00:42:18 · Zach Dell
[00:42:18] S0: I'll say this. I think that the way that we think about capitalizing the company and positioning the company is not how can we squeeze out x amount of profit this quarter or this year And how can we build a business that is strong for decades and is strong through busts and, and booms? Right? And, energy is highly cyclical. Right? It's a commodity market and there are, you know, boom years and bust years. And you really want to be in a strong position to capitalize, to play offense when when, you know, others are playing defense, play defense when others are playing offense and, you know, be able to have the op option and opportunity to, you know, be aggressive and pull back and play the game. Right? And so if you look at a lot of the players in the space, certainly the undercapitalized players, they have to take these kind of bets. So like, we're gonna load up over here and hope this happens and if it does, then we'll go here and if it doesn't, you know, we all go home. Right? Not how we run the company. Right? We we capitalize and plan the company to be in a position of strength no matter what the market cycle is. And we can talk about the nitty gritty of our long position and our short position and how we hedge those things out and how we think about that. But the broader point is we believe that, we need to be around for decades, and we need to have a balance sheet that can set us up to be around for decades, and we really want to be able to be, you know, fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. Right? And that's kinda... I I apologize for the, like, high level y answer, but that that really is the truth is like we wanna be positioned around all kinds of market cycles, and, know, be winning in the boom and, you know, be... You know, everyone will lose in the in the best years, right, in some in some ways, but we're gonna lose less than others and be in a position to go, you know, snap up some of the competition and, do some creative things when when when that time comes.
00:44:10 · Adam Miller, Sachin
[00:44:10] S2: What does the world look like in ten years if you kind [00:44:12] S1: of achieve your vision?
00:44:14 · Zach Dell
[00:44:14] S0: I mean, certainly, there will be millions of homeowners, hopefully business owners and renters across the country that enjoy more affordable and more reliable electricity as a result of base power. And a number of scaled regulated utilities across the country that run a more efficient system with better technology, lower prices, and higher reliability as a result of the technology that we develop. And maybe most importantly, we have built a team, a machine of engineers and operators and creatives that is hopefully thousands of people strong that is set up to solve the next decade of problems in energy technology. And this is part of what's so exciting about this company and why when Justin and I started this company, we did it from this perspective of this is gonna be our last company, like this is gonna be the thing we do forever is because the problem set never gets boring, never goes away. Energy is endlessly interesting. There are different, there are different, you know, regulatory regimes, different countries, different grids, different, there's all kinds of problems across all different parts of technology that that we can go after from this vantage point of energy. One thing I like to think about is we are a technology company that has decided to to to operate in the category of energy. But if you take a step back, we're just a technology. Like, we are a a group of people that have come together to build great technology for the next hopefully fifty to a hundred years, And energy is the part of the economy we're gonna focus on. Why? It's the biggest and most interesting in my opinion. Right? But broadly, we're a technology company and that I think, is what the people here are really excited about is building all kinds of technology across energy. So hopefully in ten years, we are doing more really interesting things in energy technology, but specifically homeowners, all across the country and and perhaps the world are enjoying more affordable and reliable electricity as a result of the technology that
00:46:14 · Adam Miller
[00:46:14] S2: we have. Let's bridge that gap for a second because we've been talking a lot about energy and how that's important for America, but energy is this building block where a lot of interesting industries can sit on top of. For you personally, what are the most interesting applications of America having more cheaper energy and what it means for America geopolitically?
00:46:33 · Zach Dell
[00:46:33] S0: Well, unfortunately, I think it less... It's less about what's interesting to me and more about what's critically important to the country. And, you know, I think I'm not smart enough or have, you know, I don't have the foresight enough to think or to to to know what the most critically important energy intense industries are going to be over the next decade, but I can sure as hell tell you that whatever they are, they're going to be highly dependent on the cost of electricity. Yeah. And if we can drive the cost of electricity down, we're going to create the initial conditions by which the country is able to compete at the highest level with China, our main adversary. Like, let's just call it what it is. That is our... They are our our adversary. Right? And if we look at energy production, like, their chart looks like this and our chart looks like this, and that's a big problem, and we need to close that gap. Right? And, you know, for for, you know, for the camera. Right? It's like, they're here, we're here, we need to do this. Right? And so look, is it DSAL? Is it compute? Is it, you know, you know, electrolysis? Like, there's so many different things that we could be doing with abundant cheap energy. We don't actually think that far ahead. Like, it's it's it's not our job to figure that out. It's our job to create the conditions for the country to be in a position, and, you know, we we want to enable the next generation of entrepreneurs to go solve those problems. And there's tons of great entrepreneurs who are around these problems and who are working on these things, and we wanna create the conditions by which they can do that. But we have to inflect, you know, this energy production problem. And, I mean, you guys have covered a lot of this stuff. Right? Like, in quantum, in robotics, like, you know, physical intelligence and, PsiQuantum, the companies that you guys have covered, like, are highly energy intense. And if you ask them, like, in ten years, if electricity... If your blended electricity cost is 10¢ or 20¢, like, does that matter to you? They will, like, say, absolutely. Hell yes. Like, this changes everything. Right? Like, so we want to power that next generation of companies, no pun intended, and just set the initial conditions for them to be successful.
00:48:39 · Zach Dell, Sachin
So I can't tell you exactly what the technology is gonna be, but I'm a competitor and I'm a patriot and I want America to win. And I don't think we can do that without having the most capable and performing energy systems in the world. And I wanna build the company, we want to build the company that makes that happen in America. [00:48:58] S1: A lot of the concepts we've covered today are concepts that you'd hear about in traditional energy companies as well, the manufacturing of batteries, installing, the hedging strategies, but then you also describe yourself as a technology first company. So what's the actual alpha that you're getting from building new tech? Is this in the types of batteries that you're creating? Is there internal software that you're using for maybe better hedging? What is that?