Valar Atomics’ Isaiah Taylor: Solving AI’s Energy Crisis With Nuclear ‘Gigasites’

0:00Isaiah Taylor:People thought we were totally nuts, but I will say like if you were starting a trillion dollar company and people don't think you're nuts, you're doing something wrong, right? Welcome to the Upstarts podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging tech leaders about their upstart moment. Upstarts are challengers who punch above their weight and take on the status quo to achieve a big impact and build a big business too. I'm your host, Alex Conrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. I'm excited to be joined today by Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valor Atomics. This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking that's already loved by 300 ,000 entrepreneurs.

0:36Isaiah, thanks for joining the show.

0:37Isaiah Taylor:Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited for the conversation. So I had you on because you have a Lord of the Rings name and I need to have one of those really quick, but also because... Gotta knock that out. Gotta get it out of the way. That's right. But also nuclear energy. I mean, it seems crazy. It seems like an upstart thing. And you yourself, I think, are a real upstart. You started your first company at 17 as a high school dropout. Is that right? Yeah, that's correct. Valor actually is a company I've been wanting to start since middle school. And I figured that I would need to do the Elon Musk thing where you start a bunch of other companies and then get enough capital and experience and then go do the real one.

1:10Isaiah Taylor:And that was explicitly my plan. So I taught myself to code in middle school and high school, ended up making a fair bit of money there. But I knew that I needed to start companies. So I dropped out of high school and started actually an auto repair shop. And And that actually did quite well. It taught me a lot about business. I call it like my mini MBA. Learned a ton of lessons about business, but Valor was always in my sights. This is the one that I wanted to do. So I know there was family history here. Your, I think, great-grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project. So there was nuclear energy in your roots.

1:39Was that something that you had dreamed I want to work in, I want to build a company in? Or did it kind of all just work out that way?

1:45Isaiah Taylor:So originally, it was not something that I thought I would work in. And the reason for that is I'm very much like a zero to one type person. I'm an entrepreneurial type person. And nuclear always seemed pretty figured out to me. Like it seemed like people had got it, right? I had read about all of these different nuclear reactors that have been built, over 70 different and unique types of nuclear reactors. The science was very well known, lots and lots of studies on it. And so it looked solved to me at the time. And it wasn't until I got until like early high school that I realized it's actually not solved.

2:15Isaiah Taylor:Nuclear power only makes about 7 % of energy in the world today, which is like way too small for how safe it is and how clean it is and how economical it can be. And so I was trying to figure out why that was. And I spent a long time trying to figure out really why has there not been a Ford of nuclear or a Tesla of nuclear, you know, a company that's figured out how to verticalize this mass manufacturer reactors and really make the world's energy. And that started a long journey of discovery. And I thought about joining other people's startups and eventually realized I'm just going to have to do it myself.

2:44How old were you at that point?

2:46Isaiah Taylor:That was probably when I was like 15, yeah, 14, 15, something like that. Okay. So at 14, 15, you're like, the startups out there in nuclear are not going to cut it. I need to do my own thing. Yeah. But I knew that that was not something I could do like immediately. You knew that would sound maybe a little precocious to people? Yeah. Well, I just had like a clearly no idea what I was doing. In fact, I didn't even know that venture capital was a thing. It was not a category in my brain that like people would invest money into an idea to build a company. I just didn't know that existed. And the only model that I had was like I mentioned, Elon, where, you know, he had gone had started his other companies until he had enough personal net worth that he could start SpaceX, which clearly was going to take hundreds of millions of dollars.

3:23Isaiah Taylor:And so I thought that was the only way to do it. And that's what I set out to do. Of course, on the path, I realized that you actually can go raise capital and build it even faster. And I also realized that I didn't want to spend a decade building companies that I didn't really care about just to get to the one that I did care about. And buy a social media company along the way too. It was not... Yeah, I realized this was a circuitous path that I was on and I had learned a lot. I felt like I I was ready to tackle it. And I also think that deep tech as a ecosystem has developed a ton in the last five to 10 years.

3:53Isaiah Taylor:Like probably wasn't possible when I started to actually get enough money to do something like this. But now it is. Now we have a really awesome venture ecosystem. There have been startups that have played in this area before. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I know Valor has raised around 150. Is that right? That's right. But some companies have raised even more than that. And we haven't necessarily seen them out in the world in production. is there a main reason why this has been such a hard problem? And did that give you any pause? I think it's actually been a mindset problem.

