The company building underwater drones for $50,000

1. Key Themes

Frontiers Open When Persistent Presence Becomes Cheap

Will O'Brien lays out a general framework for how frontiers get developed: expedition for a single high-value reason, then persistent settlement once access costs collapse. He maps this onto the American West (railroads), space (reusable launch), and now the ocean (persistent robotic systems). The thesis is that Ulysses is to maritime what SpaceX is to orbit.

O'Brien: "You have this exploratory period where people go there and go back, and they typically go there and go back for some kind of very high-value reason where the cost of going there... is justified because you're recovering fur... or you're getting pelts." [00:17:09] He continues: "Space, you get reusable launch. Maritime, it's like, okay, if you could actually go and have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things I think that you can do." [00:17:41] John Collison framed it as: "just like SpaceX, if you lower the cost to orbit, then there's other things you can do... similarly, you believe that you can unlock new technologies if you lower the cost of doing things in the ocean?" [00:16:44]

One General-Purpose Platform, Many Markets (Modularity as Strategy)

Ulysses started with seagrass restoration but deliberately built a "LEGO block" modular vehicle so the same IP serves conservation, Navy mine countermeasures, offshore energy, and cable security. Early architecture decisions turned later market expansion into an operations problem rather than an R&D problem.

O'Brien: "Our underwater vehicle Mako was made of these kind of LEGO building blocks... if you want to add, let's say, an extra 150 nautical miles of endurance and range, you just add extra battery packs... Some people want sonar... so we have a sonar front module." [00:09:56] On the payoff: "Because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, it was very easy for us to adapt." [00:09:56] And: "There's not any new net-new R&D we have to do to serve new contracts in that. We've already built the underlying IP. It's just like, do you have enough operators that can go in the field and operate it?" [00:13:03]

Two-Orders-of-Magnitude Cost Collapse Replaces Ship-Based Ocean Work

The incumbent model is a chartered ship at "a few hundred thousand dollars a day," with crews, shifts, managers, cooks, and doctors. Ulysses replaces this with an autonomous surface vehicle (Leviathan) that carries and deploys autonomous underwater vehicles (Mako), controlled over Starlink.

O'Brien: "Most important work today is a few hundred thousand dollars for a ship per day to go out and do something... you end up with this massive crew... If you can do that autonomously, you don't have any of the labor cost. You control over Starlink." [00:43:49] On unit pricing: "We can sell them for as cheap as $50,000. For contrast, the most common autonomous underwater vehicle that the US Navy is buying today is somewhere in the order of maybe $5 million." [00:38:50] Collison summarized: "You're targeting a two orders of magnitude cost improvement." Autonomy also removes human constraints: "Can you work in worse sea conditions...?" "Yeah, exactly... You can go fast with water, like when people on board, you can't get seasick." [00:45:06]

Vertical Integration Driven by Supply Chain Scale Mismatch

Maritime supply chains are built for hundreds of units, not millions. Ulysses is bringing sonar, inertial navigation, and more in-house, and is designing against drone, EV, and consumer electronics supply chains. Chris Sacca frames this as a "religion that came out of SpaceX and Tesla."

O'Brien: "There's about 20 million aerial drones built every year, there's maybe 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones. For us to really, fully manifest our vision, we need to be building millions of underwater drones." [00:24:44] On sourcing: "We try to build as much on top of electronic vehicle supply chains, drone supply chains, where we can't... consumer electronics supply chains, where things are made in the order of millions and not maritime supply chains." [00:24:51] On a specific component: "They make like 100 to 200 per annum... we're hoping to make a few hundred vehicles next year. Maybe 1,000... we can't build on top of that." [00:25:50] Also: "My co-founder is literally all he works on is manufacturing... Anduril's the same." [00:27:38]

Demand Exceeds Supply: The Constraint Is Manufacturing, Not Sales

Ulysses is turning away contracts and planning a very large underwater-drone factory.

O'Brien: "We will open a facility next year that could be one of the largest by number of units underwater drone factories in the world... Right now our main problem is building things. We are saying no to contracts, we have more demand than we can supply." [00:25:20]

Hardware Engineering Constraints Underwater: Comms and Edge Compute

Underwater, comms bandwidth is dial-up grade, so Ulysses compensated with unusually heavy onboard compute and a surface relay.

