mills (50:05)
They're already at it, so watch out.
Mat Vogels (50:09)
Are they really is that something that people are working on? Is that what you
guys are working on Nelson internally?
Nelson Mills (50:12)
yeah. No, yeah, yeah.
Will O'Brien (50:14)
Not yet.
Nelson Mills (50:14)
Not yet.
Will O'Brien (50:15)
⁓ Yeah,
watch Robo Shark coming soon. ⁓ So that's one. think, you know, like as we mentioned there, this kind of full read and write, know, our vision with the kind of seagrass stuff is like this like full like read and write ecosystem management, right? Like if like if the government of Polynesia comes to us and it's like we need our fisheries replenished, it's like, ⁓ here we go. We just like press this button and you like restore these ecosystems. It's like kind of having a closed loop, I think, on ecosystem management, I think is like a very like exciting prospect that I think is like it's tractable.
It's a complex system, it's not fully tractable, but I think there's interesting use cases there around restoration, ⁓ sensors, reading what's going on, but also the physical manipulation of these environments. And that has massive downstream consequences. Fisheries, 3 billion people rely on fisheries as their primary source of protein, and billion as their primary source of income. So think it's very important that we not make them collapse. ⁓ I think another variable in this read and write access in the ocean is the kind of
the taboo question of geoengineering in the ocean, whether it be on the fisheries slash carbon side, you have ocean iron fertilization, which is think very interesting, very promising. The basic concept is there's certain aspects of the ocean where it's iron deficient, and if you add iron, it's very good, get algae grows, and then it dies, and it falls to the bottom, and it sequesters carbon, but it also creates food stores for these fish. So the thing is you want to get it right, right?
know, fuck it up and have like negative dance from consequences. But someone did this before in Canada and the following year on the...
It was a bit controversial. can look it up, Russ George, geoengineering. that same year they had the biggest ever salmon catch they've ever seen. This like exception billionaire was like, he has this banger quote where he's like, you know, give me an iron, give me an, a tanker of iron filings and I will give you an ice age. Like how that goes is insanely hard. So I think that's interesting. I think it's interesting kind of, yeah, this notion of stewardship. You know, another one is like treasure hunting. I think like,
Mat Vogels (52:01)
Yeah.
Ha
Will O'Brien (52:23)
There is like so much ⁓ like lost.
Mat Vogels (52:25)
Do you have
a number? What's the number of treasure that's like waiting to be discovered?
Will O'Brien (52:28)
Billions,
there's a wreck off the coast of Colombia that has about 20 billion dollars of emerald and gold on board. Now, the thing is, right, you can't keep the 20 billion if you find it. There's a international law that says you have to share it with the country that, if it's in waters, it's the country that the waters are, so it's Colombia in this instance. But if it's in Atlantic waters, ⁓ then it's outside, it's international waters, then you have to negotiate with Spain or Portugal, which is generally where these were coming from.
They were coming and taking from South America and bring it.
Mat Vogels (53:00)
So it's where they were, where they originated from. That's where you'd have to negotiate in those waters.
Yeah. Okay.
Will O'Brien (53:04)
Yeah.
So I think there is a big business waiting to be built, an actual, you know, people talk about these like search funds, like an actual search fund, searching for treasure. I think someone is going to do that and make a lot of money and, you know, contact Nelson or Will, if you want to like get some cool under SeaTac for that, like we'd love to help. ⁓ So I think, I mean, can keep, there's, Nelson mentioned the mining thing, you know, there's two different types of mining. There's like sweep mining and there's pick and place mining. We need pick and place mining, not just like hoovering up whatever's down there. And then, yeah, I'll just come back to like the,
you know, the Peter Thiel dream of the early 2000s, seasteading, think this is like still, ⁓ you know, has like a lot of legs. I think someone can do this building in the ocean, you know, in international waters, you can do some interesting regulatory things from a biotech perspective and others. And it could just be like a nice holiday as well. It's just like land on the ocean. ⁓ So I think seasteading, there is still people working on it. ⁓ I think now is actually time to revive it. became a bit, ⁓ yeah, crap for a while. But yeah, there's...
Mat Vogels (53:52)
Thanks.
Do you do you do
you guys think that, you know, I talked to a lot of people, I feel like where they're like, run out of space or overpopulated planet, da da da da. But there is so much space in the ocean. And obviously, we're all thinking about going to Mars and the moon and all those types of things. But do you feel like it's maybe not equally as likely? And this goes back to your earlier point, Will, where we don't really have the vision of living in the ocean as we do like living on Mars or on the moon. But do you think that there's a possibility where we would have like cities
in the ocean either on top or below.
