David Kirtley: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m sure you’ve had a bunch of people probably still tell you that this is a pipe dream, that this is impossible. Are there days that you and the team think that this is indeed impossible, then you wake up the next day and you’re like, “All right, we’re going to do it anyway.” I mean, that’s the thought process. That’s the mentality. We’re going to do it anyway, let’s go do it. The world needs it. There’s no physics reason this can’t be done. Now it’s a question of how fast can you build it? And can you engineer it to be as efficient as it needs to be? And those are… engineering and manufacturing are ridiculously hard challenges. So do not short sell that. But that’s the goal, and that’s what we get up every day thinking about. This is something I was actually just thinking about and talking with some of my team in the last few days. We certainly have people that say like, “No, this can never be done,” and we had that before. We had that at the very beginning of, “I want to go merge these plasmas together,” and folks said, “Nope, that can never happen,” and we went off and did it. And, “You can’t compress an FRC because it’s unstable.” In fact, I actually still hear that. “FRCs are unstable.” And I say, “Yes, I know. Now let me introduce you to S* over E, and 20 years of studies on what we know about that and how we can combat that.” And so we’ve been able to show, through lots of skepticism, that we can still build and iterate. And there are things I don’t know. Let’s just be totally honest. As we’re going to go build these things, we’re going to discover new hard problems. If we’re not doing our job, if we’re not discovering new hard problems, we probably didn’t push hard enough. We probably didn’t push fast enough. And I think that’s really critical: that we build the team and we do the hiring to make sure that everybody is doing their problem. Now that doesn’t mean it’s not a hard challenge, and to keep folks motivated. Helion now is over 500 people, but when we built Trenta, we were 50 people. Okay.…

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