O'Brien: "You would do like 10 KB per second over like 5 km... acoustically. Ping, like a dial-up modem." [00:29:02] The response: "We have around a hundred times more onboard compute than any other autonomous underwater vehicle. We run a full Nvidia 5090 onboard with an Intel CPU." [00:29:52] Starlink on the surface craft is "a huge enabling technology for us" [00:29:52], and the surface vehicle wirelessly charges the underwater vehicle and provides live diagnostics.

Government Buyers Are Slow but Sticky, and Venture Capital Can Bridge the Gap

Collison pressed on the "bad buyer" risk of long procurement cycles. O'Brien argued that once a contract is won it is very hard to dislodge, and Sacca added that the DoD is a surprisingly good, sober customer.

O'Brien: "Once you win those contracts, you're very sticky... They don't want to wait 2 years to put someone else in against you." [00:40:28] Sacca: "Once these companies actually get to the contracting phase, they're very reliable and very bankable... one of the most sober and consistent customers for the work we do is the Department of Defense... when you see the Department of Defense or the Navy coming inbound to a startup, that's a new muscle that they didn't used to have." [00:42:48] And on the cost wedge: "You solve a problem for us at 1/100 of the cost we pay today." [00:42:48]

The Rise of Faith-Inflected, "Make Something the World Needs" Hard-Tech Founders

O'Brien describes a cultural shift from the software-era "make something people want" to hardware founders motivated by something spiritual, many of them observant Christians, and speculates on COVID-era reasons.

O'Brien: "No disrespect to Y Combinator, but there's the make something people want moniker, and I think this group is way more like, make something the world needs." [00:34:47] On faith: "All of my friends who are typically Christian are also building companies in the real world... guys who believe in God and believe in heaven and believe 'I need to live a good life or else I don't go to heaven.' And then they build these companies that make it rain, that do autonomous cargo, that do ocean robots." [00:37:16]

Persistent Maritime Defense and Critical Chokepoints

Beyond mines, the vision is permanent, always-on monitoring of critical waterways and subsea cables, since manual monitoring is too expensive.

O'Brien: "We are creating permanent settlements there... a persistent defense network around all critical waterways. A very critical waterway is off the west coast of Ireland. All of the cables that run from the US into Europe pretty much cross into Ireland... All of these areas should just be persistently monitored 24/7. But it's much too expensive to do that manually." [00:46:23] Both O'Brien and Sacca agreed cable attacks are a "totally asymmetric attack." [00:46:04]

2. Contrarian Perspectives

Verticalize Everything: Once Venture Heresy, Now the Winning Playbook

Sacca points out that this approach would have gotten a founder "shown to the parking lot" 6 to 12 years ago. The pitch of building in the US, avoiding Shenzhen and Foxconn, and making components from scratch is now the thing he and Lowercarbon back.

Sacca: "If you had come to a venture capitalist 10, 12 years ago... and said, 'Hey, we are going to verticalize manufacturing. We are actually going to build things in the US. We are not going to outsource them to Foxconn or Shenzhen... we will literally make them from scratch so that we control everything, the entire vertical stack of our device.' That would get you shown to the parking lot." [00:21:40] O'Brien confirms the iterative path: "The first vehicle was maybe 80% pieces off the shelf and we're on generation five now and... over the course of the next year we're going to bring a lot of it in-house." [00:21:22]

Neglected Seagrass Beats Celebrated Coral

The environmental community's attention goes to coral, but O'Brien argues seagrass is the real leverage point: "Coral gets a lot of the funding and seagrass is really the unsung hero of the ocean. It covers 2% of the seafloor, but holds 20% of the ocean's carbon." [00:11:52] He adds that "about 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on seagrasses as a habitat." [00:12:25] Restoration lags loss by two to three orders of magnitude: "The rate at which we restore these ecosystems is 100 to 1,000 times less than the rate we lose them." [00:09:04]

The Binding Constraint on Environmental Restoration Is "Green Tape," Not Technology

Counter to the assumption that tech and funding are the bottlenecks, O'Brien says permitting is the biggest barrier, even blocking what could be the world's largest seagrass restoration project.

O'Brien: "I think this is one of the saddest things about the environmental movement. You have this concept of green tape, right? Like red tape and green tape... that is the single biggest barrier. For example, there is a certain very endangered location of seagrasses in Australia that we would love to do a project... it would be probably the biggest seagrass restoration project in the world... but kind of banging your head off the wall." [00:18:28]

Technology Is Absorbing the Smartest Talent From Government, So Private Companies Will Own "Public" Domains

O'Brien argues that public-sector technology domains are the most interesting precisely because talent has migrated out of government. He projects a private "navy."