Will O'Brien (54:33)
I think, going ahead.
Nelson Mills (54:33)
People
David Zagaynov (54:34)
It's at LANUS.
We gotta build at LANUS again.
Nelson Mills (54:36)
are going to start building on the giant Pacific trash pile pretty soon, I think.
Mat Vogels (54:40)
I mean, there's some really cool
startups doing that. But if anything, though, David, this is where maybe you're going to shine is that you're going to all of sudden have a boom in people getting from the coast all the way into these cities in the middle of the ocean really quickly or traveling between these little cities. ⁓ Yeah. We need we need the Elon for like the ocean to all of a sudden have these crazy ideas of rebuilding Atlantis and building in these these cities in the ocean to.
Will O'Brien (54:55)
So to build Atlantis, like we have to revolve the dream of Atlantis. This is like...
I think it's...
I mean, Atlantis was probably in the Atlantic, probably on the mid-Atlantic ridge. So yeah, think it would be nice to have Atlantis. would be nice halfway out for me between Ireland and the US. I could meet...
David Zagaynov (55:09)
I think it could be feasible.
Mat Vogels (55:18)
There you go. Well, and honestly, and this is,
you this is going very black mirror here, but, ⁓ the whales probably know. So maybe as soon as we start talking to these, these animals, they're going to tell us all the secrets of all these things. ⁓ we're gonna have these agents of the ocean telling us all these things.
Will O'Brien (55:26)
it.
Yeah.
Nelson Mills (55:33)
It's
the secret to the treasure hunting, we just got asked where else.
David Zagaynov (55:33)
some Dolphin art.
Mat Vogels (55:35)
I was
just gonna say that's what's gonna be the unlock the same way that we're thinking SpaceX is unlocking these companies. It's gonna be talking to the dolphins and the whales to unlock all of these other secrets.
Will O'Brien (55:36)
Yeah, it'd be like... ⁓
Yeah,
fish food is going to become really valuable resource. So maybe just like start hoarding fish food right now and like tin sardines and stuff. And then you're like the trillionaire of like the ocean century if you have like the most sardines.
Mat Vogels (55:50)
Uh-huh.
David, on your side though, giving you ⁓ some time to chat about the future of what you're building with Poseidon. What are some of the things that you think over the next decade? If you could, again, wave a magic wand, everything goes exactly as planned and maybe even better. What does the world look like for you and what you're building? What does it unlock for everybody else if what you're doing works?
David Zagaynov (56:19)
Yeah, so in 10 years, everything goes right. A large, significant percentage of ⁓ ocean marine cargo is getting moved on sea gliders. Sea gliders become like primary mode of cargo and logistics transportation for both like defensive commercial use right alongside with like shipping containers and air freight. ⁓
And I think we can really build much bigger. so like we've like produced the Seagull, it's a 13 foot wingspan vehicle, ⁓ producing developing. Appreciate it. Thank you. We're doing the Heron right now, which was going to be like roughly 50 foot wingspan, two ton payload. And that gets you like very competitive with like regional and island air cargo. But the step after that is you can build much, much bigger.
Mat Vogels (56:49)
Which is beautiful, by the way.
David Zagaynov (57:09)
Ground Effect is awesome because as you scale your Wink Span, you get a lot more benefit out of it. It's actually a very positive scaling factor. ⁓
And so like one of the like the major large like air vehicles that we're using for like cargo logistics right now is like the 737 platform. Uh, and that carries 28 or 23 tons of useful payload. Um, when the Soviets were building their ground effect vehicles, uh, the Caspian sea monster, as we called it, cause we, we actually saw it on a satellite in the black sea and we were like, or the Caspian sea and we're like, what the hell is that thing? Um, that carried 280 tons.
of
payload and that wasn't the biggest vehicle that they had a vision for and this thing flew like it's been done it's possible like wheel or churn I have visions for 300 ton vehicle and you can go bigger like we there's been some some crazy crazy blueprints for these things so yeah we're gonna go really really big
Mat Vogels (58:15)
I love it. ⁓ We talk forever and we didn't do as much on the origin story side. ⁓ So we'll to do maybe a different ⁓ episode on that. But I do want to end this with Will, you mentioned a bunch of them, but maybe around the horn, we'll do two sets of things to close it off. The first is what area besides what you're building and specifically, are you the most excited about? So, well, you're going to to pick one and then ⁓ we'll we'll cap it off with with sharing some of the things that.
you need right now as a business if you're hiring, fundraising, all these different pieces, but ⁓ maybe Nelson starting with you, what is the one area outside of defense or even maybe underwater autonomous vehicles? Are you most excited about being unlocked over the next decade or so?
