Founder @UlyssesInc. Founder of The Hamilton Society. Irish. Catholic. Frontier Spirit.
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2010
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Ulysses has raised $46M led by a16z American Dynamism.
We are building The Ocean Company.
The ocean is 71% of the planet. But it is less explored than Mars, and full of secrets, waiting to be told.
It is the backbone of global defense. Home to the critical infrastructure that powers our world. And the key to the health of our planet.
This frontier needs technology to protect and steward it.
We are building it. And we need more builders
Join us and explore the Great Blue Frontier: theoceancompany.com/careers
will o’brien retweeted
Ulysses has achieved a new milestone: the Mako has clocked over 1,000 active hours in the water.
The ocean is hard on machines. Salt, pressure, currents, impact, corrosion.
Time in the water is where reliability is earned, and lessons are learned.
Every hour with Mako has given our team more operating experience, more data, and more opportunities to improve the system.
Thank you to all our customers for trusting us to solve problems for them at sea.
Justin is building an incredible company that will let us speak with plants.
What a beautiful sci-fi technology.
This totally changes agriculture, horticulture and so many areas of plant science.
I’m so excited to see what they build.
1/ Today we’re unveiling Bombadil, @electricplantco's foundation model that reads the electrical signals of living plants and turns them into a continuous view of their physiology.
Trained on 7M+ hours of plant electrical signal across 125+ species. That makes Bombadil the most species-diverse model of directly recorded electrical biosignals in existence. The animal equivalent would be one model that reads the brainwaves of blue whales, horseshoe crabs and fruit flies.
Three years into a company, you really begin to learn the value of persistence.
Take a good idea very seriously, work on it every day, and incredible things can happen.
There is much more to success than this, but seeing the fruits of persistence is a beautiful thing.
will o’brien retweeted
Be extremely intentional with your friendships — not acquaintances, not business partners, actual friends
Try to pick high-integrity people — the right people
Invest time in those relationships
Cut or downgrade folks who are transactional or who don’t show up for you
Reallocate that time and energy to the right people who do
It's ok to be cutthroat about this, as life is the memories you create with your friends and family.
Invest in making moments.
Thank you @packyM 😁😁
Packy McCormick's picks for the most compelling companies to join: "ambitious missions, exceptional talent density, steep learning curves, and the potential to create enormous value."
Software / AI
- Ramp
- Thatch
- Replit
- General Intuition
- Arena Physica
- Blackbird
- [untitled]
- Poetic
Hardware / infrastructure
- Base Power
- Anduril
- Hadrian
- Astro Mechanica
- Somos Internet
- Meter
- Earth AI
- Radiant
- Varda Space
- Fuse
- Westmag
- Antares
- Terraform Industries
- Standard Nuclear
- Standard Bots
- Valar Atomics
- Ulysses
- Aalo Atomics
- Senra Systems
- Impulse Labs
- Vight
- General Matter
- Monumental Labs
- Daylight Computer
- Airbound
- Autoridad Panandina
Services
- Primer
- Wander
cosign.co/lists/packym/top-c…
Another takeaway after three years of building a company is that the returns to just "being a good person", and not acting transactionally, are higher than I expected.
There are so many transactional, boring, and at times immoral people in the tech industry that if you act with sustained warmth, authenticity, humor, and integrity, great gifts will be laid before you. White pill.
will o’brien retweeted
The extraordinary porcelain of Japanese ceramic master Tokuda Yasokichi III
His Saiyū glazing technique transformed traditional Kutani ceramics into brilliant color spectrums of cobalt
Developed in the 1970s, his work earned him Japan’s prestigious Living National Treasure designation in 1997
Maritime Renaissance
Endurance is on a historic run. During our mission to the Axial Seamount, we successfully drilled the world’s first subsea geothermal well and generated net-positive power a mile beneath the Pacific. This mission was the first end-to-end test of subsea geothermal, and our fifth deep-sea deployment in just over a year. For three weeks, we worked around the clock over an active underwater volcano, running the drill and generator and handling every deployment and recovery. Along the way, we:
- Landed our drill within feet of target, drilled two holes, and cased and completed the second as a geothermal well, flowing at 260°C.
