Twilio & Inertia Co-founder, Jeff Lawson: Is Nuclear Fusion The Holy Grail of Energy?

0:00You could power your entire life's energy needs with a bathtub full of water and a single laptop battery worth of lithium. That's how efficient this process is. Can you imagine that? Hello and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLain, and me, Tommy Stadlin. We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies. At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world. This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them. We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.

0:46Today on the podcast, we welcome Geoff Lawson. Geoff is the co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, the public cloud communications platform now valued at tens of billions of dollars and used by over 300 ,000 companies. Jeff's latest company is a fusion energy startup, Inertia Enterprises, which is on a mission to create limitless energy with proven fusion science. They've raised just under half a billion dollars to date, and it certainly is a giant idea. I wanted to speak to Jeff to understand his shift from software to deep technology, where we actually are with fusion, and when we can expect a commercial breakthrough, and his lessons from building Twilio.

1:21Jeff, welcome to Giant Ideas. Thank you very much, Cameron. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. You've spent the last 20 years building one of the defining internet infrastructure companies, Twilio, and you've now shifted gears and are choosing to focus and try and solve one of the hardest problems in physics, Fusion. Why? Well, that's a great question. You know, I had been interested and curious about Fusion for a very long time, starting with just, I took a bunch of physics classes in college. And, you know, the reason is obvious, right? The promise of fusion is that if you can have cheap energy that is made out of abundant resources on Earth that will never run out, that is both clean and safe, right?

2:05This is the perfect, this is the holy grail of humanity's energy needs. And if you succeeded at bringing this to market, you could transform not just, you know, everyone thinks about electricity as the number one thing and bringing down rate at the meters, which you certainly can. And obviously put out, you know, zero emissions doing so. You know, you think about the use for AI data centers in today's age. Obviously, everybody is worried about the role that AI data centers are going to play in the grid and having enough energy for them and making sure that energy isn't dirty. But not only that, you can transform other industries, too.

2:41The heat generated by a fusion reaction is so high quality and so high temperature. You could use it to green the concrete industry, the steel industry, plastics, glass, all these industrial domains that run these blast furnaces that are emitting tons of carbon into the environment. You could instantly green all of these industries. OK, so, you know, what's what's preventing this? Well, it turns out that for 75 years, people have been wanting to make fusion work. It's just that the science hasn't cooperated. Humanity just doesn't know enough about the behavior of these plasmas at extreme temperatures to make it work.

3:20And at a high level, for anyone who isn't familiar with fusion, fusion is the act of taking light atoms, like hydrogen isotopes usually, and under intense pressure and heat, getting them to fuse into a helium atom. And just like fission, where you take these big heavy elements and split them, when you fuse two light elements together, they also release a ton of energy. And so this has been the promise. So several years ago, about four years ago, there was a breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Lab here in California, where I am. And this breakthrough was the first time that any experiment, any device anywhere in the world actually succeeded in creating energy.

4:06That gave off more energy than it took the experiment to start. Because people have known how to create fusion reactions for 75 years. It just always takes more energy to get a little bit of fusion energy out and a ton of energy in. It just makes no economic sense for why you would ever do this. But this experiment at Lawrence Liverow was the first time that scientists ever got one of those experiments to give off more energy than it took to start. Was that your eureka moment? I mean, for the world, that was the eureka moment. It was a huge thing. Well, anyway, after moving on from Twilio, I was curious just to learn more about Fusion and see where this whole thing is going.

4:45And I managed to connect with the lead designer of the experiment, the person who actually created all the parameters that allowed it to come together and finally work, this woman, Dr. Annie Kreicher. And I was chatting with her about, you know, where all this is going. And, you know, because I was expecting after this huge announcement, I mean, it really was a huge announcement, one, you know, a true global, like she'll probably win the Nobel Prize. The I was expecting to a few months later read, oh, and then there was this spin out. And now there's, you know, some company or some startup that's going to commercialize this amazing technology.