Nelson Mills (58:59)
I'm all in on Will's idea of talking to whales, dolphins. He's convinced me. it's hard to go back. But I think, yeah, it's a great question. I think there's a lot to be done with making shipping more environmentally friendly. right now we use the dirtiest possible spludge of oil and burn a ton of it. It's very efficient and cost effective for my...
Mat Vogels (59:02)
I mean, it's hard to beat that. Once it's been said, it's hard to pick anything else.
Nelson Mills (59:28)
you know, the cost perspective, but from an environmental perspective, I'd love to see some on the walk towards making shipping greener. So yeah, was there a second part to that question?
Mat Vogels (59:38)
Are there any companies
off the top of your mind that are, know that like Clippership is doing stuff like that. There's obviously, I mean, electric boats and things, but at scale, is there anybody that you can think of that's kind of trying to build that future?
Will O'Brien (59:50)
you
Nelson Mills (59:51)
Yeah,
there's definitely, there's a few people trying to build the future. I'm not sure I've seen something yet where I'm like, yeah, I think that that can be at the same scale of costs as what we currently have. That being said, maybe we just have to accept that shipping goods will be more expensive. mean, all goods are more expensive right now and look at, we're still alive so far. But yeah, everything.
Mat Vogels (1:00:13)
Well, my guess is that
one of the companies on here, Poseidon, will be able to at least eliminate the cost of a lot of those as it relates to where today things are being put on a boat and putting the sludge through the water where they wouldn't need to and hopefully soon. So that'll be one of those solutions there. Will do you have any companies that you know that are building some of that like electric and or just more environmentally friendly transport on the ocean?
Will O'Brien (1:00:37)
Yeah, there's a few. I suppose the real thing is shipping, right? Like that's 3 % of global emissions. That's insane, right? So there's people obviously building little boats, but ⁓ there hasn't been anyone yet that struck me as like, wow, they're building the replacement for ⁓ shipping diesel powered stuff. So yeah, I'm not...
Mat Vogels (1:00:47)
That's crazy,
Yeah,
wide open. Well, wide open for somebody to maybe solve it, at least on the surface. David's already solving it above the surface. ⁓ David, to you, what is the number one thing that you get excited about as it to ⁓ the ocean that isn't involving aerospace or what you're doing?
David Zagaynov (1:01:24)
I think, and this is also one of the things Will mentioned, like C-studding is incredibly exciting. ⁓ And the opportunities there, like the regulatory framework for being able to do a lot of experiments and research outside the purview potentially. But also just like as like building, it would be awesome to have my own little property, like 360 surrounded by a...
Mat Vogels (1:01:52)
Yeah.
David Zagaynov (1:01:53)
and just around in the middle of nowhere. ⁓
Mat Vogels (1:01:53)
Oh, yeah. I mean, did everybody here watch Waterworld? I feel like Waterworld is one of those movies that's like underrated. I've watched even I still love it. And it got like horrible reviews. But that's the future I think of when you mentioned that, David, maybe we're we need to work our way towards it.
David Zagaynov (1:02:00)
So good.
Nelson Mills (1:02:02)
Yeah.
My brother and I's favorite movie. Still watch it.
Mat Vogels (1:02:09)
Yeah. Yeah,
it's it's it's stood the test of time too. But we need our planes to go from each other's houses in the middle of nowhere.
David Zagaynov (1:02:18)
Yeah, if you want to get started on sea studying, you can ostensibly buy a really old, decrepit cargo container ship, one of the smaller ones. And you could just park it in the middle of a few miles off the coast in international waters. They're not that expensive. So if someone wants to spend a couple of hours on it, they
Will O'Brien (1:02:38)
I think you...
Nelson Mills (1:02:40)
Start your own country.
Will O'Brien (1:02:42)
Yeah, well,
I think actually the move is like in the next crypto bull run, we convince ⁓ we like co-opt like all of their like ⁓ undeservedly earned money and we convince them to do like a crypto community. We get biology or something like that and we buy one of these like cruise ships and ⁓ yeah, then just like sink it there.
Mat Vogels (1:03:02)
I'm
surprised. I know I've seen some of those, but there needs to be more of the, yeah, like cruise ship, people buying cruise ships and or these big container ships and doing like big old, ⁓ like, ⁓ like co-working spaces type of thing and starting them on there. So, Will, do you have one that you could, you mentioned a bunch of them. Is there one that you could pick that you think is?
