July 24, 2025 • 45 mins
Joseph Krause shares his journey from leaving a PhD program to diving into entrepreneurship, drawing on lessons from his military service. He discusses his transition to Alley Corp and insights into venture capital, emphasizing the importance of convincing investors about the potential of material science. Joseph delves into building a successful company culture, leveraging AI, and identifying target customers. He outlines strategies for scrappy startup recruiting and raising $70M in funding. The conversation covers traits of successful entrepreneurs, handling failure, and running towards goals. Joseph offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, reflecting on discipline, maintaining focus, and embracing unsolved problems.
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(00:00):
Joseph, you're in your twenties, and you'veraised upwards of or close to $70,000,000 for
your AI company.
What is it, and what do you do?
And try to explain to me, like, I'm 10 yearsold.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, great to be here.
Thank you for making the time.
So what we really focus on is removingmaterials from some of the hardest problems and
(00:20):
industries in the world.
And so when you think about all of theindustries that we care about today, right,
automotive and aerospace, manufacturing,defense, climate, energy, semiconductors, the
most important industries in the world.
All these are direct results from novelmaterial science advancements that we use to
create the technologies that build thoseindustries.
And that process today is incredibly slow,typically ten plus years, and really expensive,
(00:47):
usually north of a 100,000,000 on average for asingle material system.
Radical AI brings AI and automation tocompletely disrupt how that process operates
and really builds an intelligent scientist thatremoves humans from the loop so that we can do
way faster and more aggressive scientificdiscovery.
(01:07):
And before we get too deep into radical AI,you've accomplished a lot in your twenties.
You're in the army.
You now you were an investor over at Ali Corp.
Sure.
You now run this massive company, one of thelargest seed stage rounds in New York City.
Tell me a little bit more about your earlybackground and your early context.
What do you think shaped you to be as ambitiousas you are today?
(01:28):
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I love this question because I think I'm somuch more ambitious today than I was when I
just started out.
And by saying that now I was when I was anundergraduate, I started working in scientific
research, and I published my first paper as ajunior in college and took the normal route.
Hey.
If I'm publishing papers, I should go tograduate school.
And so I did.
(01:48):
I got into Rice University, which is inHouston.
I moved down to Texas and just started graduateresearch because that was the next thing to do.
And so I'd actually say I wasn't that ambitiousat the time.
I was much more just following this trajectoryand very quickly started to run into
frustrations that you probably felt similar inyour background where the things I cared about,
(02:10):
making an impact, developing new technology,bringing that technology to the world, I wasn't
actually doing in my day to day life.
And academic research is incredibly importantfor the world, but it really focuses on driving
understanding of science, not necessarilycommercialization of science.
And so what I originally thought going toschool, graduate school, would be working on
(02:33):
this technology that would make an impact waskind of sitting stale and stagnant in this only
driving kind of academic research.
And that's where this switch started to, youknow, tick on in my head where I wanted to make
a bigger difference.
And I really wanted to do something that, one,I was passionate about, but two, would really
make a lasting impact on the human race.
And that's exactly how everything proliferatedto radical AI.
(02:55):
Why do you think you felt that you had to leaveyour PhD?
A lot of people think like, okay, if you'reyou're in your PhD, you're probably learning a
ton, it's probably super helpful for yourcareer.
Why do you feel like you had to leave thattraditional path to do something that not a lot
of people are doing to be able to make that bigimpact?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So I had a tough leave of my PhD because Ipassed my qualifying exam.
And so when you go to grad school in The US,you kind of go through academic coursework, and
(03:19):
then you submit a qualifying exam, you become aPhD candidate.
And after you've done this qualifying exam,really, your next step is dissertation.
So you are doing research, continuing topublish, and then you do a dissertation.
So I was one step away removed from that.
My mom is still upset slightly that I decidedto walk away from that, but I think the way I
actually felt like pushing forward was a lackof learning.
(03:42):
And it wasn't learning new science.
Of course, you learn new science every day.
It was this not or this lack of an ability toreally learn about what I wanted to do.
And at this point in time, I started to hone inon entrepreneurship.
I had always kicked around entrepreneurship asa kid.
You know, when I was in graduate school, I hadhorrific attempts at entrepreneurship.
I started a coffee company with my brother,which went out of business because of COVID.
(04:06):
We did a bunch of different things to try tomake money on the side.
So this idea was always there about trying topush forward, but I just kept feeling like I
was, you know, boxed in to the academic pursuitand not able to pursue everything else.
And so after a certain period of time, itbecame too much, and I said, you know what?
I need to take a change.
And really need to think about how I can get atthat end goal I'm going for.
(04:29):
And I started cold outreaching to every VC Icould ever get in touch with and really finding
the ones that I felt like I could learn from.
I knew I was young.
I hadn't done entrepreneurship before in aprofessional setting, and I wanted to learn
from those that had.
And that's how I bumped into Kevin Ryan and andcame up to Alley Court.
Considering the scale of your business today atsuch an early stage too, what do you think is
(04:50):
some of the differences that you have in yourbusiness today that maybe were missing or
lacking with those entrepreneurial endeavorsthat you started in college?
You know, one I think is people, and that comesfrom capital and your ability to bring them in.
But when you're trying to work on really hardproblems, you need really good people.
It's the one of the most important pieces ofbuilding a big company.
(05:11):
And I think the second is really thisunderstanding of an industry that you wanna
change.
You know, I always like to say radical AI isreally a proliferation of my life's work in a
way, and I always tell the company this.
And I my one of my favorite quotes is SteveJobs.
I'm a massive Steve Jobs fan of, you can neverconnect the dots looking forward.
You can only connect the dots lookingbackwards.
(05:32):
And I had done a fellowship when I was ingraduate school at the army research lab.
So it's this corporate research facility,incredible scientist there, who kind of works
on novel research for the US army.
And the goal is to take fundamental work, likeI was talking about earlier, one step a little
bit closer to that commercialization avenue.
And so here, I was really starting to scratchthat itch of, wow.
(05:56):
I wanna actually bring things into the world.
Right?
And so it was, like, one step closer.
And so I started to really understand all ofthe fragmented processes of materials discovery
and innovation.
And then when I became an investor, I was onthe board of a couple of different companies.
I was an observer at a few companies.
I had done investments in material science.
I watched how they were building companies indifferent parts of the marketing materials that
(06:17):
they were attacking.
Again, back to that quote, all of these lookingbackwards make complete sense to where Radical
AI comes from.
At the time, I didn't actually know.
I just was kinda pushing forward to see whereit went.
And so when all of those came together, I feltlike I had a deep understanding of a space I
had worked in for the better part of the lastdecade and knew exactly what I wanted to do and
that I wanted to make a big impact.
(06:38):
And AI and automation are really at a time andplace where this is the perfect opportunity.
It's pretty unique to end up starting a companyafter being in the army.
You also had a pretty star studded careerthere.
You dealt with biological weapons, you were inlike the top 10% of your class, honor graduate.
There are a lot of things that you alsoaccomplished there.
What do you think are a few things that youlearned after spending about six, seven years
(07:01):
in the army that you took with you in yourentrepreneurial endeavors?
Yeah.
The army was truly a remarkable experience forme.
I was in the National Guard, so did service onthe weekends, then two weeks in the summer,
which is called annual training.
And you're very much still a part of the normalarmy component.
So basic training, annual individual training,you kinda do all these things.
And the army teaches you resilience.
(07:24):
You have to be unbelievably dedicated to themission that you're going after because there
is a million and one obstacles that are gonnapop up on your path to achieve success.
Sounds very similar to entrepreneurship.
Right?
And it very much is.
And so that was the biggest lesson that Ilearned from the army is that you just have to
keep beating down the door until it falls over.
And I think the second thing for me that wassuper important was, you know, there's not
(07:47):
really too low of a place that you can be.
I have slept on some of the hardest floors inthe world or in places that you wouldn't wanna
sleep, and I've also had some of the most funin environments where people would not
typically describe as fun.
And I barely scratched the surface on what thetrue heroes in this country did who have
deployed downrange and done serious hard jobsin the past.
(08:08):
But you just learn this ability to embrace thesuck.
And you hear this saying from Navy SEALs andGreen Berets all the time, but this embrace the
suck is is a mentality that I absolutely love.
You learn to love the process.
And I think that's one of the keys toentrepreneurship is, yes, the end result is
important, it's the process that keeps youcoming back over and over and over again.
(08:29):
And there's so much learning inside of that.
I feel like it's also really important toobecause it builds a lot of mental toughness.
And if you don't have that mental toughness,when things are going great and then they start
not to be going good, then you kinda are inthis like state of floatlessness where you're
not quite sure what to do because you haven'texperienced before.
What are some of the most difficultenvironments you were in in during that time
and how did you approach it?
(08:50):
Yeah.
Again, so luckily for me, I wasn't in anythingtoo difficult.
I'd say one of the one of the more difficultenvironments was actually some of the
complications that come from being a full timecitizen as well as a soldier.
So I'll give you a good example.
In my second year of graduate school or secondor third year of graduate school, we got
deployed in Houston for riots that were on theon the George Floyd riots that occurred.
(09:13):
And that was, one, had to step away fromacademia in the middle of doing a project.
Two, had to deal with a very contentioussituation, of course, in the area, different
opinions across a bunch of different people.
And then three, actually had to step away fromfamily, which all soldiers and and and people
in the military have to go through.
Those three things compounding on each otherwere quite a difficult moment.
(09:35):
We were sleeping kind of, you know, ad hoc andon the go when we could.
I'm I was in this a CBRN specialist in themilitary, which is someone who is responsible
for things like gas mask and nuclear warfare,biological weapons, and so we get a lot of
training in those areas.
It's super important to make sure all thatequipment is up to date and spec ed and
everything.
And so there was this high pressure situationwith things going on at home and in the real
(09:58):
world that I couldn't control.
I don't like not having control of things,naturally.
And so having to balance that and learning thatyou can only control what you can control, and
that's one of the values of radical AI is wecontrol what we can control, and the things
that we can't, we let go, was just a reallyimportant lesson to learn.
That was challenging.
And I think the second thing I always talkabout is when I was at basic training.
(10:19):
So basic training for the military really testsmental toughness and your ability to exercise
discipline.
Can say they're disciplined.
Everyone can say that they follow a routine.
You don't have an option at basic training.
You're up at 04:00 in the morning every singlemorning whether you want to be or not.
You eat three square meals a day whether youwant to or not.
I think that exercise puts an immense amount ofstress on the body.
(10:44):
And for me, that wasn't the hard part.
I was put into a leadership role in that.
And I actually had to get other people mucholder than me.
