Twilio’s Founder Jeff Lawson on Expanding to Fusion Power with Inertia | Disrupt 2026

Thank you. This is the first time I've been invited to TechCrunch.

Maybe. Uh, well, so I have a lot of funny interactions with TechCrunch Disrupt. Uh, I snuck in in 2008.

Uh, no. Yeah, that was probably 2014 or so, I'm going to say, which uh y'all wanted a lot of money to sponsor the hackathon. So, instead, I went to a Taco Bell in Oakland, bought the rest of the tacos they had for the day. This is around midnight. I roll up in the drive-thru. I say, 'Can I have 400 tacos?' And the lady goes, 'Hold on. Yeah, I think I can do that.' And then I see the open light turn off. And I rolled into TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon at like 1:00 am with like 400 tacos. Got way more value than sponsoring it would have.

I, um, I do things because I really want to do them and I actually uh say no to most things because I actually know myself. Like I ran Twilio, took it public in 2016, ran it until 2024. And after I left, I got approached to do a lot of like board seats and stuff like that. And I was just like, 'No, I know myself. I will be bored shitless, like sitting on board. It's like I need to do something entirely, get my hands like way in it or just not do it.' And so for me, that meant uh building a car actually with my hands. Uh literally getting my hands into it, uh buying The Onion and now starting a fusion energy company.

Well, it turns out that fusion energy, which is the process that powers the sun, all right, it is unlike fission, uh which also unlocks the power that's trapped inside of the nucleus of atoms. Uh fission, which we all know like powers our power plants today, which takes big heavy atoms like uranium or plutonium and splits them, and when you do that it releases a ton of energy. Fusion is the exact opposite. It is taking light atoms, usually uh hydrogen isotopes, and if you can get them into a plasma state of a tremendous energy, hundreds of millions of degrees, and hold them there for long enough, you can get them to fuse into helium atoms and in the process also give off a ton of energy. This is literally what is happening in our sun. And so this has long been, ever since the theory of it was figured out, you know, almost a century ago, this has been thought of as the holy grail of humanity's energy needs, right? Because it is clean, it is safe, it is cheap, it's abundant. The only small issue with it is it has never worked. The small issue, right, which it turns out is incredibly hard to impart the amount of energy you need to into a plasma of hydrogen and actually get it to those conditions and hold it there. And so humanity has tried for decades.

