Sam and Shaan sit down with Will O’Brien, 27-year-old Irish founder of Ulysses, a San Francisco robotics startup building autonomous underwater vehicles. Will lays out the case that the ocean is the most underrated frontier for startups — a $3 trillion economy with ancient technology, massive geopolitical stakes, and almost no elite engineering talent. The conversation covers seven ocean business ideas (seagrass restoration, cable defense, data centers, treasure hunting, cultivated seafood, marine geoengineering, autonomous defense vessels) and closes with Will’s theories on conspiracy theories, the telepathy tapes, and what he took from living with Buddhist monks in Nepal.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host), Will O’Brien (guest, founder of Ulysses)
Pre-Show: The Episode Setup [00:00:00]
Shaan: That episode was a whirlwind.
Sam: Yeah, we just recorded with our buddy Will O’Brien. This episode was like my favorite conversations you have living in San Francisco, where you run into a weirdo who knows a lot about something you know very little about, and in 45 minutes your mind gets blown like five times and you just get smarter. So this is a get-smarter episode for me. And it wasn’t just about the business ideas he talked about, but the mindset — how he thought about the philosophy of life. I was inspired by that.
Shaan: Yeah, exactly. So what are we talking about? We’re talking about how the ocean is the new space. There are companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin doing cool things in space. Will knows a lot about companies doing cool things in the ocean, which is something I honestly didn’t know anything about going in. Now I’m pretty fascinated by it.
But then the conversation toward the end gets really fun — conspiracy theories, why conspiracy theorists make for great founders, his summer living with monks in Nepal, and what he took from that. The end is really good. Get there. I promise you’ll enjoy this episode.
Introducing Will O’Brien and the Ocean Opportunity [00:01:30]
Shaan: All right. We got our friend Will O’Brien here. Will is an Irish guy who talks my ear off about the ocean. I honestly wasn’t thinking about the ocean at all until I saw a tweet of yours, basically saying the ocean is the new space — that there are companies like SpaceX that have built hundred-billion-dollar-plus companies exploring space, putting satellites in orbit, building reusable rockets, and that there’s an opportunity for a similar wave of disruption in the ocean.
I love that idea. I’m never going to do it — I’ll put that out front. I’m never going to do something like that. I think 99.9% of people listening to this will also never go do it. But just as a fan of the game, just as a founder, I kind of love the theory and the intellectual idea here: what is the opportunity? And if you’re one of the rare, hardcore founders who can go do this, this is going to be right up your alley.
Sam, from your perspective — are you the same as me?
Sam: Dude, I won’t even go on a cruise ship. I was at a party the other day and the icebreaker was: what are you deathly afraid of? For me, it’s being in the ocean where I can’t see land. So I’m not going to be out there. But yeah, I agree with your premise. Will, did Shaan kind of frame your argument right — as far as the business opportunity you see in ocean startups?
Will: Yeah. Absolutely. The framing is like — everyone is standing on earth looking toward the stars. And absolutely we should be doing that. We should be going full pelt trying to go interplanetary, trying to put a base on the moon, and then using that as a launching point to go to Mars. We should be trying to fly supersonic. All that’s real.
But if you’re trying to build a startup, you’re always asking yourself: where is everyone else looking, and where is underrated? I grew up by the seaside in the southwest of Ireland. If I wasn’t on the ocean or in it or near it growing up, something was wrong — the same way you’re afraid of it, I feel something wrong when I’m away from it.
And if you just look at it in fundamental terms, the ocean economy right now is already massive. It’s not like the future space economy that’s going to be massive someday. The ocean economy is massive today. It’s $3 trillion in annual spend across different sectors. It covers 70% of the planet. Three billion people rely on it as their primary source of food. A billion as their primary source of income. And yet the technology in our oceans still pales in comparison to everything else. The ships out there today — much of the technology is the same as it was decades ago. The unmanned underwater drones are similarly stagnant. The core technology stack supporting the key pillars of the ocean — transport, fisheries, defense, energy, biodiversity — it’s the same old stagnant incumbents running on ancient software. Very little innovation.
You ask someone: what’s a sexy ocean startup? They scratch their heads. You ask them about space, it’s SpaceX straight away. That’s the core of the thesis.
Shaan: Sam, he just wound me up really easily. This is going to be one of those podcasts — we’ve only had maybe five ever — where at the end of the hour we’re no longer podcasting. We’re getting into the ocean business.
Sam: Let’s go.
Shaan: So Sam, he said a bunch of stats. Which ones surprised you? He said 70% of the earth is covered in water. He said a billion people rely on the ocean for their primary income, and three billion rely on it for their diet. Will, explain those two.
Will: It’s just that most human societies settle along coastlines — that’s a very common historical trend. In developed countries it’s not as obvious, because we’ve developed logistics. You can walk down the street, walk into a sushi bar, and get bluefin tuna that flew in last night from Japan. But if you’re in Mogadishu, or Somalia, the systems are not set up that way. And it’s important to remember most of the world doesn’t live in developed countries. Most humans live along a coastline, and the easiest source of food for them is fish.
Shaan: And a billion people rely on it for their income. What are those jobs? Fisheries, shipping, defense?
