Jeff Lawson leaves Twilio behind to commercialize fusion energy with $450M raise at Inertia Enterprises

for helping with this stuff.

Very good. So,

well, let's bring Jeff Lawson in to the TBP and Ultra Dome.

How are you doing?

What's happening?

Very good. Thanks, guys.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh, first time on the show. I mean, I feel like most people will be familiar with your career, but but please give us a brief introduction.

All right. So, I'm Jeff. Uh, you know, I've been a an entrepreneur my whole career. I've been a software developer and started a bunch of companies uh on the internet. So um very first company during the dotcom era was the first CTO of StubHub was one of the first product managers at AWS. Uh but then founded the company that most people know me for which is Twilio back in 2008. So enabling software developers to build um communications and all the apps that we use all day and grew that over 16 years to about four billion in revenue and took it public in 2016 and uh and now I'm here in the fusion energy world with inertia.

Amazing. I have to I have to say thank you because uh Twilio sponsored a lot of hackathons when I was in college and it was like the go-to like fun tool to pull off the shelf and build something that was a little bit more interactive than just a normal website. I built something that would text me every day with little updates and stuff. It was like so much fun to be tinkering in that era. So, thank you for everything you did at Twilio. But

it was a crowd-pleaser.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it just like delightful product experience. uh so many interesting unlocks and then obviously like huge partnerships you see it part powering Uber and all the big companies that need to send a lot of text messages. So obviously fantastic business but uh get us up to speed on Inertia Enterprises.

Absolutely. Well, so Inertia is the commercial fusion energy company. And I know that sounds like, you know, saying we're selling unicorns or something, but um that's because fusion energy has been the thing of of myth for nearly 100 years since it was first uh hypothesized because fusion energy is the perfect form of energy for humanity. It is clean, it is safe, it is low cost, it is abundant. The only question has ever been, will it work? Well, that changed in 2022 when the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab actually created the first experiment to create energy with fusion. And this was a huge uh breakthrough. And so, Inertia is commercializing that experiment, taking it out of the lab and bringing it to the grid. And the way we do that is with few things. Well, the way that experiment works is they hit this tiny little peppercorns sized uh bit of fusion fuel uh with the world's largest laser. you know, you get it just right, you compress it, and you create uh this reaction that releases a bunch of energy.

Uh and so for us, commercialization means number one, we're starting with proven science. This is pretty important, right? You want to have science, basic science that works before you start commercializing. So that's step one. Step two, we're going to go build the world's most powerful laser. It is uh a million times more powerful than the laser they currently use over at Silvermore National Lab.

That's crazy. It is uh 20 times more efficient. It is onetenth the size. So, it's a really modern but the coolest laser uh the humanity will have ever built. The third thing we're going to go do is build the world's first fusion fuel uh factory where we are making these fuel targets in a automated scaled way. And then lastly, we bring all that together and we build a grid scale gig gigawatt scale power plant that is enough energy to be able to power a medium to large size city. A million homes you can power with this facility. So that's our plan.

That's actually that's so crazy. Uh talk to me about the capital intensivity of this. This is hard tech. This is energy. This is a big deal. How much did you raise? And

I love that you're doing the meme too. The like, you know, make you build software, you know, hardware and do and then do the hardest possible, right?

That's great.

Well, you know, I feel like that's one of the things that uh that is exciting to do. like having done the software thing for most of my career, uh, taking what I've learned in terms of building a company and scaling a company and now bringing it to this new domain is is really exciting. So, in terms of the capital intensity, you're right, fusion is not a cheap endeavor. Uh, so today we announced uh our first capital raise, $450 million. It's a milestone based approach.

Nothing like 450 to to kick things off.

That's a fantastic round. It's a good way to get started.

Thanks. Thanks. So, we've got uh a milestone based approach. So, we basically we take this and we've got a great group of investors who have come around and said, "Hey, look, you know, fusion is something that we want to invest in, but we want to invest in a commercialization effort, not in basic science." And so, that's what our investors have come to the table to do. And so, we're really excited to be embarking on this. Now, we will raise more capital later, especially as we get to that last stage, which is to go build the first fusion power plant. That'll be capital intensive. Uh but this funding is uh allowing us to take a lot of the design work that we're doing today and then start building these uh prototypes. So scaled down version of that laser, a scaled down version of that uh target assembly plant in order to prove that uh these technologies are ready for the scallop.

Yeah.

Uh with a business like this, it feels like you know uh obviously the TAM is massive. It's no doubt that the world needs tons and tons of energy. We want as much of it as possible. uh how do you how do you look at the risk to the business? You've got technical risk, execution risk, regulatory risk. What's your what's your kind of personal framework and and how are you trying to like, you know, chase each one of those down and to uh you know, eliminate that risk?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's interesting. Uh it's the exact opposite of the world of software. In the world of software, it was always, you know, you can build just about anything. The only question is does the world want it?

Is anyone going to pay you for it? This is the opposite, right? know the world needs energy especially if it is cheap, clean, abundant uh and uh safe. Uh the only question has always been will it work?

And so here we are with the you know physics of it now proven it's the scale up and so what is that scale up consist of? Well it is essentially building supply chains building vendor bases and scaling up uh a number of fields to meet the demands that a first uh power plant would put on some new technologies. So for example, we're working with a lot of uh companies in the uh laser diode field to scale up production of the particular kinds of laser diodes that we need to go build our um our plant. And in order to do that, we have to scale up production of these particular semiconductor diodes by about a,000x what the global production is today. And so you look at something like that and you're like, okay, that is doable. It's a lot of hard work. Uh and so the milestones that we look at is like, okay, we're bringing the vendors along for the ride. We have to do some invention, some automation. But, you know, this looks a lot like bringing um a consumer product uh to the market. You know, I think about here's what Apple does every year. They dream up a new iPhone and then they figure out how are we going to make a billion of them and then they introduce it to the world. And every time they do that, well, there's a bunch of hard things they have to go figure out about how they're going to uh take a design and manufacture them at scale and with a certain yield and with a certain precision. And so those are the kinds of uh undertakings that we are uh going under for both the laser scale up as well as our target development scale up.