5:19And I never read about such a company. And I was really curious to understand why. And so I was talking to Annie and she said, yeah, I don't really understand it either, but I'm not a business person. I don't know why no one is commercializing it, but I've been told that people just think it's too expensive to go commercialize this technology. So they're continuing to look at other ways that have never actually worked, but people think maybe we'll work one day. And I was like, well, that seems a bit odd. Like this eureka moment for society after 75 years, they made it work and everyone's kind of ignoring it for commercial purposes.

5:55Well, why is that? And what I found were two reasons that people generally gave. They said, you know, first of all, so the way the experiment works is they take this tiny little target of fuel. It's about that big, about the size of a popcorn. corn. And they hit this tiny little thing full of deuterium and tritium, which are just two isotopes of hydrogen. And they hit it with the world's largest laser from all sides. They hit it with all this laser light, mega joules of energy in this one pulse. And if you get it just right, you compress this little sphere of fuel down to this tiny thing. And inside you've created now, you know, huge temperatures and pressures that allow you to actually create that fusion then, And then it creates all this energy.

6:34And so the story was the reason why you couldn't commercialize it was because, oh, well, building a laser for a plant scale endeavor has to be a much bigger laser, a much more efficient laser. And it's made out of diodes. And people said, oh, these diodes are so expensive. In fact, to try to go build a power plant out of this would cost you$100 billion because these laser diodes are so expensive and you need so many of them. And I kind of looked at this and said, oh, that's a lot of money,$100 billion. What's the deal with these diodes? And I go look into it just to understand this better. And it turns out that this particular kind of laser diode that you would need is this tiny cottage industry.

7:15It's this, you know, there's only a few use cases for it. The total output of the global industry of this particular kind of diode is 0.1 % of what you would need the industry to be for building a plant. Okay. So I'd have to scale up this diode, this semiconductor fabrication industry by about a thousand X what it is today to go build a plant. And a lot of people are like, well, see, that's a reason why you can't do it. I was like, well, actually, that's the whole name of the game, right? If it's too expensive and it's this tiny scale thing today and we scale it up a thousand X, guess what? We all know what happens when you scale up semiconductor fabrication by orders of magnitude.

7:54The cost go like that, right? It's simple. It's not simple. There's a lot of work to go do, but the economics of semiconductor scaling are well understood. So I was like, OK, well, that seems like a solvable problem on the grand scheme of things, you know, compared to solving basic science problems that have eluded humanity for 75 years, scaling up a little corner of the semiconductor industry with well-known process. Like, OK, that seems easy. All right. What's the other problem? There's another problem people said. They said, you know, Jeff, these targets that they shoot, each one costs half a million dollars to make.

8:29And in order to create energy, you're shooting these targets 10 times a second. And each time you hit them, they basically explode and give off all this energy. So you need to replace it. And so they're like, Jeff, you're going to blow up$5 million a second. How are the economics of this power plant ever going to work out? And I said, you know, I was like, oh, well, yeah, that doesn't sound very good. I'm blowing up$5 million a second. Okay. What's the deal with these targets? And I start looking into it. And I'm like, okay, there's only really four components to these targets. You can make these out of fairly, you know, cheap materials.

9:03It's not like the materials cost. Okay. Like, why are they so expensive? And I'm talking to Annie. And I say, how many of these targets, you know, a year do you guys shoot? And she says, six. I'm like, what, six million, six billion? She's like, no, no, no, six. We run this experiment about every other month. And each time, by the way, we're doing science. We're not just doing the same thing every time. We're trying to learn new things all the time. So every time we make one of these targets, it's different, slightly different specifications in order to learn and see if we can, you know, make the experiment work even better.

9:41And I'm like, oh, I know what these are called. Prototypes. You guys are prototyping at the lab. That's what you're doing, right? You're making a bunch of different variations, each a little different to see if you can get it to work. And I'm like, okay, well, then what do you do when you have a prototype you like and you want to bring it to market? Well, you go take it and you go figure out how to make it in a factory. And when you do, you now amortize the cost of, you know, the targets aren't that expensive to make. They're just expensive because you're amortizing big fixed costs over six units.