- Landed Adélie, our 3-ton test plant, and ran it in real time from Seattle over subsea fiber.
- Drilled with filtered seawater, not drilling mud, and monitored the site on every dive.
- Recovered, serviced, and redeployed Adélie in about 16 hours.
- And on Sept. 27, connected to a 281°C natural vent, spun the turbine up to 26,000 rpm and ran the plant net positive for 8.7 seconds, peaking at 16.5 kW.
Net power is the threshold every new energy source has to cross. For Endurance, it proves subsea geothermal is real, and gives us the confidence to keep sprinting towards commercial scale.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn: a battery protection trip ended the run, a pump cable failed on restart, and the new well was too restrictive to run the plant. Those lessons go straight into Gentoo, our next test plant, this winter and Leopard, our 2 MW commercial generator.
We’re incredibly proud of what we accomplished together. It took creativity, precision, an uncompromising focus on safety from everyone on board, and it’s only the beginning of what we’re capable of. We couldn’t have done it without Stabbert Maritime and the crew of the Ocean Guardian, the ROPOS team, the University of Washington, WASSOC, and the National Science Foundation.
Jimi Hendrix was once asked “What’s it like being the greatest guitarist that’s ever lived?”
To which he replied “I don’t know. Ask Rory Gallagher.”
Most children (and adults) can identify 100+ logos and nearly 0 native plant species
This is not healthy for society
Native wildlife roots us in our place and we should treat it with such reverence
If we do not root ourselves in the land it is very easy to lose our ourselves
will o’brien retweeted
.@willob on how Guinness gave us Student’s t-test
“I studied math in college, and one of the tests from that is the Student’s t-test. This is how you derive either the standard deviation if you know the mean, or the mean if you know the standard deviation from a small sample, less than 30.
This was a problem at Guinness because one of the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness is the amount of lipids or fats in hops. So, they were having to take up hundreds of hops to see is this a high-quality batch or not? And they were losing a few percent per batch. And that means a lot when you’re in the high-volume, low-margin food-and-beverage industry. So William Sealy Gosset had to publish under a pseudonym. That's why it's called the Student's t-test.”
will o’brien retweeted
Will O'Brien of @UlyssesInc on why today's young founders are more Steve Jobs than Jeff Bezos:
"The founders look very different, right? It's like the kind of rah-rah, smoking, go to church on Sunday, maybe a bit louder, working typically on hardware rather than software."
"It's like a different motivation. There is seemingly more of a kind of a spiritual reason to why people start their businesses."
"I often think of there being head and heart type founders, where Jeff Bezos is the canonical head-based founder... 'What would be the best thing to sell on the internet? Oh, books are good because you can move them easily.'"
"Steve Jobs being the canonical heart-based founder, the bicycle for the mind, the hippie on acid... And I think this era of founders are way more oriented on the heart-based."
"A lot of us were very, I think, impacted by something like COVID. A lot of us are typically in our later 20s now, but were in college or something like that when it happened. It kind of made me feel a little bit cheated."
"We were forced to be in the digital world, so we feel cause to impact the physical world... Or maybe we're just more of a product of the times that we're in."
@Willob on Cheeky Pint
Ulysses has its own aquarium full of live seagrass, fish, shrimp and other little critters. This aquarium has been built from the ground up to be self-feeding. Each trophic layer feeds the next with seagrass at the base. It’s a beautiful embodiment of our mission of ocean stewardship in action.
Robots. Robots. Robots.
Come join Ulysses if you want to be sent internationally with robots to solve very difficult undersea problems.
We are deploying robots in Australia, [REDACTED], [REDACTED], SoCal, and NorCal, in just the next few weeks alone.
We’re regularly running multiple robots and multiple missions across multiple geographies.
We need more people to help deploy more robots.
Come build The Ocean Company. New roles posted:
theoceancompany.com/careers
Fun fact: when you google “lads drinking Guinness” I’m the first result
Who would have thought that it took a 29-year-old Irishman to put the teetotalers of San Francisco in their place
I have been training to competitively drink Guinness for decades
I was born for this
Sorry @elonmusk
