#22 - Augustus Doricko, Founder & CEO of Rainmaker

0:00I'll also ask people when I'm hiring them like, are you prepared to go live on a mountain for six months? Usually it's something like, well, that sounds great. Sure, I can come back, see my family now and then. And it's like, no, no, you can't. You have to go live on this mountain until the job is done. Since last I interviewed you in like March of last year, I think you were at like eight or nine employees. You've almost you haven't quite done a 10x, but you're at like, you know, six, seven, 8x that employee count. You went from working, you know, testing on farms to now you're doing, you know, full-blown operations in a few different countries.

0:34And you're basically vertically integrating your entire business. So what's it been like, you know, growing through that? It's been pretty electric. Trying to think of an easy way to summarize all that activity. Um, well, I think that really the most salient explanation starting place, right, is when Rainmaker deployed to Pendleton. So some people know this, some people don't know this, but we were originally testing in the Central Valley. That's where we were flying our first drones. Rainmaker at that time was essentially like a service, like a systems integrator and service provider. Like we didn't build much.

1:20We didn't build drones. We didn't build radar. We didn't build our own way of dispersing the airsole. We didn't make our own airsoles. We had very little software. We were a small team. But we were planning to just buy a bunch of these different pieces, mix them together, and then modify the weather that way. None of that worked. Regulatorially, we were not permitted to continue testing in California. Let's put it that way. What was the time frame around there? That was September, October, 2024. It was really September, 2024. So up until that point in the company, we were learning a lot, but mostly just by getting punched in the face.

2:00You know, like off the shelf hardware providers either were lying to us about their capabilities or their lead times were a year, or they just didn't have like the specifications that we even needed. Like there There was nothing on market that we could get. And then when we had to find permissible airspace to test in and more frequent conditions to test in, we surveyed the United States over trying to find an area where we could fly drones at altitude, sometimes at night, actually get a weather modification permit, all this kind of stuff. And so we moved the entire company to Pendleton, Oregon, which is a little town on the border of Idaho.

2:39It's 16 ,000 people, which incidentally is about the same size as El Segundo, but it is significantly less dense. 2 ,000 of the people that live there are prisoners. Most of the rest are farmers. And so we all moved into a warehouse. And we found out pretty quickly that we had to vertically integrate everything. So from October on, we decided to vertically integrate our drone. We decided to build our own radar. We decided to start doing our own particle design. um that was harrowing uh right yeah like so you weren't planning on this you just like had to do it yeah yeah we had to uh and and you know like like i said we needed more air we need more permissible airspace we needed more frequent clouds to test in uh and then we found out we needed to vertically integrate all this stuff right so you had your own version of the whole like russia trip where you figure out you know yeah it costs way too much and it takes way too long.

3:32Yeah, literally. Right. Yeah. No, we, uh, we, we could not buy a rocket off the shelf. Right. Um, and so those of us that lived through the Pendleton experience, I think that we all have like very different neurologies coming out of that. Um, because it was, it was, it was below zero most days. Uh, the warehouse that we were living in was ice cold. The heating barely worked. Uh, we converted all of the offices into bedrooms, uh, that smelled awful by the right candidly um and that's really where like we we earned our stripes um since then since like october when we kicked it in gear and then december when we really started to get like our first evidence of effect from seeding like from anthropogenic precipitation enhancement um finally rainmaker feels like the rocket ship that we always kind of knew it would Um, but now, yeah, like we, we are over 50 people.

4:27We're operating in Utah, Colorado, Oregon, California, Texas, a country in the middle East that like a lot of people may know, um, Argentina, we got our first guys deployed down there. Um, so it's, uh, it, it is, it is hyperscale time. Um, everywhere in the world should and will have weather modification program. I think every continent will have a weather modification program in about two years with Rainmaker. we'll try to make that faster but that's about the timeline that I'm thinking right now so it feels very fast finally, which is good you know, a funny thing about starting early stage startups I'll stop rambling in a sec but it's like, pre-seed companies you're kind of just messing around like you're kind of just trying things you know, because you don't have enough money you don't have a big enough team, especially in hardware to do much that's consequential so you just got to get to the point where like you have the capital and resources and personnel to like actually enact the vision.

