Will O'Brien

speaker

199 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Will O'Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The a16z Show · Three Startups Reinventing Critical Infrastructure · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

very classified stuff.

They couldn't talk about it publicly, right?

So you had this like insane engineering, the same exploration going on undersea, but it was totally classified and we couldn't speak about it publicly.

And also like Jack Cousteau, the biggest cultural icon for it, he was real about exploration and then he kind of pivots more to like conservation.

So,

There's this cultural shift, there's this classification, and as a result, 50 years later, we're still working with the same tools in the ocean.

And it's exactly this kind of exploration spirit, this desire to conquer this great blue frontier that we're trying to reignite and be that SpaceX for the ocean that young kids dreaming about being in.

you know, aquanauts as well as like astronauts and, you know, going to these frontiers.

Because when you get into the engineering of it, it's gnarly stuff.

Like it's really gnarly stuff to kind of make vehicles that can work in the deeps, work in the depths.

It's like arguably more difficult than like a lot of the, like making a vehicle that can survive in space.

And there's a lot more things trying to take you out down there.

I think, yeah, there's a cultural kind of and like military reasons why we don't really have a generation of kids thinking of building ocean companies.

I mean, yeah, this is, you know, kind of the long and the short of it is in the undersea domain, it still remains a domain in which like the U.S.

can create a decisive advantage, right?

It seems like on shipbuilding, like, you know, China is, you know, by far and away ahead, right?

Building hundreds of ships per annum to the U.S.

building kind of single digit ships, right?

In aerial drones, it's like they're producing tens of millions.

The U.S.

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