Tag: Chaotic

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Finance Startups

Day 1996 and Criticality at Valar Atomics

I am going to be scattered and long winded so please excuse my exhaustion and joy, as I have used up all of my focus in the excitement of a truly incredible moment that represents years of work.

I watched “our” reactor go critical on a livestream with the Valar team. Yesterday midafternoon on mountain standard time (around 1:45am for me on GMT+3) in the beautiful desert of Orangeville Utah, Valar Atomics took its Ward 250 critical for the first time.

Mission Control at Valar Atomics

Moments ago, Valar Atomics took Ward 250 critical for the first time. This fulfills President Trump’s EO 14301, which called for 3 advanced reactors to go critical by July 4th.

This is our second criticality as a company, and an important step toward our goal of power by July 4.

This is a historic moment and the culmination of two years of work on the part of the Valar Atomics team. This is the most hardcore, intelligent, and driven people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with; which will be seen as we begin power ascension in the coming days.

Our mission at Valar Atomics is to make abundant energy for all mankind. The best way to make energy 10x cheaper today is to mass-scale nuclear fission. We began our mission by creating WardZero, our fully functional thermal prototype. Next, we took the NOVA core critical.

Today, we took the next step: criticality in the Ward 250 test reactor. Ward 250 is a TRISO-fueled High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) designed for simplicity and scale, and is the first nuclear reactor ever air-lifted by a C-17.

We’ve been honored to be become part of the community in Orangeville, Utah, the home of Ward 250. Many thanks to all of our government partners who made this possible: hundreds of individuals across the Trump administration, the DOE, the DoW, and the government of Utah.

The list of individuals who have spent their time and energy and talents to accomplish this feat is too long to list in one post, but I am incredibly grateful to all of them.

Isaiah Taylor of Valar Atomics

I am one of those individuals who spent their time, energy, talents and capital to accomplish this incredible feat. Investing in Valar may well be the greatest accomplishment of my life.

You see I am Valar’s very first investor. Yes I mean I wrote the very first angel investment check from my small venture fund.

I know it’s a little crazy that a weirdo like me should be investing in small modular nuclear reactors built by brilliant young Zoomers and equally brilliant old timer experienced nuclear engineers, but weird is how I invest with chaotic.capital.

Crazy but possible makes complete sense to me. So I said he’s. And we chewed glass for a few years working towards the possible, while everyone told us it couldn’t be done.

Through the magic of Twitter DMs, I met Isaiah before he had even started Valar. He was working on another startup I didn’t love but I knew immediately that I loved him as a founder.

I was so impressed with his intelligence and his capacity to learn quickly. He had that ineffable “it” quality that all founders possess in some measure. He took feedback well but had a firm backbone. He listened to one piece of advice I gave him and based on that decision alone, I told him I’d back anything he did in the future and I meant it. I’ll admit I didn’t expect it to be “I’m building a nuclear reactor” but I am true to my word.

Fast forward several years and here we are. Just a few weeks ago I was racing through the desert to see the reactor our first check helped build the day before it was encased in shielding in preparation for criticality. It will be a memory I will treasure forever.

A few months ago this hanger didn’t exist

We’ve been there for every step of this amazing journey. It was an objectively insane thing to invest in. Yet the more time I spent with Isaiah the more convinced I was that he was a generational talent. The best part of being first is the opportunity to spend lots of time with a founder before anyone else learns of their genius. I learn as much from them as they do from me. And Isaiah is a quick study.

I wrote the check and went about the long grueling process of convincing others they should invest alongside me. It wasn’t easy. We got told no a lot. Failure lurked around every corner. People ranged from outright hostility to tempered skepticism. There were moments when defeat felt very close.

There were hard times. A lot of glass chewing. I never wavered in my belief that Isaiah would get it done. Alex and I were blessed with the opportunity to invest more and gladly wired in additional capital when others couldn’t see as far as we did. This may well be a career defining investment for me. I intend to keep putting in whatever Isaiah will allow us to invest.