10:14So now you got to amortize your costs over, you know, millions or billions of units. And that's how the economy's scale kick in. And in fact, these things can be made quite cheaply. You just have to figure out like all the process steps to go take something that's done by hand today and automate it. And it turns out that there are a lot of people in the world. In fact, many of them right down the street from where we are in the Bay Area that work at places like Apple that every single year are figuring out how do I bring some product to market with some new specifications that no one's ever made before.

10:42and we got to go figure out how to take some designer's whim and turn it into a billion units at a price point and a yield and everything else. So I was like, this is another thing that is, you know, not easily solved. Maybe to radically simplify it for our listeners, you basically looked at the problem. You said, this has been solved scientifically, but let's reduce it to first principles. There's kind of two core inputs that I think we could radically reduce the cost of production of. If we were to do this at scale, we will get huge economies of scale if we apply best practices that we've learned in the chip industry.

11:14And so all these assumptions that people are saying, this is too expensive, this can never work, they're now false. So what's the key challenge commercially? Well, and that's what we set out to prove. So we started Inertia to go with the first step, prove that those two things that people thought were impediments to commercialization are in fact false. And what do you think the key commercial challenge is today to bring this science to scale? Well, it's mostly about building up a supply chain and doing process development. So, for example, we've got to figure out how to scale up these diodes. So we're partnering with the major laser diode vendors in the world and basically doing process development with them and say, OK, well, you know, this part of the process here to make it is using a three inch wafer.

11:58OK, what do we need to do to take that up to a modern six inch wafer process? or, hey, this assembly step, because, you know, you have to package them and process them after you make the semiconductors. Okay, well, that step is done manually today by a person in a lab because, you know, the demand is so low, there's no incentive to go automate it. Okay, but if you look at scaled things that we make, it's all automated. The whole end-to-end process is completely automated. Okay, well, what do we need to do to go automate this process and, like, build, you know, robotics in and automation and increase batch sizes and things like that?

12:29And so it's basically bringing the best practices and everything we've learned about fabricating semiconductors and consumer electronics in other areas, in other disciplines, and just bringing them into this one. Fascinating. Reminds me a lot of the approach the founder at SciQuantum is taking to quantum computing, which we also had him on the podcast. But other very well-respected, well-regarded fusion companies like Commonwealth, Helion, they've taken a completely different approach. So why are they wrong? look i i'm not going to say they're wrong i'm not smart enough to to know if if what they're doing is going to work or not uh all i would say is that given the choice when it's time to go commercialize given the choice between an approach where the uh physics is well understood and well known and yours is called inertial confinement correct yeah that's the inertial confinement fusion in fact it's it's i think people often confuse the fact that there's because this one experiment worked.

13:28All that says is the pretty specific conditions that they created there are now a well-understood regime. But if you change things too much, now suddenly you've wandered back into the realm of unknown physics. And so one of the things that inertia focuses on is making sure that in all the things we do in order to create this scale-up, we are always staying within the boundaries of what is this known physics regime. And it's a very specific one. You hit a certain kind of target with a certain kind of laser pulse. We know it works. That took 75 years to figure out. Okay. So one of the principles of our company is number one, start with understood physics.

14:06Number two, don't mess up the physics. And so that's kind of how we think about the problem. And in fact, you know, our roadmap is actually pretty simple. You know, step one, start with known physics. Number two, go build the world's most powerful and most energetic laser. Number three, go build the world's first fusion fuel target assembly line, like a factory. And then after you figure those two things out, go build them into the first of a kind power plant to actually bring all these technologies together and produce energy. And so that's really our roadmap. It's quite simple. And if you succeed, how does this change life for the average person?

14:48Well, I think you'll see is, you know, fusion is going to, it is really the holy grail of humanity's energy needs, right? So a lot of the consternation that we have about our energy being either too expensive, too dirty, or too unsafe, or non-renewable, those all go away. And so I think what you'll see is a lot of the consternation around climate, at least from the corner of the of the of the of the production which is either based on you know burning petroleum in cars now that we have EVs whether it is how we get electricity to our home whether it is how we are creating concrete plastic steel all these things can now be clean industries with zero emissions and between all of these things you've now chipped away at the major sources of our our climate problems.