O'Brien: "If the smartest person in 1960 was probably going working in government and now they're going working in San Francisco, ergo, an increasing share of the things that were previously the reserve of government are now going to be the reserve of private companies. So there is a future where Ulysses is the largest navy in the world." [00:42:14]

Defense Tech Is Not About the Warhead

Most defense-tech narratives center on lethality. O'Brien dismisses the explosive part as trivial and frames the platform as the hard, valuable problem: "A lot of the folks in the defense sector are thinking, 'How do we make things go boom?' Frankly, that's not an interesting technical problem for us. Any numbnuts can put C-4 on a vehicle and make it go boom. The very difficult, interesting technical question is how do you build a general-purpose underwater robotic platform. That's the thing that turns it from a $3 trillion economy into a $10 trillion-plus place for commerce." [00:45:37]

3. Companies Identified

Ulysses

Co-founded by Will O'Brien; builds autonomous surface vehicles (Leviathan) and modular underwater vehicles (Mako) for seagrass restoration, Navy mine countermeasures, offshore energy inspection, and cable monitoring. Mentioned as the subject of the episode, with a $50,000 base vehicle versus roughly $5 million for the Navy's incumbent AUV. Lowercarbon Capital led the pre-seed. O'Brien: "We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans." [00:00:00] Sacca: "I can say with confidence that you've had from the beginning the vision of how do we build a universal thing, make it extensible to all of these applications." [00:14:32]

Guinness (Diageo)

Irish stout maker. O'Brien holds it up as Ireland's most innovative company: an in-house R&D team from the 1890s, the origin of the Student's t-test, Project ACORN's widget, and category-leading marketing. O'Brien: "They were starting an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s... a research and development team where you would just hire extremely smart people and just say, come in here and find a problem to work on." [00:00:38] On the widget: "Did you know it was voted above the internet in the 1990s top 100 inventions of the 20th century." [00:03:06] On marketing: "They've won more Cannes Lions advertising awards than nearly any other company." [00:03:48] On quality: "The seven Cs of Guinness quality standards... Crafted presentation, consistent freshness, counter visibility, correct gas, correct temperature, clean lines, clean glassware." [00:04:16]

Stripe

Payments company co-founded by John Collison, and publisher of Works in Progress magazine. Mentioned by O'Brien as an example of revered Irish-founded technology: "We revere companies like Stripe and others." [00:05:18] Sacca also drew an analogy to Stripe's discovery of bottlenecks as it scaled. [00:26:44]

Works in Progress

Stripe-sponsored print and online magazine on progress ideas, plugged by Collison. Collison: "I think it's the most beautiful magazine in print today." [00:20:52]

Anduril

Defense technology company. O'Brien cites it as another example of the manufacturing-first co-founder pattern. O'Brien: "Anduril's the same. One co-founder is pretty much all on manufacturing." [00:27:38] He also positions Ulysses as different: "Where we're different maybe from an Anduril or otherwise is... how do you build a general-purpose underwater robotic platform." [00:45:26]

Saronic

Autonomous surface vessel "neo-prime." Collison asked whether Ulysses competes with it. O'Brien: "Saronic don't have an underwater vehicle. They're building ships, and they're just going to become a new shipyard." [00:45:25]

Giga (Lowercarbon portfolio)

Transformer manufacturer. Sacca uses it as an example of founders spotting a supply chain bottleneck: "We've got these guys, Giga, who taught themselves how to build transformers in their backyard using YouTube videos. Somehow nobody died... they went to China to see how China manufactures them, and brought that back. And now they make transformers in a way that's not all hand-spun." [00:26:44]

Lowercarbon Capital

Sacca's climate and hard-tech fund, a Ulysses investor. Sacca: "As Lowercarbon Capital, our firm has been involved with you since before the pre-seed, we led the pre-seed." [00:14:32]

SpaceX

Cited as the template for cost-to-access unlocking new industries and for supply chain verticalization. Collison: "Just like SpaceX, if you lower the cost to orbit, then there's other things you can do. You can do Starlink." [00:16:44]

