Relentless

Keller is Co-Founder and CEO of Zipline — the biggest drone delivery startup in the world. A few weeks ago, Uber Eats partnered with Zipline to deliver 1 million packages a day within the next 2.5 years. This was significantly more demand than Zipline was planning for, so now they’re trying to rapidly open new factories and scale drone production.

Ethan Thornton is the founder and CEO of Mach Industries. Mach is an LA based defense tech startup working on solid rocket motors, high-altitude balloons, missiles, long-range precision strike drones, low-cost kinetic interceptors and multiple other programs which are not currently announced.

Olaf is Co-Founder & CTO of Neros. They just moved into a new 250,000 sq ft factory, expect to hit a 130,000-drone annual run rate by the end of the year, and plan to scale to 1 million drones a year by 2028.

Sam Altman is the Co-Founder & CEO of OpenAI.

Isaiah Taylor is the Founder of Valar Atomics. Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor.

Timestamps:
0:32 Manufacturing nuclear reactors is a SpaceX style problem
2:58 Scaling from 1 reactor to 10
4:31 Why it’s so tempting to iterate on paper instead of actually building reactors
7:37 Having contact with reality - modular shielding
10:09 Steel is cheaper than software engineers
11:09 Why the idiot index is so high in nuclear
16:02 Becoming a nuclear company
18:57 It's important not to lie to yourself
21:55 Obsessing over critical path 
24:54 Nuclear reactors are relatively simple
30:35 Safety is a function of iteration speed
30:55 Why Valar had to vertically integrate
35:01 Designing a Toyota Camry vs a Ferrari 
38:07 Running through 1-way doors
41:13 Pulling rabbits out of a hat
46:13 Wartime mode
48:49 Being willing to do unreasonable things
51:20 How Elon injects urgency into his companies
56:56 Relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10x cheaper
58:32 What’s changed over the last 3yrs
1:00:51 Designing safe nuclear reactors
1:13:05 Learning from SpaceX - optimizing for scale
1:18:07 Having a high tolerance for looking dumb
1:19:50 How Palmer Luckey handles hit pieces
1:20:55 Inevitable time
1:25:26 Predicting unknown bottlenecks
1:28:08 Scaling
1:29:45 July 4th will be a rebirth for nuclear in the United States