Can Fusion Power Solve the Energy Crisis? Twilio’s Co-Founder Is Betting Big

We're here with Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Inertia, and former co-founder and CEO of Twilio. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. Great to be here. You're here giving such an incredible talk about a topic that a lot of us are thinking about, energy, the future, AI. Talk to us a little bit about this company and what we're going to see as we move forward. So Inertia is commercializing the experiment that is the only experiment in the world that has ever created energy from fusion. And fusion has... ...has always been thought of as the holy grail for humanity's energy needs. And so it is a process of releasing the nuclear energy inside of the nucleus of an atom, but instead of splitting an atom like fission does, taking uranium or plutonium and splitting it, fusion is the opposite. It's taking really light atoms, usually hydrogen isotopes, and with tremendous temperature and pressure, getting them to fuse into a helium atom, and in doing so, giving off... this nuclear energy and it's amazing because it is the the ultimate form of energy in the universe it's how the sun works it is clean it is safe it is cheap it is abundant the only little problem with it has been no one's ever gotten it to work and that's not due to a lack of trying scientists have tried for 75 years to make fusion energy work hundreds of machines Machines have been built, tens of billions of dollars spent, and it wasn't until December 5th of 2022. That one of those experiments finally actually worked, and that experiment is at Lawrence Livermore National Lab about 80 miles east of where we are right now in San Francisco. And at that lab, they take the world's largest laser and they shoot it at a tiny fuel pellet about the size of a peppercorn. And if they get it just right, they compress that peppercorn-sized target and compress it so much that it starts out the size of a peppercorn, ends up the width of a human hair, creates so much temperature and pressure inside that actually the fusion happens and it releases a tremendous amount of energy. And so what Inertia is, we are a spin-out from Lawrence Livermore National Lab. I'm here to go commercialize the physics that's now been proven and repeatedly demonstrated and to go actually now bring it to the grid as commercial fusion energy. My co-founder is Dr. Annie Kreutzer, who's the lead designer of that experiment. So she's the one who after many decades, she's the one who finally got it to work, figured out all the parameters for the physics. And so she, my other co-founder, Mike Dunn, is a power plant designer. And together, we are bringing energy to the grid. We're going to have our first power plant break ground in 2029. And the goal is to have first light on that around 2035, while we're breaking ground on our second of a kind. And by the end of the 2030s, have three power plants under construction or operating here in the United States. It's just incredible to think, because as you mentioned, fusion, the idea of it, has been around for so long. But actually harnessing it, making it work, is a different story. So it must be so exciting that you finally have made that work. When it comes to opening power plants and actually making this something that people are using on a regular basis, how likely do you think that really is to start happening in the next decade where this is not just a power plant here or there, but something that people are really relying on for energy? Well, the hard thing about fusion has always been the physics has been just beyond humanity's grasp. Every time scientists have thought that they were just there, that they're going to reach the finish line, if I can only build this machine and turn it on, it's going to create all this energy. Every time scientists have tried that, it has failed because the physics has been just beyond what we've understood it to be. And so we learn a lot, of course, every time, but we've never made it work until now. And so the running joke in the world of fusion is it's always been 30 years away and it always will be, right? Well, now that the physics has been solved, the basic science, That's the big unknown, because basic science doesn't really care about, you know, your investor's exit strategy. Basic science moves at the pace it moves. That's why it's usually best left up to national labs and universities. And so we are not actually working on physics. We are working on the commercialization of the physics that's already known. And that's the big difference from where Fusion has been for the last 60 years and where we are today. And so we're going to bring power to the grid in the next decade. And our goals have three power plants up and running in the 2030s. And by 2050, we envision a world where the only form of energy that would be worth it to go build is fusion energy, and we think solar will survive as well. But every other form of energy, it will not make sense, both from a pollution and climate standpoint, but also from an economic standpoint. You would have no need for any other form of energy. So as humanity is decommissioning the power plants of the last century, these will be the only ones that will get built. Yeah, it's just incredible to think about where all of this could go and where we're looking at the next decade down the line. And you look at Inertia, and then you have Twilio. Talk to us a little bit about the business there, what we're looking at in business terms. Gotcha. Well, so my last company, Twilio. I was a software company, and so my career prior to Inertia has been in the world of software. So I built multiple companies. I was the first CTO of StubHub, the first product manager at Amazon Web Services. Then I founded and ran Twilio. I founded it in 2008, took it public in 2016, grew it to $4 billion in revenue. And so the interesting thing is my co-founders at Inertia, one of them is a leading scientist in the world. She just won the E.O. Lawrence Prize, which is the highest science prize you can get from the U.S. government Department of Energy. My other co-founder designs power plants and ran the Stanford Linear Accelerator, one of the huge labs in our world. So they are the real brains behind this. But my job is to build a company that works. If they build physics and technology that works, my job is to build a company that works. And having built a company to about 10,000 employees with a global footprint, that's one of the things that I love doing. And so I feel a tremendous amount of joy to create a company where some of the best scientists and engineers in the world can do work that is going to fundamentally change the way humanity uses energy. Yeah, I was going to say, you have such a robust business history here. Again, creating companies, selling companies, and being so involved in so many parts of technology that just keep marching forward. As you look to the future here with Inertia, with all of these companies and this kind of knowledge that you have behind you. Where do you hope all of this is going, not just with fusion energy, but really with everything as we move forward with AI and this whole tech space? What are we looking at here? Well, what I really hope is that we as a society, we can navigate the coming years and couple of decades because it will be a very tumultuous time as we navigate the changes that are coming. and those can go in a variety of directions. But I truly believe that we can navigate this to build a world where AI does a lot of the heavy lifting. that allows us to focus on more interesting endeavors, creates new jobs we can't fathom today, but it won't be without a lot of change that goes on. And so I think actually we need wisdom in our leadership to be able to do that. But having, if you look at how much conflict there is in the world over energy, it's the fundamental thing that fuels our society, energy. And so if we can unlock the ability for energy to take that off the table so it's no longer a geopolitical source of conflict, but rather an abundance on planet Earth because fusion energy is cheap. It is roughly a fifth to a tenth the cost of today's cheapest forms of energy once it gets to maturity. It is clean. It creates no pollution, no carbon. It is safe. There's no explosion risk. There's nothing that can get into the environment that's awful. And it is abundant. The only inputs to it are water and lithium, and the output is helium. It is the perfect form of energy. If we can solve this problem, you can start to make your way towards a future that I think we could all love to imagine, where energy is cheap, free, safe, and clean, we've got intelligence surrounding us in terms of AI, and we're able to continue to progress as humans. That's certainly my hope. Well, that's wonderful. We really appreciate it, Jeff Lawson. Thank you so much for talking with us today. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much.