00:02:22 · JC Lozano, Ryan Deng
[00:02:22] S1: that Believe it or not, like buying a mine is actually not very difficult. Really? Yeah. You can you can just go and buy them. Mhmm. Yeah. So... No. You can... Like, we, you know, we started the company two years ago. Mhmm. Been doing a lot since then. Just closed our series b, which is what you're referring to Mhmm. When a bunch of those folks came on to the cap table. But no, we started it two years ago with the goal of kind of two real reasons, you know, like, at the end of the day, if you think about the modern economy, it's like powered up metals. Right? Right. And so our goal with the company is, you know, in order to fuel things like robotics, energy transition, defense tech, basically anything in the modern world, right, is a lot of metals. And our thesis, which continues to to bear evidence to being true, is that, like, the existing mining companies are just not ready for that wave of demand that keeps coming. And so whether it's, like, fueling the energy transition with lithium for batteries Mhmm. It's building or mining copper Right. That goes into conductors, that are used in data centers, that are used in basically anything electrical, like all that. You know, we're of the belief that keeps, like, being true that, like, basically, there's there's gonna be a ton of demand coming down the pipe. Right. And so we need just a new way to mine fundamentally. And so a new way to mine and refine all these metals. So [00:03:47] S0: Yeah. Part of this, like, American Dainism wave, sort of industrialization Mhmm. Industrialization country. Right? Yes.
00:03:47 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:03:47] S0: Yeah. Part of this, like, American Dainism wave, sort of industrialization Mhmm. Industrialization country. Right? Yes. [00:03:53] S1: So believe it or not, we were doing that before that started. Yeah. So we... Yeah. We started the company two years ago now, basically on this premise that we kind of saw this demand coming Mhmm. And, like, didn't believe that the minerals industry was ready for it. And so I think the, like, American dynamism kind of thing was was just getting started then as well. But no, like when we originally started it, we were like definitely looked at as pretty out there, [00:04:21] S0: let's say. So you're the OGs of the of the movement. Now everybody's on the wave. Right? Energy for data centers, you know, mining for robotics. You guys are kind of in there in the beginning. [00:04:31] S1: We were there early, which is awesome. So... Because it means like, you know, we started it November 2024. Wow. October 2024, something like that. [00:04:40] S0: So it's been two years now? [00:04:41] S1: Two [00:04:41] S0: years. Yeah. Two years, 400,000,000 later. Yeah. Correct. Crazy.
00:04:41 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:04:41] S0: years. Yeah. Two years, 400,000,000 later. Yeah. Correct. Crazy. [00:04:45] S1: Yeah. Two years, 400,000,000 later, $1,600,000,000 valuation, things are going well. But like what was cool is that because we had started it, when we were excited about it Yeah. We thought that like the the market was gonna move that way, it meant that we could build, like, a really, really good team. Right? So we were, like, in the perfect position to... As the market started to accelerate, like, we'd already built our core team out. Mhmm. We'd built out our initial facilities. We had our first project. We'd already started detailed... Our basic engineering on that first project. Like, so we're in a really good spot to basically, like, take advantage of of a lot of the the tailwinds that that we've seen over the last, like, year, year and a half, which has been great. Right? Like, the best time is, like, right before the market starts, like, exploding is when you wanna be in there because you can... You have access to a really good talent base. You can sort of build out your build out your team and build out your sort of, like, execution motion [00:05:34] S0: Mhmm. [00:05:34] S1: And then just, like, really start accelerating.
00:05:34 · JC Lozano, Ryan Deng
[00:05:34] S1: And then just, like, really start accelerating. [00:05:36] S0: I've always had this question for, like, founders that are building, you know, very ambitious projects. Right? Because I think most would agree that, like, software today is pretty commoditized. How did you guys get your first round of funding for this? Because to me, I've always been astonished by how people, especially in Silicon Valley and San Francisco... Right. Don't get me wrong. There's crazy ideas everywhere. Yeah. But just get funding and just buy a mine. What does that process look like? How did you get your first check? What do those conversations look like? Yeah. How did you find your cofounders? Like, what happened? What... Like, how? Like, November 2024, we're on the tail end of election year. Like, what what makes you say we're doing this, guys? [00:06:12] S1: So me and the other two cofounders, Baker and Turner, who's our CEO. Baker's who are our CFO. We've actually been friends since college. So we've known each other for too long now. Thirteen years. Stanford [00:06:23] S0: University. Yeah.
00:06:23 · JC Lozano
[00:06:23] S1: So we all went to Stanford together, knew each other there, were friends there, stayed in touch afterwards, and then we're always like... You know, our careers went in different directions. So Baker is on the finance side of things, so he went into basically like energy investment. So he worked at a couple of like nontraditional energy investment types of firms as well as some like more name name brand firms. Turner went to Tesla for a while where he started first on kind of like the battery supply chain side of things, on actually the cathode side of things, and then eventually kept moving upstream. And then I went the traditional, you know, Silicon Valley startup route. So I was... Started a company that did three d mapping of indoor spaces, and then did an AI developer tools company, and then eventually ended up at a buy now, pay later company called The Firm. But we'd always stayed in touch. Like, were always, like, looking for a way to collaborate and a way to, like, do something together. So we stayed in touch. Always we're just kinda, bouncing ideas around. And then eventually, we're like, oh, wow. Like, this is actually... Because the problem is you have to, if you're gonna work with when you're looking for your co founders, right, like you wanna find people that are, you know, you get along well with Right. That you have like a super high degree of trust in Mhmm. Which is obviously really, really critical. Mhmm. But then you also need to find something that is like at the intersection of all those skill sets. Right. And so if you think about it like physical industries, finance, and then software and machine learning, like there's not that many things that are kind of in that like intersection of those those three sets. And so this ended up being one of the ones that was very obviously where like, wow, this is really exciting. We're super passionate about this. We're really excited about the energy the energy transition. Mhmm. And it's just turned out to be a great fit for all of our backgrounds. And so we're like, we absolutely have to do this. So you
00:07:59 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:07:59] S0: got three n of one people, including yourself in different industries. You prestige maxed, obviously, with the Stanford University. Like, where did you go, like, to find the VC? Were you just like, hey. We wanna buy a mine. Let's go around Silicon Valley. Like... [00:08:12] S1: Well, we didn't start with... We we didn't tell anybody we were gonna buy a mine [00:08:15] S0: eventually. [00:08:15] S1: Right? Like we're [00:08:16] S0: How did it start, though? Tell tell me. Give me the secret. [00:08:19] S1: Simpler. No. No. No. So the the first project we have, which is under construction right now, is a lithium refinery in East Texas. Mhmm. And so felt like we had an inside track there. We felt like we, like, were ahead of the market on sort of extracting lithium from oil and gas wastewater. Mhmm. [00:08:33] S0: It's a [00:08:34] S1: fairly simple process, but the point is is that we felt like we had, like, an angle there where we're like, okay. This is our first project. We can, like... We have a route to getting our first contract. Like, let's go do that. And then we always knew we were gonna expand into mining, but then you have to, like, go and find the mine. Right? But we also need to build a bunch of facilities. We need to build the team, like, all that stuff. And so [00:08:55] S0: who did we... We talked to a [00:08:56] S1: bunch of venture capitalists. I mean, was like a... Like,