Tesla

Cited with SpaceX as the origin of the supply-chain-expertise "religion." Sacca: "It is a religion that came out of SpaceX and Tesla." [00:27:20]

Starlink

Satellite internet; "a huge enabling technology" for controlling Ulysses' surface vehicles. O'Brien: "It's connected then to Starlink... And Starlink's a huge enabling technology for us." [00:29:52]

Nvidia

Maker of the 5090 GPU run onboard Mako vehicles. O'Brien: "We run a full Nvidia 5090 onboard with an Intel CPU." [00:30:22]

Manna

Irish aerial drone delivery company where a Ulysses co-founder previously built drones. O'Brien: "He had been building aerial drones for food delivery with Manna and was like, surely you could build an underwater equivalent." [00:07:27]

Komos Tequila

Sacca's tequila brand ("the only 100-point tequila in history"), partly aged in wine barrels and aerated. Sacca: "This is Komos Tequila... it's the only 100-point tequila in history." [00:33:36]

Y Combinator

Startup accelerator referenced as the archetype of the "make something people want" ethos. O'Brien: "No disrespect to Y Combinator." [00:34:47]

Amazon

Cited as the example of a head-oriented founder business. O'Brien: "Jeff Bezos is the canonical head-based founder... books are good because you can move them easily." [00:35:19]

Apple

Cited as the example of a heart-based founder company. O'Brien: "Steve Jobs being the canonical heart-based founder... the bicycle for the mind, the hippie on acid." [00:35:19]

Anheuser-Busch and Heineken

Guinness competitors who were not to know that Guinness employed researchers like Gosset. O'Brien: "They didn't want Anheuser-Busch or Heineken or other people to know." [00:01:36]

Biometrika

Journal where Gosset published the t-test. O'Brien: "He published in the first journal of Biometrika, which is now a very famous mathematics journal." [00:01:36]

Western Union

Money transfer service used to pay the bail in O'Brien's Shanghai story. O'Brien: "We had to Western Union the money." [00:19:52]

ElevenLabs

AI voice company, joked about as the source of deepfaked scam calls. Sacca: "That's an ElevenLabs call for sure." [00:20:27]

Scooter-Sharing Startup (O'Brien's first company)

O'Brien's first startup was "the first scooter sharing startup in the UK and Ireland," where he learned to sell to government. [00:41:16]

4. People Identified

Will O'Brien

Co-founder and president of Ulysses; Irish entrepreneur from a family of entrepreneurs, former scooter-sharing founder. Highlighted for first-principles product architecture, manufacturing ambition, and an unusually broad intellectual range. Collison introduced him as someone whose "larger ambition is to make ocean operations so cheap and routine, to support entirely new industries." [00:00:13] O'Brien on his drive: "We've mapped more of the surface of Mars than we have our depth of our ocean... less than maybe 100 people are thinking about this and working on this on a daily basis." [00:15:19]

William Sealy Gosset ("Student")

Guinness statistician who developed small-sample statistics (the Student's t-test), published under a pseudonym. O'Brien: "William Sealy Gosset had to publish under a pseudonym, 'The Student'... that's why it's called the student's t-test still to this day, cuz they didn't want Anheuser-Busch or Heineken or other people to know." [00:01:36]

Ronald Fisher

Statistician who worked with Gosset. O'Brien: "Fisher, famously, another famous statistician at the time." [00:01:36]

John Collison

Co-founder of Stripe and host of Cheeky Pint. He drove the sharpest business questions: the buyer risk, the economics, the supply chain, and the "SpaceX for the ocean" framing. [00:17:09]

Chris Sacca

Founder of Lowercarbon Capital, investor in Ulysses, and founder of Komos Tequila. He supplied the investor view on supply chain bottlenecks and defense as a customer. Sacca: "We have now started to see companies like this really get to be supply chain experts and see what's standing in the way of their 100x from today." [00:27:20]

Colm (Ulysses co-founder)

One of four Ulysses co-founders, focused almost entirely on manufacturing. O'Brien: "We have four co-founders. Colm, all he does is pretty much manufacturing." [00:27:38] He is also the co-founder who previously worked at Manna, though that attribution is by implication.