I 20, 21 years old at the time, 30, 35 yearsold, understand and really embrace that part of
joining the military.
That was challenging.
Everyone is feeling the same immense amount ofstress, and trying to figure out how to lead in
(11:05):
an environment I hadn't been in before whilealso feeling that same stress was quite
challenging.
You spend a lot of time on the technical sidelearning about bioweapons and and deep tech in
the military, but then you eventuallytransitioned to Ali Corp coming Kevin Ryan.
What's the story there?
You end up joining as an investor.
It's kind of a different side of a differentlens for sure.
How did that come to be?
Absolutely.
(11:25):
So I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Right?
And I knew I didn't know shit about it.
And so I knew I was gonna have to figure outsomeone I could learn from to actually go out
and build a company one day in the future.
And so when I was going out to talk to venturecapitalists, I was cold emailing probably a 100
people a day, some average like that.
And I was looking for people that had built acompany, particularly in the past, or had a
(11:48):
group of people at the firm who had built acompany.
And I bumped in to Kevin Ryan.
I emailed him, and to his credit, he emailed meback and said, let's hop on a call.
And so I got on a call, and I told him Iactually told him, if you're not investing in
material science, you're not investing inanything in the future.
And he was like, that's a big claim.
I don't know if that's true, but why don't youcome to New York and we'll see what happens?
He gave me a six months opportunity.
(12:10):
What the time?
I was in DC working at the Army Research Lab,so doing some of that commercialization work
for the Army.
And this is my fourth year of my PhD as well,so I was doing a joint appointment.
And he was like, come to New York.
Six months, if it goes well, you found your newcareer, and we can work together.
You can look about investing in companies, thenyou can start one.
Or if it goes poorly, you can go back toschool, and you had a great internship or
(12:31):
opportunity in the interim, and that was aboutfive years ago.
So it's been going pretty smooth from there.
And when you walked away from your PhD andeverything there, what were you feeling at that
time?
Did you feel like a sense of like, losing asense of structure or, like, a backup plan?
Or how do you think about that?
I felt felt free.
I felt like I could finally go after somethingI had been talking about thinking about and
(12:52):
debating on for for quite from quite some time.
And I think one of the big hurdles I talk tothe team all about it all the time is just
getting started.
That was a version for me of just gettingstarted.
I knew I wanted to do this.
I knew I did not wanna go into the scientificdiscipline from a research perspective, a
professional research scientist, and I knewthat what I really wanted to do could only come
(13:12):
from taking action and going and making thathappen.
And so for me, that was my get started moment.
And you mentioned one of the most importantthings you could do is, like, focus on only the
things that you can control.
Yeah.
There a lot of people that say that and thinkabout like, okay, I wish I could just and they
try to, but then they get distracted and otherthings that are going on around them.
Sure.
How do you actually just zone in and just focuson what you can control?
(13:34):
Yeah.
There's a great book which is calledEssentialism, which one of my cofounders made
me read probably a couple months before westarted the company.
We had worked together both at Alley Corp.
He's incredible.
And the whole premise of this book is reallythat when you're focused on too many things at
one time, naturally, everything just doesn'tget your full attention.
Right?
And so it doesn't get your best work productfrom that.
(13:55):
Whereas if you really dedicate all of yourattention to one thing, you can accomplish that
thing and then move on to the next thing thatyou were gonna do and, again, have that same
attention.
I think that book was pretty level setting forme.
Right?
Again, I had a lot of ambition when I startedgetting into venture.
I wanted to do a lot of things.
I wanted people to see that I could perform,and I think a lot of people get the wrong idea
(14:17):
of what that is.
Right?
They wanna look busy rather than find successfor whatever that means for them.
And I think I very quickly learned that justbeing busy or just taking a lot of motion
without very specific direction is not a pathto success.
You need to generate a lot of motion, but youneed to do that while you're pointing in
somewhere that you want to be, whatever yournorth star might be.
(14:39):
And that was a really important learning forme, and we take that into the company every
day.
There are a million and one things that we canbuild when you're building an integrated system
to solve materials research and development.
We have to be very pinpointed on what we'refocused on this week, this day, this hour so
that we can continue to push the companyforward.
And all of that feeds into a bigger vision.
(14:59):
I love Jeff Bezos' quote all the time, to be,you know, concrete on your vision and flexible
on the details.
And that flexibility is that focus individuallyas you need it.
When you told Kevin Ryan that this industrythat you're in now is going to be, like, the
future, it kinda has to focus on it, what weresome of the things that you might have said to
convince him at the time that this was actuallythe future?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
(15:19):
I think the thing that we always talk aboutwhen we're talking about radical is you have to
think about all the ages of the human historyand how they're defined.
Right?
The stone age, the bron age, the silicon age.
I mean, our entire industry in tech, SiliconValley is named after a material invention,
silicon being used in the transistor, whichkind of unlocked an Internet in a wave that we
all know and live in today.
(15:40):
And so for us, what we try to explain and whatwe try to articulate is that it doesn't matter
what you do, what industry you work in, or whatyou care about.
It could be everything from space travel andnuclear fusion through to cosmetics or
different athletic wear.
All of those things have materials as thebedrock to the performance that they're
achieving, and that is truly why this industryis so impactful.
(16:02):
I mean, we say all the time, it is one of thelargest industries in the world that can truly
unlock technologies that will alter the courseof human history, and that's what gets us so
excited.
And while you were at AliCorp, what were someof the things that you were looking at in terms
of from an investing line?
How did you approach that, and then how do youapproach it differently maybe as an
entrepreneur?
Yeah.
I love telling this story because it's humblingin the sense that entrepreneurs always used to
(16:26):
give me sometimes pushback when I'd wanna opineon their business, and I would get frustrated
as a young investor.
I'm like, hey.
I wanna help you build a big company too.
And they would always have this perspective of,yes.
You just haven't been here yet, and so Iappreciate the opinion.
But let let me think a little bit.
On the flip side of the seat now, man, do Iunderstand what those entrepreneurs were
(16:47):
saying.
And it's an entirely different ballgame tobuild a company than to just invest in one.
But there were a couple key things I learnedfrom that process.
I think the first thing is really your culture.
Companies build a culture from day one betweenthe cofounders, which really inform the rest of
the company on how they're going to operate.
(17:08):
And the second you lose your culture, youforget about your culture, you ignore your
culture, things start to erode from therebecause the culture that your cofounding team
has is why the company came into existence inthe first place.
And so that was the first.
Second is bias to action.
You have to have a ridiculous bias to actioninside startups, in my opinion.
And the companies that I saw that had the mostsuccess took immense effort to make action
(17:35):
happen, and the ones that didn't let thingshappen to them.
And I think those are the differences, some ofthe differences between good and bad companies.
And then the third is talent.
And I hate to come back to this, but it isincredibly important.
The people that make up the company are trulywhere innovation comes from.
They have to be people who believe in mission,who subscribe to your culture, and who are the
(17:57):
best at what they do.
If you can get those three things together, youtruly have a special group of people that can
unlock novel technology, new performance, orwhatever other thing you might be focused on.
We've sat down with a lot of entrepreneurs whohave scaled to multibillion dollar businesses.
We've seen culture is one of those things thatlot of people like to talk about.
Yeah.
What do you think are the top three things thatare important from a culture's perspective to
(18:22):
get right early on?
Mentality.
You know, we tell people all the time, and andthere was this amazing interview that Brian
Chesky did a couple a couple weeks or monthsback with with Keith Raboy where he talks
about, you know, not faking the pitch topotential employees around how hard it's going
to be to build what you're building.
And we believe that at Radical AI.
(18:44):
We are trying to change the scientific process.
It's been around for thousands of years.
It's led to some of the most importantdiscoveries in human history, and we're trying
to change that entirely.
That's hard.
We're gonna run into a lot of problems.
You have you're gonna be continually tested onthat journey.
If you bring in people who don't understandthat and have the mentality of this is a
(19:05):
problem I wanna solve, you're gonna struggle.
And so mentality is something that you reallywanna vet against in culture.
I think number two is alignment to the mission.
I tell every single person that I interview inthe company, if you are looking for a job, this
is not the place for you.
Go work somewhere else.
If you are looking for a dedication to amission that can make an impact, then you
should come to Radical AI.
(19:26):
And I think the third piece is reallyresilience, not being afraid to challenge and
ask the question why from first principlesperspective.
When you do that, you're gonna run intoproblems, and you have to be ridiculously
resilient, especially on those other twocategories of culture that we care about, to
actually achieve success, to continue to pushthrough.
You can be all bought in on the mission, andyou can have the right mentality about what
(19:49):
we're building.
But if you cannot continue to come back afteryou fail, the other two don't matter.
And so it's really a combination of these threethings just to call out a couple that are
really important.
Let's play a scenario.
Let's say I'm, like, someone who wants to applyto work over at Radical.
What are the a few things that I should besaying or thinking about during that interview
that would set me apart from 99% of othercandidates?
(20:11):
The first thing I always wanna know is whatdrives you as a person, what makes you wake up
every day and do what you do.
And the answer that I'm always looking for isactually it doesn't matter what the answer is,
It just can't be shallow.
It needs to be something that authenticallyspeaks to why you do what you do because that's
what we do.
We all deeply believe in what we work on, andyou need to share that same passion.
Problem solving ability.
(20:33):
Goes to the three things that I just mentioned.
We always ask people to solve a problem andactually walk through the problem as they solve
it.
Like, give us the step by step detail of whatyou're doing and why because those are more
important than just having the answer in theend.
And then three, first principle analysis.
Why is one of the most important questionsstart up can ask in the world.
(20:54):
We ask why repeatedly inside the company, andwe would wanna see that the interview quite
frequently.
So much so I've had candidates say, well, whyare you doing it that way?
That's a great question to ask when you'regoing through an interview and learning more
about a company in my opinion.
Okay.
So we understand the positioning from thecandidate side.
We understand a little bit more about thecompany.
(21:14):
How do you guys plan to make money?
Sell materials.
Sell materials.
We actually wanna create materials and sellthem.
Who do you wanna sell them to?
So it'd be companies like in aerospace ordefense, automotive, energy.
You could think about companies like SpaceX orRaytheon or Commonwealth Fusion Systems when
nuclear becomes about where you need novelmaterials to make an impact and actually see
(21:35):
that your technology comes together.
I love using SpaceX as an example.
One, they're an incredible culture company.
But two, if you're trying to land on Mars,right, you hear them talk a lot about TPS,
thermal protection system.
It's a material science problem.
And so making, scaling, and selling that TPS toa SpaceX will be a great example of material
that we wanna scale.
And what are some of the ways that you're ableto leverage AI during that process to help
(21:58):
scale and then also on the selling side?
