#20 - Will O'Brien, Co-Founder of Ulysses Eco

0:00it's funny because when you're on a tech fucking podcast when someone says Steve it's like Steve jobs but this is sir when steve erwin i could just imagine him with a koala or something ah he was just man just he exuded passion like raw passion for what he did like he just fucking loved nature you know what i mean like and it's like again in this like world where we're all driven by our head we're all in our head all days we're stressed out it's like that man just loved it he just fucking it came from here do you know what i mean this is will o 'brien um let's start off with basically what is ulysses yeah um uh ulysses we're building um autonomous systems to automate the most critical tasks in our oceans uh there is a abundance of things in the ocean today um that uh activities that are too dangerous too expensive um or too difficult to do uh and as a result they're not being done and um that's having big downstream impacts on the kind of nature climate biodiversity side of our oceans and the safety and well-being of them and a whole other things so yeah our first product is a series of autonomous robots for seagrass ecosystem restoration that make the restoration of seagrass ecosystems cheaper easier faster much larger scale and yeah that's just like the first step on our kind of broader journey of broader vision of just I suppose it's very difficult to do things in the ocean and much more difficult than land and what we want to do we want to make it as easy to do an activity in the ocean a critical task in the ocean as it is on land so yeah that's our first step towards that yeah and I before like hearing about Ulysses I had literally never heard the term seagrass like in my entire life what is seagrass why do I think this is a this is a sign that you're onto a good startup when uh you're coming to meetings and you're saying telling them about uh something that they've never heard about before and they're like holy shit uh and i think that's actually kind of been some of the magic in in the start of ulysses is like we have started working in a domain that most people have never heard of this plant uh when we started telling them about it uh if someone told you that there was a plant that is um the you know one of the best in the world at removing carbon 35 times better than a rainforest it's 10 times more abundant in the oceans than coral reefs and uh they've never heard about it you'd be like hmm and that was us like two years ago when we when we started this journey we don't come from like seagrass biology expert backgrounds by any stretch of the imagination like i grew up by the sea like i was i grew up by the seaside seaside in um the southwest of ireland but wasn't an expert in it but um but uh yeah sorry to answer your question about seagrass yeah so it's this wonder plant it's incredibly good at removing carbon it's also uh yeah so it holds seagrass uh sediments hold about 20 of the carbon in in the ocean the ocean is the world's largest natural carbon sink and if we lose the seagrass ecosystems then we lose this massive deposit these gigatons of carbon um and uh so you know that's one downstream effect if we lose our seagrass ecosystems at the rate we're losing them today um another downstream impact is the impact on fisheries right so three billion people rely on uh fisheries as their uh as their primary source of protein a billion as their primary source of income and seagrass is one of the most important ecosystems uh for the health of the fisheries it's where small fish go in to hide from larger predators it's where other fish go in to lay their eggs it's what we would call a scaffold species right it creates a support structure for a healthy ecosystem so without seagrass ecosystems you know goodbye fisheries so people around the world have been we've been losing all of our ecosystems at an insane rate you know for the last 50 100 years 200 years in some instances um oceans have been particularly negatively impacted and we've been living in these seagrass ecosystems all around the world and people have been trying to bring them back but um the way you know the state of kind of ecosystem restoration in the ocean is like um you know it's it's kind of like at the level of uh people doing a bit of gardening in their back garden right like it's like small scale projects all manual it's not like agriculture right and like that's what we want to We want to make it, we want to build the agricultural machinery to enable this, um, this, uh, this like radical scale up of the restoration of ocean ecosystems.