4:20Isaiah Taylor:The way that you build something really, really hard, like a very advanced, sophisticated piece of technology, something that's meant to be mass produced, you don't design it right the first time, right? Like it's impossible to design it perfectly the first time. You have to go through hardware iteration, right? You have to build something that you know is not the final thing and try it out and then build another one, tried out, built another one that's very, very iterative. And when I was doing my own exploration to figure out, okay, whose nuclear startup do I want to join? That's what I was looking for.

4:50Isaiah Taylor:I was trying to figure out who has built a reactor and turn it on. It's not going to be the final thing yet, obviously, but who has at least turned one on. And I was totally shocked to find that no nuclear startup had ever built a nuclear reactor and turned it on. That just hasn't happened yet, despite hundreds of millions of dollars. And actually there've been about a hundred nuclear startups. They've raised about$10 billion cumulatively. They've spent over a thousand years of engineering hours. When we started the company, not a single one had ever gone critical. And Valor actually became the first startup in history to go critical a couple of months ago.

5:22Isaiah Taylor:So basically, it's a philosophy difference. We just decided that hardware and hardware iteration is the most important thing. So this is not necessarily a science podcast, and we won't go deep into diagrams of how this works. But let's talk a little bit about your idea the angle that you took with Valor because we've seen companies want to work on fusion versus fission. We've seen people doing these small modular reactors that could fit on a truck. Yep. You have a very different approach with sort of the giga. Yep. Yeah. So tell us about a gigasite. Tell us about the sort of technological unlock that you see with Valor.

5:55Isaiah Taylor:Yeah. So I think the most important thing is you build a simple reactor that can be manufactured easily and everything sort of comes from that. And, and actually a simple and safe reactor are basically the two things that we set ourselves out to build. A smaller reactor is a safer reactor. There's like a fundamental geometric reason for that, actually. And also a smaller reactor is a more manufacturable reactor. It's easier to build. And so you put those together and you say, okay, the reactor is probably going to be smaller than the ones we used to build in the past. It's going to be safer. It's going to be simpler.

6:23Isaiah Taylor:You can manufacture it. And are these the ones that are on subs or sort of like, do they exist today, the smaller reactors, or is that totally new? Subs are a good example, but the, yeah, you could call the reactors in a submarine SMR, but they're really only suited for submarines. Okay. You know, they don't work very well on land. There's a bunch of reasons for that that you could go into from a scientific standpoint, but it's a similar concept in the United States. We've never had a small modular reactor. We've never turned one on. They've turned on a couple in China and in other places in the world, but not yet in the U S so it is doing something that's, that's pretty much brand new, but our approach was, okay, figure out the size of the reactor and you should actually be kind of agnostic about it.

7:00Isaiah Taylor:Like to an extent, you shouldn't really care what the power output and the size of the reactor is, because you're going to be building lots of them no matter what, right? And so the size should be driven by safety and manufacturing, right? So you want the size to be a safe size and a manufacturable size. And then when you pick how much power you want to make on a site, you basically just build as many reactors as you need to to reach that power level, right? And it should be driven by rapid manufacturing. So that's the concept of a gigasite. We don't think of our nuclear sites as somewhere where we build a fixed number of reactors and then we're done and then we walk away.

7:32Isaiah Taylor:We think of it as a sort of a canvas on which we build many, many reactors and in a continuous fashion, right? Coming off of a line, building more power, building more power, and you bring customers along with you into that, right? So data centers, advanced manufacturing, these sorts of things. So a couple of thoughts there. First off, GigaSite, is this inspired by Elon again with the Gigafactory idea? Yeah. Gigafactory is a good comp to this. Also gigawatts, right? We want to make gigawatts of power. And actually our ambition is that these should be the largest nuclear sites on earth. If we do our jobs correctly and we make reactors very cheap to build, we make it very simple to install them and they're very safe to operate.

8:10Isaiah Taylor:We should be able to have sites that go into the tens of gigawatts. The largest sites in the world today in China and Japan are about eight gigawatts each. And so we see this going into the many tens of gigawatts. And I read that the sort of last generation or sort of 50 year old nuclear sites in the US, they were producing more watts of energy than sort of what is standard today, right? Which kind of maybe increases the need for your approach in your mind or? Yeah, I think the biggest thing that's driving it today is two things, manufacturing and AI, right? So AI has this obviously massive power demand that came out of nowhere and like surprised a bunch of people, right?

8:47Isaiah Taylor:But the backdrop to that, which was already happening is that we are re-industrializing the United States. We all sort of collectively woke up and realized it's probably not a good thing that we can't make things in the U.S. anymore. And when you say we all, you mean the deep tech folks in El Segundo that are your friends or more? I think it's more broad than that, right? Like even you look around and like the United States led many industries across the board. We were the first to mass manufacture cars. We were the first to aircraft. You know, our train system was more developed before the rest of the world.