5:24And so it feels like that is underway now. Like we're actively making water, which is very satisfying. Yeah. So I know like a lot of different startups, you know, they put out basically some form of the Ernest Shackleton ad where it's like, you know, come work in terrible conditions and all this stuff and you'll love it. We'll pay you almost nothing, yada yada. but I think it's kind of bullshit in most cases in Rainmaker's case it's actually very real you know if you want to live in a crate or like die on top of a you know snowy mountain this is the place to be how do you like filter for people like that yeah so you know you're in part referencing like that twitter post that I made right um so the Rainmaker Ford operations core it is I think tapping into this latent spirit that all people have had since the beginning of time, but there's nowhere to express that and fulfill that in modern life.

6:20And that's the desire to adventure, the desire to be a real pioneer. Because you can go be a startup founder or employee in SF, and you're going to grind, right? Or you can backpack the world and see different sites around Europe or Southeast Asia. But if it's leisure, it's not really adventure because there's no real challenge. If it's work in an office, there's no real adventure, even if it is like a grind. So the Forward Operations Corps, like the men and women that are going to go starting that already have, but then really in earnest and at scale starting in October this year, um they're going to be essentially like oil roughnecks national parks folk marine corps uh retirees like veterans um we filter for people that desire adventure and that have grit um and the funny thing about that is like we've had people from uh i was about to say black water not the mercenary company uh black stone is that the black stone yeah black like equity or yeah equity yeah we've had financial analysts from blackstone applied to become forward operating specialists uh just because they're like hey i make a lot of money i hate my life and desk job like i want to go live an adventure and so the the people that we've been hiring for that hiring about 50 right now um they are true adventurers um that is what we're looking for above anything else.

7:50Yeah, I know that the like, basically, the retention is absolutely crazy, because I've talked, you know, I talked to a whole bunch of people and leading up to this. And it's effectively like, you know, someone at the company will, you know, say, like, you should come join. And then, you know, someone's like, I don't know if I want to. And then they like, come stay for, you know, a week or whatever. And then like, holy shit, I can't believe I haven't been here already. I definitely don't want to leave. And I don't know, it definitely, you have a way of getting people excited. Um, how do you manage through, there's, um, another thing that I heard again and again was every two months or three months, it's like a completely different company.

8:29Um, how do you manage through like growing through those stages? Pain tolerance. Right. Um, yeah, I mean, like, like I said, over the summer, we were fooling around in the central Valley. Then in October and November, we were like, just barely starting to figure out how to build our own drones. December and January, we started serious operations. February through April, we had a regular cadence. May, a lot of our engineering staff was back in Gundo. And then we started scaled production of our newest drones and have our radar deployed out in the field. A lot of personnel have joined since then.

9:13A lot of new programs have opened up since then. Um, I think that, uh, I'm not exactly sure how frequently you should go through like corporate overhauls and structural overhauls, but, um, doing that often seems like a good way to say dynamic. Like a lot of companies get slothful and lazy fast. And so like forcing ourselves to break existing systems just to create like the currently optimal version of them, that's been good. But everybody at Rainmaker is extremely autonomous. They have a ton of personal ownership. There are too many radically different scientific engineering, business development, and regulatory dynamics for me to, even if I wanted to, micromanage them.

10:01And so by hiring people that can get the job done themselves and identify problems themselves, we've been able to make it through all of these reorientations. Yeah. I would like to know, like, what's a typical like week in the life of Augustus Dorico in 2025 right now? They vary a lot. Well, I would probably say there's a 50-50 chance that I am in either 50 % probability that I'm in Los Angeles and El Segundo. So the other 50 % is either me in Saudi Arabia, D.C., or one of our program areas throughout the United States, so like Utah or something. If I'm there, then it's probably calls really late at night because everybody's on L.A.