So, since basically the 40s and 50s, hundreds of machines have been built, tens of billions of dollars have been spent by some of the smartest people around the planet. And the thing is, they've never been able to get it to the point where it actually creates energy. We've known how to take a plasma and using a ton of energy, get it to this high energy state, uh but never to the point where it actually starts heating itself and therefore generating net energy. That is until December 5th of 2022, which is when at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, just about 80 miles east of here, uh they had this enormous breakthrough, which is the experiment they run there, which what they do is they have this tiny little uh fuel target about the size of a peppercorn full of deuterium and tritium fuel. And they hit this tiny peppercorn-sized target with the world's largest laser. Literally three football fields long, 10 stories tall. Imagine a laser that's that size. Two megajoules of energy every time it is shot on this tiny little target the size of a peppercorn. If you get it just right, you can take this sphere of fuel, compress it just perfectly, and actually raise it to the temperature of those hundreds of millions of degrees and hold it there for long enough uh to actually generate net energy. So, uh they have been working on this for 60 years over at Lawrence Livermore. Uh $30 billion have gone into this experiment and its predecessor experiments and they finally made it work. It's the moment of ignition. And so when I don't know about you, I saw that news. How many of you saw that news in December of 2022? It was headline news like almost everywhere. Uh because humanity has sought fusion energy forever and finally they made it work. Um I saw that news and I assumed, you know, I always thought fusion energy was a thing of science fiction. It'd be like, you know, warp drive and teleporting and fusion energy, right? And I saw this announcement and thought, 'Holy crap, maybe fusion energy will be a reality in our lifetime because they finally cracked the nut.' And I kept expecting to see some spin out from the lab, you know, of a startup that's going to go, you know, now go run and commercialize this thing. And I kept waiting for that announcement of that startup and I never saw it. But, you know, I was running a public company. I was kind of busy. So, I like, you know, I kind of paid a little attention to it. So, in 2024, after I hand the reins of my company over, um in addition to building the car and buying The Onion, you know, I had in the back of my head, you know, I kind of wonder what the deal is with that whole fusion thing. And so, I managed to track down Dr. Annie Kritcher, who's the lead designer of this experiment. She's the person who brought together all the parameters that for 60 years has evaded science, who finally got it to work. And I had a simple question for her. And the question was this. Why haven't I seen a spin out? Why isn't anybody commercializing this? And I figured that she would have some great answer. Oh well, it's because of the neutron thing. Whatever. You know what her answer was? She's like, 'Yeah, I've been wondering the same thing. It would seem like 60 years and $30 billion. That's the hard part of getting the physics to finally cooperate with us. Commercializing it would be the next logical step and by contrast easier than proving the physics.' But she was like, you know, a bunch of people came in, they looked at this thing, they saw this laser that's three football fields long and 10 stories tall and these fusion targets that are today made by hand and each one is to bespoke specification. They looked at this and they said, 'God, this couldn't be more uneconomical, right? I don't know how you're going to go create your cheap, clean energy with these handmade targets and a laser that's three football fields. Oh, and by the way, the laser is 0.5% efficient, right?' So, it loses more than 99% of the energy that it pulls off the grid is lost before it even turns into laser light. How are you ever going to make a power plant if you lose 99% of the energy in the first step, right? There are all these things about it that looked incredibly uneconomical. And so, a lot of people said, you know what, we just don't think this can be commercialized. We're going to go focus on a bunch of other ways of trying to create fusion energy because mankind has tried a lot of different ways. This is the holy grail. It is worth trying everything. And so people have tried these uh other approaches. You know, one approach most people probably when they think of fusion energy, they think of this donut-shaped device with like the glowing plasma running through it. You know, that's called a tokamak. And people have been working on those for 60 years. Um you know, it's got other variants of it too. One called a stellarator. There's one uh that tries to smash two plasmas together. That's what Helion is doing. You've got uh things that use electricity to try to zap a plasma. That's what another company, Pacific Fusion, is doing. So, people have invested in all these different things. And so, Annie and I looked at this universe of fusion. And at this point, $10 billion of private capital has gone into fusion. All of it into those other schemes. So, we've kind of asked ourselves a question. There have been other companies that do inertial confinement though, right? Inertial confinement, but the exact thing that they do at Livermore. Like the configuration is very like, think about it. The way that they've run that experiment at Livermore has been more or less the same for at least the last 25, 30 years of that experiment. It's tiny minute differences that make the difference between complete failure and a world-changing headline. Right? In fact, my co-founder just today, uh hot news, hot off the presses, uh was awarded the highest honor for scientists in the Department of Energy, the E.O. Lawrence award. She was awarded today for designing the fusion experiment at Livermore.