Absolutely.
So what we do is really break down thescientific process that a human will go
through, and we always describe this process asa very serial based approach where we take one
step after the other as a scientist.
I'll give you a real example.
So when I was a scientist, I would look into aspace and go, okay, I'm gonna make a new
(22:19):
material here, and I would read a bunch ofpublications.
Right?
Five, six different papers in the space, try toget smart, what has been created before.
Okay.
I have an understanding.
Now I'd make a hypothesis, a recommendation.
Here's what I'm gonna try first in the lab.
I would go out and make that, and then you testthat material.
You actually understand what did I make andwhat can it do?
What are the properties this material has?
(22:41):
And then you take all the information, and yourestart that process over again.
And that's very, again, serial in nature.
We flip that on its head with AI.
We are actually doing all of those thingssimultaneously.
We are reading millions of publicationsinstantaneously.
We are generating billions of novel structuresthat we can go actually test and actually weed
(23:02):
out as novel stable materials.
We are running thousands of experiments in anautomated lab, whereas I could only run one at
a time.
And then we are analyzing all the informationwith AI.
And so we actually can draw conclusions betweenan information that the human brain can't pick
up on.
That's how we kind of bring AI deeply throughour process, and there are different pieces
(23:24):
where it comes together, but that is the fullstructure of how we run the scientific process
with a different approach.
And there are a lot of companies that prettymuch, I think, to build any large company
always starts with a lot of scrappiness,especially in the beginning.
What are probably some of the scrappiest thingsthat you've done either to raise money or or
just start building out the company Sure.
(23:45):
Early on?
Yeah.
You gotta be scrappy in a lot of differentways.
So a great example.
So material science is a smaller field thanmost fields.
Right?
If you're going into just language models orfor in in in the machine learning sense, for
example, more people than in material scienceand AI field today.
So when we started the company, we reallywanted to find people who were great at what
(24:08):
they did and would want to actually try tochange this process.
So we did upwards of 800 interviews to find the20 people we thought were the great starting
nucleus for the company.
And we're we're really big believers in howimportant that early nucleus is, but that was a
lot of interviews.
A lot of cold emails, a lot of cold calls toget that many that many across the board.
(24:30):
But in doing so, we really learned for thequalities that we were looking for.
We learned why someone would be a good fit atRadical AI and why they wouldn't be a good fit
at Radical AI.
And so in that scrappiness was an immenseamount of learning and that's one example that
I love to tell, that we really pushed over theline.
And when you first had this idea for Radical,what were the first steps that you did to try
(24:52):
to get the wheel in motion?
Yeah.
So me and one of my other cofounders wereactually at a board meeting in Silicon Valley,
and we were kind of having this idea or thisthought around what what could be a company in
AI that is interesting.
And so a little bit of backstory, Ali Corp, asa venture fund, also does a lot of incubation
work internally.
(25:12):
So they'll dive into a space, they'll learneverything about that space, they'll do deep
diligence in companies that exist, and they'llmake a thesis on either a, one of those
companies is the company to back, or if thereis not a company or one that they don't wanna
back, to incubate themselves.
And that was where radical started to comefrom.
And my cofounder was diving deep into AI, andJorge looked at me one day and said, I just
(25:35):
don't understand when no one is using AI tosolve really hard problems.
Who cares if our email is, you know, optimized?
I'm sure it'd be great, but how do we actuallypush past that?
And I said, well, you know, materials arereally important.
Go figure.
And we started diving into that, and weprobably read three to 400 different scientific
(25:56):
publications on the intersection of materialscience and machine learning.
And we came away from that saying this is thefuture.
This is where science is going to go.
This is truly gonna make an impact.
And that's how we bumped into our thirdcofounder who is an academic professor.
He has built some the most incredible systemsand materials, one being an a lab at Berkeley,
(26:17):
and so he's done this automated fashion before.
And we learned more about this self driving labapproach, these robotic labs that can actually
run these high throughput experiments.
And those ideas meshed together and puttogether a big big template pitch deck and and
went to Kevin Ryan and said, this is what wehave to do.
We have to build this company, and we'd loveyour support.
And if not, we're gonna do it anyway.
And to Kevin's credit, he said, absolutely.
(26:38):
This is incredible, and I wanna be involved andand help us do it.
You raised $70,000,000 to date, the fourthlargest seed round in New York City.
What's your playbook to raising money?
So I think it depends on what type of businessyou're building.
We are what I call a category of deep tech.
We're building real tech hard technology.
(26:59):
I think the the first thing to think about whenyou're trying to raise money is what are you
trying to tell?
Like, what is the vision of the company, andwhat do you want investors to know about what
you're doing?
And I think that's really important because,yes, you wanna get capital.
You also want investors on your cap table whohave a directly aligned interest in what you
(27:21):
are building.
They believe in the future that you want tocreate.
If you don't have that alignment, it's gonna bea very tough relationship outside of
everything, outside of or all the other thingsthat come with being on the cap table.
And so I think if you can articulate what youwanna build, why you wanna build it, and the
way you're gonna change the future, and you canfind alignment in an investor, that's the first
(27:43):
checkpoint that I think is really important.
The second, what have you done?
And, again, this depends on stage to show thatyou'll do whatever it takes.
That might be if it's early recruiting and howdo you get great talent in the door.
It might be early traction on customerdevelopment or sale or sales, and it might be
technology development.
It might be, here's what we built.
(28:04):
Look at how incredible it is.
But you need to have a proof point around weare the best at what we do, and we think that
you should be involved with us if you're gonnamake a bet in this space.
And I think the third is really anunderstanding on why.
Back to that same question.
Like, why are you doing this?
I think there can be, again, a million answersto that question.
(28:24):
There's not a right answer.
But if you don't have a good why for whatyou're doing, as an investor, I think now I
would question why are you doing it in thefirst place.
And I think you will see that from investorsthat start to look in and get interested in
your space and in your business around, so,Joseph, tell me why you decided to do this.
Like, you were at Ali Corp.
You worked with Kevin.
Why?
Why would you go do radical AI?
(28:45):
And it's what I told you earlier.
This is a summation of my life's work.
This is where everything was meant to fold inon.
That's the type of answer I think an investorwants to see.
And where do you wanna see the company in thenext five years from now and then in a ten year
time horizon?
Yeah.
Sure.
Let's start from the ten.
So we believe we're gonna be one the mostimportant companies in the world.
Again, materials impact every industry.
And when we started the company, we had abinary based approach that we still hold to
(29:09):
this day.
This is a $100,000,000,000 company that's oneof the most important in the world where the
technology does not work, and we do not driveenough value.
That's the exact way that we build the companytoday.
And so our ten year vision is removing some ofthe most important materials from industries
that we want to see come into existence.
You can think about energy.
You can think about space travel.
(29:30):
Think about transportation.
These industries require novel internaladvancement.
In the next five years, we'll take the firststepping stone to showing that that can become
a reality, and that exists in what we call theAI scientist.
It is this form of AI, as I mentioned, that cando what a scientist can do from computational
design to experimental confirmation andvalidation.
(29:53):
We really wanna build our first system and thenshow that that system can predict, synthesize,
and analyze novel materials in a better waythan a human scientist can.
And one of the things I've noticed whenfounders are tackling really difficult problems
like you are with Radical, there's alwaysproblems every single week that they're trying
to solve.
What do you think is one of the most difficultproblems you're encountering right now, and how
(30:15):
are you trying to solve it?
From the business side and building a startupor material science?
Deep technology has slower wins than somethinglike a software business does.
You are not going to have ARR stacking monthover month in the very early days of technology
development because you're building thetechnology before you can get there.
And so we you really have to think about theright milestones to set to demonstrate
(30:39):
performance and success and then the rightcadence to celebrate them with the team
internally.
Because you're not gonna have these ARRmilestones or LTV to CAC or whatever other
metric you care about in this in in a differentworld.
It is really important to make sure you'redefined on them and that you stick them.
And we use OKRs in the company veryaggressively.
(31:00):
Everyone that joins the company has to readMeasure What Matters by John Dewar, and it is
really a metric that allows us to groundourselves in what are our milestones, what are
our objectives, and what are the steps we'regonna take to achieve them?
And what are some of those things that you'remeasuring internally to help verify your
success early on?
Absolutely.
So I think speed of execution is the thing thatwe continually come back to, and we use a rule
(31:22):
called the 51% rule.
I think SpaceX or someone similar coined itwhere when you are 51% sure of the decision you
should make, you should just make it.
And we always draw this graph for new hires onthe board where if you actually take your time
in this stepwise approach to making a decision,you accomplish less than if you make very quick
decisions and even have some failures along theway.
(31:44):
And so the speed of execution for radical AI isincredibly important.
And then the second is true performance.
And performance can mean a couple differentthings.
On the software or AI side, it is predictingmaterials that are really interesting, that a
human scientist would look at and say, I didn'tthink of that.
That's really cool.
And then on the experimental side or theautomation side, it is doing science in a way
(32:08):
we haven't thought about doing before.
You know, there's so many variables in science,in the scientific experimentation process, that
are human driven because humans have always ranthe process.
When you move to an automated environment, youremove that constraint, and you can start to
rethink the way some systems operate.
A metric of success for us is when we walkedinto a system that was built with legacy humans
(32:32):
in mind, how well have we accomplished the sameobjective in an automated fashion?
And it's something that we keep very close tabson.
On the 51% rule, what if somebody is thinking,like, okay, what happens if the decision
doesn't work?
How do you address that fear
early So you have to get comfortable is thehonest truth.
You can't expect everyone to be perfectimmediately.
(32:54):
I'm still working on getting good at 51%.
I think you always will be working on that.
I'm a big believer in lifelong learning.
But the real answer, in my opinion, is culture.
They have to be comfortable with failing.
They have to know that their the success oftheir job and of their career at Radical is not
on if every decision was the perfect decision.
(33:16):
It is on if they are working towards a cohesiveand collective objective and accomplishing
Radical's mission.
That's really important.
And so I think if you build that internally,your people naturally start to learn that I
don't care if I'm wrong here.
The ability to make the decision is much moreimportant and the outcome could be huge if I'm
(33:38):
correct, and the risk is really minor.
We just have to restart the project or make analteration or some change.
I think you have to get better with that riskreward relationship, and that's what we talk a
lot about.
51% rule is all about this risk worse versusreward relationship.
Why is it so important for someone to becomfortable with failure?
Because it happens every hour of every day,especially in early stage startups.
(34:00):
That can be as small as, you know, themicrowave stops working in the kitchen to as
big as the system that we tried to automatefailed.
The design didn't work.
And we've had both of those things occur.