Now three years into this journey, it’s clear to everyone that Isaiah is the talent I always knew him to be. I may have been first but I won’t be the last. This is the kind of company investors dream of finding early and Isaiah is a leader I am proud to follow. Valar is racing towards the kind of future I want to build for the next generation. Abundant cheap fuel can power a better cleaner world for all of us.

And to everyone who said it couldn’t be done, or that it was too early or too risky to invest in something as crazy as nuclear, please let me invite you to join us now. There is much more to be done. We will need all the talent and capital we can get to win this bright future for America and for humanity.

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1994 and Wondering if 2000 Days Should Be The End? Or A New Beginning

I am getting closer and closer to a big milestone on here. Day 2000! I’ve been writing for two thousand days in a row and hitting publish. Five years and five months (almost six at 5.7 months) or 285 weeks of daily journaling in public.

I began in the height of the pandemic, and one can hardly recall just how bizarre those years were now. The great weirdening which began long before the pandemic arrived for almost everyone sometime in those long years.

Static and yet unstable. A long horizon of the long now, keeping us in semi-stasis as the institutional bulwarks cracked, and then crumbled, and then began accelerating into change. Everyone is holding on tight and pretending like it’s not a white knuckle era.

We are over the vibe shift, the Vibecession, and another vibe change after that and who knows what is coming next. I feel the same sense of being unmoored as I did when I started.

This despite having built a stable and thriving family and investing career. The biggest problems I had when I started (children, visas, family abroad) remains the same problems I have now. The temptation to simply change how we live is ever present. We escaped from some of flatland but more can be done to build communities and nations that are capable of thriving in the ceaseless change.

I still feel like I don’t know what’s coming, even as the future I sensed has come into being at an alarming right. But the perpetual not knowing can drain hope and energy if you are not careful to replenish. It’s exhausting physically too. The energy to understand what’s coming gets harder day by day and so we must get stronger ourselves.

I’ve probably put over a thousand hours of writing into this (maybe closer to 1500 as it runs from 20-45 minutes of time on any given day) so I’m a better writer but I don’t know if I’ve become a more palatable or appealing one. I don’t care too much as this is for me more than it is for any audience.

Most humans seem to prefer smoothed algorithmic writing over hand crafted artisanal human writing. Which is fine by me, as I don’t necessarily want to change my personal spaces to pander to anyone.

I was on a podcast recently where I reiterated my hope for being a node in the future. I want us to hope for the best by seeing clearly about the worst. That focus on solving problems is replenishing for the soul.

I’ll remain a little under the radar as a specialty node broadcasting to my oddballs. I’ll feel better about broadcasting know that is the long. The longevity posting, the nuclear posting, the odd travels and strange people posting will continue. I will try to broadcast on the pirate wires of the human web.

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Travel

Day 1988 and European Interstate Highway System When?

I had a long travel day. I didn’t expect it to be long as the drive on Google Maps estimated it to be around 5 hours or so. That’s barely a third of my waking hours so I can easily shove that into an early morning and get a workday in right?

Alas I didn’t take into account that in America that’s four to five hundred miles of well maintained interstate travel. Easy peasy especially with a Starlink for rolling calls.

But in Europe it’s a whole other beast requiring concentration, quick corrections and constant change. Roads are a mishmash of local jurisdictions, variable paving quality and constant switches in speed limits and limited straightaways.

Also a lot depends on which country is in the EU versus Schengen zone (so many border crossings) versus just a NATO ally but neither EU nor Schengen.

Then finally you must factor in how corrupt its various elites happen to be at any given time versus when they are in a debt restructuring and revitalization phase. A corrupted ally might have much worse roads than a debt restructured southern EU member.

I did a cruising tour of coastal roads in the Mediterranean last summer from Croatia through Albania to Greece and then another run from Tirana to Istanbul so I’m not a total novice to grand tours.

