Isaiah Taylor

It was essentially me, my friend Elijah, and I had written this

like 200 page memo on how to fix nuclear energy.

And it was essentially just me running around, like handing that to people and like saying like, hey, can I have a couple million dollars to go do this?

And I finally found somebody who said yes, so.

What sold them?

What do you think sold them?

I'll tell you who it was.

Steve Marcus is the founder of Riot Ventures, which is a great deep tech fund in LA.

The thing that's super unique about Steve is, first of all, he's MIT trained.

Second of all, he started a bunch of his own companies before he got into venture, which means that he just thinks for himself.

The problem in venture today that nobody's really figured out how to solve is that it's full of people who don't think for themselves.

And I would say that if you read my memo, you would see that there are the ingredients in there that are going to be a trillion-dollar company.

And if you have the confidence in your own intellect to be able to read that and break down the assumptions, you can find that, right?

But if you're looking at it from more of a signaling perspective or, you know, what are other people going to think about this, you might not get there.

So it really took a very unique person who understands the world on his own terms to write that check.

How many people did you have to pitch to before you?

I pitched 80 different VC firms.

80 different VC firms.

Yeah, and I got 80 no's.

They just straightforwardly don't.