4:50And like, like, uh, you know, one thing we, we talk about a lot internally here is like, okay. Um, there was a period in human history where we were saying, we're going to have too many people. We have to stop growing the population. We're going to run out of food. Um, you know, guys, we've got to stop having kids, like stop having kids. we've got to stop growing the economy um and uh uh and people were panicking right and then um and then a technological uh uh revolution came along uh the agricultural revolution uh outputs went up and all of a sudden we could keep growing and the panic was over does that sound familiar yeah yes that's exactly the same place we are today right people are like stop having kids we need to stop growing the economy that's what a lot of these like mainstream environmentalists who we very much you know uh don't align ourselves with uh like to say um but uh uh you know the answer is like you know two things like restoring ocean ecosystem drawing down like a vast amount of more carbon per annum bringing these ecosystems back we can continue to grow the the world economy we can continue to have kids we can continue to grow the pie and um yeah so so we offer this automated seagrass restoration service to our main customers our governments and governments are the main ones responsible for the restoration of this ecosystem and we can just do it at a faster faster time horizon larger projects and for a fraction of the cost of manual methods which is mainly just done by hand and divers yeah i'd want to like so i know that the first like um the start of this was someone going in like i think doing like a surfing day or something yeah yeah so what was the first like month of people going down both all four of you going down a rabbit hole and kind of discovering it individually yeah yeah yeah yeah it was like standard like just like four lads getting nerd sniped on a on a topic and oh we have started a company um it happened really quickly to be honest yeah jamie one of my co-founders um he he's a very avid surfer and he was surfing and met a marine biologist and she told him about seagrass about how brilliant it was great but then she was working on a restoration project and she was complaining about how difficult it was to restore this ecosystem and uh and how expensive it was and like how it wasn't effective and it was small scale and he was working on drone delivery at the time he was like didn't know much about subsistence you know um you know autonomous underwater vehicles but he was like i think you could do something here and uh then he picks up the phone to akil akil is a guy who uh one of our other co-founders the guy he worked with in that drone delivery company i had been friends with akil since college and he'll pick up the phone to me he also picks up the phone to columb his one of his childhood friends who was working in red bull formula one team at the time and uh all of us buzzed on it in different ways i was looking at the commercial side uh you know the guys were maybe looking at more at the engineering and the science side and uh group chat made like the following week it was like oh my god like why is nobody doing this why is nobody talking about this like you know there's companies being built to use drones to plant forests on land like why is nobody doing this in the ocean like this seems like a no-brainer especially when the plant is 35 times better than removing carbon and when the restoration activity the cost of planting it is about like 10 times more expensive than planting a far an acre of forest like an acre of seagrass seagrass ecosystem restoration is the most expensive form of ocean ecosystem restoration more than carls more than mangroves more than anything um just with like current technology and you can like manual methods yeah all of them on all of them on manual methods yeah and so how how does that work like so you guys are going to be using machines but yeah historically people have just like manually planted yeah so how you plant seagrass is similar to how you plant regular grass you take a seed you find a place to plant it you go plant it or you can take a seedling from you can do a transplant or you can grow it in a nursery and you plant but basically you're taking some planting unit you're putting it typically in an area it's restoration right so restore to restore where it once was so we know through maps where seagrass used to be and we're going to those areas and reintroducing plant material uh and and uh and letting kind of like yeah nature like do its thing then after that so yeah we use seed-based restoration so we uh you know a plant follows like an typically an annual cycle uh when it's playing ball and uh it'll fruit and then we'll collect the fruits and then we'll uh take the seeds out of the fruit and And then we'll come back with the same system a few months later and monitor it for growth.

9:34And that's how seagrass restoration happens. Yeah. I know. So you said like your three other co-founders are like the technical guys and you're more like a business facing person. Resident ideas guy. Resident ideas guy. Perfect. Yeah. So what was the like experience for you figuring out, you know, how to like sell this and make this a commercially like viable company? Yeah. Interesting. I kind of had experience in doing something similar before. Before my first, like, startup experience out of college was working as the first hire in a European scooter sharing operator where I was just fresh out of college, done, like, an e-comics and maths degree.