But today felt exhausting as more need kept coming in and then my rolling calls got interrupted by my “hold on lemme get through this border crossing” as rather expectedly borders were on a bit of a high alert.

Thankfully I’ve made it to my destination just as the markets wrap in American after having stopped for a dinner I’d hoped would wrap quickly but turned into a leisurely discussion of the various news items of the day between Dutch, British, Swedish, Albanian, Slovenian and Greek tourists. They all seem to enjoy a long dinner while I just wanted to get my butt into bed so I could do some actual work and also write my post. So my duty is done. European driving in a nice Audi is harder than American driving in a base model Subaru. Fancy that.

Maybe Brussels should consider an interstate highway system for the European Union if they are serious about shouldering more of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization responsibilities. Eisenhower did a good thing making America’s system so free hero status to however can manage it on the continent.

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Finance Politics Startups

Day 1983 and Socialism is Bad

There is a lot of chatter as to the eventual ownership makeup of the frontier artificial intelligence labs and their economic surplus. One question that came up this weekend is whether equity in the companies should be owned in some portion at the nation state level. I am opposed to this for a host of reasons that I’ll try to get down in whatever garbled form.

I do not own a stake in any of the frontier labs other than owning ETFs that own Magnificent 7 exposure who own portions of the labs. I do invest in compute, nuclear energy and cryptography. I believe AI will change a lot about how we do business, my revealed preferences show I live remotely in Montana, I have a tendency toward emergency planning and Plan B scenarios. As a disclosure of my priors.

There are lots of competing interests in this and the self interests from the labs does no any favors. Especially after months, nay years, of overwhelmingly hyperbole about changing labor dynamics, the potential for mass layoffs due to automation as well as obfuscation and excuses about the reason for layoffs in existing companies. And that’s before we get the singularity which is a religious orientation toward making super intelligence that is Godlike in its framing.

I hate this entire conversation on nationalization and socialism. Part of it is that state actors desiring ownership of private companies reeks of the “you didn’t build that” malapropisms from Barack Obama’s presidency in which he attempted to articulate that America’s enormous wealth is built on generational compacts that no one individual could ever own outright. It triggers socialists and capitalists both.

We all contributed in our own ways to the shared infrastructure, institutions, education, cultural norms and the pluralism embedded in our governance systems that enabled the American Dream.

Unless you are a deep partisan, you understand Obama was trying to articulate that none of us made America alone. But the framing from liberals (and populists of all stripes) automatically make this conversation concerning.

Economics is complicated, central planning has a hell of a body count and your average American can only gesture towards the invisible hand and the benefits of self interested commerce. It’s easy to sell us bad policy from envy and fear.

So I must ask why are we acting like we have suddenly won a national level economic boom with clear winners whose spoils must be distributed by the nation state before we’ve even managed to understand how it will be used, at what level an AI model is a commodity and where the benefits will accrue?

Self interested pluralism with a system of checks and balances at the national federal level coupled with states exercising their own interests has been the bedrock of our national success. Changing this has not gone well for us as a nation nor do we have better examples in other nations.

Sure America has had a few twists and turns. The last time we made an attempt at a New Deal post Great Depression worked only thanks to a global world war industrial mobilization in which we won the war and all our other competitors were decimated on bombed our continents across massive geographical boundaries.

And that boom has been largely spent by the children of the generation that fought this war and their children are looking at a pretty significant bill. So why do labs suddenly want to “compensate” Americans and our collective contributions to the models?

And why are politicians taking this bait when we have so little insight into whether we should funnel cash into them in order to own them in trust for some nebulous future?

I have a few reasons in no particular order that I put on Twitter as to why I am opposed to this format of American state equity being the means through which we compensate the people who theoretically trained these models with our output on the wider open web and its content.

