What if Russia stopped selling uranium to the US tomorrow | Scott Nolan, General Matter

Summary

Ti Morse interviews Scott Nolan, co-founder and CEO of General Matter, a company building domestic uranium enrichment capacity in the United States. The conversation opens with a stark question: what happens if Russia stops selling enriched uranium to the US tomorrow? Nolan explains that Russia currently supplies roughly 25% of US enriched uranium, and a bipartisan congressional ban on Russian uranium imports takes full effect on January 1, 2028. With no domestic enrichment companies and a supply chain that was systematically dismantled after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US faces a critical vulnerability. General Matter was founded to solve this problem by bringing back scalable, lower-cost enrichment to Paducah, Kentucky — the last place in the country where enrichment was performed at scale before it shut down in 2013.

Nolan draws heavily on his early career at SpaceX (2003-2007) and his 12+ years at Founders Fund under Peter Thiel to explain how General Matter approaches the enrichment problem as an engineering challenge rather than a science experiment. He describes the “idiot index” for both cost and timelines, the importance of parallelizing work streams, making decisions at 80% confidence rather than 99%, and the lesson from SpaceX’s switch from ablative to regeneratively cooled engines — sometimes the best move is to abandon a path that is not working rather than stubbornly push forward. The conversation covers the AI data center energy boom (which could eclipse the entire current US grid by 2030), China’s rapidly growing nuclear capabilities, and why the best talent gravitates toward the hardest unsolved problems.

The interview culminates in Nolan’s thesis that it is sometimes easier to build a really hard company than an easy one: if the problem is big enough and genuinely unsolved, the mission attracts 10x better people even though the problem is only 2x harder. He argues that founders should not focus on problems that are already being solved, but instead dedicate themselves to the large, neglected challenges where a new company can make an outsized impact.

Highlights

”We Have to Make This Project Last”

“I actually got feedback from coworkers who said ‘Hey, you’re doing too much, you’re going too fast, like you might as well you should slow down a little bit. We have to make this project last.’” — Scott Nolan, 4:54

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”This Is Not a Science Experiment”

“On day one of joining SpaceX we had an employee handbook and I remember the first page of the employee handbook I think in big bold letters said this is not a science experiment, this is an engineering problem.” — Scott Nolan, 28:59

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”There Are No Companies That Make It in the US”

“There are no companies that make it in the US. We completely import it from Europe and from Russia.” — Scott Nolan, 16:32

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”Sometimes It’s Easier to Build a Really Hard Company”

“Maybe the problem’s twice as hard, but you get ten times better people. And so net, it’s somehow easier.” — Scott Nolan, 1:33:00

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”AI Data Center Demand Will Eclipse Today’s Grid”

“By 2030, I believe the AI, the latest projections are that the AI data center demand for electricity is going to completely consume or equal today’s grid.” — Ti Morse, 1:19:35

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”Don’t Focus on Problems That Are Already Getting Solved”

“Don’t focus on problems that are already getting solved or adjacent to problems currently being solved that you know are going to be tackled by someone else. Focus on the problems that are big and that are just not getting solved.” — Scott Nolan, 1:33:00

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Key Points

• Russia supplies ~25% of US enriched uranium (0:43) - If Russia stopped shipments tomorrow, utilities would eat into inventories, scramble to buy from Europe, and electricity rates would spike dramatically
• Russian uranium ban takes effect January 1, 2028 (3:00) - Congress passed a bipartisan law banning imports; waiver process expires on that date
• US dismantled its own enrichment after the Berlin Wall (6:29) - The US went from 85-90% of worldwide enrichment to zero domestic capacity, shutting down the last plant in Paducah, Kentucky in 2013
• China’s grid has doubled since 2010 while US stayed flat (9:23) - China went from roughly 4,000 TWh (tied with US) to nearly triple, with 28-30 reactors under construction vs two in the US
• SMRs need higher enrichment fuel (HALEU) that doesn’t exist in the West (12:41) - Advanced reactors need 19.75% enriched uranium vs 3-5% for existing reactors; no Western source exists
• Founders Fund starts companies “under duress” (14:44) - They try to find someone else solving critical problems first; only start a company when nothing exists
• Jensen Huang said “don’t do it” about starting companies (19:50) - The 100th person at Google made more money than the average founder; only start a company if you have to
• Boeing told him to slow down, SpaceX was “night and day” (24:54) - Boeing coworkers on a cost-plus military project said “we have to make this project last”; SpaceX culture was the complete opposite
• SpaceX employee handbook page one: “This is an engineering problem” (28:59) - The mindset from day one was pragmatic engineering, not scientific exploration
• First Falcon 1 launch failure: “No one ever makes their first jump” (30:33) - The team expected the first launch was a coin flip, which is why they had funding for three attempts
• Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund philosophy: back founders unconditionally (34:42) - Statistically, founder-run public companies have outperformed non-founder-run; the power law means the best companies are worth more than all others combined
• Key metric is dollars per SWU (separative work unit) (44:52) - Just as SpaceX focused on dollars per kilo to orbit, General Matter focuses on reducing the cost per unit of enrichment
• 2x cost reduction potential through vertical integration (48:03) - Designing own technology, managing own construction, and strategic facility siting can halve enrichment costs
• Idiot index for timelines: parallelization and granularity (54:06) - Three levers: run things in parallel, increase schedule resolution from months to days, and make decisions at 80% confidence instead of 99%
• Paducah, Kentucky chosen for first facility (1:03:00) - The last place enrichment was done in the US; community remembers and supports nuclear; DOE lease secured
• Nuclear supply chain is China-independent (1:09:45) - Unlike solar and batteries, the US nuclear fuel chain (mining through fabrication) does not involve China today
• AI data centers will need to double the US grid (1:19:35) - By 2030, AI data center electricity demand may equal today’s entire grid; hyperscalers plan behind-the-meter SMRs
• SpaceX switched from ablative to regeneratively cooled engine (1:22:03) - When the ablative chamber had persistent issues, the team made the hard call to switch approaches entirely rather than stubbornly continue
• Elon’s nonobvious decisions: Tesla vision-only (no lidar) (1:25:39) - What seemed wrong at the time (dropping lidar) proved correct because autonomous driving was a controls problem, not a perception problem
• Harder companies attract 10x better people (1:33:54) - The very best talent wants to work on the hardest problems; the mission compensates for difficulty

Mentions

Companies

• General Matter (0:43) - Scott Nolan’s company building domestic uranium enrichment capacity in Paducah, Kentucky
• SpaceX (0:13) - Where Nolan worked from 2003-2007; foundational experience in hard tech company building
• Founders Fund (14:44) - Peter Thiel’s VC firm where Nolan spent 12+ years before starting General Matter
• Boeing (24:06) - Nolan’s internship on a military aerospace program; culture of “make the project last”
• Tesla (1:25:39) - Referenced for lidar-vs-cameras decision and Gigafactory construction lessons
• Anduril (1:09:12) - Mentioned as example of Founders Fund-backed company; has internal 2027 urgency policy
• Palantir (1:08:00) - Referenced as precedent for Founders Fund creating companies when no one else was solving the problem
• Uber (37:21) - Example of how a company changes when the founder leaves
• Y Combinator (34:42) - Referenced as the seed-stage accelerator that demonstrated companies are cheaper to start

Products & Technologies

• AP1000 reactor (10:54) - One-gigawatt reactor design; the administration is working on deployment deals
• SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) (11:44) - Next-generation factory-built reactors that require higher enrichment fuel (HALEU)
• HALEU (High Assay Low Enriched Uranium) (3:51) - 19.75% enriched uranium needed for advanced reactors; no Western production exists
• LEU (Low Enriched Uranium) (3:51) - 3-5% enriched uranium powering today’s grid reactors
• Gaseous diffusion (5:07) - First-generation enrichment technology used by the US; energy-intensive and now obsolete
• Gas centrifuge (6:06) - Second-generation enrichment technology used by Europe and Russia; more efficient than gaseous diffusion
• Merlin engine (27:00) - SpaceX’s rocket engine; evolved from ablative to regeneratively cooled design
• Falcon 1 (27:00) - SpaceX’s first rocket; three failures before first successful orbital launch in 2008
• Falcon 9 (1:27:00) - Originally planned as Falcon 5; Elon pushed to jump directly to the larger rocket
• Starlink (44:36) - Referenced as SpaceX filling its own launch supply with its satellite network
• SWU (Separative Work Unit) (46:48) - The standard unit of enrichment; General Matter’s core cost metric is dollars per SWU per kg

People

• Scott Nolan (0:00) - Co-founder and CEO of General Matter; former SpaceX engineer and Founders Fund partner
• Ti Morse (0:43) - Host of Relentless; interviewer
• Elon Musk (28:15) - Referenced extensively for SpaceX and Tesla decision-making; drove urgency and first-principles thinking
• Peter Thiel (34:40) - Founders Fund founder who convinced Nolan to join; taught multi-layered abstraction thinking
• Jensen Huang (19:50) - NVIDIA CEO who said “don’t do it” when asked about starting a company again
• Travis Kalanick (37:21) - Former Uber CEO; example of what happens when the founder leaves
• Talulah Riley (28:15) - Referenced as describing Elon waking up throwing up during SpaceX/Tesla near-bankruptcy
• Dwarkesh Patel (1:16:10) - Referenced for asking Elon about hiring PhDs vs great engineers
• Walter Isaacson (59:16) - His Elon biography referenced for the “$10M lost per day” mental model

Surprising Quotes

“If Russia stopped shipments of uranium to the US tomorrow, utilities would start eating into their inventories… for some period of time rates would go up a lot.” — Scott Nolan, 1:01

“I said, ‘Why don’t the companies in the US that make that fuel make HALEU?’ And they said, ‘There aren’t — what do you mean?’” — Scott Nolan, 15:07

“The average, like the 100th person at Google made way more money, to put it in financial terms, than your average founder in Silicon Valley.” — Scott Nolan, 19:50

“In 2010 we were tied, completely neck and neck, roughly 4,000 terawatt hours. Since then they’ve doubled their grid, almost tripled it, while we’ve stayed flat.” — Scott Nolan, 9:23

“People associate going faster with spending more, sometimes you can actually go faster and spend less and get a better product.” — Scott Nolan, 1:01:46

Transcript

Scott Nolan: 0:00 During college I was an intern at Boeing on what seemed like the coolest project you could do, which was a government military project at a top secret location. I actually got feedback from coworkers who said, ‘You’re doing too much, you’re going too fast.’ They literally said, ‘We have to make this project last.’

