Core Memory

Guinness. Sharks. American manufacturing. These are a few of the interests I share with the founders of Ulysses, a San Francisco startup building autonomous underwater drones.
The idea for Ulysses started when one of the four co-founders was on a surf trip and learned how much of humanity depends on a single marine plant: the humble seagrass. He spent a weekend designing a robot to plant it. Two years later, the group of Irishmen — and for diversity, a Scot — have moved well beyond ecological restoration. They’re providing services for the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and selling their drones to the U.S. Navy.
The robots are called Mako. They’re two meters long, weigh about 400 pounds, and can dive 5,000 feet for up to 72 hours at a time. They’re also modular — payloads swap in and out like Legos, so the same vehicle that plants seagrass in Australia one week can inspect a submarine cable in the Baltic the next. A base Mako costs $50,000. Most legacy underwater drones built by big defense contractors can run between $1 million and $20 million each.
On this episode of the Core Memory podcast, we’re joined by Will O’Brien and Akhil Voorakkara, co-founders of Ulysses. They build these drones out of an office in San Francisco — for conservation, for academia, for national defense. They just raised a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz through its American Dynamism fund. We discuss what it actually takes to make robots for the most hostile environment on Earth, why the ocean is about to have its SpaceX moment, and the surprisingly thin line between planting seagrass and defending NATO.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

We’re in a moment of insatiable desire for more energy and more computing. And so the ideas of how to provide said energy and computing are getting ever more adventurous.
Case in point: Panthalassa, which is the subject of this week’s episode, alongside our guest Garth Sheldon-Coulson, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
Panthalassa makes an object that it calls a node and that looks like a giant lollipop. This odd contraption is meant to live out in the deep ocean and produce energy from the movement of waves. Water goes into the node where it’s funneled through a series of channels and pressurized. After that, the water is directed into a turbine that spins and connects to a generator that produces electricity.
How big is this node? Quite f*****g big. It’s about 20 meters across at the top of the lollipop and then goes down about 80 meters into the water. The contraption can move and steer on its own and travel about 30 miles a day to reach the ideal spots where the waves just keep coming and coming.
There’s some universe where this thing is bobbing around in the ocean, generating electricity day and night and storing the electricity in batteries. Panthalassa, though, wants to put servers packed full of GPUs and TPUs right on board and use the electricity to fuel AI jobs. It will then send the results of the work up into space via Starlink and then back down to Earth. Simple.
We get into all of this in detail with Sheldon-Coulson.
Panthalassa has been operating in semi-secret for about ten years. This episode marks the first time that Sheldon-Coulson has discussed the company’s technology at length. We talk about his backstory, how this wild idea came to be and the engineering behind the nodes.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

Three years ago, I’d caught some videos online of paralyzed people walking again. This struck me as miraculous. It also confused me. If paralyzed people were moving again, why weren’t more people talking about this incredible occurrence?
The company helping people move again is called Onward Medical, and it’s based in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2023, I booked a flight to Europe and went to visit Onward and met its CEO Dave Marver, who is this week’s guest.
During my trip, I did, in fact, witness amazing things. An Italian man named Michel was walking again with the help of a spinal implant device made by Onward. He could stand and walk and exercise daily. And a young Belgian woman named Julie used an Onward device to regulate her blood pressure. Before receiving the Onward technology, Julie had contemplated suicide because it took her hours each day to get out of bed – the result of blood pressure fluctuations that caused her to pass out. After receiving the device, she reenrolled in her PhD program. Her whole life had been turned around.
Onward has developed products that deliver electrical stimulation to the spinal cord. Some of these products work outside of the body and some require an implant. More recently, Onward has begun pairing its spinal implant technology with brain computer interface implants. This allows patients to think about their desire to move and have those thoughts translated into actions executed by the spinal implant.
In this episode, Marver walks us through the history of Onward’s technology development and how all of these products work. It’s a story of academic research being turned into life-changing technology. I would argue that no company does more to help people dealing with paralysis.
This episode will surprise you, and, I think, warm your heart.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

Pedro Franceschi taught himself to code when he was eight years old. At 12, he began receiving legal notices from Apple, asking him to stop hacking iPhones. By 14, he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling software and had his mom accompanying him on job interviews in his home city of Rio de Janeiro. Even among coding and hacking prodigies, Franceschi stands out.
Today, Franceschi is the co-founder and CEO of Brex, a financial technology company that was just acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. Franceschi is all of 29 years old now, so he’s done alright.
Brex led a new wave of companies that brought more modern financial tools first to start-ups and then to businesses of all sizes. Over the years, it’s had some ups and downs, and Franceschi has been remarkably open about Brex’s stumbles, his mental health struggles and about the areas where he thinks Brex got things very right.
Franceschi remains a hacker at heart and has been experimenting away with AI agents. He, in fact, says he’s running Brex – and his life – with a team of AI agents that read his e-mails and Slack messages, perform job recruiting tasks and schedule his day-to-day activities.
We get into all of this on the episode, charting Franceschi’s rise from hacking phenom to running a multi-billion-dollar company and discussing where he thinks AI and money are heading.
Do we have journalistic conflicts with this episode? Yes, we do. Brex has been the top sponsor of our podcast and video series. You can learn more about the depths of our relationship and what Brex can do for your business right here.
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

Baiju Bhatt is trying to pull an Elon Musk.
About 25 years ago, Musk sold his finance tech company PayPal and left dot-com life to get into rockets with the founding of SpaceX. Hardly anyone considered this a rational choice on Musk’s part. Space, after all, was where rich people went to blow their fortunes and fail.
For his part, Bhatt co-founded the investing service Robinhood in 2013 and has now decided to get into the space business as well via a start-up called Aetherflux. The company aims to build a network of solar panel-packed satellites that suck up sunshine and then beam it down to Earth via infrared lasers. Yes. Actual space lasers. What could go wrong?
The lasers would feed antennas and ground stations on Earth with energy. In theory, you could then direct power just about anywhere without needing to build a ton of infrastructure on the ground. Army convoys, data centers, etc. could just have electricity sent to them in remote areas.
Bhatt explains all of this in the episode and gets deep into his personal story. He also recounts starting and running Robinhood through its ups and downs, including being both beloved and despised.
Will the space lasers work? I dunno. It’s a lot. But we are fully in the era of trying new, bold ideas in Low Earth Orbit, and, well, I wrote a book predicting this very thing, and so am very much here for it.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe