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Select Quotes From This Episode:
“It’s kind of clear that in the future, robots are gonna do all the important jobs... in many ways, the ocean’s just getting more and more and more important. It’s gonna need robots, and they’re the ones that we build.” – Will
“Functionally, at the end of the day, you want to build a business that really fully realizes your vision... You want to move to a world of abundance, right? Let’s go forth and conquer it.” – Will
“I kind of draw the line between what I would call ‘stewardship technologies’ and climate tech... there’s this kind of meekness [in environmentalism]... we need this pro-human framing.” – Will
“You’re actually just extremely weak-willed if you let [naysayers] get you down, and you’re never gonna do anything of import.” – Will
71% of the planet is the ocean.
And yet it remains largely unexplored.
Many of us may not realize this, but it is the ultimate geopolitical and environmental frontier. It houses critical subsea data cables and untapped minerals. It acts as a massive carbon sink via seagrass ecosystems. The ocean is vital to human flourishing. Despite all this, we have relatively little dominion over it. And the dominion that we do have is absurdly expensive.
To help us understand the ocean frontier, we sat down with my good friend, the Ocean Cowboy — Will O’Brien.
He and his crew are building Ulysses to tame the ocean frontier. To become stewards of the ocean at a scale humanity has never seen before.
Practically speaking, they are building autonomous underwater robots that solve the ocean’s most slippery tasks. They started out solving the slow and manual process of planting and restoring seagrass but have quickly expanded their scope as they’ve realized the true potential of this space.
Their market encompasses all things on the ocean. Environmental, commercial, and defense. By working with all of these industries, they have been able to raise more money at better valuations, make sales to partners who move quickly, and, importantly, their unit economics are coming down quickly, allowing them to serve more cost-sensitive customers as well (like seagrass restoration projects).
Stewardship
Part of the reason I wanted Will to be the first interview we published under the new brand is he has a very strong focus on stewardship. Not stewardship in a soft sense, but in a strong domineering sense. He believes in Stewardship Technology. Similar to our favorite cowboy, Teddy Roosevelt, Will believes tech should serve humanity, while helping us steward the scarce resources we’ve been given to ensure future generations continue to flourish.
When you top it all off with the fact that they are also involved in defense, I think Teddy Roosevelt would be proud of them, seeing that they embody so many of the things he took as important. Technological progress. A frontier spirit. Conservation of our earth. And projection of strength throughout the world through our military, especially our Navy.
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Here are some key timestamps from the episode:
00:00 – Intro & The origin of Ulysses: Discovering the ocean as a massive business frontier.
02:57 – Why underwater robotics? Solving the manual labor problem in seagrass restoration.
05:20 – Moving to San Francisco: Why the Bay Area is still the undisputed king of HardTech.
07:51 – The Strategic Ocean: Geopolitics, AI, deep-sea minerals, and subsea cables.
10:23 – Pragmatic Business Models: Using defense and commercial revenue to fund nature restoration.
13:17 – Grey Warfare & Illegal Fishing: The environmental destruction caused by foreign fleets.
17:35 – The Case for U.S. Manufacturing: Supply chain security, geopolitics, and clean industrial standards.
23:14 – Making Climate Bipartisan: Why focusing on abundance and energy resonates with the median American.
35:44 – Hiring “Farmers” and Builders: Why hands-on projects beat fancy engineering degrees.
42:13 – “Stewardship Tech” vs. “Clean Tech”: Rejecting scarcity for a pro-human, expansionist mindset.
This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.
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