Patrick OShaughnessy@patrick_oshag
.@ScottNolan started his career as employee 30 at SpaceX. He left to join Founders Fund after Peter Thiel recruited him personally in 2011, and spent the next 12 years backing companies like SpaceX, Anduril, Radiant, and Crusoe Energy.
The through line across all of it, and the worldview Thiel built Founders Fund around, was finding important problems that incumbents have no incentive to solve. Scott's version of that thesis was physical-world companies in a decade when venture capital had largely decided not to fund them.
Before starting @generalmatter, Scott met nearly every advanced reactor company in America. They all were constrained by the same problem - no one was enriching uranium domestically at scale. He spent 2023 looking to invest in a company solving it and found none.
The US once led the world in enrichment. But it let its enrichment plants calcify and shut down its last domestically owned facility in 2013. Today Russia supplies about 25% of the enriched uranium that fuels 20% of the country's electricity. Congress has already passed a ban on those imports that takes full effect in 2028.
So Scott started General Matter, the first private American uranium enrichment company, built on DOE land in Kentucky where the country's last enrichment plant once operated. In January, the DOE awarded it a $900 million contract.
Thiel sits on almost no boards, yet he joined General Matter's.
Enjoy this great conversation with Scott Nolan.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:00 Finding Important Problems
6:18 Lessons from Peter Thiel
9:32 Spotting Underappreciated Companies
21:46 The Danger of Falling in Love with Ideas
25:12 The Nuclear Energy Bottleneck
30:44 Why America Needs to Vertically Integrate
37:55 AI, Data Centers, and the Energy Squeeze
45:41 Advanced Nuclear Reactors
49:27 The Bring Your Own Energy (BYOE) Concept
53:45 Navigating America's Nuclear Fuel Cliffs
1:15:32 The Trade-offs Between Investing and Operating
1:18:00 Kindest Thing