15:41And so not only does energy get cheaper, it also gets better in terms of every attribute you could possibly look at for where we get our energy. And even things that are impossible today become possible. Like you could have desalinization everywhere you need clean drinking water because suddenly the energy you need to power it is essentially cheap and clean. And so, you know, and the other thing, by the way, is there's no, unlike fission plants, We have proliferation risk and things like that. There's nothing in fusion that could allow you to create weapons, create national security problems. And even the inputs to it are so commodity that we will never run out of them.

16:23In fact, you could power your entire life's energy needs with a bathtub full of water and a single laptop battery worth of lithium. That's how efficient this process is. Can you imagine that? That is incredible. That is a step change. But some people would argue that, you know, solar, batteries, geothermal are getting more and more effective, improving rapidly. The kind of the cost curves when you compare the two doesn't really make sense to be chasing this fusion dream. What would you say to that? Well, the thing I agree with there is the best form of energy. In fact, you know, if you think about it, the most effective way of scaling up energy over the last 50 years, give or take, has been solar and batteries.

17:06And there's a particular reason why it's because we can make them in factories, you know, unlike big fission plants or even geothermal projects or even like, you know, wind projects or hydro. You know, these are all big projects where each project is a bespoke implementation. And that's why they're slow, expensive, usually end up costing five times as much as the designer said it was going to cost the beginning of the project. That's what makes them so hard. But solar and batteries have the amazing property, which is we make them in factories. And so you can get better and better at them. There's a learning curve.

17:42And if each panel gets twice as efficient and effective and have to cost every five or 10 years, you can see these curves kick in. That is really powerful. Now, the thing about solar and battery is there's only so much of the Earth's surface that we're going to devote to taking over with solar panels. And if that wasn't the case, like if it wasn't the societal pushback on, we don't want solar panels absolutely everywhere because, you know, they can be an eyesore or whatever. Then I think you'd already see solar having taken over our grid. You just haven't seen it happen because there's enough pushback.

18:17And so certainly there are great applications of solar in places where there is a lot of sunlight and not a lot of people. Like that's where you see it spring up. But in places where there isn't as much sunlight or there is more population density. And it turns out electricity is hard to move. So you really do need your power generating somewhat close to your population centers because it's loss. You lose energy across transmission. And so and I think that's why. And I think that also the inputs to solar and batteries and batteries in particular, at least today's chemistries, you know, you do start to look at it and say, wow, we actually start to run into the availability of the materials needed to make these batteries.

18:53Now, we're not close to those limits today, but if you really try to deploy these resources at societal scale, you would start to say, hey, look, we actually don't have the right amount of these elements, at least available in any reasonable way, to produce as much battery as we need. Now, over a long enough horizon, sure, battery chemistries can evolve and can change and become easier to produce. So I think it's a combination. In fact, I think that 50 years from now, there will be two sources of energy on the grid. there will be solar plus battery and there'll be fusion energy. And there'll be no need to produce anything else.

19:29I think so. Because solar and battery will be an effective way. But I think fusion will be cheaper, easier to deploy, and actually just much more available in terms of its inputs. And so I think you will see those two forms win out. My view is the more the merrier, but I agree with you about those two paradigms. AI has been like a huge boon for nuclear, right? I mean, that's one of the reasons we've seen such a renewed interest in fusion and vision is we need this clean energy baseload for data centers. Do you think that fusion is going to go the same way as some of these other critical technologies like AI and minerals, where it becomes a real sovereign race between nations?

20:06Is that kind of what you're seeing? I think there is a bit of that going on, yes. You know, frankly, I think you do see nation states where, you know, we're living in a world now where, you know, I think like the war in Ukraine showed people that the global market for energy is not one we can take for granted because energy was cut off to a lot of Western Europe and people realize that the precarious position they might be in. And so I think that's why you see a lot of geopolitical concerns driving this race towards new forms of energy. And in fact, you see the Chinese are investing a lot in fusion.

20:44Your government, the British government, actually has just put a few billion pounds to work to develop fusion domestically for you. The Germans have been investing a lot because they have already committed to divesting themselves of fission plants. kind of right around the time when their energy needs got more complicated by their supplier of gas, which turns out was Russia. So, you know, you see a lot of geopolitical concerns here driving the need for every country to want to make sure that they are energy independent or they have a reasonable path to get there. And you just can't do that with natural resources that don't exist everywhere.