10:52time. So I'm up in the middle of the night trying to catch up with the team. It's trying to break down like the regulatory issues like we were having in Florida. I was there for a while. Maybe we'll touch on that. And then back in Gundo, it's trying to just get the appropriate resources, personnel, financial, or just like thinking sessions to the different engineering programs as they require it. Emails. I read a lot of emails. I don't know, I guess because we're not in the operating season right now, we've probably transitioned from like more glamorous adventure camping up at the top of mountains, flying drones to, uh, work office work, setting up all the logistics for the programs that are currently granted underway in, uh, Texas and Argentina, but really are going to start again in earnest in October.

11:45How do you think about, uh, pushing forward with maximum aggression while also ensuring that you don't, you know, physically die yeah i probably probably come a little bit closer to physically dying have we talked about spider eyes no but i heard about this from chris last night yeah so you know that october period um rainmaker uh moved to oregon uh we acquired a company we acquired one of the old legacy cloud seeding companies let's talk about that what was that deal well how about i do that i'll do that um and everybody thought it was pretty crazy to acquire a company because we were like essentially seed stage um i was a little bit stressed out and not sleeping a whole lot and uh it turns out if you sleep so little for so long then these uh essentially microscopic arachnids that live all over your skin will start to like burrow into your skin and eat you alive.

12:48And they happened to target my sebaceous glands in my eyeballs. Um, and so they, I had these like microscopic arachnids eating my eyes. And funnily enough, ivermectin is the only way to cure it. Um, which took a lot of medical research to figure out, but, uh, it's more or less solved now. So I definitely tend more towards the, you know, grind yourself into dirt. Right. Um, And it's, you know what, like you're a, you're a man in your twenties, right? Like you should, you should really leave it all on the court. You should be on the verge of death at all times and live a very vital life. But like, uh, the, the bear case for Rainmaker is that, you know, at some point, you're like eyes, you go blind or something.

13:28Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think Neuralink will solve that. Right. Exactly. Elon's going to come and clutch it. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Uh, Elon, please give me the eyeball enhancement. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. How do you balance that? Probably, probably don't. Did you change anything after the spider eyes or are you just actually, you know, saying we're going to recover from that, take some horse, you know, medication and then exactly horse dewormer and then just keep on grinding? No, I have a lifetime supply of horse dewormer. Incredible. Now that's the solution. Awesome. Okay. Yeah.

14:02So, you know, I think so there's there's the acquisition, but there's also this other aspect where, you know, you tweeted it back probably a few months ago now. basically with you know your vision or your strategic vision not all your investors agreed with that vision and it felt very good to be kind of vindicated or proven right that you could actually execute this thing that you were trying to do uh what was like that idea and then how you know how do you manage investors um regarding the acquisition you mean yeah and when when their strategy you know when they think that you're making potentially a mistake but you believe something else and you want to build the company that you want to build.

14:41Yeah. I mean, well, what I would say is I'm grateful that I'm on the same page with everybody now. And I think, yeah, like it's good that that strategic decision was not a blunder and it panned out because we all see the benefits in it. But basically the context is this. The cloud seeding market essentially does not exist because it's never been a viable product before, right? Even if the tech in its nascent state has existed for 80 years because nobody was ever able to prove that it was working, nobody was willing to buy it except some very, very desperate watersheds like, you know, those in Utah or in Nevada, but small scale, right?

15:19So how do you run a deep tech company when the market does not exist? Like even for fusion, like people will buy energy. There's an energy market. There is no water from the sky market right now, or at least there wasn't when we were starting this. So, so there's, there's a very small old school market as it stands. The sales cycles are long because you're primarily doing B to G, um, business to government. Um, so how do we, how do we grow? How do we even get to test this stuff in the next year, two years? Um, well, we're not going to win a government contract and get through an appropriation cycle in 12 months.