10:18I was tasked with, like, selling shared e-scooter schemes to governments in Ireland, the UK, Spain, Poland. It was great. scaled team 30 35 people sold the company seven figures right that was it yeah that was fun that was good like i came in to that company in may of 2020 june 2020 the laws in the uk changed two weeks before i hired like three interns that summer and me and three interns won contracts in like seven cities against like bird and lime and all these types and uh how'd you guys win against those competitors uh like we we we apply so a lot so like yeah we were up against bird and lime and these companies that were like you know we had like maybe raised i think 200k at that point and um we were all on like no no money um well there's not great salaries like uh and you know interns like none of us had any experience in scooters um actually none of us had any professional experience uh like full stop and then like yeah yeah yeah there's like uh yeah seven yeah five locations to begin with but it grew to seven locations across the uk that chose us as their operator um i think you know again it just went down to like uh understanding like what did these local areas need what do they want like what were the local requirements for an e-scaler scheme and uh we just wrote really we wrote a ton of we applied to every single uh proposed uh rfp that went up that summer so what happened was the uk government let legalized e-scaler sharing schemes and uh we uh we were like quick to respond you had all these big you know bird was a bloated company at this time right like this 2020 zerp they're hiring like crazy and they're raising it like a two billion valuation or something quickest company to one billion yeah and they just weren't adapting very well to work from home and like uh they weren't like again they were just getting bloated and then like ford motor company had a like a player in the race and they were all just working like nine to five hours and stuff and like whereas we were doing like 100 plus hours a week working out of a the the founder of the company his family owned a hotel so we're just working out of this like unused hotel just like grinding out like application after application rfp after rfp with like um how many do you think you submitted i'd say we submitted about 40 that summer i'd say there was 40 cities that went looking for e-scooter schemes and we we um yeah we landed like uh seven and uh yeah we became like a top five player in the uk and like off and then we raised another round off the back of that but um so i had like that was that was a really good experience in just like graft hard work like building something building something yeah and just like selling to government um and uh and something that is new however there was kind of a template there because bird and lime had done it before whereas like as you said you've never heard of seagrass before so when we came to this party like you know that was two years ago we started thinking about it like 18 months ago when we started working on it um and then yeah like uh yeah did did a fundraising around like about yeah like november october 2023 20 24 23 yeah um and kind of like i really got got stuck in then uh yeah i mean it's like these are all like first of a kind deployments of this technology so we have been having to think through like what does our go-to-market motion look like and that's uh it's unique in in some ways it's like this weird three-sided uh thing where you know there's us the technology provider you have the uh implementation partner like a local biologist or scientist that really understands the locality and then you have like the like uh the the kind of sponsor or the the funding partners maybe like the western australian government or something like that that's you know three-sided kind of like um you know it's nearly like the spider-man meme you know like it's like but it works it works yes it works yeah it's fun yeah it's fun but a big focus of ours is like the science right the science and finding scientists and getting them excited about what we can do um like i think one of the things i'm most proud of at ulysses is our company had been around for like we we uh we spoke at the world seagrass conference this year they gave the most attended uh talk at the entire conference we had a room overflowing with people we had been in this field for like a year right like at this point and we had it was in naples how many how many people like 200 plus okay people that are at our talk at the conference itself like maybe like 500 400 500 so like most people yes exactly so and we had only been working in this space like a year at that point so uh and i think it's because they they do see where we're coming from like that where our message is like we need to radically scale this up it shouldn't be like this small small scale thing um we need we want to make it cheaper and easier to do these large scale projects so um yeah um yeah that's been that was fun i'd be curious so i've only heard of two other companies that have the like same number of co-founders as you guys and that's like doordash and ginkgo bioworks and so what like how did you guys decide to have four co-founders and what's that experience been like uh i mean look like i'd love to sit here and say like everything here is like well thought out and there was method to the madness but man like it was a group chat you know what i mean like it was like like um like it makes sense like as in like in the first instance the reason we went for four was because everyone had a brought a different skill set like we have distinct capabilities me on like the commercial government sales side we have like you know another co-founder very heavy on like electronic engineering embedded systems uh another two like very good on on mech uh one having done like full systems designs of uh satellites drones all sorts another one um with deep actual ml experience uh working with red bull and uh also like hydrodynamics research background so there was like all these like different compatibilities um but um yeah it's kind of like the midwit meme as well it's like it wasn't we didn't big brain it at all it was like made a group chat and we're like you guys were just like all down to start just like dudes rock like let's just do it dudes rock like just let's do it like and uh and yeah that was the founding strategy just rock yeah but it's midwit like it's like the midwit thing like it's like like um yeah like i'm not like yeah it worked it was working yeah clearly uh how