1) We don’t know who the winners will be or where the benefits will diffuse (as in post liquidity the current winners might not be the eventual winners) so compensation for model training when the eventual benefits disperse elsewhere isn’t ideal. Why aren’t taxes at state & federal level aren’t adequate enough here should be answered before we make moves

2) Existing IP law doesn’t account well for culture which is a shared co-creative process (i recommend Susan Scafidi of fashion law institute “who owns culture” ) so compensation is already not easy to track back

3) A state entity w the monopoly on violence can do a lot of damage on the margin by not fully understanding who created what and where it is applied especially in non deterministic systems

4) Much of what the models were trained on was open source licensing including the company where my own family made money Stack Overflow. We got paid sure, but none of this would exist without the effort of its users who contributed on those open license terms. But clearly the final value of the content created & company’s value itself were harvested much further down the line in enterprise contracts for coding models. It was not in the management of an open source license community product created by users or managed by engineers, so who should have been paid? The users who wanted their content to be open sourced? The volunteer moderators? The full time employees? The shareholders of the company, the buyer of the company or the users of that data set at Claude or Cursor or OpenAI? Or is it Americans that never even heard of SO? Where does value accrue over time versus point in time? It’s not an easy question to answer is it?

Categories
Startups Travel

Day 1974 and I Am Out

I have really had a busy spring. I was across the country from Utah to Washington DC and back to Montana with an outing to San Diego. Montana did not get much of a winter which is always a disappointment.

I never expected to spend so much time on policy issues. It has unexpectedly taken over a a real portion of my time.

The nature of my portfolio investments has slowly taken me across every issue from banking’s relationship to crypto to the nuclear renaissance to artificial intelligence. American needs a lot from its younger generations and we need to support them.

I feel an obligation to bring my full self to the issues as it gets to the heart of what could change the nature of assumptions of costs and access in meaningful ways.

I do however need a break from all of this as I am quite tired from all the back and forth. I need to take a little break and get some off grid time on another continent. I need to get some perspective before celebrating America’s 250th. There is a lot happening.

So if all I wrote about is makeup and skincare and some science fiction for a couple weeks I hope no one minds. I need a break. I need some Netflix even.

Categories
Startups Travel

Day 1969 and A Very Nice Day

I am in the middle of the Utah desert returning from a site visit to Valar Atomics. If you have the means to tour a nuclear facility I highly recommend it. It is so choice. That’s Ferris Bueller for the Zoomers.

I’ll use another choice line from the John Hughes classic to illustrate how gratifying it has been to drive a remote Utah town for a chance to see our investment in action.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

We hadn’t planned to drive down to the Ward 250 facility after Abundance Institute’s Operation Gigawatt. Life is busy, it’s a holiday weekend, I’m flying out to part unknown from Montana in two days.

But what’s another three hours on the open road when there is one of America’s sustainable energy labs and a tour from your favorite engineers on offer? Yes they are all working this weekend. They have a deadline for July 4th that’s pretty important. It’s crazy that this wasn’t in my itinerary in the first place if I’m honest. What a way to kickstart the summer.

Getting up close to “our” reactor is a privilege I never conceived of experiencing. I’ve been lucky enough to invest in some very cool things over the years, but to actually place a bet on a serious industrial effort and have my choice end up at the forefront of a major national push for nuclear energy? Not a thing I saw coming.

So in the hustle of the moment, I am glad to slow down and admire that it is actually possible to do things. That’s a very nice day to have. Yes that’s a Day 69 joke.

I’ll treasure this moment forever. Even if we fail, at least we tried. And who wouldn’t want to put yourself on the line and try when it’s something that matters this much? So we speed up to slow down and see. Because it’s true if you don’t you might just miss it. So yeah it was a nice day.

Utah desert near sunset.
Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1967 and Up In The Air Boss Don’t Care

Will you spare a prayer for the pitiable management class as they fly back and forth on their jets from capital to capital in the hopes of securing any kind of policy that remains in place long enough to do planning? No, I didn’t imagine you would. But maybe you should.