Will: The way I think about the ocean economy is you break it into three categories. You have the biosphere — fisheries, ecosystem restoration, environmental mapping, science and the ocean, biodiversity management. Then you have the prosperity-oriented part, which is the commercial side: energy, infrastructure, oil and gas, data infrastructure, logistics and shipping. And then you have keeping the seas safe, which is defense and security — border security, critical infrastructure protection, deploying ships in the South China Sea, those sorts of things.
Ulysses: What the Company Actually Does [00:09:00]
Shaan: Give me an example of a startup doing well based on this ocean economy thesis.
Will: There are a lot of legacy players in ship building and unmanned systems. One interesting company in the unmanned systems space that’s been around for over a decade — one of the first players to do interesting new things in the ocean — is Saildrone. What they do is solve the data-gathering-at-scale problem in the ocean. They build these autonomous sailboats, huge vessels that can stay at sea for many months at a time. You can put all kinds of sensors on them that can take data from the water, gather video footage at the surface, and relay it back to, say, a government agency like NOAA that wants to know how much fish is in the seas off Alaska. Or sell it to the US Navy to know how deep the waters are around Guam. They sell this as a service. The founder is super sharp — obsessed with sailing for decades. You see this a lot with ocean founders: they’re very obsessed with the ocean and then try to make a business out of it.
Shaan: What does your business do?
Will: We’re building a general-purpose autonomy platform for maritime operations.
Shaan: Say that like we’re stupid.
Will: Autonomous robots for the ocean to do important things.
Shaan: And what’s one important thing they do?
Will: You would go to a pipe in the ocean and determine if it has a hole in it. That’s one thing. But our first business line has been working with a plant you’ve probably never heard of. There’s a plant in the ocean — probably about 10 times more abundant than coral reefs — that is 35 times better than rainforest at removing carbon. It supports about 20% of the carbon stored in the ocean and about a quarter of the world’s most critically important fish stocks. It’s called seagrass. Basically just grass in the ocean. And this plant is dying off at an insane rate — about 7% loss per year globally. If you follow those trends, we lose all of it.
Sam: Why is it dying? Pollution?
Will: Water quality is a very common cause. Other causes are construction around coastlines — dredging, digging it up — changing ocean temperatures, changing ocean currents. And basically there are governments all around the world panicking about this. If they lose their seagrasses, they lose their fish stocks. And we’re back to that billion people relying on it for income, three billion for food. Restoring it — bringing it back — is currently a very manual process. We build autonomous robots to do it.
Sam: Are you actually building the robots yourselves?
Will: For this first use case, we’ve built a custom robotic payload. When you’re starting and trying to do something new, it’s important to get initial traction somewhere specific. If we’d just built the platform — an underwater vehicle and a surface vehicle that dock together — we might have had trouble getting traction. So we built attachments that go onto our underwater vehicle that collect seeds, plant seeds, and measure their growth, to get initial traction. In our first year, we did a million dollars in revenue with a five-person team based here in San Francisco.
Sam: Why would someone pay you to do this?
Will: The ocean ecosystem is critically important, and losing it has very negative downstream impacts — that’s one reason. Another is that lots of governments around the world have implemented laws that restrict your ability to damage this plant, or require you to pay someone to plant it if you do damage it. So they’re paying us for compliance-driven restoration. We have a contract in Western Australia, a contract in Florida, a contract in Virginia. Either compliance-driven restoration or voluntary restoration.
Shaan: Sam, I put “how important is seagrass” into ChatGPT. Here’s what it said: seagrass captures carbon 35 times faster than rainforest — which he just said — and it’s like a baby crib for the ocean. Small fish, crabs, seahorses, and even endangered species and turtles are born and live their early lives in seagrass. It says: lose the seagrass, and entire marine ecosystems collapse.
Sam: He built a robotics business — in the first year, you said you raised $2 million or something like that?
Will: Yeah.
Sam: So with $2 million in funding in your first 18 months, you did a million in revenue. Is that right?
Will: Yeah. And just five people.
Sam: Is there something new about building a robotics company today that lets you do it way cheaper? Did something change, like when the Raspberry Pi came out and suddenly you had a computer for $35?
Will: 3D printers have been huge. A total game changer. The speed of iteration has gone up massively. It’s also easier to get parts overnight now. And the cost of a lot of things has gone down massively — with the advent of electric vehicles, batteries got cheap, and a lot of electronic components and motors dropped in cost because of the drone industry.
For us, a critical enabler is Starlink. The way our system works: we have this autonomous boat — a surface vehicle, our mother ship — and it has a docking system that releases daughter robots, autonomous underwater vehicles, to do the critical work in the ocean. We wouldn’t be able to communicate with those assets without something like Starlink. Before Starlink existed, the bandwidth just wasn’t there.
Ocean Defense: Saildrone, Saronic, and Undersea Cables [00:19:00]
Shaan: That company Saildrone has raised over $100 million — valued somewhere between $500 million and a billion dollars. There’s another one called Saronic. Sam, you know Saronic?
Sam: No. How do you spell it?
Shaan: S-A-R-O-N-I-C. Will, you probably know more about this one than me. I think Joe Lonsdale seeded this company, right?
Will: Yes. Yeah.