did you get the first i think you like came out of stealth with like a million dollars in revenue and uh who were those first few customers and how did you get them yeah so um yeah last year did a million in revenue um well probably like double or triple that again this year um i think for me coming from like the world of scooters to this is like biggest learning has been like um uh like you know the the the the realism uh competition is for losers so true like that scooter world there was like like whatever 10 plus companies trying to compete in this market all had the exact same scooter from one of two suppliers um and competition there's just no differentiation and honestly man it hurt my soul working in that because i was i was i was telling these cities this is why we're different this is the zip difference and undoubtedly there were areas of differentiation however in like you know in a sense to like the real service of getting people from place a to place b yeah it's just the exact same thing with a different color and a different four-letter word you know like it was like oh instead of zip it's bird you know like like you know they were all four-letter words that was the hilarious thing about it like zipp yeah yeah yeah exactly um uh but uh so now what we're doing we're like we're like 10 to 100 times better than the alternative is there any competition in in this because i've never heard of a company doing this and i also don't really understand why no one else is doing this um because it's difficult and it's it's it's not sexy it's not like you know seagrass wasn't in finding nemo you know like it's like not this like this is a like it's not like ai generated pictures yeah like it's there's it's difficult to get ai generate pictures of seagrass like um it's yeah i don't know uh there is like there has been there is like projects ongoing to uh to you know automate it but nobody like on the scale though or has achieved as much as we have and uh nobody has like really gone out into the field on the scale that we have but um yeah how did we get those first ones i think honestly it was it was uh finding really good partners as well like the people like i'm so grateful to professor gary kendrick in the university of western australia like beyond belief he took a bet on us early on when we were just like four irish lads on a zoom call being like uh we think you can make seagrass restoration way more efficient and then he was like can you come out next week it's planting season and we just we flew out there two of the lads went out there just flew to australia flew to australia fantastic and uh and planted some seagrass with a mechanical planter not like a robotic one um but just to test the planting method and uh and then i think he saw okay these guys are legit they're they're actually like passionate about it and uh so like we got lucky with like a good partner there and that's become a big project for us and uh yeah other great partners as well in our other like areas like florida and virginia we have amazing partners there and so i think that's been very helpful again like i'm saying this kind of three-sided deal uh that we that we have uh so i think that that was it but honestly i think having a very just playing in domains where there's no competition is just so critical like it's just like why do people why do so many people tackle things that like the unit economics don't make sense whereas this seems to definitely work if you can like figure out the technology well i mean the people go after things when the unit economics don't make sense because there just tend to be like this like order of magnitude reduction in unit economics if you can click some things right or at scale so um what do you mean i don't know that like i've heard of a lot of uh like kelp companies that uh i don't understand how they can make money um yeah i don't know um uh yeah we we um look we are all here at ulysses very passionate about our oceans and like the state of them like it's what we work on all day is trying to have oceans that are thriving in biodiversity you know clean water um you know abundant fish stocks for the next generation drawing down carbon like agree with all those things 100 percent um so i'd be curious like if you guys completely succeed uh how much like seagrass is there today in the world and then how much will there be in like 15 years yeah we could probably um double like the amount of the CRS coverage and we could probably satisfy like 10 % of the world's need for 2050 carbon removal which if you could do that and if we were selling credits at 150 a ton that would be like 1.5 trillion dollars 10 gigatons is what we need so one gigaton multiplied by 150 dollars a ton would be a 1.5 trillion dollar business by 2050 that's if we do they could end the route of selling credits on the restorative meadows um and in an ideal you know that would be like a scenario where you could hold on to all of the revenue it's not likely the the avenue we're going to go down like we we started this business we were thinking that we were going to do like restore the ecosystems and then sell the credits and that use that to finance more uh project development in in the oceans is difficult because it's owned by government whereas if you want to do if you want to like restore a rainforest right you just buy the land or let rent the land off and just like plant the trees a landowner and you give the money and they'll give it to you whereas with government like it's more of a well what are you going to it's not like money doesn't like talk in those scenarios right and you have to get permits and stuff so uh that adds like that extends the project timeline and uh and we realized like actually people are just willing to pay us to to plant grass not to develop the project and then sell the credits like governments would just pay us to plant grass for them so we opted more for that model and also we saw that really the opportunity for our business is being this like general purpose robotics platform for the ocean and automating more critical tasks like like you know you see this in like all these humanoid startups right um the humanoid form form factor will not translate to the ocean humans are not evolved for the ocean right so therefore you need another form factor for doing autonomy in the ocean and automating weight labor and other critical tasks and uh yeah so so that's where like our platform which is a surface vehicle integrated of an underwater vehicle with the ability to carry robotic payloads or run models on