Scott Nolan: 0:13 On day one of joining SpaceX, we had an employee handbook. And I remember the first page of the employee handbook in big bold letters said, ‘This is not a science experiment. This is an engineering problem.’ And it was like night and day.

Scott Nolan: 0:23 Congress passed a law banning the import of Russian uranium starting on January 1st, 2028. We need to be online as quickly as we can so that there’s a reliable source to really offset that loss of US supply. Our goal is not just bringing back US capabilities, it’s also making it more scalable so we can power all the things the US wants to do.

Ti Morse: 0:43 Today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Scott Nolan. He’s the co-founder and CEO of General Matter. Scott, I think today Russia supplies roughly 25% of all the enriched uranium to the US and I want to know what would happen if Russia decided to just stop supplying the US tomorrow?

Scott Nolan: 1:01 If Russia stopped shipments of uranium to the US tomorrow, utilities would start eating into their inventories. Um, we’d continue importing from Europe, but soon we would have to figure out how to replace that. Um, we would probably talk to the European suppliers about purchasing more. Maybe there would be a lot of pressure to start even thinking about purchasing from China, who’s one of the major producers. And, um, that would be the solution. We’d be buying more probably from Europe and then maybe Europe’s buying more from China and then maybe China’s buying more from Russia. So we’d be kind of bringing in through that channel. Um, and at some point, maybe it would be too hard to purchase or prices would go up a lot and utility prices would go up a lot, um, and maybe there would be occasional brownouts. So I think it would be a scenario where you truly have a shortage of about 20, 25% of uranium supply onto the grid and we would be- we would be scrambling to figure out where that’s going to come from and probably for some period of time rates would go up a lot.

Ti Morse: 1:46 And uranium isn’t really like an elastic supply, right?

Scott Nolan: 1:51 It’s, you know, there’s a lag time on it, which is why people carry inventory. But the whole supply chain of enriched uranium, if you go end to end, um, is- you really start with mining. And so mining- ramping up mining has- has major lag time on it. Then you convert it into a gas. Those facilities exist. They’re not that flexible. They’re basically at capacity right now. And then enrichment is this other- other capacity piece where you need a large factory running enrichment equipment, enriching and depleting uranium at the same time. And then you’re turning that into fuel. So- so there’s a lot of fixed capacity in the supply chain. It’s not something that’s easily just ramped up overnight. So I think it would be a race against time to- to actually bring new capacity online, whether that’s inside the US, in European allies, um, with a fallback plan of finding someone who can make it and at some point that becomes China.

Scott Nolan: 2:58 And maybe I should add… The reason I think you’re asking this question is because in 2028 that becomes reality under current law.

Ti Morse: 3:06 What do you mean by that?

Scott Nolan: 3:07 Um, Congress passed, uh, you know, a law banning the import of Russian uranium starting on January 1st, 2028. And, uh, currently we’re under a waiver process where utilities can say, I don’t have a good source of this uranium, this enriched uranium or this fuel other than Russia and so we do need to import this to make sure that we can keep the lights on. And so that’s the waiver process that’s going on now. On, on January 1st, 2028, that path, that waiver process actually expires. And so as, as written in the law today, that, that is the, the deadline.

Ti Morse: 3:41 Would you expect the US to kind of change their stance ahead of that to basically make sure that that doesn’t just immediately get turned off overnight?

Scott Nolan: 3:51 I mean, this is why what we’re doing what we’re doing. So, the Russia, the Russia uranium ban was a bipartisan act, extremely, extremely supported in Congress, very consensus. I don’t think it’s something that the US wants to back down on. And so the reason we started as, as a company was to address the supply chain issues that the US is facing from low enriched uranium that powers today’s grid, which is 18.6 to 19% nuclear. Um, the advanced fuel that all advanced reactors need called HALEU, high assay low enriched uranium, that we can’t get at all today. So every advanced reactor company that you’ve heard of is looking for this fuel and trying to find a long-term supply. And so it’s this, this inability to expand the grid, to expand nuclear because we don’t have the missing piece of enrichment is why we’re doing what we’re doing. So, and, and, you know, whether Russia’s in the market or not, this is a major issue that we’re trying to address.

Ti Morse: 4:46 I’d love to talk about the history of uranium enrichment. I think back in the like early 2000s, space and actually getting astronauts to orbit was one of the last things that like Russia was only able to do and the US didn’t really, like we were shutting down our shuttle program and then SpaceX came in and now that’s kind of flipped. How did like the world kind of unfold where Russia is actually supplying us with this very critical material?

Scott Nolan: 5:07 It’s an interesting history. So the US was first to do enrichment. We did it during the Manhattan Project. We did it for nuclear weapons to win World War II. And that process was, you know, that was done using a process called gaseous diffusion. It was a first generation technology. The US did it at scale, did it across a few sites: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Paducah, Kentucky; Portsmouth, Ohio. Three places that we did enrichment for decades. And that enrichment was, was later, you know, it was used for weapons originally, um, but very quickly then used for nuclear power. And so the US was the leader in enrichment. We were doing it, you know, 86, 85 to 90% of worldwide enrichment was the US using this gaseous diffusion process.

Ti Morse: 6:00 Um, that was something we thought was really important during the Cold War to have our own supply chain. Later after the US got this capacity online, Europe came up with their own enrichment, Russia came up with their own enrichment capacity. These were with a second-generation technology, the gas centrifuge. And so these two paths kind of diverged; the US kept doing gaseous diffusion, Europe and Russia did centrifuge.

Ti Morse: 6:29 The US kept it going until the fall of the Berlin Wall. And at that point, the US said, ‘Hey, you know, we’re clearly now in a free trade world. We don’t need to do this gaseous diffusion process anymore. The process that Europe and Russia went with is more efficient. We can trade for this.’ This is an economic decision; it’s not a national security decision as much. ‘We have a huge stockpile, we have plenty of weapons. We do not need more of that. Let’s focus on nuclear energy.’ And for nuclear energy, we don’t really need to have our own enrichment capacity. This old process is a lot more expensive, it’s more energy-intensive. ‘Let’s work with our foreign allies to trade.’ And so over the next few decades post the Berlin Wall, the US progressively shut down its gaseous diffusion capacity to the point of in 2013, it shut down the last plant that was owned and operated by the US in Paducah, Kentucky. And, you know, we said we’ll keep trading. And so over the last decade, it’s become more obvious that that probably wasn’t the right approach.

Scott Nolan: 7:29 Is there a reason that the US kind of made that decision in the first place? Like, it seems like a very strategic thing to have here in our borders. How did that happen?

Ti Morse: 7:40 I think it’s like a lot of industries where we said, ‘We’re in a global free trade world.’ Um, you know, we’re allies with Europe, we’re on good terms with Russia, we’re trade partners with China, freely trading with them for the last, you know, decade, all the way through — you think of all the way back to like the Clinton administration, this seemed like the consensus. China’s a growing economy, we can move manufacturing there, we can do other things here, and then, you know, free trade. So I think we just undervalued the importance of having our own capacity, whether it’s manufacturing or critical minerals or things like the nuclear supply chain.

Ti Morse: 8:25 On one level, this is purely a domestic US thing, like how do we make sure we have our capability, but the second tier of it is really global influence. So today, because we can’t produce fuel for reactors unilaterally within the US, Russia and China are really driving, you know, the vast majority of reactors that are deployed elsewhere. So north of 70% of reactors internationally, I think, are Russian and Chinese designs because they can come with a fuel supply.

Scott Nolan: 8:53 One of the things that really surprised me when I was researching for this interview was apparently the US actually has the most reactors out of any country right now. I think it’s like —

Ti Morse: 9:00 94 and China is at something like 59. But China is turning on like 28 to 30 right now, like they’re under construction, whereas the US maybe has two. And so they are, just like solar, just going to absolutely destroy us if the current trends persist. How do you think we kind of stop and buck those trends and get back to building nuclear?