Shaan: So when I was at Joe’s house and he was telling me about this company, I should have just invested on the spot. He was basically like: we’re building drones for the water. In the same way Anduril is doing it for the sky, modern warfare has turned drone-based and they’re building unmanned surface vehicles — USVs — for the ocean.
Do you know how many ships are in the US Navy fleet? Sam, take a guess.
Sam: 500? I honestly don’t know. 100?
Shaan: You’re closer than you think. It’s 300 ships. And we have 67 submarines.
Sam: That’s it? 67?
Shaan: I had more kids at my three-year-old’s birthday party. That’s insane to me. 300 ships, and the average cost of these contracts is something like $250 million each. So you’re a startup like Saronic and all you have to do is say: we’re going to come in, build the most innovative autonomous vehicles, and operate at a fraction of the cost.
What Anduril did was remarkable. In Silicon Valley, the smartest tech people were not working on defense. Google had famously shut down its defense project. Defense was taboo — you’re making weapons, that’s not cool. There were basically zero weapons startups in San Francisco. And what they did was say: we’re going to do this. We’re going to use Silicon Valley methods and talent to change the cost structure.
All the big defense primes were operating on what’s called a cost-plus model. Their incentive was to have really high costs because they made 10% on top of whatever the cost was. So you get a single airplane that costs a billion dollars to build. The government was paying a lot, and these companies had no incentive to innovate, no incentive to cut costs. And they were using talent that was not the smartest engineering talent in the world — which was all concentrated in Silicon Valley.
Then Anduril comes along — Palmer, Paul, Trey, and others — and says: we believe this is important, America needs this, and we should put the best talent in the world on this problem. They’ve built a 20-to-30-billion-dollar company doing it.
And the reason I find this exciting is that I love these huge opportunities hidden in plain sight. A friend who knew Elon told me: I was impressed with Elon, but not because he was the smartest guy in the room. At a party of 20 people, you couldn’t say “that’s the guy.” But what Elon did better than everybody else was look down at the ground and see a trillion-dollar opportunity just sitting there. Before Elon, it’s not like there were a bunch of people trying to build rocket companies or electric car companies and failing. They weren’t even trying. The beautiful thing about Elon is that he saw those opportunities and didn’t ignore them like the rest of us.
Anduril did that in the defense space. And now Saronic is basically doing that in the ocean defense space — elite talent in robotics, AI, and autonomy paired with an old industry. I think you have a pretty unique window to build a very big company doing this.
Will: They’re building the Humvees and we’re building the Toyota Hiluxes. They’re building these ultrafast defense-focused vehicles, making the South China Sea a hellscape and keeping Taiwan safe. We occupy a different niche — we want every single day-to-day task that’s done at sea done on our platform. All the servicing done by Ulysses platforms.
Shaan: There are a lot of things making the ocean more important in this century than previous ones.
Will: Warfare is a good example. Every war we’ve fought in the last three decades was in a desert. Now we’re going to the ocean — that requires a complete retooling of the military and fundamentally changes how we think about warfare.
The climate question is ultimately an ocean question. The ocean is the world’s largest natural carbon sink, where most of the life on earth lives, and one of our biggest sources of food in a world where population is growing and food scarcity is always a question.
And then just look at AI — the data infrastructure build-out for AI is going to be enormous, requiring more cables connecting different parts of the world, more data centers, more energy. We’re already testing putting data centers in the ocean. The cooling costs go down massively, they become more efficient.
Shaan: So there are already pipes under the ocean — internet pipes — correct?
Will: Yeah. Most of the information traveling over our internet connections is moving underground. Who built that? So a lot of the initial infrastructure build-out came from telecom companies in the 80s. There were a handful of telecom startups scaling like crazy — the fastest-growing companies in the world at the time, equivalent to AI companies scaling to $100 million in revenue today.
Shaan: And now you’re seeing the buildout coming from FAANG and soon from AI companies.
Will: Exactly. AI companies need data centers — huge amounts of GPUs — and those data centers need cooling, power, tons of things. They ideally need to be close to where people are using them. Microsoft did the first experiment of putting a data center underwater. There’s a YC startup run by a friend of mine, Sam Mandel, called Network Ocean — they’re building and operating these. The plan is for them to be subcutaneous. And Ulysses wants to be the servicing partner for those — inspections, maintenance, all of that.
But I think the biggest opportunity in this paradigm, as more and more data cables are laid on the seabed, is actually in the protection of them. In the Baltic Sea and similar places, about 11 cables have been cut by foreign actors in the last year alone.
Shaan: And these cables — how big are they? It’s like a human-sized tunnel?
Will: They’re on the ocean floor. And okay — literally the Chinese are publicly advertising the cable cutters they have. China unveils powerful deep-sea cable cutter, could reset the world order — in the South China Morning Post. They’re not even hiding it. They’re cutting cables and posting about how big their cable cutter is.
Sam: Wait, calling this a “cable cutter” is like calling a submarine a rowboat. What they’re showing is basically a huge submarine. This is insane.
Will: And what does cutting a cable do? Let me give you this vision. These cables run between military bases. Say a hot war breaks out in the South China Sea. First target: military base in the Pacific — Guam, for example. If you want to scramble their situational awareness, you send subcutaneous drones to cut the cables giving them comms and energy, while simultaneously scrambling their airwaves with electromagnetic interference. That’s how you prevent American military responses in the Pacific.