the edge is uh naturally and it's very low cost meaning you can scale it up and cover large areas uh at a fraction of the cost of traditional unmanned systems um so that they're like some of the key innovations in our platform is fraction of the cost of traditional unmanned systems platforms in the ocean much cheaper than any other our underwater vehicle and our surface vehicle are both cheaper than and offer the same functionality as anyone else on the market and secondly they're integrated surface vehicle underwater vehicle the underwater vehicle can go into the bed of the surface vehicle and then be transported that's not a common functionality in unmanned systems in the ocean and that gives you full xyz access to the ocean and then when you strap on the ability to run robotics on the edge that gives you not only like um that gives you read and write capabilities as well right so you can a lot of a lot of people are just doing like read capabilities on the ocean they're just like reading and they're scanning and they're taking in data but they don't actually do right they can't physically manipulate um and that's that's that's big when you can physically manipulate things then it's like okay there's like 10 billion years spent on commercial diving it's like if you can add a manipulator arm you can start chipping away at that market um or building bespoke payloads like we've done for seagrass um so wasn't isn't one of the things that you might be able to do like help the coast guard catch drugs yeah so like the platform as i said it's extremely low cost and it's dual domain meaning that you can see what's going on the surface you can see what's going on beneath and if you need to you can do an intervention you can send a uv to do what you need to do and yeah like the seagrass restoration business is like where we've begun and it's where we've started and it's growing fast and we have a big pipeline for deals this year that we're going to close out over the next um few months and continue to grow but again the big vision for us is to be the like autonomy platform in the ocean and uh and yeah like who spends a ton of money in the ocean who is doing really critical stuff coast guard navy um i think coast guard are very interesting one like they're really like actually one of the unsung heroes here in the u.s like um when people think of armed armed forces like they just think of military military yeah exactly yeah exactly um coast guard every day out there intercepting drugs preventing uh you know doing search and rescue and keeping borders safe and protected and uh yeah like across we're seeing this across the navy and the coast guard uh huge labor shortages like the the coast guard are retiring ships every year because they don't have enough people to staff them and this is a common problem like around the world um on the ocean like they could like um there's not enough people not enough people talking yeah so you need like again there's a labor shortage you need to again like same argument that you have on land for humanoids uh applying for this for the ocean automating um and uh and taking off some of the roles that you would have a person maybe on board a 70 foot cutter doing and putting them and building a purpose-built autonomous system to do that um like uh yeah so yeah maritime this area is called maritime domain awareness uh it is one of one of the yeah we have we have a new product launching this year we'll be sharing more on it later this year um and uh and yeah this is yeah coming soon coming soon um i want to know like what is the what has been the most difficult moment since starting the company probably like having tests in the field and then like not going well um you know like there's like what that like famous photo of like musk with like the they just exploded rocket exploded rocket all around in them yeah we've had moments like that and like look I'm not day-to-day working on the engineering thing but the lads are fucking killing themselves to work at an insane pace and and then it's just it just takes what you know in hardware it just takes one thing to go wrong and your test mission isn't working and it's fine because we build on it like and we get better but those are those are tough days when lads have been like cranking for ages on like a development direction then you go out into the field to test it it doesn't work it's like that's a bummer um so i'd say they're they're they're they're the harder uh days when you just work for months and it just doesn't work yeah exactly when you're all like super excited for like next phase of testing it doesn't work but then it's gone because then the next week you go back out with or the next day you go back out with a fix but uh but yeah you're so excited for testing or whatever um so um yeah i mean we came to this field not with a with a naivety that has actually been very helpful i think like none of us had worked on autonomous underwater vehicles previously um and we developed a platform that is like one-tenth the cost of like incumbents and uh that was just kind of out of like maybe a bit of hubris and naivety but like um the guys have been able to make it work and uh and uh you know we just kind of came in being like well we plant grass on land therefore we should just be able to repurpose agricultural machinery and make them make it work underwater and kind of brought that model and then like we were like we started looking at the so we actually thought we were just going to build the machinery like for the planting and the collecting of seeds and then we like looked at the unmanned systems market and like some of the offerings there and they were just like it was like 500k for like one of the vehicles we wanted to buy an underwater vehicle to like carry our we were like man that's like a quarter of our like like a seed round and a pre-seed like we're like no and then like not even messing over like three or four days jamie like our cto like just like locked in uh he was like flying back to scotland for something like locked in on a flight and uh just like designed a platform from scratch an auv platform from scratch and then we're like turned around like four days later we're like what like you know like he's a freak in the best way i love him but uh and then we just went into building like we were like shit this like all works like and he just like he just like you know the typical kind of like elon thing like delete things that are not you know worthwhile and do you guys follow the same uh i forgot Not exactly what they're real.