15:56Uh, our only option is while we're pursuing these new contracts and appropriations, um, buying one of the old school legacy companies. How many of those were there in the U S four, four, four. Um, so there was one in Texas, one in California, one in Utah, uh, one in North Dakota, technically five. There's one in Colorado as well. Um, there's four remaining. And so we were, we were from the jump. We knew we were going to buy one of these companies, inject our tech into it, uh, improve the operation and then upsell from there. That was, that was the market thesis from the beginning and everyone like us to some extent was like okay that makes sense but then when the rubber hits the road and you're like all right we're gonna shell out a lot of money to buy a company um take on take on debt to buy a company spend some venture equity to buy a company um yes the company at this time is actually almost equivalent headcount to the existing organization we're gonna double in size with a bunch of people in another state um it it It seemed a little silly.

16:57Was this going to be like the first time where you guys had actual operations? Like you just acquire operations kind of thing? So we'd been doing a lot of tests. But we didn't have any commercial contracts yet. So yeah, like the plan from the very beginning was to acquire operations and improve them with our tech stack. And that's what we did. But I think, you know, I think then it seemed crazy. Now, though, I have a lot of founders, not to leak alpha, but I have a lot of people reaching out to me because I think for deep tech, this play makes a lot of sense. There's all these legacy industries.

17:34You have a better product. You cannot reach scale as quickly if you just outcompete them over long sales cycles. So just like roll it up, use different financial products and venture equity and then, you know, still get the software, software margins or whatever, like a real tech company can. And then and then you'll be 10 times larger, 10 times faster. You know, I think you mentioned at one point that basically you don't think that enough founders think about their like capital structure and how to, you know, raise different forms of financial instruments. how do you think about that and like specifically in the case of you know you did this thing that but you're also going to be creating like a land fund at the you know first second quarter or something of next year to basically buy land and then you know make it arable or i don't know arable but yeah exactly arable yeah so there's there's two different things that we're thinking about there one is financial instruments to operate like your call it core business and then there's like more value capture on the stack.

18:40I think the former is applicable to almost all companies. The latter is more unique to Rainmaker.

18:49Everybody like says that they don't want to be diluted, but like how many practical steps do you take to mitigate that? Your growth trajectory should be asymptotic, right? Like you should be worth significantly more every year, you know, multiples more every year, then yeah, you should be worth multiples more every year. And so if you can finance a lot of your equipment, not attributable equipment, so you probably shouldn't finance drones that are crashing. But if you finance a lot of your equipment, if you take out debt, either for, like I think even debt for a sales team is interesting, right?

19:26Because you get a pretty clear return on investment there. Software companies kind of do this right now. Um, but if you set up project finance, right? Like if you're, if you're a manufacturing company, you don't necessarily need to own the factory, like the new industrial corporation, Greg Bernstein owns this. Um, he's, he's one of the founders of it. They're offering project finance where, okay, you're a company, you have some manufacturing process. You do sell an end product, but like, should you use venture dollars to build multiple factories? No, probably not. you should actually take project finance, so set up a subsidiary LLC that owns that factory, have some outside partner buy equity in that factory, put debt into that that the Topco owns, and then pay back the debt, gradually buy back the equity in that subsidiary company.

20:13That's a way to mitigate dilution. I know a lot of people, I know a lot of manufacturing companies, manufacturing startups that are spending venture dollars on factories and... It just doesn't make as much sense. If you're trying to minimize for dilution, no, probably not. Now, the second thing that you mentioned is like the land fund. We are producing water in areas that do not have water. There are places in Arizona that have the same soil mineral content as the Central Valley, but they don't have water. The Central Valley used to be a wasteland. It used to be deserts and swamps. Then we brought water to it.