Nelson Mills (1:03:02)
People are trapped.
Will O'Brien (1:03:17)
Yeah.
Yeah, it'd
be awesome to speak to whales and dolphins just to add another one in there and to bring attention to it. I do think like that.
geoengineering is just going to be a necessity for this century. It just gets so clear we're not going to meet any of our targets. And also, it's not even just to meet global warming targets. There's this great Stewart Brand quote. It's like, are as gods. We may as well start acting like it. It's not even just like you should.
you know, brighten the green clouds or something like that. It's like, if you have the capability, you actually have to. ⁓ There is like, ⁓ I'm Catholic, and there's like this notion of like stewardship or whatever. You know, God gave us like dominion over the earth and the seas. But you know, dominion implies domination. It's not domination. It's like actually, you know, the stewardship mandate as well, he asked us to tend to it. So it's actually a responsibility to, you know, again, read and write functionality like on our like, on our like, on the biosphere. And that's
I think these ocean iron fertilization, marine cloud brightening, these are how we stop the coral reefs from getting totally bleached, right? And we just lose them forever. This is how we stop fisheries collapse and a billion people going out without their primary source of income, three billion with their primary source of protein. It's actually just manning up and being like, yeah, yeah, obviously the science is controversial. We need to do testing. But we're kind of running out of time. And I think that future is very beautiful when we develop these
because then all of a sudden, it's not like, ⁓ we're running out of carbon emissions, we just turn off the global economy. It's like, actually, let's go full-pallet on growing the global economy, grow the size of the pie, because we have all the tools in our, these stewardship tools in our toolkit, whether it be ⁓ people making it rain or people making the fisheries, like, restored, or bringing the seagrasses back. I think that's where I would love to see just a killer, massive company. ⁓
I just think it would be so sci-fi. It's so fucking cool. And like, it's very, you know, yeah.
Mat Vogels (1:05:27)
I know it's a lot of there's a lot of black
mirror episodes that could be happening in the ocean in the next ⁓ decade or so. So I think there's a yeah, there's some exciting pieces. So what was that? Yeah, yeah, it's so yeah, exactly. It's just around the corner. ⁓ Thank you guys so much for hopping on this. Like I said, I want to finish with going around the horn a quick you know, what you need what you're looking for right now what's going on right now like a CTA so to speak on on what you're building David maybe ⁓
Will O'Brien (1:05:34)
White mirror. This is white mirror. This is optimistic. Hopeful this is not black mirror, think.
Mat Vogels (1:05:56)
kick it off, do you need right now? are you trying to do right now?
David Zagaynov (1:06:00)
Yeah. If you like BD in either the business development sense or buying drinks, hit me up. We're Thank you very much. But yeah, I think that's definitely hiring BD and expanding the go-to-market team here.
Mat Vogels (1:06:06)
It's the same thing. It means the same thing,
Love it. Nelson, how about you?
Nelson Mills (1:06:19)
Yeah, I mean, we're hiring across the board, engineering, business development, et cetera. So if you guys want to work for a cool company and live in Rhode Island or maybe BD, Washington, DC, then yeah, hit us up. In particular, some great test engineers. If you've got a captain's license and like to drive boats around and chase underwater vehicles, look us up.
Will O'Brien (1:06:41)
Thank ⁓
Nice. Yeah. Same. Looking for bright minds, people who like being out at sea, people who like being shipped off to different corners of world to work on exciting frontier projects. If that excites you, ⁓ being posted in somewhere like Virginia, Florida, Australia, the Middle East, other locations where we're doing work, Asia. ⁓ Yeah. Ulysses.eco/jobs. ⁓
Mat Vogels (1:06:44)
Love it. Will.
Will O'Brien (1:07:14)
Yeah, join us on the frontier, the Great Blue Frontier.
Mat Vogels (1:07:21)
I love it. Well, again, thank you guys for joining. ⁓ It was the first recording. It'll probably the first episode that we launched as well. So you guys get to be the the guinea pigs. ⁓ I hope people thought it was a fun and exciting. We'll do a lot more of these. think doing more on the ocean in general, I think there's just so much to cover. ⁓ We talked about energy. We talked about mining. Talked about talking whales. ⁓ I think there's there's each one of those is an individual episode. So I'm excited to ⁓ to keep the conversation going.
David Zagaynov (1:07:48)
Sweet, like us. Thanks, Mat. Yeah. Soon, soon.
Will O'Brien (1:07:48)
Thanks for having us. ⁓
Nelson Mills (1:07:49)
Don't forget oceans in space too.
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