31:32Not really, no. The algorithm or whatever. No, not really. Like, I think, yeah, I don't know how that guy's brain, Jamie's brain works. He's amazing, though. I love working with, like, these guys. What do you think the, like, best thing about working with them is? Oh, man, we have so much fun. We have the best crack ever. Like, we're, like, yeah, our company culture is just very oriental and, work hard play hard like you know like it's like but like nobody here takes themselves seriously everyone's like mocking each other like it's very like but in a kind way yeah it's kind of like like a bunch like i grew up with like two brothers so i'm very used to this like like mocking each and like our irish culture is very like nobody takes themselves too seriously right like you know um 700 years of british oppression would make yourself make yourself not take yourself too seriously um we like to have fun we like to have a drink like we like to have the crack um and like this is like that group here um there's just yeah a lot of well yeah how does that translate to you know i think you guys are going to be hiring quite a few people over the next year or so what's your we made three hires in the last few weeks yeah yeah what what is your like process for finding people that will fit with this culture so we made we made an amazing hire last year for a founding engineer and the guys knew him previously they'd worked with him previously right Dylan he's phenomenal um and uh so that was just like from network um another one of the three hires we just made again was from network um yeah we've made two other hires there I think two very critical things like like you know to both of the people we've hired the other people that you know we didn't know previously that we hired um they came to us like we were just like publicly posting and I was shit posting on Twitter and I think one of them saw like the job description as a result of that um or it got sent to someone or whatever um and uh anyway um both of them are like the people two people we hired that we don't didn't know previous to starting the company technically insanely competent both of them like both have like stellar records or whatever and everything they've done and uh very much we're very much hiring for a slope um like not neither of them both of them in their 20s neither of them have like credentials let's say um but uh but like they were strong culture fits like we could just see them fitting in there um so i think the pro like it's hard it's hard to find these people but i think the main thing is when you're doing hiring is to not compromise on your culture in the early days and if you have like a if you have like it's hard like cultures i actually hate the word of it to because it's like it's like i mean look it's it's a word for it but like uh it's it's it's vibes based right like it's vibes based like just like listen to your like do they do they fit the vibe yes it's all like it's gut right like i i am i honestly think like uh intuition is like so powerful you need to listen to it like if if i look back the worst decisions i've made it's when And I've ignored my gut in favor of data or something.

35:09Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Interesting. So it's kind of like the Bezos thing where he's like the most important decisions may be informed by data, but they have to be like from the heart. Yeah, well, I think it's different. I think there is like two types of founders, right? Head and heart founders, right? Like, and you can broadly put them in. You can put like the Steve Jobs into the world of like heart based founders. And like Bezos is the typical head founder. now Elon is kind of like unique because he can also catalyze this kind of like uh heart and like you know catalyze this vision for going to Mars but also like he's one of their best IC engineers or something like that you know like he but he's like technically incredibly strong uh I definitely put myself more into like the heart-based like founder camp and like um uh and even like internally you can ask the guys about this but they have their own like vibes-based engineering uh philosophy which I won't try to explain Fives based engineering philosophy yeah and

36:06but yeah for me anyway I used to be hiring it's all intuition based or not all but like it's important to listen to that and not to deny it yeah like I've made hires before that didn't turn out well and it was because I was ignoring my intuition so and yeah just made bad decisions before and you yeah just don't yeah don't ignore that intuition i think it's i think in a world of like optimize everything like wearing my aura ring to like data's everywhere data's everywhere like optimize everything i think that's all bullshit to be honest like i i don't like measure my sleep score i don't like um follow a routine like i don't like um yeah i don't follow a routine i think routine is so overrated to be honest like when in human history has like how like do you think cavemen woke up in the morning it was like 7 a.m better fucking go and stare at the sun for 15 minutes before i might cold plunge in the river like no like you you base on the day right like you you roll with the punches and you like and uh and yeah like i definitely think there's this like there is a role for data but it shouldn't override everything for sure yeah like let's like balance obviously like like i'm not like they're planning 2025 for Ulysses and being like the KPIs for this year are the vibes you know like we still have to write investor reports where we give our burn and runway and all this you walk in and say our vibes are at all time yeah exactly yeah you should see the slope the KPIs do not like we don't have OKRs for vibes but like yeah it's just not my