20:52It's now the most productive agricultural region in the United States. That's like an example of actual US already terraforming something. Exactly, right? It's us already modifying the water cycle. It's not playing God. It's just engineering. And it is terraforming. Rainmaker can bring water to these desert regions. Sure, we can sell the water. But if the water is being bought, that means people are creating more value with the water than they are paying for it. So really what Rainmaker should and will do is buy up the land that can be terraformed and then either flip the agricultural assets once they are viable or just own them and then make money off of whatever you're growing there.

21:33Yeah. Okay. I know, you know, a while back, so you've got this like, you know, discussion with Florida right now. But I was kind of thinking a while back, you know, I texted you and you said, I love fighting. and I was kind of wondering what or do you have any like moment in your childhood or something about your childhood that made you just enjoy the you know exhilaration of fighting and like fighting for something that you care about yeah um well probably a lot of moments like that but related to loving fighting this isn't so much uh learning to love to fight but learning to love, uh, like pain or exhaustion.

22:19Um, I was in something called the student space flight experiment program, um, where a bunch of high schools and universities compete to design an experiment conducted on the ISS. Um, and so my high school team was selected for that. Very cool. It was not like revolutionary science. We were doing some early simple biology stuff, um, just on like yeast cell replication, that kind of thing. But during that period of my life, my junior year of high school, in order to keep up with school because, you know, college applications were coming up, do competitive sports, competitive debate, and then the student space flight experiment program, you had to be awake longer hours and just keep working.

23:07And so there were most nights during that phase of life where I was up till, I don't know, 2, 3, 4 a.m. This kind of sounds like hustle porn. Like I'm not trying to make it out that way. But it was the most satisfying portion of my high school because I was doing so much. And it was all extraordinarily rewarding work. And I was in love with space. I still think space is spectacular. Partially I'm building Rainmaker because I think terraforming other planets will be a big deal in the future. um but like because of how meaningful that period of life was and because of how exhausted i was all the time i ended up associating that sort of like you know joint aches and pains headache feeling pain towards like success deep meaning yeah exactly and so that that i think was probably the moment that i would say i learned to love the the taste of blood in my mouth my mouth if you will So that was probably like the year.

23:59Yeah, it's interesting because like I if you don't have or if you're not working on something that you really care about, you will burn out. And the fact that you're able to like kind of die working is a really good and like go back to doing it is a good sign that you care about the thing that you're working on. I care about nothing more in the world than than I suppose Jesus Christ, Rainmaker Technology Corporation, and then everything else. Yeah. What is like, what are you going to be super focused on over the next like six or 12 months?

24:37So this, there's going to be a more formal announcement of what's to come.

24:44I'll talk about where this is at a later date, but the biggest weather modification program in the world outside of China is going to begin this year. And Rainmaker's running that. our goal is to reach parity with the largest desalination plant in the United States in terms of water production. And how much water production is that? It's about 10 billion gallons in six months. I think that we can do far, far more than that over the course of the next year, two years. But if we reach parity with that, then I think what we'll have de-risked is in public perception, at least, the notion that cloud seeding is like an effective means at producing water at scale and that cloud seeding really is water infrastructure.

25:32That is, insofar as it's a technical endeavor, qualifying our drones in really severe conditions, getting lots and lots of hours on the system, qualifying that we can do appropriate phase detection and precipitation rate measurements from our radar. We've done some of that, but the reason why we're in Argentina right now is to continue testing and operating in glaceogenic conditions, in snowpack enhancement conditions, so that all of the system has been de-risked and also has a lot of reps under it, has a lot of cycles and hours out in the field. And then logistically, like I said, we're hiring 40, 50 people for that program.

