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

If you want to buy an autonomous vehicle,

underwater vehicle from one of the primes or something like that to do these interventions and protect your cables today.

You're paying like in the order of millions of dollars and they don't come with a launch and recovery system to recharge them and they don't have native integration into seedbed sensors to protect the cables.

So yeah, that's why we're kind of taking this full stack from sensors to surface to subsea approach.

And yeah, these are all very much things that we're kind of thinking about.

Yeah, a part of it was, you know, I moved to San Francisco and I came from Ireland where, you know, we love to drink pints of Guinness and like that's our social, you know, we go to the pub, you know, we hang out, you know, groups and none of my friends worked in tech.

So then like being, you know, dropped into San Francisco where nobody drank, everyone took off their shoes.

You were in like someone's like extremely brightly lit like living room.

and uh and then like everyone was talking about their stupid startup I was like this is like hell I don't want to talk about these things I don't want to be in this like environment I want to have a drink I want to have like you know fun I want the room to be a bit darker more dimly lit and then like Hamilton was like the opposite of all the things you don't talk about your startup you keep your shoes on you dress nicely and uh you talk about like an important problem of the day and and you know so it was like that was my own kind of personal motivation and that was kind of like a lot of the motivation to

community uh that of co-founders that we started with but in addition to that there was this kind of bigger like belief that you know San Francisco is yeah in my opinion you know the most important city uh in the world and but it doesn't have social institutions that match its ambitions in the material world it doesn't have places where ideas are formed where people can debate you know it's just really people shouting at each other on Twitter and if you look at like any great

moment of kind of immense you know wealth creation or otherwise we've had these social institutions where people could network and connect and like for converge on like what is truth of what this community should advance and seek to advance and you know together you know the UK kind of had like Oxford Union and these set of like members clubs in places like London the you know we had the Pacific Union Club you have other kind of members clubs on the east coast as well in places like New York from the industrial revolution but you know today like

you know, this physical place instantiation of it does not exist.

So Hamilton's society was kind of conceived in that vein as well.

And yeah, looking to draw on the kind of heritage of places like Oxford Union, how they run their debates.

So, yeah.

I think it is in its early days of kind of cultural impact.

I think it has been good at like, you know, like I think one example is like the billionaire tax.

Anybody who was at that debate has come away with an actually way more high fidelity understanding of like why a billionaire tax is like very bad, right?

Beforehand, it was like the extent of which people really had seriously engaged in it was like,

Maybe you were just like, billionaires are good, or something like that.

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