And so in startups, you're just always going torun into problems.
And if you're not comfortable having failure,then you're going to continually struggle to
(34:24):
make steps forward.
You're gonna continually struggle to have thatresilience and come back and challenge the
problem the next day.
And you just have be really comfortable withthat.
You've met hundreds of entrepreneurs, if notthousands, have invested in a few, and then now
you yourself are an entrepreneur.
What do you think is the number one trait thatmakes a successful entrepreneur?
(34:46):
You gotta make things happen.
That's your job, is to make things happen inthe fastest way possible.
You can have the greatest strategy sessions.
You have the greatest people.
You can have the most money.
If you don't make things happen, nothing comesfrom that.
And so you just have to have an immense bias toaction and really push for things.
(35:07):
Yeah.
It's one of the things I've noticed acrossespecially young people who have been very
successful Yeah.
Is they really have to break the traditionalnorms because this is like so one of my friends
is his name is Zach Yadigari, and he runs acompany called Cali Eye.
They do, like, food scanning.
They do 18.
They do 30,000,000 in ARR a year.
It's for him.
(35:28):
Between him and a lot of other young peoplethat have been very successful, he's like, I
basically had to stop going through life
Mhmm.
So a lot of people say like, okay, well firstyou, you know, if you wanna build an app, you
gotta go to coding class, you gotta get adegree in computer engineering Yep.
Then maybe you should work at a company andlearn how to build products, and then you can
go out and build something yourself.
(35:48):
He said, you know what?
Screw that.
I'm just gonna figure it out myself.
So he went on YouTube, figured out how to codestuff, and just did it.
And I think that's one of the things I'venoticed with a lot of successful people is they
just have this bias for action and they don'tfollow things linearly, and they're willing to
just take the largest possible leaps just toget things done.
A 100%.
I mean, my wife loves to tell this story.
(36:10):
When I got the job with Kevin Ryan, I walkedupstairs and said, honey, we're moving to New
York next week.
And she laughed and said, oh, that's a goodone.
I said, no.
I'm I'm serious.
Back to the apartment.
We're moving next And it was just this exactlywhat you just said, this this ability to just
think this is the opportunity that I wanna goout and take, and everyone told me I had to
finish my degree.
Everyone told me I had to go get an MBA if Iwanted to break into venture.
(36:31):
Everyone told me you couldn't do it unless youwere an entrepreneur first.
And those aren't true.
What people say are true is never the case.
There is always some finite detail or nuisanceinside of that that you can work and wiggle
with, and I think that's what making thingshappen entails.
How does it feel to have tens of millions ofdollars in the bank at 29 years old knowing
(36:51):
you're gonna build a multibillion dollarbusiness?
It feels exciting for what the future is gonnabe for humanity.
It feels like we have the ability to execute onwhat we have told our investors, our employees,
and the world about what we are going to do.
We are going to create a world that everyonebenefits from and drives the progress of the
(37:11):
human race forward.
I always used to think and one of the things Ilove about Radical is everyone thinks their
mission is the biggest mission.
Brightly so.
They entirely should.
One cool thing about Radicle AI is thatregardless of what industry you work in,
materials are involved.
And so when you think about the impact that wecan have, it is truly every human being on the
(37:33):
planet and potentially in the future in thesolar system.
And for us, that is what drives us every day.
And that is why when you have capital and youhave talent and you have a mission and a vision
to go after, it's exciting because you think ofthe world that you can help build and the
builders that it requires to make it happen.
And for some closing questions, one, what doyou think is your greatest failure, and what
(37:56):
did you learn from it?
You know, one of my bigger failures was when Ifirst got to graduate school.
I was confident in my research ability, and Iwas confident that I would be able to get a lot
of fellowships and work on work that was fundedexternally.
And that didn't happen whatsoever.
(38:19):
I didn't get a single fellowship.
I didn't get rewarded anything.
And the reason that this is important for me isit was the first time that I was confident
something was going to happen and it didn't.
And I had no option but to find a secondalternative or I wouldn't have been funded in
school or in the way that I wanted to be.
And so for me, that failure wasn't the hardestthing I've ever been through.
(38:43):
It wasn't the most shocking to my system thatit happened.
What it was was this first time I smacked intoa wall, but I still had to find a way to get
over it.
And that was an important lesson for me toreally learn.
And I think in that setting, being young andbeing excited about research and having just
gotten into the school and all these factorscoming together, it knocked me down a few pegs
(39:05):
and gave me a realization and a reset.
One of the things I've learned from a lot ofpeople who have been very successful, and this
comes from inspiration from Harry Stebbingsfrom from twenty BC, is that typically there a
lot of people are motivated, of course, butthey're either running from something from
their past or running to something in thefuture.
(39:25):
Sure.
What are you running from or towards?
Running towards towards building a world thatis not blocked by material science.
There are so many things I see that materialsenable.
Look at look at semiconductors and silicon.
The world we live in today, the computer you'reholding, the room that we're in, the apps that
we use, all from that invention in silicon, andthen therefore the transistor and scaling
(39:47):
semiconductor technology.
When I think about that impact and the way theworld looks today and I think about the novel
materials that Radical AI wants to build, wecan't envision what the world is going to look
like.
That's what I'm running towards, helping tocreate a world that people have to imagine and
isn't yet possible in in reality.
(40:09):
If somebody is listening to this and maybe theyhave a laptop, an Internet connection, they
don't have a ton of resources, think of, like,your college shelf.
They wanna become an entrepreneur.
What advice would you give them?
Make stuff happen.
Get things done.
I think you have to do a lot of self learning,and I think you have to talk to a lot of
people.
I think if you email a thousand people a weekfor five weeks straight, you will be shocked at
(40:32):
how many people respond to you and will spendthirty minutes, an hour with you, whatever it
is, telling you about their experiences, givingthem examples of their past, and giving you
advice on what you wanna move forward.
And I think that is a first step in makingthings happen.
I think you can learn anything you want.
I mean, we live in an era today where you canbecome an expert in quantum physics or an
(40:52):
expert gardener, right, through the technologythat's available today.
That is one of the bigger benefits, I think,the up and coming generations can have,
including myself where I'm learning everysingle day.
So if you can couple knowledge with executionor or taking action really, not even execution,
but just as bias to action, you can putyourself in any situation that you wanna be in.
I refuse to believe you can't.
(41:13):
Especially when you're young too.
You have a massive leverage point.
Absolutely.
When you
go in and email people and say, hey, I'm astudent or I'm 18, I'm 19 years old, like,
people pay attention.
They're not gonna pay attention to the 36 yearold who emails, but the 18 or 19 year old,
they'll they'll always pay
for it.
And you stand out.
Like, if you're reaching out to these people,one, you care.
Two, you're thinking about life in a way manyaren't yet thinking about.
And three, you have a motivation.
(41:34):
You have a mission.
No.
Maybe not the mission of removing materials orthe mission of starting one of bigger media
companies in the world, but you have thismission of I wanna figure out what I wanna do
next.
I wanna figure out where I'm going to go fromhere.
And I think that resonates with builders andpeople that have built something of of success
in whatever way, shape, or form that may be.
And I think you separate yourself from thepack.
(41:56):
I think that I mean, Dana White says this allthe time.
I think I think that the current generation isso easy to run over if you just put motivation
and discipline and hard work together.
They're soft.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You said it, not me.
If I sold you over a phone and you could callyour 20 year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
(42:18):
I would call, and I would say to trust theprocess.
I would say to stop trying to interfere withthe natural connections of the dots that I can
now see.
Now I can see them.
At 20, I could not.
I did not know where the next dot was comingfrom, and so I would tell myself, I'm not gonna
tell you what the dots are, and I'm not gonnatell you how they're gonna connect.
(42:39):
I'm just gonna tell you that trust that thosedots are gonna connect.
Keep taking action, and you will see them inten years, fifteen years, twenty years, when
you look back, make complete sense in theirconnection.
That's that's that'd be the only advice I couldgive today.
I'm still a little young.
I'm from the 20 side.
Yeah.
And by your resume, you superstar studied.
You're probably in the top 1% of heroes on theplanet.
(43:01):
What do you think is one rule you live by thatmost people don't?
I actually think a lot of people live by thisrule, but I think it's really important, which
is discipline.
I'm immensely disciplined, and I think a lot ofthe things that I've been able to do come from
that.
When you set a vision and you set a goal, it'sdiscipline that brings you to action, to stay
(43:25):
consistent with that and to achieve it.
And I think a lot of people maybe discount andthey don't think about the simple things in
life.
Know, I learned this from the military, I stillmake my bed every single morning.
It's a funny, cliche thing that a lot of peoplesay.
No one starts my day with a win.
I believe in that.
I do it every single morning no matter where Iam, no matter what happens, no matter where I
am in the world.
(43:45):
That's good for me.
And so I think these little things ofdiscipline enable me to have opportunities that
maybe others don't walk into because they'llgive up, they'll take a side street, they'll
not pay attention to a small marker that's infront of them, or they just get distracted by
the millions of things that life throws yourway.
You know, I'm I'm a new father.
I'm married.
(44:05):
I have a lot of I
have a I have
a thank you.
I have a personal life at home.
I mean, there are a million and onedistractions that can try to come into what
you're doing.
Discipline is how you sort them, bucket them,and execute across all of them.
I firmly believe that.
What does Alex Mosey say?
He says something along the lines of the harderit gets, the more excited he gets because he
knows fewer and few people take that path.
(44:26):
Right?
Exactly right.
And I think that's learning to love the processin a way.
Yeah.
Right?
Because you're like, I haven't been throughthis one yet.
You know, me and my cofounder say that all thetime, this is a tough problem and we haven't
solved this one yet.
Wonder where it's gonna go.
And we love that experience because we knowwhen we come out the other side, we're gonna
have an incredible amount of knowledge on thatparticular moment.
And if you just keep stacking those moments,well, in twenty years, you're gonna be an
(44:49):
entrepreneur who's probably lived through mostthings in the early startup stage.
Those are the things that we love to do.
And I think that's how you start to learn tolove the process.
Yes.
You care about the end result.
Yes.
You care about the way to get there.
But what you really love is the process ofgetting there.
I think that's the most important thing toheart.
Also, feel like if you know how to solve everyproblem, then life gets just pretty boring.
(45:10):
It's incredibly boring.
I don't even know what you do all day.
It's like you always have to have anotherproblem to solve.
And I always tell people, why do some of thegreatest innovators in the world continue to
work or continue to start new companies orcontinue to do what they do?
I think it's exactly that.
I think it is this itch to not make more money,not build another product, not do whatever
(45:31):
they're focused on, but to continue thisprocess of development, of learning, and of
execution.