21:19You know, not everywhere has coal, gas, had dinosaurs, you know, a few hundred million years ago. And so everyone's got to go figure out, okay, you know, what is something that we can power our society with that we do have domestically? And it turns out water and a little bit of lithium, most people can get their hands on those things. And so fusion is a great natural resource. In fact, compared to fission, which I agree is having a resurgence because of AI and everything else. But again, the inputs to it, you know, so, you know, highly enriched uranium. Yeah, that turns out that isn't everywhere.

21:49And even if it was everywhere, how to enrich it and whether the world wants you to enrich it, is a whole other question. And again, that's why fusion is such a compelling technology here for humanity. So this experiment in the National Institute was a huge moment, right? Because they proved that you could use a laser to smash atoms together to create more energy than it took to do so. But the quip would be that fusion has always been 20 years away for the last 60 years. So if I'm going to push you on commercialization timeline, when we see a fusion plant delivering real energy to the grid, what would you say?

22:21Our goal is to have it first commissioning of that plant be about 10 years from now, although it won't be fully, fully capable. I should caveat that, right? I think it'll be 15 years before we're actually putting out serious energy on the grid. So, you know, unlike others who say it's just around like it's next year. And they'll say that for 20 years. I'm not going to say that. I'm going to be realistic with you. So it's not an answer to like tomorrow's AI data center problem. And I just think that as a entrepreneur, I've always thought that the best thing to do is under promise and over deliver.

22:53So do I hope that we can deliver energy before 15 years from now? Absolutely. But I want to under promise and over deliver because that's the way to set expectations properly. But, you know, it's interesting. And you said Fusion is always 20 years away. In fact, I've always been 30 years away. I'm glad that you're more optimistic. Or maybe that's just sort of a conversion factor for imperial units. English to American. But the reason why is fascinating. And there's this analogy that we like to tell. If you go back to the sort of first understanding of fusion in the 1940s, which is when it was first kind of really figured out the basics of it.

23:33the analogy is okay people heard about an island far off that was full of riches gold you know endless amounts of gold and treasure okay so explorers set off in all directions to try and go find this island you know some you know one went north one went east one went west one went south right they all went in these different directions hoping to find their island and they kept believing that just over the horizon they're going to find their island and of course they sail another day and you know the island hasn't appeared and then okay well i'm pretty sure it's just another day out right and that's kind of been the the the attempt to go find fusion and make it work well it turns out that this one approach you know hitting a tar a very specific kind of target with a very specific kind of laser it turns out the people doing that are the ones who found the island they landed on the island there we go and so therefore it's like now we're talking about a known quantity because if you're still looking for your island it could be that it's just a day's sail away over the horizon.

24:32It could be it's a year. It could be there's no island at all in your direction. And so that's the thing that made it always seem 30 years away, which is a long enough period of time. You're like, well, anything could be possible. So 30 years is not actually a prediction. It's just an admission that they don't know. Well, guess what? We're on the island now and we're looking up and there's a mountain. We got to go climb on the island. Great. We got our hiking gear out. We're going up the mountain. But that's the value of having reached the island is now we know we know we and we know how tall the mountain is we have to go climb to go commercialize love that for our overachieving listeners can you just give us a brief overview of the other approach the magnetic approach just so they understand what's been yeah yeah so every approach diffusion is is the same fundamentals which is you're trying to essentially heat up a plasma of fuel typically isotopes of hydrogen to some amazing temperature or pressure uh so it's usually you know give or take hundreds of millions of degrees and then keep it there for long enough that the atoms, these isotopes start fusing into helium.

25:32And the longer you can keep it at those conditions, you know, very intense conditions, and that's where you get all this energy that starts to get created. And your goal is to burn as much of your fuel as you can. And then there's different ways. So the magnetic way, which is actually the primary way most of scientists have actually looked at fusion over the decades. And there's a reason for that. I'll tell you in a second. The way that they, the way they do it is they have this up, they create a plasma and again, creating a plasma is not hard. Everyone, you know, society is not going to do that.