Shaan: And how many cables does America rely on?
Will: There are only about 600 active. I know, that surprises people. Insane amount of data goes over them, but there’s very little redundancy. They’re extremely difficult to lay.
So you’re way better off defending them with unmanned water drones than trying to lay backup pipes. You need to be persistently out at sea, century-style, in the same way Anduril built border surveillance systems to see what was coming over the land border. We need the exact same type of systems out at sea, permanently sitting on top of these cables. They need to be cheap to deploy at scale. The ocean is huge. And you need to see what’s going on at the surface and subsurface — which is exactly the platform we’ve developed: a surface vehicle with a docking system that drops an underwater vehicle. And we’ve made the whole thing about 10 times cheaper than anything else out there.
Shaan: How deep do your vehicles go?
Will: For the Baltic Sea, one of the shallower seas — and currently a major area of activity around cable cutting — our vehicle works at all depths there. When you get into gnarlier parts of the Pacific, 8,000 meters deep, Mount Everest levels of depth, we can’t go there yet. But we’ll be adding future vehicles to the fleet.
Shaan: How old are you, Will?
Will: 27.
Technology Windows and the New Hardware Era [00:34:00]
Shaan: When Sam and I moved to San Francisco — I moved there in 2012 — the thing was the sharing economy. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft were the winners, and then a bunch of derivative things. A few years later it was AI and crypto. Bitcoin and Coinbase were the winners. Right now it’s AI, but it’s also this hardware wave you’re part of. It’s wild to me that this shift has happened, because 10 years ago you would have been completely out of place at a YC group.
Will: The low-hanging fruit of software has been eaten. Like, how many more CRMs are there to build? The boomers got cheap real estate, you guys got B2B SaaS — that’s like your deal. And now it’s on us to do the next frontier, which is fundamentally hardware. And it’s a no-brainer: look at the top 10 most valuable companies in the world — seven out of 10 of them have an extreme hardware component. The biggest companies being built today are hardware companies. And in a world where you can vibe code a CRM overnight, is there really a moat in those kinds of things anymore?
Sam: And you’re right. When Shaan and I lived in San Francisco, if someone who looked like you — wearing a Ford Broncos shirt, probably cowboy boots, bit of swagger — if you’d been talking about what you’re talking about, it would have been: you’re out of touch. Out of touch even for the YC crowd. And now it’s the opposite. It’s just so interesting to me.
Shaan: I did a podcast with James Currier and he has this concept about technology windows. He basically says there’s an almost scientific reason for what you just described. When a wave of startups comes out, it’s because of a technology change — an inflection point. When I first moved to San Francisco in 2012, the mobile window was open. That’s when Instagram, Uber, Snapchat got built — companies that relied on you having a computer in your pocket at all times, with an internet connection, an accelerometer, a GPS. But that window opens for a fixed amount of time, the low-hanging fruit gets eaten, and it closes.
He went back to the railroads — the railroad technology window was open for 40 years. After that 40 years, there was not another successful railroad company. Automobiles was a 25-year window: Buick, Dodge, Ford, Cadillac, GM, Chevrolet, Lincoln, Chrysler — all born within that window. Then nothing for about 80 years until the window reopened because of battery technology and you got Tesla and Rivian.
He was saying B2B SaaS had a 20-year window. AI software is the current window — starting around 2016. And what Will is doing, and what a lot of smart entrepreneurs are doing right now, is they’re in the technology window of AI, robotics, and 3D printing. Those three technologies have opened the door to build things that couldn’t have been built 10 or 15 years ago.
And there’s this pattern Currier describes. Step one: the technology is invented and only hobbyists are playing with it. Step two: the status moment — a hobbyist achieves status and wealth using it. Mark Andreessen on the cover of Time, barefoot, because the hobbyist internet guy became rich by building the browser. That happened again with social networking. That happened again with Palmer Luckey — literally living in an RV building VR headsets for 90 bucks using spare parts. He was a hobbyist. Then he got the status moment when he sold to Facebook for $3 billion.
Then comes knowledge diffusion — conferences, podcasts like this, newsletters, Twitter, where ideas explode. Competition floods in. The new incumbents are born. They build something defensible — hardware, scale, network effects. And the technology window closes. 90% closed. You’ll only have a few exceptions from there on out.
Sam: It’s so funny, Shaan, to meet Will, who is like in the thick of exactly what you’re describing.
Shaan: Will, when did you start? Were you a hobbyist messing around with ocean tech?
Will: I’ve been on the ocean, in the ocean, near the ocean since I was a kid. Diving, surfing, wakeboarding — all of it growing up. But I’d never actually built in this space before. When the scooter-sharing startup thing popped off, I was working in that world. My co-founders had been tinkering, but none of us had actually done anything in the ocean — which I actually think is a massive benefit. We came in without preconceived notions about how subcutaneous drones should work.
My two co-founders were building aerial drones in a drone delivery startup before this. They brought a lot of the primitives from that. One had worked on self-driving cars. And I think to really shake up an industry, it’s probably good if you don’t come from it. We looked at all the subcutaneous drones on the market and they were crap. One that had the specs we needed cost $500,000. That’s like a quarter of our pre-seed raise. So our CTO Jamie just went into a cave for a few days and came back with a design for a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle. We tested it, and it worked — and it was 10 to 20 times cheaper than anything we could have bought.