That is and then from them, things come fromthat, but that's what they really seem to be
chasing.
Awesome.
Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
Thanks, Joseph, for taking the time to come onthe show.
If anyone is building materials at SpaceX or alot of those big companies, go check out
Radical AI.
They're beasts, and thanks for joining.
Joseph, you're in your twenties, and you'veraised upwards of or close to $70,000,000 for
your AI company.
What is it, and what do you do?
And try to explain to me, like, I'm 10 yearsold.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, great to be here.
Thank you for making the time.
So what we really focus on is removingmaterials from some of the hardest problems and
(00:20):
industries in the world.
And so when you think about all of theindustries that we care about today, right,
automotive and aerospace, manufacturing,defense, climate, energy, semiconductors, the
most important industries in the world.
All these are direct results from novelmaterial science advancements that we use to
create the technologies that build thoseindustries.
And that process today is incredibly slow,typically ten plus years, and really expensive,
(00:47):
usually north of a 100,000,000 on average for asingle material system.
Radical AI brings AI and automation tocompletely disrupt how that process operates
and really builds an intelligent scientist thatremoves humans from the loop so that we can do
way faster and more aggressive scientificdiscovery.
(01:07):
And before we get too deep into radical AI,you've accomplished a lot in your twenties.
You're in the army.
You now you were an investor over at Ali Corp.
Sure.
You now run this massive company, one of thelargest seed stage rounds in New York City.
Tell me a little bit more about your earlybackground and your early context.
What do you think shaped you to be as ambitiousas you are today?
(01:28):
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I love this question because I think I'm somuch more ambitious today than I was when I
just started out.
And by saying that now I was when I was anundergraduate, I started working in scientific
research, and I published my first paper as ajunior in college and took the normal route.
Hey.
If I'm publishing papers, I should go tograduate school.
And so I did.
(01:48):
I got into Rice University, which is inHouston.
I moved down to Texas and just started graduateresearch because that was the next thing to do.
And so I'd actually say I wasn't that ambitiousat the time.
I was much more just following this trajectoryand very quickly started to run into
frustrations that you probably felt similar inyour background where the things I cared about,
(02:10):
making an impact, developing new technology,bringing that technology to the world, I wasn't
actually doing in my day to day life.
And academic research is incredibly importantfor the world, but it really focuses on driving
understanding of science, not necessarilycommercialization of science.
And so what I originally thought going toschool, graduate school, would be working on
(02:33):
this technology that would make an impact waskind of sitting stale and stagnant in this only
driving kind of academic research.
And that's where this switch started to, youknow, tick on in my head where I wanted to make
a bigger difference.
And I really wanted to do something that, one,I was passionate about, but two, would really
make a lasting impact on the human race.
And that's exactly how everything proliferatedto radical AI.
(02:55):
Why do you think you felt that you had to leaveyour PhD?
A lot of people think like, okay, if you'reyou're in your PhD, you're probably learning a
ton, it's probably super helpful for yourcareer.
Why do you feel like you had to leave thattraditional path to do something that not a lot
of people are doing to be able to make that bigimpact?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So I had a tough leave of my PhD because Ipassed my qualifying exam.
And so when you go to grad school in The US,you kind of go through academic coursework, and
(03:19):
then you submit a qualifying exam, you become aPhD candidate.
And after you've done this qualifying exam,really, your next step is dissertation.
So you are doing research, continuing topublish, and then you do a dissertation.
So I was one step away removed from that.
My mom is still upset slightly that I decidedto walk away from that, but I think the way I
actually felt like pushing forward was a lackof learning.
(03:42):
And it wasn't learning new science.
Of course, you learn new science every day.
It was this not or this lack of an ability toreally learn about what I wanted to do.
And at this point in time, I started to hone inon entrepreneurship.
I had always kicked around entrepreneurship asa kid.
You know, when I was in graduate school, I hadhorrific attempts at entrepreneurship.
I started a coffee company with my brother,which went out of business because of COVID.
(04:06):
We did a bunch of different things to try tomake money on the side.
So this idea was always there about trying topush forward, but I just kept feeling like I
was, you know, boxed in to the academic pursuitand not able to pursue everything else.
And so after a certain period of time, itbecame too much, and I said, you know what?
I need to take a change.
And really need to think about how I can get atthat end goal I'm going for.
(04:29):
And I started cold outreaching to every VC Icould ever get in touch with and really finding
the ones that I felt like I could learn from.
I knew I was young.
I hadn't done entrepreneurship before in aprofessional setting, and I wanted to learn
from those that had.
And that's how I bumped into Kevin Ryan and andcame up to Alley Court.
Considering the scale of your business today atsuch an early stage too, what do you think is
(04:50):
some of the differences that you have in yourbusiness today that maybe were missing or
lacking with those entrepreneurial endeavorsthat you started in college?
You know, one I think is people, and that comesfrom capital and your ability to bring them in.
But when you're trying to work on really hardproblems, you need really good people.
It's the one of the most important pieces ofbuilding a big company.
(05:11):
And I think the second is really thisunderstanding of an industry that you wanna
change.
You know, I always like to say radical AI isreally a proliferation of my life's work in a
way, and I always tell the company this.
And I my one of my favorite quotes is SteveJobs.
I'm a massive Steve Jobs fan of, you can neverconnect the dots looking forward.
You can only connect the dots lookingbackwards.
(05:32):
And I had done a fellowship when I was ingraduate school at the army research lab.
So it's this corporate research facility,incredible scientist there, who kind of works
on novel research for the US army.
And the goal is to take fundamental work, likeI was talking about earlier, one step a little
bit closer to that commercialization avenue.
And so here, I was really starting to scratchthat itch of, wow.
(05:56):
I wanna actually bring things into the world.
Right?
And so it was, like, one step closer.
And so I started to really understand all ofthe fragmented processes of materials discovery
and innovation.
And then when I became an investor, I was onthe board of a couple of different companies.
I was an observer at a few companies.
I had done investments in material science.
I watched how they were building companies indifferent parts of the marketing materials that
(06:17):
they were attacking.
Again, back to that quote, all of these lookingbackwards make complete sense to where Radical
AI comes from.
At the time, I didn't actually know.
I just was kinda pushing forward to see whereit went.
And so when all of those came together, I feltlike I had a deep understanding of a space I
had worked in for the better part of the lastdecade and knew exactly what I wanted to do and
that I wanted to make a big impact.
(06:38):
And AI and automation are really at a time andplace where this is the perfect opportunity.
It's pretty unique to end up starting a companyafter being in the army.
You also had a pretty star studded careerthere.
You dealt with biological weapons, you were inlike the top 10% of your class, honor graduate.
There are a lot of things that you alsoaccomplished there.
What do you think are a few things that youlearned after spending about six, seven years
(07:01):
in the army that you took with you in yourentrepreneurial endeavors?
Yeah.
The army was truly a remarkable experience forme.
I was in the National Guard, so did service onthe weekends, then two weeks in the summer,
which is called annual training.
And you're very much still a part of the normalarmy component.
So basic training, annual individual training,you kinda do all these things.
And the army teaches you resilience.
(07:24):
You have to be unbelievably dedicated to themission that you're going after because there
is a million and one obstacles that are gonnapop up on your path to achieve success.
Sounds very similar to entrepreneurship.
Right?
And it very much is.
And so that was the biggest lesson that Ilearned from the army is that you just have to
keep beating down the door until it falls over.
And I think the second thing for me that wassuper important was, you know, there's not
(07:47):
really too low of a place that you can be.
I have slept on some of the hardest floors inthe world or in places that you wouldn't wanna
sleep, and I've also had some of the most funin environments where people would not
typically describe as fun.
And I barely scratched the surface on what thetrue heroes in this country did who have
deployed downrange and done serious hard jobsin the past.
(08:08):
But you just learn this ability to embrace thesuck.
And you hear this saying from Navy SEALs andGreen Berets all the time, but this embrace the
suck is is a mentality that I absolutely love.
You learn to love the process.
And I think that's one of the keys toentrepreneurship is, yes, the end result is
important, it's the process that keeps youcoming back over and over and over again.
(08:29):
And there's so much learning inside of that.
I feel like it's also really important toobecause it builds a lot of mental toughness.
And if you don't have that mental toughness,when things are going great and then they start
not to be going good, then you kinda are inthis like state of floatlessness where you're
not quite sure what to do because you haven'texperienced before.
What are some of the most difficultenvironments you were in in during that time
and how did you approach it?
(08:50):
Yeah.
Again, so luckily for me, I wasn't in anythingtoo difficult.
I'd say one of the one of the more difficultenvironments was actually some of the
complications that come from being a full timecitizen as well as a soldier.
So I'll give you a good example.
In my second year of graduate school or secondor third year of graduate school, we got
deployed in Houston for riots that were on theon the George Floyd riots that occurred.
(09:13):
And that was, one, had to step away fromacademia in the middle of doing a project.
Two, had to deal with a very contentioussituation, of course, in the area, different
opinions across a bunch of different people.
And then three, actually had to step away fromfamily, which all soldiers and and and people
in the military have to go through.
Those three things compounding on each otherwere quite a difficult moment.
(09:35):
We were sleeping kind of, you know, ad hoc andon the go when we could.
I'm I was in this a CBRN specialist in themilitary, which is someone who is responsible
for things like gas mask and nuclear warfare,biological weapons, and so we get a lot of
training in those areas.
It's super important to make sure all thatequipment is up to date and spec ed and
everything.
And so there was this high pressure situationwith things going on at home and in the real
(09:58):
world that I couldn't control.
I don't like not having control of things,naturally.
And so having to balance that and learning thatyou can only control what you can control, and
that's one of the values of radical AI is wecontrol what we can control, and the things
that we can't, we let go, was just a reallyimportant lesson to learn.
That was challenging.
And I think the second thing I always talkabout is when I was at basic training.
(10:19):
So basic training for the military really testsmental toughness and your ability to exercise
discipline.
Can say they're disciplined.
Everyone can say that they follow a routine.
You don't have an option at basic training.
You're up at 04:00 in the morning every singlemorning whether you want to be or not.
You eat three square meals a day whether youwant to or not.
I think that exercise puts an immense amount ofstress on the body.
(10:44):
And for me, that wasn't the hard part.
I was put into a leadership role in that.
And I actually had to get other people mucholder than me.
I 20, 21 years old at the time, 30, 35 yearsold, understand and really embrace that part of
joining the military.
That was challenging.
Everyone is feeling the same immense amount ofstress, and trying to figure out how to lead in
(11:05):
an environment I hadn't been in before whilealso feeling that same stress was quite
challenging.
