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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Okay, you want to have logistics freshened up pretty frequently.

Again, trying to get a big container ship or someone like that to come out and stop off in your location and drop something there, maybe not that realistic.

But again, if you have a Poseidon Aerospace autonomous cargo plane that can come out and refuel you every two weeks or week with new supplies, that's great.

Okay, you want to do maintenance on your floating rig, this floating rig right there, things are breaking.

divers are super expensive okay that could like pretty much bankrupt you if things are breaking and you can't fix them in time okay you have your Ulysses autonomous underwater robots that go in and like fix the cables underneath it and tie these things down or whatever so you're starting to see the preparation of tools now that I think that can actually reduce the cost of preparation down such that the benefits do outweigh the costs in something like seasteading

You also need energy generation at sea.

Solar has come on like leaps and bounds in the last few decades.

So that's possible.

We're also seeing interesting advances in ocean geothermal, or basically just like taking advantage of natural heat in the ocean to generate energy with pantalasa generating wave energy.

We have Car Power Ship who developed these modular kind of floating power stations that you can put on a ship so that it can be brought out to locations.

So yeah, the power, the logistics, the data problem, the kind of like operators and maintenance, these are all problems that are now starting to be solved for the first time.

So yeah, C setting, I would love to see it come back.

Yeah, you need a combination of, you know, sensing, sensor nodes like placed along all this infrastructure and you need to make, they need to be really cheap.

And that gives you like your kind of, your eyes and ears, you can tell, but you need to also be able to intervene and actually protect.

So that's where the robotics and like underwater drones like the Mako would come into it.

And so you need those two kind of combination of those two things.

And then you need the ability to refuel them at sea as well.

So you need something like Leviathan, the autonomous surface vehicle, that can recover them, recharge them, connect them to the internet so they can relay that data back.

And then you need all of the stack to be made super cheap, such that you can deploy them over a massive scale.

This is exactly the lens that we brought to building these things.

Showing 121–140 of 199 · page 7 of 10