style um and I think it's um a little bit overrated so yeah i i try to use intuition in business decisions and uh i think it works for me i'd be curious who are the people that you look up to the most i know that steve erwin was one when you were a kid i love i still love steve like we have photo of him over there um frame frame frame photo of him yeah yeah um a little relic to him uh yeah we love steve uh rest in peace to a king uh i think what why is steve that's funny because when you're on a tech fucking podcast when someone says steve it's like steve jobs but this is erwin i could just imagine him with a koala or something ah he was just man just he exuded passion like raw passion for what he did like he just fucking loved nature you know what i mean like and it's like again in this like world where we're all driven by our head we're all in our head all days we're stressed out it's like that man just loved it he just fucking it came from here do you know what i mean and like i think if we can channel some of that here wow that's powerful you can move fast then you can move like if you can move with that passion and that that um so you can also move others if you have that passion yeah yeah it's magnetic you know he was so enthusiastic it was infectious he he got people to care about the environment he got people to care about nature he educated people but like it was all because he was enthusiastic yeah you're right it was infectious so i think his passion is something that i and like he was cool and he was just like renegade you know like i i like uh he was rough like at the frontier in himself he was well he was being himself but he was being himself that's a big thing he was being true to himself but he was also like going off to random places to like look at this type of snake or this type of shark or whatever and he was he was like there was risk and there was adventure and i think that appealed to me um and oh man i still remember the day he died like i was so sad so so sad i remember I was in my third class so that means I was fifth like that would be fifth grade equivalent so I was like 10 and like remember like being like sad and like not playing with anyone at lunch and being like why are you all so happy like Steve Irwin died like tried I tried to convince my school to have like a vigil for him and they wouldn't but um yeah he was he was a big one for me um just like general role models or like whoever you know you think of comes to mind um yeah and then like naturally you're like parents and stuff are like a big inspiration um both my parents are big inspiration to me my mom my dad in different ways they push you towards entrepreneurship um yes in different ways um my dad was just always he was an entrepreneur and so it was my granddad my granddad on both sides were entrepreneurs one granddad was a pig farmer and uh no pig he didn't actually oh you pig farmed sold pigs had a pub any odd job he was like he was doing it yeah like eight kids typical irish catholic family like uh looking after and his wife was um was a bit uh ill so he was kind of like single parent a little bit um for eight kids and uh and then other side of the family uh yeah my my granddad he was william as well um actually funny sorry my grand he was uh the first like person to bring in uh i should know if i can say this on the podcast you got it uh worst comes to worst we edit it he was the first person to bring like plastics or was like a big plastic importer in so they call him plastic willy um so uh are you just trying to make up for your past generations like maybe yeah he was also he brought cranes into ireland he brought like um he's like an importer he uh well he he operated the cranes he had like a bought in the cranes and then like would rent them out and like just general like for like building roads and stuff like that he built on like worked on building roads infrastructure building in ireland and also like for he had like about 10 different businesses lost his shirt in a recession and started another 10 businesses you know like just kind of did a bit everything a real just like just a grinder relentless guy yeah yeah absolute grinder and uh so yeah had that on both sides and my dad as well like has now he has like yeah he's got like a social um social enterprise and he's started two businesses and kind of did his own things and again similarly it's been up and down for him but so I'm always I've always been exposed to it in that way so that was kind of like maybe like exposure you see that other people you see it can be done and uh and then I think yeah like my I did I did remember my I nearly became a vet at work so I nearly became a veterinarian um loved animals and wildlife growing up and worked in a in a vet practice in in Cork where I'm from when i was in in in secondary school and and then um partially because you just really cared about like and looked up to steve erwin uh yeah honestly it was because i what i loved about working in that vet practice was because they were working with them they had the contract for the local zoo so they did exotics so there was like pictures of cheetahs on the wall and they were getting call-outs to go to the giraffes and like all this so i was that was sick like and yeah so i was kind of on this path where i was like i'm gonna be a vet like gonna go to dublin study veterinary but my mom knew as well that like i like i was doing like i was in secondary school i was like selling widgets you know like just i was kind of buying shit online like laser pointers and so that and sell in school i was always kind of like had like a different arbitrage and yeah i always had a scheme to make money and uh and i think she maybe saw that no your mom knows you better than anyone you know really like and i think