From Twilio to Fusion with Jeff Lawson

Sure thing.

Great to finally be here.

The Onion. Yes. I like The Onion.

I too will endorse JP Morgan Chase.

Thank you. The exact one flight that stood between the Jewish holiday and me being here on time got cancelled at 2 a.m. So, I apologize, but here we are.

It's a really great question. I mean, you know, first of all, I would say while my co-founders are the domain experts. So, one of my co-founders, Dr. Annie Kritcher, is a lead designer of the NIF experiment, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab that achieved ignition. So, December 5th, 2022, that big announcement, she's the physicist who made it all work. My other co-founder, Mike Dunn, he ran the LCLS, one of the largest laser experiments over at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. And before that, he designed a power plant for the Lawrence Livermore National Lab based on the technology. So, they are the deep domain experts. And the way I think about it is I am here to actually bring together all these different talents and allow them to work together to unlock this world outcome. That's what I bring to the table having built a company. And what I've seen is that, you know, you've got scientists who have a certain way they think about the world and academics, people from national labs, you've got all sorts of different skill sets, but rarely in that group do you actually see entrepreneurs or scaled entrepreneurs, people who have built companies. And so what I have been finding the skill that I bring to the table here is really helping them to build a company. And something I used to tell people at Twilio is that, you know, I'm building two products here. I'm building the product our customers buy and I'm building the company. And the company is itself a product. Is it the kind of place where great people would want to work? Is it the kind of place where you can get stuff done? You know, you think of a company like a product and you design how you want that place to work. And so I would say that sort of working backwards from how is this place going to work to go solve some of the world's hardest problems. That's the sort of product thinking that I bring to the table.

especially when you think about the places in the world that do these large experiments. So, think national labs, they are funded by Congress. And one thing I have found is if you are funded by Congress, you don't like to fail.

And so, these are environments that are very risk averse. And so one of the key things we've had to do as we build the culture of Inertia is to find the right balance between, you know, scientists who are great at what they do but maybe a little more methodical than say a startup or commercial enterprise would tend to be and the world of software which obviously moves at lightning pace which isn't exactly appropriate for deep tech either. And so finding that right balance and here's an interesting example of that. I'm a big believer that you want symbols that symbolize the culture you're building all around your office. At Twilio, I hung customers' shoes in every conference room as a reminder that one of our values is wear the customer's shoes. So, we literally ask customers to give us their shoes and we hung them on the wall with their name and their company. And the reason we did it is so people would ask that exact question. You know, people would come in for like interviews and say, "Yeah, I have a question. Why are there shoes on the wall?" And it is a great intro into this is one of our values. We wear our customers' shoes. So at Inertia, one of the things that I decided was, you know, at Twilio, we had this day one value, which I just blatantly ripped off from Jeff Bezos, right? The idea that you're never done. It's always day one cuz you can never rest on your laurels. Why? In the world of software, everything is so easy to replicate that you always have to keep building and keep being more ambitious. It's the exact opposite here. Actually, what I did is I put a counter on the wall, six-foot-tall numbers that count up the number of days since we started the company. And it counts up and it's a constant reminder. Every Monday in our all-hands meeting, we look at the number and we say that's how many days it's been since we started this venture. Did we get that many days' worth of work done? Because every day matters. And that's becoming one of the values at Inertia, which is this notion of, yeah, we can't sit around and deliberate for extended periods of time. In fact, failure is an option. In fact, it's the only way you learn. And we are going to fail at a great many things in the service of learning what is right in this Edisonian kind of way.

In a way, yes. First, I'll just start about the thing that I actually like about that value, and there's a lot of things about that value and the way it's evolved at Meta that I would say I don't like. But the thing that is brilliant about that as a corporate value is that it literally gives you permission from the CEO and founder of the company to break things as long as you're learning, as long as you're moving the company forward. At how many companies, if you broke the website, the thing that makes all the money, do you have a career path ahead of you? That's the default of almost any organization, but at Meta, Zuck gave permission to say if you are learning, you have my permission to actually break the place as long as we're making progress. And that is rare. Now, they also have systems that counterveil that so that you can't actually break the website.

the system. The system that allows someone to break it, right? So you actually have this kind of force. So at Inertia, we actually have one of our values is blow it up already, which is interesting. It's taken us a year to really settle on is that really one of our values, but very early on it took hold. Why? Because we thought about SpaceX actually and the thing that that implies, blow it up already implies two things. Number one, people look at SpaceX, they look at the Boeing counterexample and they say, "Wow, Elon was willing to blow up rockets in order to learn faster and do it in a public way. Wow, that was so bold." Actually, I don't think it was that bold because he figured out that that actually is great content for the internet, too. So, you know, it's actually pretty genius. But the real learning there is not the willingness to blow up the rocket, but the enabler. What allows you to blow up rockets is the fact that he could manufacture the next rocket for about $30 million in about two weeks versus Boeing that spent billions of dollars and it would be multiple years before they'd have another rocket to test. So when your next rocket is years and billions of dollars away, you are precious about it. When your next rocket is weeks and millions of dollars away, you are free to blow it up. And so the real learning is to put yourself in an environment where you can afford to try many things, and that's the Edisonian approach that we are really adopting at Inertia.