26:13How far along are you on that like hiring spree not far enough apply at rainmaker.com slash careers to the forward operating specialist role um yeah i mean we we've got about 20 we got about 30 percent of those people hired um really yeah yeah um and we need all the rest of them onboarded by august 1st um so that we can train them appropriately and send them out to the field um but it's it is really it is really like that is far and away my biggest focus it is uh that is the foundation for becoming the biggest water utility in the western united states um if we do that then we can rinse and repeat that in every other target watershed and in 20 in the 2026 2027 uh operating season uh be the biggest water utility in the u.s and what is what is the typical like operating season for rainmaker yeah so given the state of the technology right now um what we do is we identify where there is super cool liquid water in clouds um so water that's below 32 degrees fahrenheit but hasn't yet frozen uh it turns out water doesn't instantaneously freeze into like negative 38 or celsius that is um so if there is liquid in cloud that hasn't been frozen yet but that is cold, then we'll target that, fly drones into it, disperse silver iodide.

27:32That's the material that we use right now that freezes the liquid into big snowflakes that then fall. They'll melt back into rain. If it's warm beneath the cloud, they'll stay as snow otherwise. The time of year in the Northern hemisphere where those conditions exist is October through April. So that is in the Northern hemisphere, our operating season. In the Southern hemisphere, it's the inverse. Um, right now we're doing new particle design and a bunch of new atmospheric research to figure out how to continue operating through the fall, spring, summer. Um, I think that in two years that will be sufficiently de-risked such that the entire world all the time will be, uh, will have an atmosphere that is engineerable.

28:15Yeah. Did you, so did I get it right that basically in September last year, you figure out about all these like lead times and all this terrible stuff. And by March or no, like May, maybe you're using your own tech. Well, no, we were by, we were by, uh, November. By the end of November, we had our own drones. Then April, we had our own radar. Wow. Yeah. Okay. What was the process of like getting that built and then like shipping? um you know i will give a big shout out to um you know jackson schultz jordan mcmillan uh those are the engineers that really made um a lot you know camillo uh he's another one of our engineers here clinton bain um these guys were just workhorse monsters on the engineering team getting elijah our drone platform up and running um and we went through a lot of iterations We had the V0, the V0.1, the V0.2, the V0.5, the V0.75, the V0.9, the V0.99, and then 999.

29:20What was the average time in between versions? Weeks. Less than weeks, I think. Less than weeks. Yeah, in some cases, it was probably like a week. So we were iterating pretty fast. We crashed a few. Yeah, tell me. Got any good stories? oh yeah i mean this is kind of a universal experience of people that went to pendleton but what would happen harry's gonna be upset listening to this because i think you know we ultimately did report it to the test range but you know you fly up into these severe icing conditions we didn't have an anti-icing system developed yet um we're flying into clouds with a ton of cold liquid water, wow, surprise that ice is up.

30:04So on our V1, we solved that. But what was happening then was we would seed. If we were too aggressive, then ice would accrete onto the drone or the winds would just take it away. And then, you know, if it's flying up at two, three kilometers, that thing is going to land two, three kilometers downwind. So it would be snowing, the fields would be wet it would be about 20 degrees Fahrenheit and then you don't exactly know where the drone landed you lost comms with it a little bit before it crashed and then we spread out about 100 meters apart and would just walk for a mile two three miles but not on like a road like through mud at night um and then the trucks that we took to get to where to get close to where the drone was they always got stuck in the mud we were covered in mud digging these things out our hands were numb was this the time when you were like tweeting i need a truck i'll buy it yes for any yes yes yeah yeah no we we we got we got three trucks stuck in one night and i was like we are going to perish out here who came to your rescue um we woke up some of the other guys that weren't on that operation um and they came out although a few other people offered to help so thanks to the dudes in washington that did offer to help that night but um yeah they they woke up they drove out i think it was like two or three in the morning by the time they got there uh we had done a lot of digging we probably moved a few cubic meters of mud uh we also learned dude another thing we're morons uh i was a moron for not thinking about this we like some of the trucks didn't come packed with shovels so we were digging with our hands um yeah like we did a lot of stuff wrong but now the lesson from that that uh our field our our Ford operating core has is a full build out of all of the things that you need to get a truck out of mud.