AI Summary
5 min readWill O'Brien, co-founder and president of Ulysses, is building underwater drones that cost $50,000 — two orders of magnitude cheaper than the $5 million vehicles the US Navy currently buys. The company started three years ago with a seagrass restoration project and has since expanded into mine countermeasures for the Navy, offshore wind cable inspection, and undersea cable security. O'Brien's operating thesis is that if you can dramatically lower the cost of persistent robotic presence in the ocean, you can unlock entirely new industries — the same way SpaceX's reusable rockets enabled Starlink.
The architecture decision that unlocked everything
Ulysses made a deliberate early bet on modularity. Their underwater vehicle, Mako, is built from Lego-like building blocks: battery packs for more endurance, different rear thrust modules for speed, stereo cameras for 3D imaging, sonar for bathymetric maps. This wasn't just a design preference — it was a strategic decision to make the platform general-purpose from the start.
"When the US Navy comes knocking and says, 'Hey, we've got some problems,' or offshore energy companies come calling, because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, it was very easy for us to adapt."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Company Mission & Guinness Innovation Prelude** - Will O'Brien introduces Ulysses as a company building underwater robots for critical ocean tasks, with a larger ambition to make ocean operations cheap and routine.
- 2 (06:01) **What Ulysses Actually Does** - O'Brien explains the company's origin: building autonomous underwater robots to perform critical, currently unaffordable or unscalable ocean tasks.
- 3 (09:45) **The Robot Architecture: Leviathan & Mako** - O'Brien describes the two-vehicle system designed for full ocean access.
- 4 (11:52) **Why Seagrass? Mission, Passion, and the Frontier** - O'Brien explains the choice of seagrass as a starting point, driven by personal connection and a frontier thesis.
- 5 (18:59) **The Chinese Prison Story** - A brief, memorable anecdote about O'Brien being falsely accused of shoplifting in Shanghai as a teenager, requiring a Western Union bailout from his mother.
- 6 (21:40) **Vertical Integration Strategy** - O'Brien explains why Ulysses is bringing manufacturing in-house, moving from 80% off-the-shelf components to building critical parts from scratch.
- 7 (27:51) **The Hardest Part of Ocean Robotics** - O'Brien identifies the key technical challenges of building a robot for saltwater.
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Show Notes
Will O'Brien, founder and CEO of Ulysses, joins John and Chris Sacca for a pint to discuss how underwater autonomous robots are scaling up to solve critical ocean challenges.
They cover the technical history of Guinness (including the math breakthrough that created Student's t-test), why seagrass is an overlooked super-sequester of carbon, and the engineering required to operate robots thousands of meters beneath the surface. Will also breaks down Ulysses' vertical integration strategy, the reality of eco-pragmatism versus "green tape," and what it takes to sell hard tech to defense and offshore energy sectors.
Timestamps
(00:00:30) R&D at Guinness
(00:05:43) Planting seagrass with robots
(00:16:53) Lowering the cost of doing things in the ocean
(00:19:00) Landing in a Chinese prison
(00:27:53) Building robots to withstand saltwater
(00:31:08) Live use cases for underwater robots
(00:46:03) The undersea cable vulnerability
Resources:
Guinness Quality Standards: https://www.guinnesscelebrate.com/our-quality/quality-standards
No Great Stagnation in Guinness by Will O’Brien: https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/no-great-stagnation-in-guinness
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