How important is it to find a dance partner with one of the hyperscalers? Now I I've seen a number of news articles about not just fusion but also fision projects and just big energy projects. You know these things are measured in years if not decades. uh and it feels like uh there's a lot of advantages to having uh at least an LOI that says hey if we can deliver this you know AWS wants it or something like that. How are you thinking about pull uh you know spinning up the bisdev muscle of the business maybe before you break ground?

Well you know I think that if anybody is able to deliver on cheap uh abundant clean safe energy is there any question that you will have buyers for it? You know I don't think that's really the problem. I think really the problem is actually bringing those things to reality. But we are

So would you say would you say the people that are like you know still have all this risk technical risk to their business? Can they scale it up? Regulatory risk all that and they're focused on like finding their dance partner. It's like is that just for hype and and and do you think maybe that's like the wrong focus or is creating some amount of hype necessary to attract capital? I mean, you you have the luxury of a track record that allows you to raise half a billion dollars out the gate,

whereas someone else might need to find that dance partner to get any type of excitement around what they're doing.

Well, I think really it's about focusing on the core progress that needs to be made because um no matter what your approach is, there's a lot of things that have to get proven. There's a lot of things that have to be done. And so I don't think that necessarily the validation of a buyer is the most important thing for the stage at which you know most fusion companies are at. Um that said we were happy to have Google ventures become a part of our uh our round. So they are an investor in inertia and obviously we you know we think that if we are able to deliver on the promise of clean safe cheap abundant energy that they and many others will be interested buyers but really our focus is heads down let's make it work. let's do the engineering and the scale up and the supply chain work that is needed in order to uh go build that first plant.

Why inertia?

How'd you pick the name?

Well, uh the there are two major uh types of fusion like u methods. One of them which I think you may have heard about before is magnetic confinement fusion. The other one is called inertial confinement fusion. And we are doing the inertial confinement fusion using lasers. Uh, and so given that, I thought the word inertia was a super interesting word.

Um, because it both uh can refer to the um the lack of change of direction, right? The if you have inertia, you're like, well, you're not going to move. And I thought that actually spoke to humanity's dependence on carbon-based energy, interestingly enough.

But inertia, the flip side of inertia is once you have uh momentum, once you are moving, it's hard to stop you. And of course that's our goal with building the company. And so I thought there was a number of interesting things about the name. But it all stems from the the basic technology that we're pursuing which is inertial confinement fusion.

That makes sense.

Uh prior to this you've kind of lived and built through a number of cycles. How have you been processing kind of everything else happening in nature outside of outside of energy?

Yeah. You know it's interesting. We started um StubHub. It was during the the dot meltdown in 2000. Started uh Twilio during 2008. the financial crisis and so

you were born in the darkness.

Yeah.

You know, I think the thing is you got to start companies irrespective of the macro environment uh that you're operating in because the macro environment is going to change and so the business itself has to be built on the fundamentals of whatever is going to make that business successful. So for the case of say StubHub or Twilio, the fundamental was focus on customers. If customers need what we're doing, great. We'll eventually, you know, show the world and win and do all the things we need to do. If we're not serving customers, then we won't. It's as simple as that. For inertia, it's a little bit different because we're not going to have customers in the short term. But I like to say our biggest customer is the laws of science, right? So, we always have to be serving the laws of physics. Uh, and if we focus on that, taking

got to talk to the you got to talk to your you got to focus your time talking to your customers. The law physics laws of science.

Our customer is uh the universe.

Yeah. And but if we focus on that of doing all the engineering, all the scale up work we have to go do to go take the proven result and now build it bigger and um uh into a power plant, that's the thing. By the time we're done with that and proving that out, whatever the current economic story of the day is or or even the story of the year is will be long gone and we talking about something else. And that's how I've always looked at my uh at my startups.

What's the what's the hardest role to hire for right now? Hm. Well, you know what's interesting? We are, one of the things I like and I'm really uh excited about with Inertia is that we are not fighting the talent war for AI engineers. Now, we have software engineers on staff and we are hiring people versed in AI, but it's not the same kind of people that, you know, uh that Meta and Google and every startup down the street and I'm here in San Francisco at the moment, uh is fighting for. And you see some pretty bonkers things going on in the talent market right now for those, you know, foundational AI engineers. And I'm quite frankly just happy that we're not in the market for that talent. We're we're hiring for a lot of engineers, but, you know, not necessarily those. We're hiring for mechanical engineers and materials engineers and industrial engineers. We're hiring people from the likes of, you know, Apple, people who figured out how to take these products every year and take them from a designer's desktop into, you know, a factory where they're making billions of them. We are hiring people from the likes of Whimo, where they had to figure out over the last decade, hey, how are we going to build this first of a kind autonomous car and scale up things like LAR and make them better and cheaper and faster and all these things in order to enable those amazing cars we see driving around autonomously in here in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it's like those are the types of people who've done those scaleups uh are the most um you know a lot of the interesting talent that we're going after right now. And I think that's just a little bit different than the you know than the AI uh um uh let's just call it a hot mess right now in the industry.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come by and explain it all to us. This is

great to excited. Come back on anytime.

Everyone's rooting for you in the chat.

Big updates, small updates. You're going to be legendary. Uh thank you for all the hard work. It's going to be probably decades, but hopefully we'll have you back a bunch along the journey because this is a lot of fun.

Hopefully a a decade. Uh and then and