You spend a lot of time on the technical sidelearning about bioweapons and and deep tech in
the military, but then you eventuallytransitioned to Ali Corp coming Kevin Ryan.
What's the story there?
You end up joining as an investor.
It's kind of a different side of a differentlens for sure.
How did that come to be?
Absolutely.
(11:25):
So I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Right?
And I knew I didn't know shit about it.
And so I knew I was gonna have to figure outsomeone I could learn from to actually go out
and build a company one day in the future.
And so when I was going out to talk to venturecapitalists, I was cold emailing probably a 100
people a day, some average like that.
And I was looking for people that had built acompany, particularly in the past, or had a
(11:48):
group of people at the firm who had built acompany.
And I bumped in to Kevin Ryan.
I emailed him, and to his credit, he emailed meback and said, let's hop on a call.
And so I got on a call, and I told him Iactually told him, if you're not investing in
material science, you're not investing inanything in the future.
And he was like, that's a big claim.
I don't know if that's true, but why don't youcome to New York and we'll see what happens?
He gave me a six months opportunity.
(12:10):
What the time?
I was in DC working at the Army Research Lab,so doing some of that commercialization work
for the Army.
And this is my fourth year of my PhD as well,so I was doing a joint appointment.
And he was like, come to New York.
Six months, if it goes well, you found your newcareer, and we can work together.
You can look about investing in companies, thenyou can start one.
Or if it goes poorly, you can go back toschool, and you had a great internship or
(12:31):
opportunity in the interim, and that was aboutfive years ago.
So it's been going pretty smooth from there.
And when you walked away from your PhD andeverything there, what were you feeling at that
time?
Did you feel like a sense of like, losing asense of structure or, like, a backup plan?
Or how do you think about that?
I felt felt free.
I felt like I could finally go after somethingI had been talking about thinking about and
(12:52):
debating on for for quite from quite some time.
And I think one of the big hurdles I talk tothe team all about it all the time is just
getting started.
That was a version for me of just gettingstarted.
I knew I wanted to do this.
I knew I did not wanna go into the scientificdiscipline from a research perspective, a
professional research scientist, and I knewthat what I really wanted to do could only come
(13:12):
from taking action and going and making thathappen.
And so for me, that was my get started moment.
And you mentioned one of the most importantthings you could do is, like, focus on only the
things that you can control.
Yeah.
There a lot of people that say that and thinkabout like, okay, I wish I could just and they
try to, but then they get distracted and otherthings that are going on around them.
Sure.
How do you actually just zone in and just focuson what you can control?
(13:34):
Yeah.
There's a great book which is calledEssentialism, which one of my cofounders made
me read probably a couple months before westarted the company.
We had worked together both at Alley Corp.
He's incredible.
And the whole premise of this book is reallythat when you're focused on too many things at
one time, naturally, everything just doesn'tget your full attention.
Right?
And so it doesn't get your best work productfrom that.
(13:55):
Whereas if you really dedicate all of yourattention to one thing, you can accomplish that
thing and then move on to the next thing thatyou were gonna do and, again, have that same
attention.
I think that book was pretty level setting forme.
Right?
Again, I had a lot of ambition when I startedgetting into venture.
I wanted to do a lot of things.
I wanted people to see that I could perform,and I think a lot of people get the wrong idea
(14:17):
of what that is.
Right?
They wanna look busy rather than find successfor whatever that means for them.
And I think I very quickly learned that justbeing busy or just taking a lot of motion
without very specific direction is not a pathto success.
You need to generate a lot of motion, but youneed to do that while you're pointing in
somewhere that you want to be, whatever yournorth star might be.
(14:39):
And that was a really important learning forme, and we take that into the company every
day.
There are a million and one things that we canbuild when you're building an integrated system
to solve materials research and development.
We have to be very pinpointed on what we'refocused on this week, this day, this hour so
that we can continue to push the companyforward.
And all of that feeds into a bigger vision.
(14:59):
I love Jeff Bezos' quote all the time, to be,you know, concrete on your vision and flexible
on the details.
And that flexibility is that focus individuallyas you need it.
When you told Kevin Ryan that this industrythat you're in now is going to be, like, the
future, it kinda has to focus on it, what weresome of the things that you might have said to
convince him at the time that this was actuallythe future?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
(15:19):
I think the thing that we always talk aboutwhen we're talking about radical is you have to
think about all the ages of the human historyand how they're defined.
Right?
The stone age, the bron age, the silicon age.
I mean, our entire industry in tech, SiliconValley is named after a material invention,
silicon being used in the transistor, whichkind of unlocked an Internet in a wave that we
all know and live in today.
(15:40):
And so for us, what we try to explain and whatwe try to articulate is that it doesn't matter
what you do, what industry you work in, or whatyou care about.
It could be everything from space travel andnuclear fusion through to cosmetics or
different athletic wear.
All of those things have materials as thebedrock to the performance that they're
achieving, and that is truly why this industryis so impactful.
(16:02):
I mean, we say all the time, it is one of thelargest industries in the world that can truly
unlock technologies that will alter the courseof human history, and that's what gets us so
excited.
And while you were at AliCorp, what were someof the things that you were looking at in terms
of from an investing line?
How did you approach that, and then how do youapproach it differently maybe as an
entrepreneur?
Yeah.
I love telling this story because it's humblingin the sense that entrepreneurs always used to
(16:26):
give me sometimes pushback when I'd wanna opineon their business, and I would get frustrated
as a young investor.
I'm like, hey.
I wanna help you build a big company too.
And they would always have this perspective of,yes.
You just haven't been here yet, and so Iappreciate the opinion.
But let let me think a little bit.
On the flip side of the seat now, man, do Iunderstand what those entrepreneurs were
(16:47):
saying.
And it's an entirely different ballgame tobuild a company than to just invest in one.
But there were a couple key things I learnedfrom that process.
I think the first thing is really your culture.
Companies build a culture from day one betweenthe cofounders, which really inform the rest of
the company on how they're going to operate.
(17:08):
And the second you lose your culture, youforget about your culture, you ignore your
culture, things start to erode from therebecause the culture that your cofounding team
has is why the company came into existence inthe first place.
And so that was the first.
Second is bias to action.
You have to have a ridiculous bias to actioninside startups, in my opinion.
And the companies that I saw that had the mostsuccess took immense effort to make action
(17:35):
happen, and the ones that didn't let thingshappen to them.
And I think those are the differences, some ofthe differences between good and bad companies.
And then the third is talent.
And I hate to come back to this, but it isincredibly important.
The people that make up the company are trulywhere innovation comes from.
They have to be people who believe in mission,who subscribe to your culture, and who are the
(17:57):
best at what they do.
If you can get those three things together, youtruly have a special group of people that can
unlock novel technology, new performance, orwhatever other thing you might be focused on.
We've sat down with a lot of entrepreneurs whohave scaled to multibillion dollar businesses.
We've seen culture is one of those things thatlot of people like to talk about.
Yeah.
What do you think are the top three things thatare important from a culture's perspective to
(18:22):
get right early on?
Mentality.
You know, we tell people all the time, and andthere was this amazing interview that Brian
Chesky did a couple a couple weeks or monthsback with with Keith Raboy where he talks
about, you know, not faking the pitch topotential employees around how hard it's going
to be to build what you're building.
And we believe that at Radical AI.
(18:44):
We are trying to change the scientific process.
It's been around for thousands of years.
It's led to some of the most importantdiscoveries in human history, and we're trying
to change that entirely.
That's hard.
We're gonna run into a lot of problems.
You have you're gonna be continually tested onthat journey.
If you bring in people who don't understandthat and have the mentality of this is a
(19:05):
problem I wanna solve, you're gonna struggle.
And so mentality is something that you reallywanna vet against in culture.
I think number two is alignment to the mission.
I tell every single person that I interview inthe company, if you are looking for a job, this
is not the place for you.
Go work somewhere else.
If you are looking for a dedication to amission that can make an impact, then you
should come to Radical AI.
(19:26):
And I think the third piece is reallyresilience, not being afraid to challenge and
ask the question why from first principlesperspective.
When you do that, you're gonna run intoproblems, and you have to be ridiculously
resilient, especially on those other twocategories of culture that we care about, to
actually achieve success, to continue to pushthrough.
You can be all bought in on the mission, andyou can have the right mentality about what
(19:49):
we're building.
But if you cannot continue to come back afteryou fail, the other two don't matter.
And so it's really a combination of these threethings just to call out a couple that are
really important.
Let's play a scenario.
Let's say I'm, like, someone who wants to applyto work over at Radical.
What are the a few things that I should besaying or thinking about during that interview
that would set me apart from 99% of othercandidates?
(20:11):
The first thing I always wanna know is whatdrives you as a person, what makes you wake up
every day and do what you do.
And the answer that I'm always looking for isactually it doesn't matter what the answer is,
It just can't be shallow.
It needs to be something that authenticallyspeaks to why you do what you do because that's
what we do.
We all deeply believe in what we work on, andyou need to share that same passion.
Problem solving ability.
(20:33):
Goes to the three things that I just mentioned.
We always ask people to solve a problem andactually walk through the problem as they solve
it.
Like, give us the step by step detail of whatyou're doing and why because those are more
important than just having the answer in theend.
And then three, first principle analysis.
Why is one of the most important questionsstart up can ask in the world.
(20:54):
We ask why repeatedly inside the company, andwe would wanna see that the interview quite
frequently.
So much so I've had candidates say, well, whyare you doing it that way?
That's a great question to ask when you'regoing through an interview and learning more
about a company in my opinion.
Okay.
So we understand the positioning from thecandidate side.
We understand a little bit more about thecompany.
(21:14):
How do you guys plan to make money?
Sell materials.
Sell materials.
We actually wanna create materials and sellthem.
Who do you wanna sell them to?
So it'd be companies like in aerospace ordefense, automotive, energy.
You could think about companies like SpaceX orRaytheon or Commonwealth Fusion Systems when
nuclear becomes about where you need novelmaterials to make an impact and actually see
(21:35):
that your technology comes together.
I love using SpaceX as an example.
One, they're an incredible culture company.
But two, if you're trying to land on Mars,right, you hear them talk a lot about TPS,
thermal protection system.
It's a material science problem.
And so making, scaling, and selling that TPS toa SpaceX will be a great example of material
that we wanna scale.
And what are some of the ways that you're ableto leverage AI during that process to help
(21:58):
scale and then also on the selling side?
Absolutely.
So what we do is really break down thescientific process that a human will go
through, and we always describe this process asa very serial based approach where we take one
step after the other as a scientist.
I'll give you a real example.
So when I was a scientist, I would look into aspace and go, okay, I'm gonna make a new
(22:19):
material here, and I would read a bunch ofpublications.