Scott Nolan: 9:23 Yeah, even at a bigger level, if you look at China’s grid, in 2010 we were tied, completely neck and neck, roughly 4,000 terawatt hours. Since then they’ve doubled their grid, almost tripled it, while we’ve stayed flat. And so this, you know, this issue of capacity and power production is upstream of everything. And it’s like yeah, all the things that you hear about, like probably half the companies that you’ll talk to are doing something that has a major energy input, especially AI. So AI data centers, manufacturing-driven companies, defense, all of these things require a solid grid and good base load. And China now has 2x what we have. This is something we have to fix as quickly as possible. So it’s, this is why we’re working on this. It’s really upstream of everything. It’s the ability to enrich is upstream of making nuclear fuel, making nuclear fuel is the required input for every reactor. And it seems like the only clean, you know, it seems like we’re going to go with, for the grid to expand, it needs to be clean base load. And I think the only form of clean base load that we have today that’s economical is nuclear. It’s always been the cleanest, it’s always been the safest base load. So we see that as being the way that the grid expands through existing reactors, advanced reactors, but without the fuel you can’t do that.

Ti Morse: 10:46 This is kind of a hypothetical but let’s say you were given like $25 billion today and just said go turn on as many reactors as possible, how would you actually do that?

Scott Nolan: 10:54 The administration is doing a version of this right now with AP1000s. And so I think that’s the reactor that we have that really moves the needle on the grid.

Ti Morse: 11:08 And what is that?

Scott Nolan: 11:10 So AP1000 is a one gig- roughly one gigawatt reactor, one gigawatt of electricity production. And so you look at a lot of these data centers, and they used to be a few hundred megawatts, now they’re gigawatt scale. So in order to really move the needle quickly on approved reactor designs, you’re going to have to do something with a one gigawatt class reactor. And that’s what you see the administration doing with deals around their deployment. In the next few years, we expect there to be a bunch of approved next-generation reactor designs. Pretty much all the startups you’ve heard of are doing this type of design, a lot of people call them SMRs.

Scott Nolan: 11:44 Small modular reactors. There’s also microreactors in there. And so the big question people have, or the big thought behind this, the big idea, is how can we take something that was historically a huge construction project and turn it into a factory build that can be done at scale? And so almost all of these companies have the premise of we’re going to take a civil works construction project and we’re going to turn it into a factory build that’s modular, small modular reactors. We’ll take those modules and we’ll take them to the site and then we’ll connect everything and get it online without the same 10-year construction effort that’s required historically in the US. When you do that, you end up needing to make your reactor smaller. And if you make your reactor smaller, your core is smaller. And if your core’s smaller, to get good nuclear reactions, to get good burnup, good efficiency, you end up wanting to run more enriched fuel.

Ti Morse: 12:41 That’s like the difference between like three or five percent and like 20 percent?

Scott Nolan: 12:43 That’s right. Yeah. Yeah, it’s typically three to five percent or 19.75 percent is where most reactors are going.

Ti Morse: 12:48 And what is the difference in the process for like enriching uranium if you’re just doing like three or five percent versus, you know, 19.75 or 20?

Scott Nolan: 12:54 I would think of it like a refining process or a, you know, even a distillation process. It’s just like refining another time. So, most enrichment methods are a series of steps to just further and further and further refine material. And so all you do is further refine it some more. Um, so when uranium comes out of the ground, it’s about 0.711% U-235. And so that’s the fissile material that you want, and that is elevated to three to five percent for the reactors on the grid today. So it’s refined until you get to that threshold. For advanced reactors, that’s taken up to 19.75, but the process is not fundamentally different to do that.

Ti Morse: 13:46 And is this something where like tomorrow if there was a small, you know, SMR that could be turned on, does the fuel even exist right now to make that like work? Or is this something that has to be kind of scaled in parallel?

Scott Nolan: 13:59 Yeah, not in the West. So, yeah, if we go back to the whole origins of General Matter, it was — it was around this question. To answer your question directly of if there were $25 billion, what would I do? Um, I would probably, you know, if you want to get started today, you would deploy some — some large reactors, you’d deploy some AP1000s. There’s a huge wave of advanced reactors coming through many startups, some incumbents. These are very promising. It is likely the path to bring down the cost of nuclear and to scale it rapidly. And so I would save some of that money for when they are licensed and they are ready to deploy and deploy some of those. Um, you might do a mix of some microreactors for some environments, for some remote applications, or if then get their cost low enough, you can tile them together and then other SMRs for applications like data centers and behind the meter.

Ti Morse: 14:44 When we were talking before we started recording, you mentioned that basically with Founders Fund the way that you guys decide or, you know, you decided to start this company is almost under duress. Like you ideally are trying to go find someone else that’s doing it and, you know, go fund them. But if something is super critical and no one else is doing it, then maybe you’re the right person to do it and you go do that. How’d you kind of make that decision?

Scott Nolan: 15:07 Yeah, so the origin story was really at Founders Fund. I was looking at many different engineering companies, everything from transportation to space to nuclear. And so met a number of nuclear companies, other energy companies over the years. By the late 2010s, early 2020s, there were a bunch of interesting advanced reactor companies. And Founders Fund invested in one of them, and I was talking to them about the path forward. And the prior on this was that the hardest thing would be getting licensed because for a long time, no one had gotten a license on a new reactor design. And they said, ‘Yeah, that’s not trivial, but there’s a known process and we’re going to do that process. It’s just that no one’s really tried to do that or no one’s done it well, and we’re going to do it well.’ That was what the reactor company told me. And then they said the much bigger challenge besides getting a license is actually getting the fuel. And so I started looking into this and trying to understand, you know, what do you mean, why the fuel is so hard to get? Clearly, we have reactors on the grid today that are running on fuel. Is it that much harder to make HALEU, the more advanced fuel that you need, than to make LEU, you know, the three to five percent enriched fuel that all reactors run on? And I said, ‘Why don’t the companies in the US that make that fuel make HALEU?’ And they said, ‘There aren’t what do you mean?’

Ti Morse: 16:31 There is no company.

Scott Nolan: 16:32 Yeah, there are no companies that make it in the US. We completely import it from Europe and from Russia. And so I said, ‘Well, okay, where are you going to get HALEU?’ And they said, ‘There’s one place, it’s Russia. We have to import it.’ And so this combined with the Russia ban, this was already challenging for them, but then combined with the Russia ban, it was extremely difficult.

Ti Morse: 16:51 So when you like initially get that information, what’s going through your mind on this clearly doesn’t work? Like, there’s this massive roadblock that’s going to happen that you can see is going to happen. And for some reason, people are just kind of like saying we’ll figure it out.

Scott Nolan: 17:04 Well, I think it wasn’t something people were worried about or it wasn’t relevant for a long time. So if you’re a utility operator, you have a bunch of nuclear reactors, you know, you’re purchasing fuel from Europeans or enrichment from European firms. And, you know, you’re importing some from Russia because it’s been historically very low cost. And, you know, it hasn’t really been a problem. The grid hasn’t been expanding. You keep your contracts going. The utility fuel buying teams purchase where they can get it from. And there hasn’t really been the impetus to create new enrichment capacity in the US. As reactor developers, like all the startups working on reactors, I think they have been the first to really encounter that the supply chain in the US is not where it needs to be. I think utilities may have been aware of this, but there’s, you know, it’s not within their scope. And so they’ll buy from where they need to purchase from. New reactor companies kind of discovered this as they go and realize that, okay, it’s time to start thinking about our supply chain now that we have some of our design worked through.

Scott Nolan: 18:00 And then you realize this really weak part of the supply chain. So the Founders Fund story was, they were telling me about this issue, and then I spent basically all of 2023 trying to find a company that was solving this and working on this. And after an extremely thorough search, understand, you know, all elements of the supply chain from mining to conversion to enrichment to fuel fabrication, they were right. It was really an enrichment issue. And so, spent months trying to find the right company that was doing enrichment, realized it didn’t exist, realized that, like in the past, like with Palantir and Anduril, a new company needed to be created. And so started pulling, thinking about how do we pull together that company in 2023, and then officially incorporated, officially launched at the start of 2024 with a core team. And so to your question of under duress, yeah, it’s not something that Founders Fund does programmatically or even desires to do, but it’s something that when there’s an opportunity that no one is solving, um, it’s been the case that people on the team find it worthwhile to put everything else aside and go start something. So we started this with the desire to bring back domestic enrichment, to make it much more scalable, much more reliable, it’s already extremely safe, and then to bring down the costs so that we can power everything the US is trying to do that’s going to require a massive increase in the grid or behind the meter power production.

Ti Morse: 19:28 I was reading this doc that you gave me earlier this morning and you basically said most of the time when you’re talking to founders, you’re almost trying to convince people to not start companies, because they’re not necessarily doing it for the right reasons. For you yourself, this is like a very long journey. How did you kind of come to the conclusion that you wanted to spend the next maybe decades of your life working on it?

Scott Nolan: 19:50 Yeah, I think, um, yeah, to address that point of like trying to convince people not to start companies, I’m, yeah, I’m certainly not the first person to say this. I think there’s been allusions to this by, like, Peter at Founders Fund has long said, you know, the average, like the 100th person at Google made way more money, to put it in financial terms, than your average founder in Silicon Valley. So if people are trying to start companies for financial reward, it’s often much better to just join a great company. And I think a year or two ago, Jensen said this also. Someone asked him if you’re going to do it all over again, what would you do differently? He said, don’t do it. Um, cause yeah, I think starting companies is hard and I kind of knew what I was getting into after 12 years of working with different founders at Founders Fund and three, four years working at SpaceX very early on. You know, it’s something you should do only if you have to do it. So my criteria, a lot of people would ask me, you know, during my decade plus at Founders Fund, would you ever go start a company? And I had a pretty standard answer, which was, yeah, I would do it under three conditions. If there’s a really important problem

Ti Morse: 21:00 that’s not getting solved and somehow I can, I have a good shot of helping solve it, then I’ll do something. And so with this one, through talking to reactor companies, it became obvious this important problem of actually making the fuel that they needed was not getting solved. So that checked number one and two. And then when I really dug into it during 2023, it became obvious, you know, you would need a few different things that had to come together for this to work, and I felt like my background unexpectedly set me up to do that.

Scott Nolan: 21:35 And why was it that when you went to search for the company that was already doing this, nothing came up? Like what about this problem in particular didn’t seem sexy to people?

Ti Morse: 21:44 I think it was just a completely unknown problem. It’s the sort of thing where people just assume —

Scott Nolan: 21:49 Did people just think about the reactor and then they don’t actually think about the supply chain behind it?

Ti Morse: 21:54 Or you assume the supply chain’s fine because, like, you know, existence proof, we have nuclear power in the country today. Obviously, the supply chain exists. Obviously there can’t be an issue. But then when you actually realize, okay, we need to do something slightly different and we don’t have the capability to do that, you start pulling the string and realizing, you know, you do the research and you realize the current status. So I think it was off people’s radar. I think when you think, you know, you think about an enrichment business, it sounds like a big industrial chemical business, a processing business, which it is. And that doesn’t sound that sexy. And then I think there was also an element of wondering, are we even allowed to do this? And so when we started, our first conversations were with the DOE. Hey, this is what we’re hearing from reactor vendors, this is what the problems that we’re seeing. Is this really an issue? Is this something that a private company could help solve? And the answer was yes. But prior to that, you would say, okay, let’s look at who’s done this before, and it’s all nation-state or state-owned entities, spinouts of national labs, companies that used to be part of the Department of Energy, clearly like very, very strong government DNA and a history within the government. And so is this even something a private company is allowed to do? And so through a lot of conversations, we were encouraged to do this. We learned that, yes, you can do this, but we need to work really closely together. And so I think it’s a combination of, to your point, it’s not the world’s sexiest business. It’s also not something that’s been generally on people’s radar because there was no need for new expansion of enrichment in the US, at least so people thought. And then there was a question of is this even allowed and what would it take to get the government’s support? And so now through a few years of work, really starting in 2023, we’re working very closely with the DOE and the NRC on bringing this capability back.

Scott Nolan: 23:57 You worked at SpaceX from like 2003 to I think like 200…

Ti Morse: 24:00 Seven-ish, right? What was that like and then what were you able to kind of like take from that to starting this company?

Scott Nolan: 24:06 Yeah, so SpaceX was not my first job. Even though it’s my first job out of college, the one, the place I worked right before SpaceX was Boeing. And so during college I was an intern at Boeing on what seemed like the coolest project you could do, which was a government military project at a top secret location working on a military program. And so I’d been a mechanical engineer, aerospace engineer, undergrad and masters, and so this seemed like a great place to go. Much more interesting than working on commercial airliners I thought, so let’s work on a military program and let’s try and push the limits on what’s possible in the aerospace world. And you know, it was a multi-thousand person project out in the desert.

Scott Nolan: 24:54 And it was relatively slow. I tried to work as fast as I could, do as much as I could, and I actually got feedback from coworkers who said ‘Hey, you’re doing too much, you’re going too fast, like you might as well you should slow down a little bit. We have to make this…’ they literally said ‘We have to make this project last.’

Ti Morse: 25:14 Is it because of the incentives with how they were getting funded?

Scott Nolan: 25:17 It was, I think it was partly culture, it was partly the people there, but ultimately you could say it came back to the incentive structure of running a cost plus program where whatever you spend, you get that times 1.X and that’s the money that you make. And so yeah, there’s a very clear incentive to maintain the contract, do the best job that you can, take very little risk, and on the margins maybe go a little bit slower to do a better job and take less risk. And that’s going to increase the budget of the project. Now you only want to do that up until the point that the project keeps going. You don’t want to push it so far that it gets questioned. But to a limit, that was the incentive. And so I had worked on a very large aerospace program in college and then after college graduated and, well, before graduating was an intern at SpaceX in 2003 and then joined full-time in 2004. And when I got there it was, you know, 30-something people as an intern, 50-something as a full-time employee, and it was like night and day. And even after my internship I knew SpaceX was going to win on the launch market just by seeing the two cultures.

Ti Morse: 26:26 This is like years before… didn’t they land their first rocket in 2008?

Scott Nolan: 26:32 First successful orbital launch was 2008. And so yeah, to your question what was it like? It was a team of let’s say 50 people working on the basic infrastructure required to achieve the mission of SpaceX, which was ‘Let’s make space flight much more affordable so we get much more of it’ and ‘Let’s make it reliable and safe and bring down the costs and let’s actually help humanity make the next step towards Mars.’ So there were 50 people who were a mix of new grads, people from the industry, all true believers in the mission, working in this small company that was relatively unknown at the time, not taking the standard aerospace job, but believing that a small group of people could do something to move an industry forward that had completely stagnated for decades. And so when I was there, it was, you know, 2003, we were starting on building test stands, there was initial engine designs, initial engine tests, and we just scaled that up into, you know, engine development program on Merlin, on other engines, get those working, get performance up higher and higher, integrate those into Falcon 1 and, you know, the original Falcon 1 launches. So there was a three-year arc to see that progression. And it was just a lot of people working as hard as it took to make things succeed and, you know, working constantly 60-hour weeks or more, but not 100-hour weeks every week. It was this is something where we’re going to, we know where we’re headed, we want to get there as fast as possible at the lowest total cost. And yeah, let’s do our best to make this succeed.

Ti Morse: 28:15 One thing I’ve noticed over the past probably 20 years is Elon’s way of building companies has drastically shifted. Like even 2008, 2009, SpaceX and Tesla were near bankruptcy. Same thing with like 2018 production hell that brought Tesla close to the brink. I think for a very long time Elon didn’t want to run multiple companies. Talulah Riley at one point said he was like waking up in the middle of the night throwing up and stuff, trying to basically survive. What was kind of the evolution of the way that he operated over that time frame?

Scott Nolan: 28:41 I would say, yeah, when I started there in full-time 2004, the pace was fast, everyone was working hard, but I think the lesson that’s been learned since then by everybody at SpaceX is just the feeling of urgency. Of how long these projects can take if you allow them to, and how close survival might be to the line and how you just don’t know where the line is. And instead of letting things get to the brink with like you said, two companies that were on the brink at the same time trying to survive that, nearly impossible. Instead of getting to that point, let’s work harder upfront, let’s go faster upfront, let’s have higher expectations of ourselves to avoid ever letting it get that close ever again. I think that is a lesson I would draw from that is people were probably too comfortable. We all were very optimistic, we all believed it was going to work, but it did turn out to be close. And so we probably should have been stepping on the gas even harder on day one. And so maybe that’s one lesson. I think, yeah, there’s probably many, many lessons learned over the years about how to maintain a really strict meritocracy, how to reward the best people, how to attract the best people and how to just have extremely high standards for yourself.

Scott Nolan: 30:00 Steer around all these things to actually achieve the long-term mission. Because if you allow any drift, you’re very unlikely to actually make a huge impact. And so you’ve just got to be extremely strict, extremely focused on what you’re trying to achieve. And then, you know, today we’re I guess we’re about 22 years into SpaceX. And so you realize these things can take a very long time. And so we should try and go as fast as we can so we can really get it done.

Ti Morse: 30:27 What was the feeling internally when the first three rocket launches, like, failed?

Scott Nolan: 30:33 So I was there for the first two. The first one was I think people were pretty discouraged. That was, you know, we had obviously hoped it would get to orbit and we did get off the pad and got some altitude but then there was a fuel leak in the engine area which caused a fire which led to the rocket not making it to second stage ignition or separation or even max-Q. And so that was pretty discouraging, but we knew after the first one like, you know, it’s almost like in The Matrix, no one ever makes their first jump. Very unlikely for a first rocket to actually make it. And so we knew, okay, that’s, we should expect that this was a coin flip on the first one. And so that’s why we have enough funding for three. And the second one really was very close. It was a, two and three were very, very close.

Ti Morse: 31:21 Wasn’t there basically just not in the fuel tank, there weren’t these like stoppers to stop the sloshing of the fuel?

Scott Nolan: 31:23 Yeah, there were no, there weren’t sufficient baffling inside the second stage tank to prevent that oscillation from having a positive feedback loop. And so yeah, eventually the engine ingests gas and then that was it. On the third one, it was a really fluke thing where one component changed and then that created a time delay in some gas release, and the two stages bumped just as the second stage was trying to fire off, which caused an explosion there. But after the first launch, it was really close. It was just these little things that came up two more times. But I left thinking that the second, after the second launch, okay, we’ve absolutely got this in the bag for the third one, we’re in good shape, let’s go try and do other things. But obviously, there was a 20-year history after that of doing way, way bigger, more amazing things with landing, reusability, the Starship. And so that was really just the beginning, but as someone straight out of school, you don’t always realize that.

Ti Morse: 32:41 Coming out of SpaceX, how’d you kind of decide to figure out what you wanted to do next?

Scott Nolan: 32:46 That is the important question that is often very hard to answer, what to do next. I left thinking that the next step was to really learn, to gain experience in quote-unquote the business world and so I did just under two years of consulting at a management consulting firm thinking I would learn a lot from many existing businesses and how they operate, how to make them better, that this would somehow be really useful in the future for working at another company. And then, you know, you learned that actually many of these big companies are just doing things the way they’ve always done them. There may have been a moment in time where they came up with these processes where they thought from first principles but now they’ve been around for decades and the way they’re operating might be out of date. But the moral of that story was just that you can just think things through and figure it out. And so basic tools like the ability to just analyze systems whether it’s a business system or an engineering system and sort of an engineering or math background was really useful for thinking this stuff through and often the people on the ground didn’t have any really unique special insight into why they were doing things the way they were doing it and there was often a better way to do it. And so that was probably the main lesson drawn out of that. But knew I didn’t want to stay in that industry forever and was thinking about what was next and ended up thinking okay maybe I will go to another tech company or even could go back to SpaceX at some point and then actually met Peter from Founders Fund who convinced me, hey, don’t join startup XYZ, join our startup in the venture capital space and that was 2011.

Ti Morse: 34:40 What did Peter say to you when he was trying to convince you to join?

Scott Nolan: 34:42 I don’t think it was any one thing. We just had a series of conversations about what I had worked on, what I was thinking about doing next, what was interesting and, you know, at that time that was like early years of Y Combinator and there was clearly this shift in how companies could be started, how they should be started and funded. And Founders Fund’s — so Y Combinator was taking the thesis that companies are much lower cost to start now and a version of software will eat the world and there’s all these opportunities and teams of two living in an apartment can get something started and prove real traction. Their thesis was very focused on that. Founders Fund’s philosophy at that point in 2011 was very focused on really two things. One, in the name Founders Fund, we will back founders unconditionally no matter what, and this was not the case at the time. This was coming out of a 2000s era history of thinking of the company as a horse and a jockey, and the horse was maybe the market or the technology and the jockey was the founder. And maybe you had a great horse but you could just get a different jockey.

Scott Nolan: 36:00 That had been the conventional wisdom at the time. Founders Fund took a very different stance on this and said basically the founder is almost the company. Like, if you think that you’re creating a great company and you can just swap the CEO and they’re just a fungible resource, then you’re probably just building a very normal, very standard, commoditized company in some way. The idea was that the founder who really noticed the problem, came up with the idea, had really the moral authority to lead and only they really understood the inner workings of the company and could drive it properly. The more pessimistic view would be something like, if a company is struggling so much, this would maybe be the VC view. If the company was struggling to the point where you need to replace the CEO, maybe you should spend your time on finding different companies to invest in, not trying to fix companies. And so there’s a positive version, which was really the real version, which was great companies are run by their founders. And this was statistically true if you look at public companies and you look at two baskets: founder-run, non-founder-run, the founder-run have done much better historically. And then there was the VC version of let’s focus on the great companies and put all our energy and time there and not be too obsessed with helping a struggling company barely make it. And so that’s played out as well and was known throughout the 2010s even today as the power law, where the best companies are worth much more than all the others put together.

Ti Morse: 37:21 Yeah, the way I think about it is basically the founder is kind of the keeper of the soul of the company. And if you pull the soul out, you’re not going to have the same, like the mission disappears, honestly. If you think about, like Uber, pre- you know, while Travis was running it, it was a completely different company than the one that exists today. I also find it a little bit interesting when you have that situation where Travis does leave or he has to leave, where there’s almost like a loss of story, almost.

Scott Nolan: 37:54 Yeah, you could say there’s like, some people refer to NPCs, but you could have like an NPC company where it’s just the standard thing that’s doing its bureaucratic motions and what’s really driving it? What’s making sure that this is achieving the mission that it set out to do? And who’s really going to hold it accountable and ask the really hard questions and make the really unpopular choices that put it back on the right track when it gets off track? Yeah, I think only someone who knows the whole history, who’s really willing to sacrifice a lot before it’s all proven, clearly has that motivation. And so it’s the best bet is just let the founder run it and try and work with great companies from the VC perspective.

Ti Morse: 38:35 What was the most unintuitive thing that you learned from Peter?

Scott Nolan: 38:39 Probably coming from the business consulting world, which I’d done right before Founders Fund and been in that world. That world thinks pretty differently than I would say Peter would think. And so oftentimes it’s a lot of conventional frameworks, more conventional straightforward linear thinking to arrive at hopefully the right answer. More linear thinking I’d say in that world, which can result in more conventional answers and more conventional ways of doing things. But I think the big difference with what I first saw at Founders Fund was that it wasn’t this linear thinking approach. It was often very abstracted. And so you would often ask questions that were not obvious. I think it went back a lot more actually to asking the right questions than just following the breadcrumbs. But it was taking a step back and trying to figure out how do we look at this from a totally different angle and try and realize something that could surface one problem or company or solution above the others and which of these angles do we think is actually correct? And sometimes it would involve multiple layers of abstraction to generate new insights.

Ti Morse: 40:54 Give an example of that?

Scott Nolan: 40:56 One company we invested in probably my first or second year there was a cancer therapeutics company and this cancer therapeutics company was really focused on a slightly different or like not articulated theory of cancer which was that ultimately most cancers were really driven by stem cells and you just had to really focus on the stem cells and how to differentiate them from the rest and how to specifically try and target those cancer cells. And you would say okay and maybe by today people realize this and it’s not unconventional but 15 years ago it was not popular. And this company was uniquely focused on that. But I think the conclusion was yes this all looks good but we Founders Fund don’t have any really special insight into biology more than people in academia do. They know much more than we do. And so these mouse studies can look good to us. Mouse has been — cancer’s been cured many times in mice before. What’s different about this?

Ti Morse: 42:00 How do we know that this stem cell theory is correct? And I think at the time there was like one insight of at the same time there had been a very pro-stem cell argument in the scientific and government community about how these were actually useful for many things, which they were. And so there was the conclusion that hey, maybe this is a really under-explored area because it’s maybe unpopular to say that stem cells are involved in cancer because we’re supposed to be looking at only positive things about stem cells. And then that company ended up succeeding from a business perspective and then many of their targets that they developed are now in cancer therapeutics that are coming to market.

Ti Morse: 42:56 I think in the, you know if we go back to the example of SpaceX. At the time the launch market was not a huge market. It was single digit billions. And I guess this was another example of the abstraction kind of going to a social political level and saying what things maybe for the first time could be done well by a private company as opposed to a government organization. And so space launch has historically always been done by the government or government contractors, and a lot of people accepted that that was just the way that the industry had always been and would always be and that maybe it could never be highly commercial and it would always need to be subsidized by the government. And maybe the thinking or the different questioning was around is this true and is it generally the case that private companies can do things better? And if so, how far does that span? And so SpaceX has proven that one.

Scott Nolan: 43:51 Mhmm.

Scott Nolan: 44:03 I think one of the least understood things is it’s very important to ask the right questions. And I think prior to SpaceX people were not asking the right questions as to how to get mass to orbit. And Elon was, from what I can tell, the first person that basically just optimized for this one key variable, which is how do you get mass to orbit instead of, you know, what does the US government want us to do? And then with that he basically just went all in on this idea of just lowering launch costs with the understanding that hopefully there was going to be a market afterwards. And it seems that you know, with what he’s done recently, it’s effectively just scaling his own network of satellites because he’s able to fill his own supply.

Scott Nolan: 44:46 How did you figure out what the right question to ask was for the key KPI to think about when you were starting General Matter?

Ti Morse: 44:52 Yeah, so the way we realized the importance of enrichment was talking to the advanced reactor companies and they not only said, ‘Hey, we don’t have a source of fuel,’ but they said, ‘Even if we can get it, the fuel’s too expensive.’ At these fuel costs, look at my economics, look at how much of this fuel cost is driven by the fuel. And then if you decompose the fuel into the different steps, enrichment was the biggest step. And so, it was just by digging into the problem and understanding where the cost structure was, that we realized the key cost variable was… cost per unit of enrichment drove the cost of fuel, which would drive the cost of nuclear energy going forward.

Scott Nolan: 45:41 And I think this was similar to the example that you just gave at SpaceX where, you know, you go back to the 1990s, satellites cost billions of dollars, therefore all that mattered about launch was that it was highly reliable, and launch costs therefore didn’t matter that much. Fast forward to the 2000s, people were talking about microsatellites, smallsats. Those all of a sudden were much, much cheaper, $10 million, $1 million, not a billion dollars. And so now this $100 million launch cost really mattered. And so, if you want much more of these small satellites, we have to bring the launch costs down. And launch cost is really dollars per kilo, but it’s dollars per kilo to an orbit, which is really like dollars per kilo times delta V.

Ti Morse: 46:48 And so for us, the version of that that makes nuclear energy more affordable, makes advanced reactors really succeed economically, then makes their fuel lower cost is bringing down the cost of enrichment, which is… dollars per unit of enrichment per kilo. And so you can take that one step further and make it dollars per — it’s called SWU is the unit of enrichment, really dollars per SWU per kg. And so that’s the metric that we really focus on, which is colloquially known as dollars per SWU, dollars per separative work unit. And so it’s basically, how much does it cost us to reduce the entropy of a kilo of raw uranium and the amount that you reduce the entropy is the amount that you’re enriching it.

Scott Nolan: 47:35 What was the idiot index for enriching uranium?

Ti Morse: 47:41 That is a great question. We haven’t really thought of it as much in those terms. Like the — in space, the idiot index, so like the idiot index is generally understood to be, what’s the cost of a thing compared to the cost of the raw material?

Scott Nolan: 47:57 So if a rocket costs 100 million dollars but the raw materials are a million, then it’s a 100 idiot index.

Ti Morse: 48:00 That’s right. Yeah. So that’s when you’re specifically making hardware that then goes and launches and performs a service. In our case, the service that we’re performing is enrichment. I would say it’s commonly understood to be an energy input problem. So a little bit harder to get the exact idiot index on that. Like, how efficiently can you use energy to enrich? I think in the gaseous diffusion world, it was a lot of energy cost, and so that was the focus of how do we bring this down. But if you actually look at a facility that’s doing enrichment, there’s a tremendous amount of CAPEX upfront spent in fixed equipment that does the enrichment. And actually the energy cost is relatively low. And so the version of your question is like the idiot index as popularized by SpaceX is a guide on how much should we be able to bring down the cost. And SpaceX has always said we can bring it down 10 times, an order of magnitude over time. For us, the focus has been how do we make the most economical enrichment service in the world? How do we make it extremely safe and reliable but primarily scalable and lower cost? And that comes through really thinking through how do you design a much, much better facility. How do you do better building construction? How do you make the guts of it better? How do you site in a better location, so on and so forth. And so we think there’s easily potential for a 2x reduction in the cost of enrichment versus where it sits today and likely more. And there’s a lot of ways you get there. You get there through designing your own technology, not using off-the-shelf. You get there through building your own in-house EPC rather than outsourcing everything to a GC. Instead, manage your own subcontractors and run your own project. And maybe even site in a place with available energy at reasonable cost.

Scott Nolan: 50:20 When you were starting out, because there’s literally only one like operational enrichment facility that’s just not like R&D focused in the United States and you know that it’s going to take like a multiple multiple years, maybe half a decade in order to get this thing operational so you’re actually producing enriched uranium, how much were you thinking we’re gonna vertically integrate and try to do all in-house versus like go find other suppliers and things and take learnings from other people that are currently doing it?

Ti Morse: 50:43 I think the intuition was that we would have to do it in-house. That was almost out of the gates and almost an assumption. And we did question this a little bit, but it became very obvious that a lot of things we would have to do ourselves in-house, really drawing on the lessons that we learned from the early days of SpaceX. And so our team comes from a whole mixture of places — there are people who worked at SpaceX and then went to work at other companies and wanted to get back into something very mission oriented, but places like SpaceX and Tesla and Anduril, the whole tech world who has actually broken into incumbent dominated high capital government partnered industries. So that’s the tech world, we also have people from national labs who have seen the full range of the most advanced technologies and then even people from other parts of the nuclear fuel supply chain who are very aware of how this works. And so combining that experience and just talking through how should we do this really in the first months of a company, it was pretty obvious that there were certain things you could use existing supply chains for but some things you would just have to do yourself.

Scott Nolan: 51:57 Those were pretty straightforward. I’d say the thing that we learned in the first year of the company that maybe is more surprising is that not only did you have to do that but you really should design and build the buildings yourself, not with every single piece of expertise, not with like every trade inside the company, but you need to project manage your own project, not just for cost but for schedule. And the minute that you throw your building design over the wall and you say hey some outsourced firm can you figure out what we want and design a really great building for us, there’s so much that has to be explained in that process that it’s unreasonable for someone else to figure that out unless you’re building a warehouse. But when you’re doing something more bespoke —

Ti Morse: 52:51 Is this a little bit more of the product is the factory and that’s what you have to get great at building?

Scott Nolan: 52:57 That’s right, yeah. And that extends to the obviously the guts of the factory but the thing that was unexpected or that we learned over time and that’s now obvious in hindsight is you should design your building the way that you need it to be and you should manage that project just like every other piece.

Ti Morse: 53:12 Did you try to outsource this initially?

Scott Nolan: 53:14 We didn’t go too far down that path but it’s what’s typically done in the industry. You hire a GC and they run your project. We felt like it was important to do that in-house and that’s something we saw and learned by talking with people who had been part of the Tesla Gigafactory builds and just hearing what their experiences were when they tried to do certain things with third parties who were going to need more guidance than you can provide versus just doing it in-house.

Ti Morse: 53:45 So we were just talking about the idiot index in reference to basically the cost of the finished good versus the raw material inputs. I also think something that’s interesting to think about is how long a conventional timeline is versus what the actual timeline is if you kind of allow yourself —

Scott Nolan: 54:00 Eliminated all the unnecessary requirements and all these other things. How do you think about kind of the idiot index for timelines?

Ti Morse: 54:06 Yeah, the idiot index is a pretty harsh way of saying it because often, I mean, often things are the way they are and the people working on them are really smart. They’re trying pretty hard to do their best, but people are often working on something quite narrow. And the thing you really have to do is just rethink the puzzle from big picture. And so, yeah, the schedule piece. I think commonly understood, it’s a cost thing. But there’s the same thing on the schedule side, where if you just take the conventional approach and you say, ‘Okay, this is how it’s been done, let’s continue doing it that way.’ A lot of times you can just question, do you really need to do everything in sequence? Which things can we do in parallel? Maybe we’re taking some financial risk to do it in parallel. But how do we just get going? And how do we get something online or launched as quickly as we can? Because time’s wasting and in our case, the industry needs us to do this. And so how do we go quickly in a safe, responsible way that may end up being slightly higher cost, but may actually be cheaper because we did it in half the time? And so on the cost side, it’s pretty well discussed at this point. On the schedule side, I think there’s really probably two main variables. One is which things are you doing sequentially versus in parallel, and then how long does each step take? And both have to be interrogated to really get to the shortest amount of time. In our case, that means everything from at the same time doing engineering work, tech development, standing up manufacturing capability, finding the location of the facility, preparing the grounds of the facility for construction, working on licensing, all these things at the exact same time. So one big dimension is parallelization. The second dimension that’s probably not fully appreciated is how much are you really questioning each block of time?

Scott Nolan: 57:00 You know, what’s the resolution of your Gantt chart? Is it one month? Is it one week? Is it one day? Is it an hour? And so can we question these tasks of like, “Oh, that’ll take me a week.” Okay, is it really a week? Or is it like four days? And how do we start really pushing on the limits? Why are we going to wait for a week from now when someone’s waiting on that decision from us to go design this other component when we’re all in a room right now, no one’s leaving this room, let’s just decide right now in the next 15 minutes based on what we know. So I think it’s really those two things of how do you parallel path things, second, how do you bring in the resolution of this. And there’s a military saying about this that minutes make hours, hours make days, days make months. And so how do we just really focus on the minimum amount of time. There’s probably a third piece that I did see at SpaceX, which was this idea that instead of deliberating over something to get to 99% certainty, let’s just get to where we think it’s probably the right choice with some degree of certainty more than 50%.

Ti Morse: 58:06 Roughly 80-90%?

Scott Nolan: 58:08 Maybe 80. Maybe in some cases like 50. Maybe there’s cases where, hey, these two things, we really understand they’re both pretty good paths. Instead of figuring out which one is 10% better, let’s just pick one and not waste three months and let’s just go. And let’s make forward progress because that momentum, like every day we’re waiting, we’re spending money, there’s salaries, there’s other cost, the opportunity might be going away. And so it’s this concept of if something is reversible, if it’s easily reversible, just go. And so I think that can shave months as well.

Ti Morse: 59:16 I remember Elon said that he had or like in Walter Isaacson biography they had this mental model where he would say every day that they didn’t like get to orbit or, you know, some other metric was basically a lost future day of 10 million of revenue and so if there is some thing that they could just move one day sooner by like spending $100,000 that may make sense like flying one part from like LA to Kwaj or something like that. How do you kind of think about taking risk and what things are you willing to basically take risk on in order to move the timeline just slightly faster?

Scott Nolan: 59:46 Yeah, there’s two versions of that metric. One version is the tail end, like, okay, what date do we go online, to your point, how much dollars per day of launch revenue or whatever business you’re in. So that’s the once you’re online date. And you know, if you’re building like a pharmaceutical plant, okay, a million dollars a day of revenue, every day we can bring that in is worth a million dollars. The other version of it, if you’re a very early stage company, imagine like three people in a garage working and they say, well, our product once it’s out there, we’ll be making hundreds of thousands a day. We need to spend $100,000 today to go one day faster, you could run out of money. So there’s a current burn version of this. There’s a future revenue version and there’s a current burn version. And the current burn version is basically, how much are we spending today on salaries? If we can bring our schedule in by one day, we know it’s at least worth that. So there’s two bounding versions of it. The probably the big picture one to really focus on is the once you’re online version and not be myopic and just worry about today’s spend because you’re trying to really get to that end target. But you’ve got to survive to get there. And so the right answer is typically somewhere in between those two things subject to one requirement, which is you’re not increasing your cost structure of the company with that decision on an ongoing basis.

Scott Nolan: 1:01:21 But when they’re one-off decisions, usually there’s opportunities that are not marginal. It’s usually much more like, hey, everybody take a step back. We can shave this amount of time off the schedule and increase revenue by a million dollars by spending five grand. I think that’s a good trade. Let’s do that. And people are very reluctant to, in a big company, sort of propose those things, but I think that’s one of the tools in the toolkit to accelerate.

Scott Nolan: 1:01:34 And you see the same thing even in like the film industry. Sometimes they will have to wrap up filming of a movie faster to actually save money.

Scott Nolan: 1:01:46 And so a lot of people think, like going back to the speed question, people associate going faster with spending more, sometimes you can actually go faster and spend less and get a better product. So I think that’s not commonly appreciated and remembering that’s really important.

Ti Morse: 1:02:46 What’s been a moment over the past like two years while you’ve been working on this where you’ve been able to make one of those rapid decisions that was able to kind of bring in timelines or you spend a little bit of money and shave some massive hurdle off your checklist?

Ti Morse: 1:03:00 Yeah, maybe one of the decisions that we made over the last couple years that in hindsight’s kind of obvious, but that we could have spent years and years trying to think about, was where to put our facility. And so, the first year of the company, we spent a lot of time going around looking for the right sites to put an enrichment facility. And one direction we went, we approached this one from was, which states are very supportive of energy production in general, and which ones have some history of nuclear energy or uranium mining? And let’s go to those places and let’s look for vacant land that could potentially work. And so we spent about a year visiting something like 11 different states, looking at over a thousand pieces of land, not in person, but one way or another, and certainly hundreds in person. And we could have really boiled the ocean on that and just tried to come up with complicated frameworks for evaluating these things.

Ti Morse: 1:04:13 And after some time of looking at it this way, we came across Paducah, Kentucky. And we realized this community is extremely supportive of enrichment. It’s the last place in the country that it was actually performed at scale. It was shut down in 2013, so people remembered what it was like to have the facility and understood that it was safe and an important part of the economy.

Scott Nolan: 1:04:35 Yeah, and an important part of the community.

Ti Morse: 1:04:37 Yeah. And so, really this question of what is the right place to go, you could do a really exhaustive search and do community surveys and look at costs and look at tax incentives and all these things. Or you could just say, where’s the last place this was done in the country that we know people are happy to have it in their community? And it would point you straight to Paducah, Kentucky. And so, once we realized that that community, once we had visited that community, we understood their support for nuclear and for enrichment, and then were able to work out a lease with the Department of Energy on a part of the land on that site. It was a very obvious choice.

Scott Nolan: 1:05:44 I think with this sort of company, this is going to be a multi-decade journey. And even setting out, I think your guys’s timeline is trying to have the first facility online in the next five years producing enriched uranium. How do you kind of think about maintaining this like maniacal urgency?

Ti Morse: 1:06:00 While also understanding that these are like multi-year timelines just to turn on the first facility and then scale up as quickly as possible.

Scott Nolan: 1:06:09 Yeah, I think from a motivational standpoint, how do we keep the urgency? I think that’s simply a consequence of the market as it stands today. So you asked about the Russia uranium ban that goes into full effect January 1st, 2028. We know that we need to be online as quickly as we can so that there’s a reliable backstop for that, a reliable source to really offset that loss of US supply as soon as possible. Then you look at HALEU for the advanced reactors and they have no reliable source of fuel other than the DOE today, who only has so much to give out to reactors. And you realize, okay, these are primarily venture-backed companies. If they can’t show deployment and scale-up in a few years, that’s an issue. So from the market’s perspective, the motivation is very obvious and so we’re trying to serve that market as quickly as we can. And then how do you do it internally? I think it comes down to two things. One, let’s look at that finish line and how quickly we have to actually do certain things to hit it by that date. And let’s break the schedule into big blocks and think internally in terms of those big milestones.

Ti Morse: 1:07:21 You know, to hit that date, when do we have to begin construction? When do we have to begin scale manufacturing, etc.?

Scott Nolan: 1:07:31 And then it’s decomposing that into like a very detailed, almost like day-by-day schedule that we call the master schedule, and keeping track of literally every major item that’s either under work today or coming up very soon. And so we actually had a review meeting today, which we do once a week, on each of these items. Where does this item stand? What’s its expected completion date? Are we ahead of schedule? Are we behind schedule? What does that drive? And so it’s looking at every piece of work that’s going on, understanding how that’s either pulling in or pushing out schedule based on completion, and then using that as a tool to understand where should we put more resources and how can we accelerate that thing that is the primary schedule driver, which we call the long pole in the schedule. And so these things stack up and you want to look at all those and figure out how do we resource that primary schedule driver and then how do we watch out for the ones behind it?

Ti Morse: 1:08:55 And so the more and more things you’re doing in parallel, the more complicated this gets.

Scott Nolan: 1:09:00 Yeah, taking that big picture, decomposing it, breaking it down to all the line items, understanding what your schedule drivers are and then resourcing them and addressing areas where we’re stuck or need to make a decision, that’s how you pull it in.

Ti Morse: 1:09:12 I think we like to prepare for the last disaster. And so if you see some like major earthquake or a fire burn down your house suddenly everyone wants to buy earthquake insurance or like fire insurance. I saw Elon tweet a while back where he’s like war with China is basically virtually guaranteed it’s just a question of when. And like Anduril has this internal policy where they want most done by like 2027 or something like this. In a very unfortunate scenario where we were to go to war with China even earlier than 2028, how does that impact like our ability to produce energy?

Scott Nolan: 1:09:45 In the nuclear supply chain it doesn’t, fortunately. So, right now all of our enriched — if we can talk about the different steps in the supply chain but from mining to conversion into gas to enrichment to deconversion and then fuel fabrication, these five steps currently in the US don’t involve China. So, mining is in the US in places like Wyoming and Texas, but also Canada, Australia, other places in Europe.

Ti Morse: 1:10:18 Like Kazakhstan?

Scott Nolan: 1:10:21 Yep. So uranium comes from a bunch of sources that are not China. Conversion today is done in the US and Canada and also in Europe. And then enrichment is a European and Russia supplied step of the supply chain. And then finally fuel fabrication is primarily done in the US by a mix of US and European companies. And so in nuclear, there really is not much impact. Other sources of energy there would be.

Ti Morse: 1:10:52 Like solar panels.

Scott Nolan: 1:10:53 Like, yeah, like solar, yeah probably, batteries, a range of things. You know, if we rewind like five years ago, China was a very, very tiny part of global enrichment capacity. If you look today they’re roughly 15% and next decade if they keep growing they will be 30%. So to your question of conflict with China or China’s role in the nuclear supply chain, it’s growing extremely rapidly, to where they could be neck and neck with Russia next decade if the US does nothing. But the same thing was true of launch. If the US had stayed where it was, China would be number one. So I think on this question of the US’s role and China’s role in this industry, the US has primarily just stayed flat for decades, China’s growing rapidly.

Ti Morse: 1:12:00 And bring back its own capability and expand that capability rapidly, China will dictate where the industry goes. And so that’s certainly part of our mission is to bring back the US capability, but not just for an onshoring thing, but for a move the whole industry forward thing. Nuclear energy statistically has been the safest, cleanest form of baseload for a very long time by a wide margin, but it has not been the cheapest form. It’s been more expensive than other forms.

Scott Nolan: 1:12:58 Is that mostly like a regulatory issue?

Ti Morse: 1:13:03 I think it’s a bunch of issues. A lot of people like to blame the regulator and say the regulator makes it too hard to do things. In our experience, that’s not true at all. I think first industry I worked in, space launch, people would have said, ‘Why is space launch so expensive?’ and you’d say, ‘Well, it’s really hard and you know, you need to get this reliability and maybe the regulations are hard.’ And then it just turns out that a lot of the organizations were just doing things the way that they’d always done them, that they were cost-plus organizations, that they didn’t have a lot of incentive to actually push the limits, to actually innovate and question why they were doing things, question the requirements. And I think what we’ve seen now in space launch is it’s even safer, even more reliable, even lower cost. And that’s just through getting iterations. So our goal is not just bring back US capability, it’s not just make it lower cost, it’s also make it more scalable so we can power all the things the US wants to do.

Scott Nolan: 1:14:08 What have been the biggest conventional wisdoms in turning on this sort of operation that were actually wrong when you looked at the facts?

Ti Morse: 1:14:17 Maybe the least obvious thing on questioned requirements around a company like us or even some of the nuclear companies in general, reactor companies, people would think that the entire team must be comprised of people with nuclear PhDs. And you do need people who understand the licensing, safety, in the case of reactors, nuclear reactions, and so it’s a part of the team, but it’s not the whole team. And so now you look at some nuclear reactor companies and yes they have a handful of nuclear engineers, but it’s mostly mechanical, aerospace, electrical, software, building the other systems that go into it with only a core group that’s really looking at the nuclear reactions.

Scott Nolan: 1:15:16 In our case, it’s even one step further where, yes, there’s nuclear engineers on our team and they’re a really important part for making sure that our system’s safe and that there are not nuclear reactions. But you look at an enrichment facility and there’s actually no nuclear reactions occurring, there’s no chemical reactions occurring, it’s simply phase change and separation. And so the team that you need to do that, it’s mostly software, electrical, mechanical, aerospace engineers, which is why we chose to locate the company in Los Angeles, really the hub for that. So your number one assumption would be, oh, we need a lot of nuclear engineers. We need to be located at a national lab. And after thinking about that at the very beginning of the company, we realized, no, we need to locate the company where most of the employees are going to be coming from, which is L.A.

Ti Morse: 1:16:10 Yeah, this is similar to what Elon has kind of done where Dwarkesh was asking about like, do you try to optimize for PhDs or something? And he was like, no, I just want great engineers. And great engineers don’t always have PhDs.

Scott Nolan: 1:16:21 Yeah, I mean, great engineers might not even have a master’s degree or even an undergrad degree. There’s people who are incredible technicians who are basically very hands-on engineers who might not have gone to college, but maybe they have worked on all sorts of mechanical systems for decades, even from when they were a kid because they were tuning up their shifter cart or doing car engine rebuilds or working on hot rods. And so I’ve worked with people before who are some of the best engineers who don’t have a formal degree at all, but have really built a lot of systems and have really smart ways of doing things.

Ti Morse: 1:17:02 They don’t have a traditional proof of work, but they have like real world stuff.