I’m not in anyone’s C-suite and I’d be surprised if I ever am. Being the CEO of even a small privately held company isn’t a great deal of fun. The burden of a fiduciary duty can clash with your instincts as a human.

Working with founders who have these obligations is largely an exercise in providing psychological safety so they can see the truth their hearts don’t want their eyes to see.

But I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t had to shoulder the burden of stewarding resources responsibly and profitably to be sympathetic. People who leverage collective resources to build something that is more than the sum of its parts may only think only of their part.

Still I’d hope anyone who is a parent has experienced the basics of it. Someone relies on you for their needs. Imagine it’s not just your immediate family but workers, investors and customers all demanding that their needs be met.

This isn’t meant to be mere apologetics aside, I feel bad for the technology executives who were told to show up in Washington D.C today for a last minute executive order from the president on artificial intelligence. Only hours before they were told actually it’s off sorry. The ones who could make it had already made the trip for a ceremony in which they were meant to smile and nod in obeisance to Leviathan as personified in America’s executive branch.

Either the president didn’t like how the executive order had turned out (something about staying in the lead ahead of China) or not enough of the fanciest executives could show up.

After flying to China last week to bow and nod, they needed to be whisked off back to another capital to bow and nod some more. And then oops sorry it’s canceled. As if they didn’t have other places to be. Heck one of the places they were meant to be was in Utah for a summit on providing the energy necessary to power this next step in America’s technological ambitions.

Instead it’s just all pissing and moaning and horrors from the peanut gallery about how much our bosses don’t care about us. As if the bosses didn’t report to some other big boss. They report to their board. The board reports to their shareholders.

And all of us in the shareholder class (which is most older Americans, a decent chunk of middle aged ones and anyone with social security) are all waiting on the approval of the state, who may or may not give any of us the clarity necessary to know what comes next. Better hold on tight and keep gassed up. Shame for most of us it’s not a jet. Still I’m happy with my Subaru.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1961 and The Thucydides Trap and Accelerating Chaos

Not so long ago (*gulp* five years or so) as I first began investing out of our chaotic.capital vehicle, I would discuss our thesis in terms like thriving in a world of increasingly accelerating complexity. That trajectory inevitably leads to chaos.

How does one make money and start fast growing businesses in a world where entropy must be fought at every turn and the rules are constantly changing?

There are a million metaphors and I’m sure all have been used by now. One must surf the chaos or risk being caught under wave after wave of punishing swells.

Next thing I know the world is talking about chaos constantly. And it’s always accelerating.

Keir Starmer in chaos! The Philippines in chaos! Even Xi Jipeng is hinting at the dangers of accelerating into clashes and where they might lead.

The implication? Chaos! China’s leader went so far as to invoke my beloved Thucydides, warning of the trap that arises between two powers. Yes, Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap in the recent summit with Trump.

The term was popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison in the early 2010s, drawing on the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. His argument: when a rising power challenges an established one, conflict inevitably follows.

– Bloomberg – May 14 2006 (gift link)

Hulton Archives/Getty Images Thucydides

Americans may not like the presumptive idea of a rising power challenging our existing power, but these days it’s hard not to be skeptical of American power and its limits.

After all, the acceleration of chaos globally is partially in response to our inability to manage the complexity of our systems. We seem unable to plan ahead. But if we’d like to find a win-win scenario that doesn’t end in a Peloponnesian War we might wish to find a way to learn to live with the chaos lest the trap close its mouth on all of us.

Categories
Media Politics Startups

Day 1941 and Uneven Off The Bars

It’s been such a crazy week. I don’t “feel the AGI” only because I am mired in the give and take of living in America where we still have businesses to run and a lot of regular people committed to actual civics. Progress is fast but implementation is slow.

And then above our daily lives, we are actively in the middle of a kinetic war that our population is only dimly watching.