9:15Isaiah Taylor:And these were things that we built here, right? We did forgings here. We did mass steel work here in concrete. and over the last 30 years we sort of stopped investing in physical world infrastructure and we built a lot of software right and that was nice for a time and then we suddenly realized actually you need to build things in a society you have to actually build the physical things or it will fall apart because we have to build stuff but not everyone builds it builds all of it like did it occur to you or did you think look into hey maybe we use other people's smrs and my innovation is the gigasite and sort of harnessing a scale why did you have to sort of own the whole process which is technically so much more complicated the problem is that there are there are no smrs right we're the only ones who are making them so but other startups are trying they're trying yeah trying but you just they were not going to be as good they're just not going fast enough i think that people have not really taken nuclear seriously it is the cheapest way to make energy the cleanest way to make energy and the safest way to make energy so if you care about energy, you should care about scaling nuclear as much as you can.

10:17Isaiah Taylor:And that means you have to have pace, right? And pace is, you know, we call this internal to Valor, we call it the tick rate. The tick rate of the company is how quickly can we take iterations of hardware, right? You build an iteration, you test it out, you see how well it works, you learn from it, you take your next iteration. And that tick rate actually is the growth trajectory of a company. I think this is just true across deep tech, actually. The tick rate between how long it takes you to produce hardware, learn from it, produce the next generation, learn from it. That is your growth trajectory, right?

10:47Isaiah Taylor:Because a lot of times in deep tech, there's actually not a demand problem, right? I would say deep tech in general is about execution risk and tech risk and not really market risk, right? We know the demand is there. We know we need these things. And the question is, can you do it? And so really what matters to us is this pace of execution and learning from hardware. And I just could not find that pace anywhere else. So we did it ourselves. Okay. So you decide you have to do all of it yourself. What is the reaction from other startups, from scientists in the space? Do people get excited? Do they think you're nuts?

11:20Isaiah Taylor:Yeah. People thought we were totally nuts, but I will say like, if you were starting a trillion dollar company and people don't think you're nuts, you're doing something wrong, right? Like every trillion dollar company was nuts at the start. And if it's not nuts, then someone's already done it. Right. So I don't take it personally. Like, you know, if you're doing anything of that scale in magnitude, then you're going to look crazy when you start. So yeah, we had a bunch of skeptics. Some of those skeptics have come to become believers as we've executed and shown that we actually know how to build it.

11:49Was getting just off the ground the hardest moment? Or when you think about where you were in upstart, which I think of as someone really punching above their weight, proving people wrong, was it the beginning? Was it later as you kind of have tried to bring products to the market? What comes to mind?

12:04Isaiah Taylor:I mean, I think we'll always be there, right? Like we always want to be punching way above our weight. We're always going to be doing way more with way less than anybody thinks is possible. The second you stop doing that, you're declining, right? And you can't attract the best, you know, hungriest people who want to move really fast. So we should always be there. But yeah, raising capital initially was really, really hard. I'd never done it before. I'd never raised venture before solo founder. So it was really just me running around it. Which I appreciate deeply. Yeah, we can talk about that. And it's an interesting debate.

12:33Isaiah Taylor:But yeah, so that was hard. We got through it and found some amazing capital partners, which actually I'm quite grateful for in retrospect. At the time, it was frustrating. And I was like, man, I just want these people to give me the money so I can go faster and I can run and I can build these things. But actually, the filtering process of getting to people who genuinely understood what I was doing was so much better than just taking money from somebody who really didn't get it. How old are you at this point when you're first fundraising? 23, I think 23 or 24, yeah. Okay. So you're 23, 24, first time doing this.

13:05You're getting a lot of no's. What was the number one thing that maybe helped you keep, keep cool, keep going at it? And, and I'm curious, what was the moment where maybe it started to feel like it was, it was flipping a little bit and you were starting to gain traction?

13:17Isaiah Taylor:I mean, the first thing is definitely my wife. So Sophie, like, I mean, she's just a champion. This is not her first, not our first startup together. We, you know, we were married like halfway through my first company and then second company and all sorts of crazy stuff in between. What was the second company? I don't think we talked about that. Yeah. The second one after the auto shop was a software startup for auto shops, not venture backed, you know, just had a couple of folks put in money, but yeah, like the most fundamental answer is that, you know, Sophie is, you know, in the background, encouraging me every single step along the way and also challenging me.