Sometimes you just need a new idea and an artist to go into a cave, and then you can change things.
Shaan: That’s how all the great things have been solved. All religions — Muhammad went into the cave, Jesus went into the desert. The prophets go off into the wilderness and come back with something. Then someone else spreads the word.
Wild Business Idea #3: Cultivated Seafood [00:46:00]
Sam: You said a billion people rely on the sea for their food. Has anybody done something interesting there — lab-grown tuna, salmon, anything like that?
Will: My friend has a very interesting startup called Wild Type. It’s cultivated seafood. Their first product is lab-grown, sushi-grade salmon.
Sam: What do you mean by cultivated?
Will: Grown in an industrial process — like a lab. Not farmed at sea, not caught at sea. They grow cells and put them together in such a way that it tastes like sashimi-grade salmon. In the same way Elon started with a sports car, they’re starting with sashimi-grade salmon — the highest end. I’ve tried it. It’s great.
Sam: This is in San Francisco?
Will: It looks like a brewery. Breweries are where so much of the best biotech innovation has come from — people building mass industrial processes for cultivating food over a long period of time.
Sam: So someone is growing salmon I can eat right now?
Will: I got it through a friend. I don’t know if they’re in stores yet — they’re still going through FDA approval. But no nasty heavy metals, no microplastics, no parasites like you get in farmed salmon. This is good stuff.
Sam: Is it like lab-grown meat where it’s $10,000 an ounce?
Will: Given that my friend shared it with me as a gift, I don’t think it’s crazy expensive. But they did a $100 million Series B in 2022, so they have real backing behind it.
Wild Business Idea #4: Ocean Treasure Hunting [00:49:30]
Will: This one is wild. Buckle up.
Ocean treasure hunting. There are hundreds of wrecks at the bottom of the ocean that potentially have more than a billion dollars on them — gold bullion the Spanish were bringing back from their conquests, ships that got hit by storms, that kind of thing. Probably thousands of wrecks with millions of dollars in them.
Now, the source governments — Spain, Portugal — still have claim on these things. But there is precedent in history for profit-sharing agreements: if we find it and restore all your artifacts, give you everything back, but we get to sell some of them — or keep a couple bars — you can negotiate that. It’s like those SaaS negotiation companies: if we save you money on your vendors, we keep 20%. Except you go to the Spanish royal government and say: if we find hidden treasures in the ocean, can we keep a couple bars?
Sam: Who’s building this?
Will: A friend of mine used to do this — his name’s Chip Foresight. He and his brother AJ — you might know AJ — they would basically go off the coast of wherever, raise money like a movie, make agreements on how treasure gets split, narrow in on where they think it is using historical records, spend a week searching, and occasionally hit the lottery.
Sam: Is that how it works, Will?
Will: Pretty much. There are fundamentally three parts: pre-mission — looking through historical records, scoping it out, getting permission so when you do the recovery you have some chance of keeping what you find. Then scouting — on site, using sonar to scan the seabed and understand what’s there. Then recovery — bringing out these gnarly ROVs, remote-operated vehicles, that go down, dig it up, and bring it back.
Sam: Has anyone made like $10 million finding ocean treasure?
Will: I know some people working on this who haven’t shared their plans publicly. So I won’t say more, but there are some exciting developments coming in this space that we may or may not be helping with.
Sam: You said three million shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean?
Will: I’m not sure about the total number of shipwrecks, but hundreds potentially have billions on them.
Wild Business Idea #5: Marine Geoengineering [00:53:30]
Will: All right, I’ll give you a banger quote. There’s this Canadian billionaire called Russ George who said a few years ago: “Give me a tanker of iron filings and I’ll give you an ice age.”
What he meant is you can actually alter the weather of the earth by dumping iron into the ocean. Many parts of the ocean are low in iron. If you add iron, you stimulate algae growing at the surface. Algae draws down carbon. Fish eat it, die, fall to the bottom of the sea — the carbon goes from the air to the bottom of the ocean. Generally good: we have too much carbon in the atmosphere, and we want more fish.
But you need to balance it, because you don’t want to put too much in and have ecosystems go haywire. When you’re working with ecosystems, it’s very difficult to predict how things will pan out.
This guy didn’t do it that carefully. He went off the coast of Vancouver, partnered with Native Americans, did a major experiment, removed thousands of tons of carbon by his calculations, and that year they had the biggest salmon take off that coast ever. But the academic community did not like his experimentation without proper protocols. The Canadians essentially busted his operation, got a warrant, and he got in a lot of trouble. Nobody’s really tried it at scale since then.
But I think there is going to be a billion-dollar company built in marine geoengineering. I’m Catholic, so my beliefs around environmentalism come from a Christian notion of stewardship — we should look after our lands and seas because it’s our duty. I think that’s where we’re going with climate management. Climate used to be about avoiding the worst-case scenario, just stopping emissions. But there’s a more interesting idea of stewardship — we actually take control, we get involved.