Right?
Five, six different papers in the space, try toget smart, what has been created before.
Okay.
I have an understanding.
Now I'd make a hypothesis, a recommendation.
Here's what I'm gonna try first in the lab.
I would go out and make that, and then you testthat material.
You actually understand what did I make andwhat can it do?
What are the properties this material has?
(22:41):
And then you take all the information, and yourestart that process over again.
And that's very, again, serial in nature.
We flip that on its head with AI.
We are actually doing all of those thingssimultaneously.
We are reading millions of publicationsinstantaneously.
We are generating billions of novel structuresthat we can go actually test and actually weed
(23:02):
out as novel stable materials.
We are running thousands of experiments in anautomated lab, whereas I could only run one at
a time.
And then we are analyzing all the informationwith AI.
And so we actually can draw conclusions betweenan information that the human brain can't pick
up on.
That's how we kind of bring AI deeply throughour process, and there are different pieces
(23:24):
where it comes together, but that is the fullstructure of how we run the scientific process
with a different approach.
And there are a lot of companies that prettymuch, I think, to build any large company
always starts with a lot of scrappiness,especially in the beginning.
What are probably some of the scrappiest thingsthat you've done either to raise money or or
just start building out the company Sure.
(23:45):
Early on?
Yeah.
You gotta be scrappy in a lot of differentways.
So a great example.
So material science is a smaller field thanmost fields.
Right?
If you're going into just language models orfor in in in the machine learning sense, for
example, more people than in material scienceand AI field today.
So when we started the company, we reallywanted to find people who were great at what
(24:08):
they did and would want to actually try tochange this process.
So we did upwards of 800 interviews to find the20 people we thought were the great starting
nucleus for the company.
And we're we're really big believers in howimportant that early nucleus is, but that was a
lot of interviews.
A lot of cold emails, a lot of cold calls toget that many that many across the board.
(24:30):
But in doing so, we really learned for thequalities that we were looking for.
We learned why someone would be a good fit atRadical AI and why they wouldn't be a good fit
at Radical AI.
And so in that scrappiness was an immenseamount of learning and that's one example that
I love to tell, that we really pushed over theline.
And when you first had this idea for Radical,what were the first steps that you did to try
(24:52):
to get the wheel in motion?
Yeah.
So me and one of my other cofounders wereactually at a board meeting in Silicon Valley,
and we were kind of having this idea or thisthought around what what could be a company in
AI that is interesting.
And so a little bit of backstory, Ali Corp, asa venture fund, also does a lot of incubation
work internally.
(25:12):
So they'll dive into a space, they'll learneverything about that space, they'll do deep
diligence in companies that exist, and they'llmake a thesis on either a, one of those
companies is the company to back, or if thereis not a company or one that they don't wanna
back, to incubate themselves.
And that was where radical started to comefrom.
And my cofounder was diving deep into AI, andJorge looked at me one day and said, I just
(25:35):
don't understand when no one is using AI tosolve really hard problems.
Who cares if our email is, you know, optimized?
I'm sure it'd be great, but how do we actuallypush past that?
And I said, well, you know, materials arereally important.
Go figure.
And we started diving into that, and weprobably read three to 400 different scientific
(25:56):
publications on the intersection of materialscience and machine learning.
And we came away from that saying this is thefuture.
This is where science is going to go.
This is truly gonna make an impact.
And that's how we bumped into our thirdcofounder who is an academic professor.
He has built some the most incredible systemsand materials, one being an a lab at Berkeley,
(26:17):
and so he's done this automated fashion before.
And we learned more about this self driving labapproach, these robotic labs that can actually
run these high throughput experiments.
And those ideas meshed together and puttogether a big big template pitch deck and and
went to Kevin Ryan and said, this is what wehave to do.
We have to build this company, and we'd loveyour support.
And if not, we're gonna do it anyway.
And to Kevin's credit, he said, absolutely.
(26:38):
This is incredible, and I wanna be involved andand help us do it.
You raised $70,000,000 to date, the fourthlargest seed round in New York City.
What's your playbook to raising money?
So I think it depends on what type of businessyou're building.
We are what I call a category of deep tech.
We're building real tech hard technology.
(26:59):
I think the the first thing to think about whenyou're trying to raise money is what are you
trying to tell?
Like, what is the vision of the company, andwhat do you want investors to know about what
you're doing?
And I think that's really important because,yes, you wanna get capital.
You also want investors on your cap table whohave a directly aligned interest in what you
(27:21):
are building.
They believe in the future that you want tocreate.
If you don't have that alignment, it's gonna bea very tough relationship outside of
everything, outside of or all the other thingsthat come with being on the cap table.
And so I think if you can articulate what youwanna build, why you wanna build it, and the
way you're gonna change the future, and you canfind alignment in an investor, that's the first
(27:43):
checkpoint that I think is really important.
The second, what have you done?
And, again, this depends on stage to show thatyou'll do whatever it takes.
That might be if it's early recruiting and howdo you get great talent in the door.
It might be early traction on customerdevelopment or sale or sales, and it might be
technology development.
It might be, here's what we built.
(28:04):
Look at how incredible it is.
But you need to have a proof point around weare the best at what we do, and we think that
you should be involved with us if you're gonnamake a bet in this space.
And I think the third is really anunderstanding on why.
Back to that same question.
Like, why are you doing this?
I think there can be, again, a million answersto that question.
(28:24):
There's not a right answer.
But if you don't have a good why for whatyou're doing, as an investor, I think now I
would question why are you doing it in thefirst place.
And I think you will see that from investorsthat start to look in and get interested in
your space and in your business around, so,Joseph, tell me why you decided to do this.
Like, you were at Ali Corp.
You worked with Kevin.
Why?
Why would you go do radical AI?
(28:45):
And it's what I told you earlier.
This is a summation of my life's work.
This is where everything was meant to fold inon.
That's the type of answer I think an investorwants to see.
And where do you wanna see the company in thenext five years from now and then in a ten year
time horizon?
Yeah.
Sure.
Let's start from the ten.
So we believe we're gonna be one the mostimportant companies in the world.
Again, materials impact every industry.
And when we started the company, we had abinary based approach that we still hold to
(29:09):
this day.
This is a $100,000,000,000 company that's oneof the most important in the world where the
technology does not work, and we do not driveenough value.
That's the exact way that we build the companytoday.
And so our ten year vision is removing some ofthe most important materials from industries
that we want to see come into existence.
You can think about energy.
You can think about space travel.
(29:30):
Think about transportation.
These industries require novel internaladvancement.
In the next five years, we'll take the firststepping stone to showing that that can become
a reality, and that exists in what we call theAI scientist.
It is this form of AI, as I mentioned, that cando what a scientist can do from computational
design to experimental confirmation andvalidation.
(29:53):
We really wanna build our first system and thenshow that that system can predict, synthesize,
and analyze novel materials in a better waythan a human scientist can.
And one of the things I've noticed whenfounders are tackling really difficult problems
like you are with Radical, there's alwaysproblems every single week that they're trying
to solve.
What do you think is one of the most difficultproblems you're encountering right now, and how
(30:15):
are you trying to solve it?
From the business side and building a startupor material science?
Deep technology has slower wins than somethinglike a software business does.
You are not going to have ARR stacking monthover month in the very early days of technology
development because you're building thetechnology before you can get there.
And so we you really have to think about theright milestones to set to demonstrate
(30:39):
performance and success and then the rightcadence to celebrate them with the team
internally.
Because you're not gonna have these ARRmilestones or LTV to CAC or whatever other
metric you care about in this in in a differentworld.
It is really important to make sure you'redefined on them and that you stick them.
And we use OKRs in the company veryaggressively.
(31:00):
Everyone that joins the company has to readMeasure What Matters by John Dewar, and it is
really a metric that allows us to groundourselves in what are our milestones, what are
our objectives, and what are the steps we'regonna take to achieve them?
And what are some of those things that you'remeasuring internally to help verify your
success early on?
Absolutely.
So I think speed of execution is the thing thatwe continually come back to, and we use a rule
(31:22):
called the 51% rule.
I think SpaceX or someone similar coined itwhere when you are 51% sure of the decision you
should make, you should just make it.
And we always draw this graph for new hires onthe board where if you actually take your time
in this stepwise approach to making a decision,you accomplish less than if you make very quick
decisions and even have some failures along theway.
(31:44):
And so the speed of execution for radical AI isincredibly important.
And then the second is true performance.
And performance can mean a couple differentthings.
On the software or AI side, it is predictingmaterials that are really interesting, that a
human scientist would look at and say, I didn'tthink of that.
That's really cool.
And then on the experimental side or theautomation side, it is doing science in a way
(32:08):
we haven't thought about doing before.
You know, there's so many variables in science,in the scientific experimentation process, that
are human driven because humans have always ranthe process.
When you move to an automated environment, youremove that constraint, and you can start to
rethink the way some systems operate.
A metric of success for us is when we walkedinto a system that was built with legacy humans
(32:32):
in mind, how well have we accomplished the sameobjective in an automated fashion?
And it's something that we keep very close tabson.
On the 51% rule, what if somebody is thinking,like, okay, what happens if the decision
doesn't work?
How do you address that fear
early So you have to get comfortable is thehonest truth.
You can't expect everyone to be perfectimmediately.
(32:54):
I'm still working on getting good at 51%.
I think you always will be working on that.
I'm a big believer in lifelong learning.
But the real answer, in my opinion, is culture.
They have to be comfortable with failing.
They have to know that their the success oftheir job and of their career at Radical is not
on if every decision was the perfect decision.
(33:16):
It is on if they are working towards a cohesiveand collective objective and accomplishing
Radical's mission.
That's really important.
And so I think if you build that internally,your people naturally start to learn that I
don't care if I'm wrong here.
The ability to make the decision is much moreimportant and the outcome could be huge if I'm
(33:38):
correct, and the risk is really minor.
We just have to restart the project or make analteration or some change.
I think you have to get better with that riskreward relationship, and that's what we talk a
lot about.
51% rule is all about this risk worse versusreward relationship.
Why is it so important for someone to becomfortable with failure?
Because it happens every hour of every day,especially in early stage startups.
(34:00):
That can be as small as, you know, themicrowave stops working in the kitchen to as
big as the system that we tried to automatefailed.
The design didn't work.
And we've had both of those things occur.
And so in startups, you're just always going torun into problems.
And if you're not comfortable having failure,then you're going to continually struggle to
(34:24):
make steps forward.
You're gonna continually struggle to have thatresilience and come back and challenge the
problem the next day.
And you just have be really comfortable withthat.