she knew that veterinary is extremely tracked and it's very it caps your upside and i think she could see that and in me and kind of gave me a nudge in my like last year high school being like would you think about other stuff you know and there was there was a court and i my favorite subject in school was maths and there was just like this very like maybe elite like course in one of the colleges in Dublin that uh in the universities in Dublin that uh focused on like maths and like finance economics and it's like for people generally who go into like a lot of my class went into banking or um like algo trading or something like that afterwards and she was like oh what do you think about that and I and then I was like actually you know I love maths so it was like I think you're probably right and so I did that instead and that was great because that kind of opened my world to the world of business and that became then I was like I'm definitely not doing finance like you know did you go straight from like deciding not to do finance to zip uh no uh I I made a early decision I would say in university that I was not going to work in finance um it was never for me yeah like maybe flirted with of consulting but then it just doesn't take a genius to realize that that's just not the most meaningful career path yeah yeah that's one way of putting it all right um is there any is there any good stories that i just didn't know to ask about but they're really fun a few um

45:50i lived with like buddhist monks before um for a while i've ended up in a chinese prison um i uh worked for a billionaire on a caribbean island how'd you get into that i nearly got killed once uh which one do you want to do like i mean let's fuck it it's like four you know let's just go through them oh okay okay uh first i think the monks uh yeah i was um raised catholic and uh i am catholic now however during college i did have a brief intermission where i was looking into other religions and was generally agnostic and uh was uh curious to learn more about like buddhism so i just uh i just started like reading a ton about it and then i was like not really getting much out of these books i want to go live with them i was like how do you live with them you have to go teach them english taught myself how to teach english emailed a bunch of schools um emailed a bunch of schools uh or monasteries in nepal and one of them responded got back and was like yeah come on in mr o 'brien and uh so i i i went there for a summer and uh lived with them and uh taught them english and uh uh learned about their religion and uh did Everest Base Camp while I was there as well.

47:17That was nice to notch that one off as well. Space Camp? Everest Base Camp. Like a hike to the base camp of Mount Everest. So that was good. That was a good crack. I learned a lot there. And formed a solid opinion on Buddhism. Decided not to become Buddhist, evidently. I didn't come back to Catholicism though until like not directly after that trip but a few years later. uh but yeah definitely like learn some interesting things from from those guys yeah let's end it on the the billionaires one okay the billionaire one so uh the richest man in ireland or the used to be the richest man in ireland was a guy called dennis o 'brien no relation but uh dennis uh set up a large telecoms business in the caribbean and in asia pacific and uh so main like um main like telecoms company in like papua new guinea and jamaica and uh cayman islands and all these places and um i read in his book that he got his first job by sending a letter to the founder of uh ryanair asking to be his personal assistant uh so i was like put down the book wrote a letter put in my cv i was in college at the time this was actually the summer before nepal and uh oh yeah um found out his address and sent him the letter and i think this is like very i think one thing you know in outbound in cold outbound that is underrated as a letter nobody will ever forget a letter nobody gets letters anymore and like this is ai can't yet at least write letters the mailbox is the ultimate inbox zero yes so if you want to get someone's attention write them a letter send them a letter if you want to get a job at ulysses send me a letter um you will infinitely go up in the ranks and who we consider um yeah letter writing is incredibly underrated there's something very human about it i think the returns to letter writing is only going to go up as um more ai slop tags over the internet and we go more offline and um yeah so i uh sent that letter found his address um which was hard to find i had to ask around but i had a source and got his uh personal office letter and uh sent it him a few days later get a call from an unknown number and uh it's him uh dennis and he's like yeah love the letter not gonna give you a pa job though because uh i traveled so much and it's it's just different to tony ryan where tony ryan was based in shannon or based in ireland all the time this guy's like jetting off between all his americans he doesn't need someone traveling with him he needs like pas but he doesn't need like an assistant in the way tony did so um and also like i was like 19 so probably like that was probably like another reason he was being kind but he said i'll give you a job for the summer and uh i worked in the cayman islands in that market and it was hilarious actually when i landed they all thought i was his son because i had the same surname at the start i did i told them after a few days that it wasn't his did that influence his decision the fact that you guys had the same i'm not sure you'd have to get him on and ask him he would be a great guest uh dennis o 'brien yeah so that that was that one yeah okay all right that's a perfect way to place to end it thank you very much