E5: Fission Founders, Part 2: Designing Advanced Nuclear Reactor Startups

Let's dive into the world of advanced nuclear startups—where founders are playing entrepreneurship on hard-mode, and navigating how to build new reactor designs, sell to new markets, and forge new regulatory pathways. This episode is the second focused on nuclear fission startup founders—while last week Packy and Julia spoke with entrepreneurs who laser-focused on the problem of manufacturing ready-made designs at scale, this new crop of founders featured are tackling a seemingly even more difficult task of creating new forms of nuclear reactors from scratch. As a16z American Dynamism partner Katherine Boyle says, "to build a successful energy startup, you have to excel at math, deep technology, storytelling, recruiting, and regulatory." Tune in as Packy and Julia spotlight five founders taking radically different paths to bringing more nuclear online—from radioisotopes on the literal moon to the novel production of hydrocarbons. Thank you to this episode’s guests: Katherine Boyle, Albert Wenger, Jake DeWitte, Isaiah Taylor, Matt Loszak, Tyler Bernstein, Jordan Bramble, Josh Wolfe, and David Ulevitch. SPONSORS: RIPPLING SPEND | WEIGHTS AND BIASES | GIVEWELL | ANROK Imagine total control over your company's spending with Rippling Spend, the all-in-one platform for expense reports, corporate cards, and bill pay. Visit for a free demo and one month free trial. Advanced training for building production-ready RAG applications. Learn from experts to overcome LLM challenges, evaluate systematically, and integrate advanced features. Includes free Cohere credits. Visit to start the RAG++ course today. GiveWell spends 50,000 hours every year doing deep-dives into different charitable programs to try to find the ways to do the most good for your dollar. Visit to find out more or make a donation. Select PODCAST and enter Econ 102 at checkout to make sure they know you heard about them from us. Anrok is the enterprise-grade solution that automates sales tax compliance worldwide. Visit to claim your free nexus study and take control of your SaaS tax strategy. – A huge thank you to our presenting sponsors for Season 1: Range Fund Holdings: Visit or contact your financial advisor to learn more about the Range Nuclear Renaissance ETF and start investing in the future of energy. Secureframe: Get 10% off your first year of Secureframe: Pilot.com: Get 20% off your accounting bill for the first 6 months, go to Clean Air Task Force For the full list of resources referenced in this show:

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E5: Fission Founders, Part 2: Designing Advanced Nuclear Reactor Startups is an episode from Not Boring by Packy McCormick.

This episode is 124:53 long.

This episode was published on Nov 17, 2023.

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