Someone like Ulysses can bring back seagrasses. Someone can draw down carbon when we need to, or increase fish stocks somewhere. We’re going to have to build these tools. We need them in tandem with growing the size of the economic pie. We don’t want to shut down the economy. We need these compensatory mechanisms. Marine geoengineering is an underexplored space. Main things we need to get right: better science, better technology, and governance — because the ocean is a public space.
Sam: Have you seen this guy Augustus — the founder of Rainmaker? Incredible mullet.
Shaan: Oh my god. There’s this whole cohort of people of which Will appears to be one of the class presidents. They’re very strange. They don’t fit the stereotype when you think of a tech entrepreneur. They’re kind of manly men. Not the engineer type that you and I grew up with. And I can’t tell if these guys are going to take over the world and be billionaires or if they’re going to go broke. It’s going to be one of the two.
You know this new genre I’m trying to describe? It’s like Austin and San Francisco had a baby. You get the stash and the mullet of Austin, and the insane ambition and tech chops of Silicon Valley. This guy Augustus — I think he’s on the cover of Forbes or something — and he’s sitting at a bench press. That is not something Brian Chesky or Travis Kalanick would have done in 2012.
Will: I think it’s emblematic of the evolution of the technology industry. We began with hippies who found computers — people like Steve Jobs, actualizing on the spiritual realm. Then you had people like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg, who were nerds actualizing through mind — smart and analytical. And now you have people who are openly actualizing on the body. Mind, body, and spirit — full integration. And no wonder this is happening at the exact same time that Elon is the chief tech bro in the White House. Tech has found its voice. It’s self-confident. It’s ready to actually change the world now.
Shaan: That’s poetic. You know, last night I watched the final scene of Ratatouille. The final four minutes is maybe the most beautiful four minutes in all of film — where the critic writes his review about the restaurant where the rat has been cooking. Will, I think you’re up there with the last four minutes of Ratatouille with that mind-body-spirit analogy for tech.
I’ve heard the technology part of that before. The bicycle for the mind — Steve Jobs talked about how computers would enable creativity. Then AI: we gave computers a brain and they can think for themselves. Then with robotics and self-driving cars: we gave the computers a body. And I like how you extended that to the entrepreneurial will growing in the same way.
Will: Look at Bezos and Zuckerberg. They’re getting jacked. They’re doing TRT. They look incredible. It’s emblematic of the spirit being in technology now. You have the tech brothers — Jordy and John — they’re leaning into being tech bros. That used to be a slur. Now it’s, “Oh, I’m confident in it. I’m owning it.” There’s a confidence, an air of: okay, let’s do it now.
Sam: I got an email from a Wall Street Journal reporter named Jamie who’s writing a story about tech guys embracing western wear — basically cowboy clothes — and how the tech bro uniform has changed from quarter-zips and Allbirds to denim shirts and cowboy boots. I thought: I’m not exactly in tech, but that’s amazing that you think I’m the expert to go to. Life win.
Shaan: And you’re right. The first time you saw Zuck doing MMA — is there any difference between that video and the first time you saw Boston Dynamics’ robot dog doing backflips? No difference. Same video. Both are like: wow, I didn’t know that was possible.
Can I Invest? On Startups, Risk, and the Talent Shift [01:03:00]
Sam: Can I invest?
Will: Yeah. Great.
Sam: Okay, cool. Because this is awesome. But I’m not convinced it ends one way. On one hand there’s the hubris where you’re Boeing or Lockheed Martin and Palmer comes along, and you say, “Palmer, you know nothing, just go back to making Facebook apps.” And probably eight out of ten times that incumbent is right — it’s really hard, and there are centuries of hard work to compete against.
So I have to imagine: is this the 10% of the time where you guys take over the world, or is this the time where someone says look, this just doesn’t work?
Shaan: All right, listen. That guy who said “give me half a tanker of iron and I’ll give you an ice age?” Here’s what I say. Give me 100 mullets and I’ll give you a 10x portfolio. I just need Will. I need Augustus. I need Palmer with a mullet. Three mullets down, 97 more to go. Give me the fund and I’ll find the mullets.
Will: Look, I definitely understand that feeling. I’m not qualified to judge the feasibility of something either. But in general — anyone doing a startup like this who thinks it’s a sure thing is nuts. You’re going to have to perform a miracle. And that’s okay. The important thing is: we took a portion of brainpower that was otherwise going to be building X or working at Facebook optimizing ad clicks, or starting some B2B HR software company — and instead we peeled off a portion of that talent and sent 100 mullets at these problems. That’s the winning strategy. A thousand shots on goal. The winners will emerge.
What I can tell you is what we’re doing is very real. You wouldn’t have a million dollars in our bank account without it. We wouldn’t have done all the things we’ve done in the last five months. If you want to come to San Francisco and see some real robots in ocean, the door is always open.
How Ulysses Found Seagrass [01:06:30]
Shaan: I have to ask — seagrass seems so random. When you started this company, you might have thought: I’ll do drones for warfare. How did you arrive at seagrass? Was it the initial idea?
Will: It was the initial idea. It came to one of my co-founders. He was on a surf trip, heard about seagrass from a marine biologist friend who was working out on the water, went into a cave and went deep on seagrass, and came back and presented: this is a very interesting space.