The information environment being irradiated by foreign propoganda. I am astonished to read regular blatant campaigns that no one questions. I get ads for Chinese phone companies on Twitter. Phones that are not legal to sale in America.

It doesn’t even need to be about any of the active campaigns in the news that a New York Times reader would pay attention to. Below the fold, regional political issues go uncovered. The impolite “nobody reads the Africa pages” is an indelicate joke for readers of international newspapers. Americans often don’t even get them delivered with their printings.

As an example. What does an American understand about Mali anyway? I’ve got like a half dozen friends who care about French colonialism (and the sins of Nicholas Sarkozy) so it’s a niche Francophone thing. The stuff you maybe picked up from those who lived abroad.

So no real tangible value there that isn’t social, but lots of Americans used to study with French families so you might be dimly exposed. Or in the past we had a class of people who were and had state department of think tank jobs.

You’d be shocked at how much we’ve cut back on education in the liberal arts. Just as America has her very own Sicilian expedition, we stop bothering to teach Thucydides. I’m in my Allen Bloom season but without any book tour.

I have been trying to keep my cool as a week of progress is just so fast in very real world situations. I am relishing the success of Valar Atomics as they continue own a fast pace of progress. We are going to need a lot more power to meet needs in America. I want to meet them cleanly so I am honestly wishing for a boom in nuclear beyond personal interest.

All the pissing and moaning about the ethics of artificial intelligence misses the point that we need to supply a lot more power for both consumer and defense needs before disaster could strike. So we might as well suit up. We have to manage what might happen with our physical reality. Like physics bro.

So this week was wild to watch the labs stand off with fast releases. It’s very herky jerky the progress from OpenAI but they had a big week. The enthusiasm around Codex is very real even as no one entirely trusts the even management. Still it was fun to have two new models from OpenAI in a week. It’s funny how running a big startup is still largely product management. And they struggle with it.

Which sounds cute I realize. That I am charmed by progress in energy and algorithms while we test being under a kind of network attack with a very naive and easily swayed online population.

I like to think Americans are independent but we are not doing as much as we could to enable good governance. Americans have a say and plenty understand “right to compute” just as they did the “right to repair” but some in government are actual hard power types. Did no one do any of the reading? I thought everyone was all about the Powerbroker for like a decade.

But we seem to have some real second order effect issues being missed entirely by the labs. Like maybe they are bad at politics? I know it’s a cheap shot but I spend so much of my private time as a citizen doing mop up after companies whose management is under stress.

And being transactional with people isn’t very effective for revealed preferences. You can’t buy people and Americans don’t like the implication it sends about being treated like you can.

Categories
Community Preparedness

Day 1940 and Spring Runoff Season

I joked to my husband that he better get back before nightfall. He had been in the capital Helena for our work on the digital innovation task force. Sunset was at 8:20 or so. The days are getting longer.

The day’s work went at a good clip as the weather coming in was on all minds. We were in for another large late spring snowstorm.

In our corner of the valley we got maybe a couple of wet inches but even up the canyons it was more than a foot.

It kept snowing all night through early morning. It was also quite cold. We went from lashing dry wind and the first fire of the season to snow in no time. Our AQI was poor from the fire south down range of the valley. Hopefully this helped.

It was snowing when I woke but by the time I showered and finished a cleaning round, it was already shockingly bright. Bright blue clear skies and full sun acted like a solar snowblower.

The clouds cleared so quickly and the reflection of the high altitude sun glinting off the white melting snow had me applying sunscreen twice.

We had warm days recently so the spring melt of April is already rising. Adding to snow today was looking at a picture of the challenges of our summer ahead.

Our snow pack is low, We had a rush of snow after warming which will push growth. But can it sustain itself the dryness? The fear is dried out forests and grasses like tinder by August. I hope by being away we can stay a step ahead. The patterns of the Rockies are becoming familiar to all of us.