Yeah, totally right. What is this like software API person doing in fusion? You know, when I was back in college, I was interested in physics. I took all the physics classes I could get my hands on. But obviously that wasn't what I did with my career. I became an entrepreneur in the era of the internet. So, I was running my company for whatever, 16 years. And in December of 2022, when ignition was announced for the first time ever, an experiment created energy from fusion. You know, we all saw that news. It was front page everywhere. And I was like, "Holy crap, this thing that I always assumed was science fiction that would never happen in our lifetimes might very well happen." And so I kept expecting that there was going to be, you know, news that, you know, the next day the news ends that some startup got spun out of Lawrence Livermore to go build the first commercial power plant out of this technology. And I kept waiting for that announcement. And you know what? It never came. And so one of the things I had on my to-do list was to go figure out what is going on in the world of fusion. And so I handed the reins of my company, Twilio, over to my successor in the beginning of 2024 and had this on my to-do list. Well, I got to meet Dr. Annie Kritcher, the lead designer of the NIF. And my question for her was this. How come I haven't seen some startup going to commercialize this yet? And her answer was fascinating. She said, "Yeah, I've been kind of wondering the same thing." But she said, "I'm a physicist, not a business person. So, you know, what do I know? But it would seem to me that this physics breakthrough that took 60 years, $30 billion of government money to reach this milestone, it would seem to me like that is the hard part and that going to commercialize it compared to that is relatively easy." And she said, "Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of hard things you got to go do, but the physics cooperating is the thing that has eluded humanity. Some of the smartest people on this planet for 75 years. Hundreds of machines have been built. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent all around the world in pursuit of this perfect form of energy and finally one of them actually reached the milestone of ignition and lo and behold no one was commercializing it."

Why was the question that she and I set out to answer.

Well, here's the thing. What we found was a lot of people looked at the NIF and they looked at the NIF and they said, "Wow, that thing has a laser that is three football fields long and 20 stories tall and you know they can only shoot the laser twice a day and these targets are handmade to bespoke specifications." And they looked at this and they said, "How could this ever be made into a commercial endeavor? Nothing could be further from economical than this giant science experiment." And so they moved on and they said, "Okay, well there's other forms of fusion that we're going to keep investing in." And we looked at it with fresh eyes and I didn't have any dog in this race. I had made no investments whatsoever in fusion. I was unconflicted about it entirely. We looked at it and we said, "Well, wait a minute. I think you're asking the wrong question." The question isn't is the NIF economical by any measure. It is not economical, nor is the large laser or any other giant science experiment. What you should ask is could it be made economical? And when you go to answer that question, you find out that the answer is actually yes. You don't have to believe crazy things to believe that you could take the fundamentals of the physics that have been proven and actually now go scale it up.

Yeah. So start with the very beginning, right? Fusion energy is taking light atoms, typically isotopes of hydrogen, and fusing them into helium in conditions of great temperature and pressure. And when you do that, you are able to compress them at, you know, hundreds of millions of degrees and hold them there for long enough, they fuse into helium and they give off a tremendous amount of energy. It's the exact opposite of fission. Fission is where you're splitting heavy atoms like uranium, plutonium. This is the opposite. This is fusing light atoms.

And so people have known how to create plasmas that start creating, you know, fusion happening in them. They've known that for a long time. It's just you have to exert all this energy from the outside to get a very small amount of atoms to fuse on the inside giving off this little trickle of energy, right? And so, you know, net negative, it's great for science but, you know, not anything useful for humanity per se. And that's the huge breakthrough of Lawrence Livermore. So their experiment, what they do is they have this tiny little fusion target, imagine about the size of a peppercorn, this little sphere. Inside that sphere is a fuel of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. That little sphere is inside a tiny little adorable can. The can is, you know, a couple centimeters tall and all that stuff is held in place by this little polymer tent. That's the fusion target. And then they hit that target with the world's largest laser, two megajoules of energy. Hit that target. And if you get it just right, you can create this 3 million degree X-ray oven inside the can that symmetrically compresses that sphere of fuel, starts out the size of a peppercorn, and ends up the width of a human hair.

Yes, of course. That's what I wanted to do. And so that's the thing. The hard part is getting it to perfectly compress because for decades people have been trying to get it to work and it is actually very hard to get all the parameters of this dialed in. So that's the experiment they have with Lawrence Livermore. And so people looked at this and they said, "Wow, that laser is so uneconomical. It's three football fields long. I forgot the best part. It's 0.5% efficient."