David Kirtley

And so a lot of what I think about is how do we do those two things together?

And a lot of that is scale.

And a lot of that is thinking about, and not big scale.

In fact, it's the opposite of that.

It's small scale.

It's how do you build a product that's mass producible, that you can build quickly and learn quickly?

And what I've found in my career at this is that they're actually the same thing.

And that the faster you can build a thing, the faster you can learn if that thing works, the faster you can now, you can actually iterate on that and build the next thing.

And so what I have spent my career building is teams of humans and a company that are builders, that can build high technology things quickly.

That if you want to do R&D,

You don't want large-scale, multinational, complex, huge systems.

You want to actually take the smallest thing you can build that accomplishes the mission.

And in Fusion, there is a minimum size, but accomplishes the mission, and then build it quickly and build whole teams around building it quickly and incentivize folks to move quickly, iterate, and learn.

And kind of the irony, I think, of one of the things that I've discovered is that by focusing on

By focusing on low cost, very rapid manufacturing, you actually get to do science faster.

And at the beginning of my career, I would never have guessed that.

I would have thought the way to do science is to make a giant demonstration particle accelerator somewhere.

To make a large complex science experiment is the best way to do science.

And what I found is actually small iterative just building as fast as possible gets you there faster.

because you can learn, you can build, you can iterate, you can solve the problems, and then you can learn the fundamental physics, learn the scaling, learn the FRC and the B to the 3.77 power, and learn those things way sooner than if you would have just started on one megaproject and then waited decades to get to the answer.