Sam: This co-founder built the tech and figured out the go-to-market. He’s absolutely carrying your company.
Will: He found the kind of initial insight. Then myself and my other co-founders put together what the business should look like. But then we went out from there into other areas. I think any brilliant company finds a local monopoly to build in first — somewhere where nobody else is doing things with technology, where it’s a great market and nobody’s even heard of what you’re doing initially, and you can bring cash into your business. Seagrass has been a great place to start. Nobody has ever heard of it. That’s always a good sign. And we’ll use that as a launching point to do other interesting things in the ocean.
Who Do You Admire? Will as Steve Irwin [01:08:30]
Shaan: Who do you admire, Will? Who do you want to be like?
Will: Steve Irwin, probably.
Sam: I was going to say this earlier — you are Steve Irwin. You have Steve Irwin vibes through and through. Do you have khaki shorts on right now?
Will: Not right now, but we have a picture of him up on the wall here.
Sam: I figured. You scream Steve Irwin.
Will: I’m hopeful I can get the Irwin family on the Ulysses train at some point. We gotta holler at Bindi. And Robert.
Shaan: You should have just said “Steve” at the beginning and let us fall into your trap. “Who do you want to be like?” “Steve.” And then we all assumed Jobs.
Sam: Shaan, there’s a famous video of Steve Irwin and his wife with an interviewer. Sam, just look what I was pulling up.
Shaan: Oh, there it is. Play it. Let’s play it.
[Steve Irwin clip]: What good is a fast car, a flash house, and a gold-plated dunny to me? Absolutely no good at all. I’ve been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is going to help humanity. I want to have the purest oceans. I want to be able to drink water straight out of that creek. I want to stop the ozone layer. I want to save the world. And you know what — money is great. I can’t get enough money. And you know what I’m going to do with it? I’m going to buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation. And guess what, Charles? I don’t give a rip whose money it is, mate. I’ll use it. I’ll spend it on buying land.
Sam: This is how every man should be. You’re passionate about something that’s good for others, and his wife is just eyeing him. That’s one of my favorite clips of all time.
Will: That raw, unbridled passion — this like nonsensical passion. It’s like: you think I’m going to have a conversation without a microphone? No. I’m going to put a microphone there. I’m going to record a podcast every day and I don’t give a rip who’s listening because I’m a podcaster and I’m going to podcast my ass off.
Sam: It’s a whole lot less inspiring when you’re talking about conversion rate optimization. But I mean, Will — my generation and the generation before me, we did the B2B software stuff so you guys could do the fun amazing stuff. You’re welcome.
Will: Thank you. Genuinely. Thank you.
Happy Hour: Conspiracy Theories and Why They Make Great Founders [01:13:30]
Shaan: Can we do a quick happy hour on two topics? The fun one and then the spiritual one. The fun one is conspiracy theories — you’re a fan of conspiracy theorists and think they make great founders. Give me the rant.
Will: I think a lot of the traits of a great conspiracy theorist are traits of a great founder. Someone who believes in something everyone else tells them isn’t real. People who are able to see patterns that others can’t see. They just go down these rabbit holes. The contrarian spirit is very important — the default is doing things that other people do, so it’s very important to cultivate an ability to see the world differently.
It’s funny how “contrarian” is this really positive description and “conspiracy theorist” is this negative one — but they’re really the same thing. You need to take weird ideas and take them seriously. If we had just heard the seagrass idea and trashed it, I don’t know what I’d be doing today. You need to take something weird and go with it.
So I don’t blindly believe every report of telepathy or late-night UFO sighting. But I refuse to dismiss them outright. History shows that breakthroughs often happen at the edges, where people are curious enough — or foolhardy enough — to investigate the unexplainable. Whether it’s Christian mystics who swear by miraculous healings or physics experiments that challenge our understanding of spacetime — I think it’s very important to lean into these weird things and ask “what if?”
And conspiracy theories are just kind of fun. They’re like horoscopes for dudes.
Shaan: We had Joe Gebbia on recently — 90th richest person in the world. I said: Joe, you’re worth $10 billion. If there’s an Illuminati, you are either in it or friends with the people in it. Tell me one thing you guys talk about. And he looked at me and goes: aliens are real. He went on a big passionate discussion about his belief in UFOs and aliens. And the thing is, if you meet Joe, he’s a serious person. Joe doesn’t just say wild stuff for wild stuff’s sake. Joe is an extremely principled artist. Very serious individual. So for him to say that, you don’t discount it the way you would if John McAfee was the one saying it.
Will: If your listeners want to go down this rabbit hole, the best website I recommend is evidence.com. And less a conspiracy theory, more a wild weird rabbit hole: go listen to the Telepathy Tapes podcast.
Sam: I have, and I love it. What is it for people who haven’t?
Will: Basically there’s this group of people who’ve been called crazy for two decades: the teachers and parents of children with nonverbal autism. They’ve been convinced that their kids can read their minds. And now, for the first time — with teaching kids how to spell on iPads and with researchers coming to study them — they’re actually verifying these telepathic capabilities. A mother goes into one room, is shown a random number generator, and her son in another room hits the exact same three numbers 100% of the time, consistently, in tests.
Sam: That’s awesome.
Will: It’s like Serial, but this woman is investigating these claims. She comes in as a skeptical NPR-type, like: this doesn’t make a ton of sense, but I’m open-minded.
Sam: Is she turned by the end?
Will: I didn’t finish the whole thing. I was listening while falling asleep and had some wild nights. Decided I need to only listen to this when I’m fully awake.
Shaan: Will, did you walk away half-convinced, three-quarters convinced, or totally convinced?
Will: I went in already with priors that consciousness isn’t local to the brain. We like to think our brain is a DVD player where consciousness is playing and being played back to us. I always thought we’re more like a radio antenna. You have these stories of people who just know when their child dies in an accident — they wake up in the middle of the night, couldn’t sleep, and then the next morning they hear about the accident. Or twin telepathy. There’s this whole world of parapsychology — the study of these phenomena — with actually very reproducible experiments in it.
The most reproducible experiment in this field is the Ganzfeld experiment. You take two people, put them in separate rooms — could be twins, could be husband and wife, could be two strangers. You give me a picture — one of four random images — say it’s an elephant. I talk about elephants for five minutes, saturate my brain with Africa and wild animals and savannah. You’re in the other room, listening to white noise, talking about what you sense and feel.
At the end of five minutes, you get replayed what you were saying to yourself, and you get the four random images and have to pick one. You’d assume 25% chance if it’s pure chance. Pretty consistently, you get 30% or above. And when it’s twins, husband-and-wife, or artists — they score more consistently at 35%, sometimes 70%, in some of these experiments.
So I’ve always been primed to think maybe we’re touching into something. And this Telepathy Tapes evidence seems very good and very well done. I’m like: okay, that’s 100% legit. Our brain is not just an AI chip that runs and tells us what to do. It’s an AI chip but it also has a radio antenna that can connect to other people, maybe to God, spirits, other things. We don’t really know.
Sam: I’m so bummed I grew up in the B2B era of startups. So bummed.
Will: I wish we could have hung out.
Sam: Dude, let’s grab some beers.
The Buddhist Monks in Nepal: Five Desires [01:26:00]
Shaan: Last one — the spiritual topic. You lived with Buddhist monks in Nepal for a summer. You said you couldn’t come around to their view that zero desires leads to enlightenment. You wanted to be action-oriented and do something with your life rather than renounce everything. But you said you landed on something like: I came to explain my five desires. Give me the quick story and what you landed at.
Will: I heard that you could find a monastery that would put you up if you taught them English. So I found a monastery in Nepal — pretty rural, a few hours outside Kathmandu — went there, taught myself to teach English beforehand, was teaching them English, and in the downtime was speaking with the older monks who had good English and asking about their ideology.
Wild actual segue: I was out running in the middle of Nepal one day and bumped into a dude wearing a Galway Bay 5K t-shirt. I was like — you might have no English, but where did you get this t-shirt? This is from near where I’m from. And he had kind of an Irish accent. He said: oh well, I work with an Irish guy, he has an orphanage and a charity out here. And I’m like: what’s this Irish guy’s name? He named the one Irish guy that my mom’s neighbor knew — my mom was worried about me going to Nepal and had said, you need a contact in Nepal. The one contact she found turned out to be the same guy. Irish people are everywhere.
Shaan: That’s like the moral — Irish people are everywhere. Is that what the monks were saying?
Will: We have people everywhere. We didn’t come to take part, we came to take over.
Shaan: All right, so you go there, you’re asking them questions about their ideology —
Will: And one thing I just couldn’t get over was that they don’t believe in desire. They believe desire is what leads to suffering. If you desire for something, you’re creating a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you have that thing. And I’m very American-dream-pilled — I should want for things. But I can see how that goes wrong too. Keeping up with the Joneses. So I can see where it goes wrong.
But I think there was an essence of truth in there — maybe you should try to trim down to as few desires as possible. And I had this bizarre experience: I did Everest Base Camp afterwards, and I was thinking a lot about what they’d been saying to me. I think I had a download from something spiritual that gave me guidance. I was sitting on a rock on a break in the hike, thinking: okay, if you have no desire, what do you do? Maybe you should have desire, but the minimum amount.
And then I asked myself: what is actually important to me? And on my hand I counted: my family, my friends, my health, my wealth, my craft. Five things. Nice and clean.
At the same time I had this image of a rose bush. If you leave a rose bush unkempt, it just grows into briars and thorns. The flowers don’t really grow. You have to cut it back to let the energy go back to the rose.
And I had this very clear vision: whenever I’m down about something, if it’s not one of those five things — family, friends, health, wealth, craft — just let it go. Stop desiring it. And I found that helpful.
Sam: Did you have a girlfriend?
Will: No.
Sam: That was your reaction to his story about Buddhist monks and realizing the meaning of life?
Shaan: You’re telling me an Irish guy with all that in his profile isn’t about to absolutely destroy this city? Give me a break.
Sam: Saving the world. Seagrass. Former monk. Sam’s five desires — family, health, wealth, fitness, and Will.
Shaan: Will, you’re the best. People should check you out. Where?
Will: Twitter. I’m Will O’Brien — W-I-L-O-B-R-I.
Shaan: Great. And good luck with the company, man.
Will: Thank you, dude. Thank you.
Sam: All right, that’s it. That’s the pod.