Ti Morse: 1:17:10 I think one thing that’s very important to cover is basically the idea that we’ve got this massive tsunami, which is AI, and you have to turn on all these data centers. And I think a lot of data centers need nuclear power.

Scott Nolan: 1:18:00 If you can’t actually produce power because you don’t have enriched uranium, it doesn’t work.

Ti Morse: 1:18:05 Yeah, when we started the company, the whole AI data center wave was not really top of mind for people or even for us. We were just very focused on bringing back capability as quickly as possible. Now it’s become obvious that not only do we need to do that, but we need to massively increase the amount of nuclear fuel produced to power all the reactors that people are working on, that the hyperscalers are planning to put at their sites behind the meter. And so as we think ahead to how are we doing things, everything that we’re doing is designed to scale. Right now as we build enrichment capacity in Kentucky, we’re sizing that to completely satisfy the domestic industry all the way through 2040. We want to get way ahead of it and make sure there’s more than enough capacity to power this first in decades net meaningful expansion of the US grid.

Scott Nolan: 1:19:27 How did that change the way that you think about building the company and your need to go produce way more uranium?

Ti Morse: 1:19:35 The AI boom makes it even more obvious how quickly we need to expand grid capacity. So if we go back to something I said earlier, it’s 2010, the US and China were exactly at the same place on the grid. Today they’ve doubled it. So in about 15 years it is the case that if you really want to you can double your grid from where we’re sitting today. And then if you look at the AI demand, by 2030, I believe the latest projections are that the AI data center demand for electricity is going to completely consume or equal today’s grid.

Scott Nolan: 1:20:08 Eclipse, yeah.

Ti Morse: 1:20:11 And so clearly we do need to double. Can we double by 2030? I think that’s a big feat, but what all the data centers are planning is bringing their own power, deploying SMRs. I think we see that really ramp in the 2030s. And so as we think ahead to how are we doing things, everything that we’re doing is designed to scale. How do we unlock things like mass manufacturing? All the progress in the last really 30 plus years since anyone has completely re-architected enrichment.

Scott Nolan: 1:21:05 Do you have any really great stories from working at SpaceX that kind of shifted the way that you think?

Ti Morse: 1:21:11 To your question on schedule. And how do you drive schedule? The dimensions I mentioned were put things in parallel that can be put in parallel, question your granularity on timelines, make decisions without belaboring them. I think the fourth dimension that may be very hard for people to do sometimes is don’t beat your head against the wall. If you’re working on something and it’s just a huge roadblock, also don’t be afraid to go back and make a different decision.

Ti Morse: 1:21:48 And so early days when I was there of working on the Merlin engine system alongside some incredible people, I was working on a lot of the structural thermal analysis and design around those engine systems. And I remember one night, at the time we had an ablative chamber. And an ablative chamber is basically a composite wrapped chamber that burns away as you operate the engine. And so this ablative chamber was having a few issues. We were operating it probably higher pressures and temperatures than most ablatives had been run previously. And late one night, a few people had gotten together to talk about this and the question came up like, what if we just switch? Like, what if this is a fool’s errand to get this ablative working at the thrust levels we need? What if we just bite the bullet and go as fast as we can rethinking this, accepting that maybe this was not the right path and going to a regeneratively cooled all metal engine? And that’s what we did.

Ti Morse: 1:22:54 And now obviously the Merlin engine and Raptor engines work this way and none that SpaceX flies are ablative engines. And so one lesson I learned was, yeah, try and move fast, try and make the right decisions. Don’t make irreversible decisions, but also don’t get completely stuck. And if you’re just going down a path that doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere, don’t have ego around it. Even enforce a meritocracy in your own mind and just go back. And yes, there’s going to be some moving targets. Things are going to change. Maybe you’ve got to take a hit on spend some more money to go fix this, but don’t get too hung up on things. And don’t have any sort of sacred ideas that you cannot question, like question everything.

Scott Nolan: 1:24:00 Question everything, question requirements, question the path, and just try and find the best path forward at all times while obviously trying to somewhat minimize chaos. And so this almost gets back to the founder question. Inside a company when there’s big changes and big shifts in direction in response to new information, it’s gonna mean people have to do more work. Sometimes the right path is to change and adjust. It can take someone who really has the big picture in mind, whether that’s a founder who might be the CEO, really saying, ‘Hey, let’s think more about why we’re doing this.’ And that was a lesson that I wouldn’t have expected to learn, especially given SpaceX being so known for fast schedule, hard charging, cost, but sometimes you have to actually go back and change the way you’re doing stuff.

Ti Morse: 1:25:15 Another thing that I’ve heard consistently is that Elon will make decisions, think through a problem and make decisions that no one else kind of sees and then it seems like the wrong decision short term and then later on, maybe even a year or two later, it becomes the right decision. Was there any moment at SpaceX where you saw Elon make a call that everyone else thought was wrong that ended up being right?

Scott Nolan: 1:25:39 I mean the classic Tesla example is Lidar versus no Lidar. And I think for a long time the thinking was, ‘Hey, a Lidar is only a few thousand dollars, why don’t we just put it on the car, make life easy on ourselves?’ And then years later you realize, ‘Hey, it’s not a perception problem, we can perceive the environment with cameras, it’s a controls problem, it’s a logic problem.’ So that’s probably the most salient example. At SpaceX, I think that thing might have been going to Falcon 9 sooner than people would have expected. What I was there we were at some points working on both Falcon 1 and Falcon 9. And Falcon 1 was still in the process of having its first successful flight and yet we were working on Falcon 9. And that was okay from a resourcing standpoint because we’d worked on the Merlin engine, Merlin engine was working pretty well and we knew it’d be used on Falcon 9. But at one point Falcon 9 was Falcon 5 and then it was realized, ‘Hey, for this thing to really cover the market, it needs to be Falcon 9.’

Scott Nolan: 1:27:00 And so yeah, I would say there were probably people in the company who were surprised by that like, oh wow, we were doing Falcon 5, now we’re already doing Falcon 9. Is this the right choice? And obviously it was. And so I think it can be things as simple as that of when do you launch your next product line, when do you take on another challenge. But clearly proven correct, clearly Falcon 1 was serving what turned out to be a very small market and the correct thing was to jump straight to the larger satellite market.

Scott Nolan: 1:27:41 And I think there were other examples of this too, even on the tech side, really that switch from ablative rocket nozzle to regen. And there were other decisions like hey instead of this type of nozzle for the vacuum engine we could use this other more exotic but really exciting other one and the decision was, no, don’t worry about that. We just need to get this working. This one is known to be reliable, we can buy it, it’s cheap enough and it’s going to get us to where we need to go.

Scott Nolan: 1:28:31 And it was just many, many practical decisions like that along the way. I would say many more practical decisions that were obvious when you looked at what the long-term mission was versus really deep tech breakthroughs. And seeing SpaceX succeed over the years it’s been evident that it’s just make a lot of decisions that are in line with the core metric that you’re going after.

Scott Nolan: 1:28:59 Even to that point, on day one of joining SpaceX we had an employee handbook and I remember the first page of the employee handbook in big bold letters said this is not a science experiment, this is an engineering problem. And so to that question of what unconventional choices were made that turned out to be right, I think they either followed two categories. One was those choices were pragmatic and very focused on cost and schedule. Or category two, those choices really looked at the big picture and let’s not optimize for a dead end that’s going to come two years from now. Let’s think a decade out. What are the trends? What things can we really bet on? And how do we just optimize for that?

Ti Morse: 1:29:52 While you’re mainly focused on Founders Fund, what was the biggest thing that you kind of evolved in your own way of company building and your thinking on company building during that huge 10 plus year stint?

Scott Nolan: 1:30:03 Yeah, when I started at Founders Fund in 2011, Founders Fund was really focused on two things: back founders unconditionally, and what things can we invest in that are great that otherwise won’t receive funding. There was this belief that technology was what could fuel the next wave of growth in the US, and it was systematically underfunded. When I started in 2011, hard tech engineering-driven companies were not nearly as popular as they are today. The focus was really software and consumer. And so early on for the first few years, I was much more focused on early-stage, smaller checks, seed-stage checks into engineering-driven companies. But over time, I realized more and more some of these companies work at a much larger scale than you ever think that they will, and the correct thing is actually to focus on the very small handful of companies that are going to be the most successful. And yes, that means you’re not getting to invest at a really attractive valuation. Maybe you’re investing in a company that’s a billion valuation, but what are the odds that this goes 100x? I think these things are sometimes scale-invariant where the probability of going from 100 to 1,000 employees might be higher than from 10 to 100. The conclusion I have is that sometimes it’s easier to build a really hard company than it is to build an easy company. At the end of the day, it gets back to what really important problem are you solving that’s not getting solved.

Scott Nolan: 1:33:00 Don’t focus on problems that are already getting solved or adjacent to problems currently being solved that you know are going to be tackled by someone else. Focus on the problems that are big and that are just not getting solved. Dedicate yourself to them. If you do that, it will be very challenging, but it may actually turn out to be easier than starting the next small business or the next small software company.

Ti Morse: 1:33:34 Yeah, it’s funny because you can kind of attract different types of talent. The very best talent wants to work on the hardest problems, even if it basically gives them less money or these other things. The enjoyment of working on something that’s important and valuable is more attractive to them.

Scott Nolan: 1:33:54 Yeah, maybe the problem’s twice as hard, but you get ten times better people. And so net, it’s somehow easier.