And yeah, thank you. Um that's for her. I'll deliver those applause to her. Um and so we kind of came up with this way of looking at the world of fusion of saying, okay, like if we want to have fusion energy on the grid in our lifetime, what do we think is the most probable way that that's actually going to happen? You know, and there's two ways that it can happen at this point. Number one is one of these other approaches that people have looked at and said, 'God, if we can ever make it work, would be so economical, right? This magical machine that just gives off energy.' Well, that's one way is finally get one of those after 75 years of trying, get it to work. Well, the other way is to take the one that works but is not economical and go fix the economics of it. In fact, we put together this 2x2 framework to try to look at the world of... I think we have a slide actually. Do we, are we able to put that up? I think I looked over there and there's not even a screen over there. Yeah, there you go. Right. Right? We kind of put this too and once we looked at the world of fusion in this way where you've got all these approaches where people would love to figure out how to finally be the ones to get them to work and it's so sexy and alluring to be like after the smartest people in the world have tried for 75 years my startup is going to be the one to get it to work, right? But the other approach to us is a lot simpler. It's, hey, how about we take the thing that works and we go make a laser that's a lot smaller, that's a lot more efficient, and a lot more powerful. It turns out, you kind of asked ourselves, okay, what do you have to believe in order to think that we can go make a more economical version of that experiment? And it turns out you don't have to believe crazy things. So the two biggest things are number one, you have to create a laser that is way more powerful, way more efficient, way smaller. Turns out when you look into the, it's always in the details, right? You look into the details. This laser they have over at Lawrence Livermore, three football fields long, 10 stories tall. It is powered by vacuum tubes. Literal vacuum tubes. These 8-foot tall, like think like old office lighting tubes. Because in the 90s when they were designing that laser system that was the most mature technology available was low risk. They're like well these are well understood. Meanwhile since then uh the world has developed these high power laser diodes. And so it turns out that if you do what every other part of our society long ago did, which is to go from vacuum tubes to semiconductors, you can make a laser that is way more powerful, way more efficient, and way smaller. Yeah. All right. So that's the laser. Okay. What about these little targets? People looked at these targets and they said, 'Oh, they cost half a million dollars a piece to make, and they only make six of them a year.' Six. Okay. Well, what's the key to making those things economical? Actually making them in a factory like anything that you would make because for energy, um unlike the science experiment where they only need six of these things a year, for energy you shoot uh 10 of these a second, give or take, and so you need to make about a million a day. And so we looked at these targets and we said okay how hard would it be to make a fusion target in a highly automated factory way? Well it turns out these fusion targets are made of only four parts. Four. And each one of the four parts has a clear parallel in industry today for things that are made in factories. For example, the outermost shell of the target is called a hohlraum. It's this tiny little can. And you can stamp them out of lead. They look exactly like a bullet. You can literally take how they make bullets and make that piece. Okay. This carbon shell, it's made with chemical vapor deposition. That's a process that is used all over industry to make our semiconductors and all sorts of other things. Um there's a little uh polymer that holds it together. Well, we use polymers for all sorts of things. So, what we've done is started hiring experts in all these fields to say, okay, you've solved it over here in this industry. Now, we got to solve it for these fusion targets. And so, we looked at this. We said, there's clear answers for how to do all these things. It's an industrial scale up. It's building a supply chain. These are hard things, don't get me wrong, but these are engineering things. These are financial and economic things. These are not basic science anymore. And that's what led us to start the company. And so we spent the first year creating a spin out from Lawrence Livermore where we licensed all the IP. We've licensed 200 patents from them. We spun up uh three joint research agreements with them to advance the state of these lasers and these targets and the fabrication of them. Uh and a first-of-a-kind agreement that allows Annie actually to continue to be affiliated with the lab while she's also a founder and employee of Inertia. And what we now have is the largest public-private partnership between a company and a national lab in the history of the national lab system. So that was how we created the spinout. Um then about a year ago we got the company up and running after creating the spinout. So we raised uh 450 million of funding commitments for our Series A. We got a 50,000-foot facility out in Livermore about 2 miles from the lab uh where we are uh doing the laser development and the target development. We've got about 75 folks on staff now, up from, I think, five at the beginning of the year. And so really just getting us into this factory mode of, okay, we got to go make these targets, we got to make these lasers, and we got to scale up production of both these things in order to go build a plant scale. Now we've got folks from Apple and Waymo and all these folks who know how to manufacture and build first-of-a-kind supply chains in there actually doing it, but doing it now for fusion.

It doesn't. I, you know, I think the way uh the world is going to look, the financial world is going to look at things like fusion energy, it looks more like drug discovery, you know, pharmaceutical than it does like say a software company. Okay? Because if you think about in drug discovery, you know, you have an idea for how you're going to create a pharmaceutical. You know, you do early trials in animals and then you, you know, you do, I don't actually know because I've never done this, but you know, you do trials in humans and you go through the FDA process and the moment you get FDA approval is the moment that it's clear to the world that the many years and many millions of dollars you've spent bringing this drug, you know, developing this drug are now going to pay off and the company is now worth a lot of money. And I think that is how fusion is going to work too. And so you'd ask, well, what is the milestone? What's the FDA approval moment for fusion companies? And I think it's the moment that you demonstrate that a private company can build a facility that um creates net gain. So it creates a whole facility that creates energy, puts its first electron on the grid, um puts uh some, you know, then the next milestone will be putting a more meaningful amount of energy on the grid. So there's a number of milestones along the way, but at some point we're going to look at this. Society will look at this and investors will look at this and say this is clearly at this point inevitable and now uh that company can be public. And so I think that the way it'll work for early investors, they're going to be rewarded for getting it to that point. They will probably exit. Public investors or other types of investors will come in and take it through to the generating of meaningful revenue, which will be the next phase of the company. And our plan is we're going to break ground on our fusion pilot plant in 2029. We uh we're going to have first light on that plant around 2035 while we're breaking ground on our second and by the end of the 2030s have three power plants up and running or under construction.