You've met hundreds of entrepreneurs, if notthousands, have invested in a few, and then now
you yourself are an entrepreneur.
What do you think is the number one trait thatmakes a successful entrepreneur?
(34:46):
You gotta make things happen.
That's your job, is to make things happen inthe fastest way possible.
You can have the greatest strategy sessions.
You have the greatest people.
You can have the most money.
If you don't make things happen, nothing comesfrom that.
And so you just have to have an immense bias toaction and really push for things.
(35:07):
Yeah.
It's one of the things I've noticed acrossespecially young people who have been very
successful Yeah.
Is they really have to break the traditionalnorms because this is like so one of my friends
is his name is Zach Yadigari, and he runs acompany called Cali Eye.
They do, like, food scanning.
They do 18.
They do 30,000,000 in ARR a year.
It's for him.
(35:28):
Between him and a lot of other young peoplethat have been very successful, he's like, I
basically had to stop going through life
Mhmm.
So a lot of people say like, okay, well firstyou, you know, if you wanna build an app, you
gotta go to coding class, you gotta get adegree in computer engineering Yep.
Then maybe you should work at a company andlearn how to build products, and then you can
go out and build something yourself.
(35:48):
He said, you know what?
Screw that.
I'm just gonna figure it out myself.
So he went on YouTube, figured out how to codestuff, and just did it.
And I think that's one of the things I'venoticed with a lot of successful people is they
just have this bias for action and they don'tfollow things linearly, and they're willing to
just take the largest possible leaps just toget things done.
A 100%.
I mean, my wife loves to tell this story.
(36:10):
When I got the job with Kevin Ryan, I walkedupstairs and said, honey, we're moving to New
York next week.
And she laughed and said, oh, that's a goodone.
I said, no.
I'm I'm serious.
Back to the apartment.
We're moving next And it was just this exactlywhat you just said, this this ability to just
think this is the opportunity that I wanna goout and take, and everyone told me I had to
finish my degree.
Everyone told me I had to go get an MBA if Iwanted to break into venture.
(36:31):
Everyone told me you couldn't do it unless youwere an entrepreneur first.
And those aren't true.
What people say are true is never the case.
There is always some finite detail or nuisanceinside of that that you can work and wiggle
with, and I think that's what making thingshappen entails.
How does it feel to have tens of millions ofdollars in the bank at 29 years old knowing
(36:51):
you're gonna build a multibillion dollarbusiness?
It feels exciting for what the future is gonnabe for humanity.
It feels like we have the ability to execute onwhat we have told our investors, our employees,
and the world about what we are going to do.
We are going to create a world that everyonebenefits from and drives the progress of the
(37:11):
human race forward.
I always used to think and one of the things Ilove about Radical is everyone thinks their
mission is the biggest mission.
Brightly so.
They entirely should.
One cool thing about Radicle AI is thatregardless of what industry you work in,
materials are involved.
And so when you think about the impact that wecan have, it is truly every human being on the
(37:33):
planet and potentially in the future in thesolar system.
And for us, that is what drives us every day.
And that is why when you have capital and youhave talent and you have a mission and a vision
to go after, it's exciting because you think ofthe world that you can help build and the
builders that it requires to make it happen.
And for some closing questions, one, what doyou think is your greatest failure, and what
(37:56):
did you learn from it?
You know, one of my bigger failures was when Ifirst got to graduate school.
I was confident in my research ability, and Iwas confident that I would be able to get a lot
of fellowships and work on work that was fundedexternally.
And that didn't happen whatsoever.
(38:19):
I didn't get a single fellowship.
I didn't get rewarded anything.
And the reason that this is important for me isit was the first time that I was confident
something was going to happen and it didn't.
And I had no option but to find a secondalternative or I wouldn't have been funded in
school or in the way that I wanted to be.
And so for me, that failure wasn't the hardestthing I've ever been through.
(38:43):
It wasn't the most shocking to my system thatit happened.
What it was was this first time I smacked intoa wall, but I still had to find a way to get
over it.
And that was an important lesson for me toreally learn.
And I think in that setting, being young andbeing excited about research and having just
gotten into the school and all these factorscoming together, it knocked me down a few pegs
(39:05):
and gave me a realization and a reset.
One of the things I've learned from a lot ofpeople who have been very successful, and this
comes from inspiration from Harry Stebbingsfrom from twenty BC, is that typically there a
lot of people are motivated, of course, butthey're either running from something from
their past or running to something in thefuture.
(39:25):
Sure.
What are you running from or towards?
Running towards towards building a world thatis not blocked by material science.
There are so many things I see that materialsenable.
Look at look at semiconductors and silicon.
The world we live in today, the computer you'reholding, the room that we're in, the apps that
we use, all from that invention in silicon, andthen therefore the transistor and scaling
(39:47):
semiconductor technology.
When I think about that impact and the way theworld looks today and I think about the novel
materials that Radical AI wants to build, wecan't envision what the world is going to look
like.
That's what I'm running towards, helping tocreate a world that people have to imagine and
isn't yet possible in in reality.
(40:09):
If somebody is listening to this and maybe theyhave a laptop, an Internet connection, they
don't have a ton of resources, think of, like,your college shelf.
They wanna become an entrepreneur.
What advice would you give them?
Make stuff happen.
Get things done.
I think you have to do a lot of self learning,and I think you have to talk to a lot of
people.
I think if you email a thousand people a weekfor five weeks straight, you will be shocked at
(40:32):
how many people respond to you and will spendthirty minutes, an hour with you, whatever it
is, telling you about their experiences, givingthem examples of their past, and giving you
advice on what you wanna move forward.
And I think that is a first step in makingthings happen.
I think you can learn anything you want.
I mean, we live in an era today where you canbecome an expert in quantum physics or an
(40:52):
expert gardener, right, through the technologythat's available today.
That is one of the bigger benefits, I think,the up and coming generations can have,
including myself where I'm learning everysingle day.
So if you can couple knowledge with executionor or taking action really, not even execution,
but just as bias to action, you can putyourself in any situation that you wanna be in.
I refuse to believe you can't.
(41:13):
Especially when you're young too.
You have a massive leverage point.
Absolutely.
When you
go in and email people and say, hey, I'm astudent or I'm 18, I'm 19 years old, like,
people pay attention.
They're not gonna pay attention to the 36 yearold who emails, but the 18 or 19 year old,
they'll they'll always pay
for it.
And you stand out.
Like, if you're reaching out to these people,one, you care.
Two, you're thinking about life in a way manyaren't yet thinking about.
And three, you have a motivation.
(41:34):
You have a mission.
No.
Maybe not the mission of removing materials orthe mission of starting one of bigger media
companies in the world, but you have thismission of I wanna figure out what I wanna do
next.
I wanna figure out where I'm going to go fromhere.
And I think that resonates with builders andpeople that have built something of of success
in whatever way, shape, or form that may be.
And I think you separate yourself from thepack.
(41:56):
I think that I mean, Dana White says this allthe time.
I think I think that the current generation isso easy to run over if you just put motivation
and discipline and hard work together.
They're soft.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You said it, not me.
If I sold you over a phone and you could callyour 20 year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
(42:18):
I would call, and I would say to trust theprocess.
I would say to stop trying to interfere withthe natural connections of the dots that I can
now see.
Now I can see them.
At 20, I could not.
I did not know where the next dot was comingfrom, and so I would tell myself, I'm not gonna
tell you what the dots are, and I'm not gonnatell you how they're gonna connect.
(42:39):
I'm just gonna tell you that trust that thosedots are gonna connect.
Keep taking action, and you will see them inten years, fifteen years, twenty years, when
you look back, make complete sense in theirconnection.
That's that's that'd be the only advice I couldgive today.
I'm still a little young.
I'm from the 20 side.
Yeah.
And by your resume, you superstar studied.
You're probably in the top 1% of heroes on theplanet.
(43:01):
What do you think is one rule you live by thatmost people don't?
I actually think a lot of people live by thisrule, but I think it's really important, which
is discipline.
I'm immensely disciplined, and I think a lot ofthe things that I've been able to do come from
that.
When you set a vision and you set a goal, it'sdiscipline that brings you to action, to stay
(43:25):
consistent with that and to achieve it.
And I think a lot of people maybe discount andthey don't think about the simple things in
life.
Know, I learned this from the military, I stillmake my bed every single morning.
It's a funny, cliche thing that a lot of peoplesay.
No one starts my day with a win.
I believe in that.
I do it every single morning no matter where Iam, no matter what happens, no matter where I
am in the world.
(43:45):
That's good for me.
And so I think these little things ofdiscipline enable me to have opportunities that
maybe others don't walk into because they'llgive up, they'll take a side street, they'll
not pay attention to a small marker that's infront of them, or they just get distracted by
the millions of things that life throws yourway.
You know, I'm I'm a new father.
I'm married.
(44:05):
I have a lot of I
have a I have
a thank you.
I have a personal life at home.
I mean, there are a million and onedistractions that can try to come into what
you're doing.
Discipline is how you sort them, bucket them,and execute across all of them.
I firmly believe that.
What does Alex Mosey say?
He says something along the lines of the harderit gets, the more excited he gets because he
knows fewer and few people take that path.
(44:26):
Right?
Exactly right.
And I think that's learning to love the processin a way.
Yeah.
Right?
Because you're like, I haven't been throughthis one yet.
You know, me and my cofounder say that all thetime, this is a tough problem and we haven't
solved this one yet.
Wonder where it's gonna go.
And we love that experience because we knowwhen we come out the other side, we're gonna
have an incredible amount of knowledge on thatparticular moment.
And if you just keep stacking those moments,well, in twenty years, you're gonna be an
(44:49):
entrepreneur who's probably lived through mostthings in the early startup stage.
Those are the things that we love to do.
And I think that's how you start to learn tolove the process.
Yes.
You care about the end result.
Yes.
You care about the way to get there.
But what you really love is the process ofgetting there.
I think that's the most important thing toheart.
Also, feel like if you know how to solve everyproblem, then life gets just pretty boring.
(45:10):
It's incredibly boring.
I don't even know what you do all day.
It's like you always have to have anotherproblem to solve.
And I always tell people, why do some of thegreatest innovators in the world continue to
work or continue to start new companies orcontinue to do what they do?
I think it's exactly that.
I think it is this itch to not make more money,not build another product, not do whatever
(45:31):
they're focused on, but to continue thisprocess of development, of learning, and of
execution.
That is and then from them, things come fromthat, but that's what they really seem to be
chasing.
Awesome.
Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
Thanks, Joseph, for taking the time to come onthe show.
If anyone is building materials at SpaceX or alot of those big companies, go check out
Radical AI.
They're beasts, and thanks for joining.
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