13:53Isaiah Taylor:Like basically she has always heard me talk about this. Like I've been talking about the idea that is, is Valor forever. When I decided it was finally time to do it, you know, having somebody who's like, well, you've got to do it then. Right. Maybe not a co-founder, but almost an honorary. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine that's the kind of support or belief that maybe you would get from a co-founder. Right. But also the other thing is like, it's not optional. Like this is, this is my life's work. And if I don't do this, it's not going to happen. Like nobody else was moving at the pace necessary, which means that if Valor didn't do it, frankly, like China and Russia will be the world's nuclear source.

14:27Isaiah Taylor:That's already the case today in terms of they're building their own reactors for themselves and benefiting from that. But they're also starting to build reactors for all the other countries in the world, which is a vulnerable place to be because, you know, China and Russia basically controlling many other nations' power grids through generation is a very risky place, you know, for the United States to find itself. So I don't think of this as something that's optional, right? So when we, you know, we're halfway through that fundraising process or 80 % of the way through the fundraising process and, you know, it just feels like it's going nowhere.

14:59Isaiah Taylor:This was back in late 2023. We just don't have an option to stop. You just have to keep going because this is that important. Did it feel like once you had the funding, okay, now you know what to do or did you, was there as much challenge then to actually break ground on starting to build, you know, these test reactors? I mean, every step of the way is monumentally hard, right? Because every step of the way you're doing something that's not been done before. The United States has never had an SMR turn on and we're on track to potentially be the first. So that's just hard because it's new and it comes with all kinds of things you never thought you would need to deal with in terms of the regulatory environment and politics and supply chains you never thought you would have to poke your head into and these sorts of things.

15:45Isaiah Taylor:So every step is hard, but I think that from day one, we've known what the right North star was. And for us, the right North star was we need to split the atom. And no company has, no startup has done that yet, right? Up until November, no company had split an atom before. And, you know, I used to tell our folks at Valor that we can't call ourselves a nuclear company yet because you can't be a nuclear company if you've never split an atom before. So what are you then? Nuclear aspiring company? Yeah, we would make jokes about it, right? Like nuclear wannabe or something like that. But now we are a nuclear startup, right?

16:20Isaiah Taylor:We have split an atom. We're working on turning on our first reactor and making power. So that was our North Star. It was however we can in whatever environment, we need to actually get through the real hardware R &D that's going to lead to a product. And in that sense, it's easy. Like the strategy isn't in some sense easy because it pushes you toward simplicity. It pushes you toward off the shelf parts and abundance supply chains because it's just very, very practical and focused. So all of the little challenges are very hard. I would say the macros is a little bit easier. When I launched Upstarts Media last year, I had big ambitions and a lot to figure out.

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17:42Isaiah Taylor:I found old threads like of nuclear scientists online, message board type stuff, Reddit stuff, where people were like, these kids are going to blow something up. They have no idea what they're doing. Where are the PhDs? Like, where are the grownups? Obviously, this can be very conventional thinking, but also like these are experts who probably are very defensive of their work. They maybe set back the industry even more if it's not in a great place. Were you paying attention to that? Did you try to address concerns or sort of what was your thought about the doubters within your own, you know, expertise?

18:17Isaiah Taylor:I think our styles were more show than tell. So we didn't spend a ton of time addressing that. I will say though, like the thing that people totally missed is that we actually did have an incredibly experienced team and a bunch of young engineers as well. And I think this is like a really powerful dynamic. If you look back to, for instance, the Apollo project, the average age of an engineer on the Apollo project was 26 years old, right? So when we went to the moon, there was a bunch of 26 year olds. Now, if you actually look at the individual ages, it was more like a barbell where you had a bunch of 22 year olds and 23 year olds, and then a bunch of like 15, 60 year olds.

18:52Isaiah Taylor:And that's a really, really powerful mesh where you've got the old heads who can look around corners and know everything that's going to go wrong and keep everybody stable and grounded. And then you've got a bunch of young, hungry talent who wants to run really fast. We also took some risks in the space race that, for whatever reason, we probably would not feel as comfortable with today knowing what we know. I assume you guys don't want to take risk in the same way with a nuclear reactor, right? Yeah, I think so. The way that I would characterize it is in nuclear, in startup land, we talk about like move fast and break things, right?

19:27Isaiah Taylor:Nuclear is actually just a fundamentally less kinetic thing than, for instance, rockets, right? So like rockets just kind of want to blow up. They're like a big, you know, fuel tank that you're trying to like launch to the air, right? So those things are like predisposed to blowing up. nuclear, especially advanced nuclear, where you're in graphite moderation and triso fuel and helium cooling is a much, much less kinetic system. So you have a lot of stability out the gate. And so for us, move fast and break things means the first time we run the reactor, it's not gonna be very efficient. And we know that.