Elon Musk

Referenced by Sacca for the early-days practice of cobbling components from other manufacturers. Sacca: "In the same way that Elon was getting components from Mercedes... to put the first one together." [00:26:18]

Jeff Bezos

Named as the canonical "head-based" founder. [00:35:19]

Steve Jobs

Named as the canonical "heart-based" founder. [00:35:19]

Ulysses' Marine Biologist Inspiration (unnamed)

A marine biologist a co-founder met on a surf trip whose manual tasks (photos, seeding, water sampling) triggered the company idea. O'Brien: "She described her job... it was taking photos underwater. It was planting seeds. It was gathering water samples. All these super manual tasks." [00:07:05]

5. Operating Insights

Make Early Architectural Choices That Convert New Markets Into Operations Problems

Rather than building a bespoke product for the first customer, Ulysses built swappable modules (battery, thrusters, stereo cameras, sonar) so that when the Navy or energy buyers showed up, adaptation was easy. The operating lesson: invest in a generalizable platform early so each new vertical costs operators rather than R&D. O'Brien: "It was very easy for us to adapt." [00:09:56]

Probe Suppliers for Their Real Annual Volume Before You Design Around Them

O'Brien "baited out of the supplier how many of these components they make per year" (100 to 200) and used that number to decide to insource. The tactic is to treat supplier volume as a leading indicator of whether a part can scale with your plan. [00:25:50]

Sequence Vertical Integration Starting With What You Can Prototype Cheaply and Whose Supplier Is Slowest

Ulysses went from roughly 80% off-the-shelf in generation one to in-housing acoustics and inertial navigation, targeting "a fraction of the price of the very expensive, long-lead-time supplier." The rule: pick insourcing targets where lead time and unit cost are worst, and where you can build prototypes first. O'Brien: "Initial prototypes... at a fraction of the price of the very expensive, long-lead-time supplier that we're using right now, and building out a supply chain that we could scale." [00:23:59]

Reframe Slow Sales Cycles as a Moat Venture Capital Can Pay For

Sticky government and energy contracts take time and compliance work (master services agreements, contract vehicles, clearances), but are hard to dislodge. For well-funded startups, this is an advantage over bootstrapped competitors. O'Brien: "We can afford to invest the money in the R&D and wait, because once you win those contracts, you're very sticky." [00:40:28]

Use the Mission Narrative to Recruit and Frame the Market

O'Brien compares the early settlement phases of frontiers and says Ulysses wants to "advocate the maritime domain to move away from this episodic singular campaign thing" toward permanent presence. This framing both defines product requirements (persistence, autonomy, charging, repair) and pulls in customers who need 24/7 monitoring. [00:46:23]

6. Overlooked Insights

The Surface Craft Is the Real Moat: It Solves Charging, Comms, Transport, and Repair in One Node

Mentioned as a logistics detail, the Leviathan surface vehicle is arguably the strategic core. It provides low-drag transit (2,000 nautical mile range), wireless charging, a Starlink uplink for live diagnostics, and, in future, vending-machine-style replacement modules for repairs. This collapses what normally requires a crewed ship into an autonomous logistics node and turns an underwater problem (no bandwidth, no power, no repair) into a surface problem that Starlink already solves. O'Brien: "You pick it up, you put it on deck, it wirelessly charges... and then connects us to the internet so that we can get a live diagnostic on the vehicle... In future, the surface craft will actually be able to repair the vehicle and have like replacement modules." [00:29:20] Sacca's reaction: "A vending machine-style. The surface vehicle is autonomous, too. That's cool." [00:29:49] The implication is that a competitor can copy the underwater vehicle but must replicate the full fleet system to match persistence economics.

The Customer Base Already Reveals a Dual-Use Revenue Flywheel That De-Risks the Mission Work

Almost in passing, O'Brien notes that the seagrass tech platform needs no net-new R&D to serve new contracts and that offshore wind inspection and Navy mine hunting came in year two. The non-obvious point is that mission-driven restoration work (low willingness to pay, heavy permitting friction, the "green tape" he complained about) functions as a demonstration and data-collection engine, while the Navy and energy contracts, where the buyer pays real money, fund the fleet. He also hinted at a subsea cable security workstream he "can't talk too much" about. The offshore wind use case is particularly telling: the obstacle to California floating wind is entangled fishing line harming marine life, so Ulysses' product removes a regulatory blocker for a whole industry, meaning the buyer's willingness to pay is tied to unlocking permits, not just reducing inspection cost. O'Brien: "That's been one of the biggest obstructions to offshore wind in California... we're building an implement that will cut the fishing lines off of the floating offshore wind lines." [00:32:18]