Ep. 197 - How Two Grad Students Teamed Up with Sam Altman to Build an $8 Billion Nuclear Startup
SHOW NOTES
How does a nuclear startup with about $1.2 million in revenue and no commercial power plant become an $8 billion publicly traded company sitting on $3 billion in cash?
On this episode, Oklo co-founder and COO Caroline DeWitte explains what investors believe they’re buying: a chance to supply the staggering amount of clean electricity that America will need for AI, industry, and an increasingly electrified economy. Oklo plans to build and operate compact nuclear “powerhouses,” including 75-megawatt reactors capable of running on recycled nuclear fuel—yes, what we currently call “nuclear waste.”
The company’s journey is nearly as remarkable as its ambition. DeWitte began as a climate-concerned nuclear skeptic, met co-founder Jacob DeWitte at MIT, married him, and then spent more than a decade building Oklo with him. Sam Altman, now CEO of OpenAI, became an early backer and longtime board chair, then helped take Oklo public through a SPAC in 2024. He stepped down as chair in 2025 as the companies explored potential AI-energy partnerships.
An even more unexpected protagonist is President Donald Trump. Although his administration is hardly known for climate action, its executive orders and Reactor Pilot Program helped Oklo begin construction under an accelerated Department of Energy pathway. DeWitte says the impact can’t be overstated: Oklo recently took a small isotope test reactor from an empty field to nuclear criticality in less than a year and is now constructing its first 75-megawatt Aurora powerhouse in Idaho.
DeWitte also addresses Oklo’s failed 2022 licensing effort, why the company’s timelines may have been too optimistic at first, how so-called “fast reactors” can recover far more energy from nuclear “waste,” and what could justify a multibillion-dollar valuation before meaningful power revenue exists. It’s a candid look at the extraordinary intersection of clean energy, Silicon Valley capital, AI’s electricity appetite, and presidential power.
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
Our past episodes with nuclear historian Ed Friedman, nuclear influencer Isabelle Boemeke, and nuclear influencer Liz Muller.
Our past episode with geothermal startup Fervo CEO Tim Latimer.
Bill Gates-backed nuclear startup TerraPower.
Y Combinator’s free startup resources.
Oklo’s IPO.
Oklo’s April 2026 Proxy Statement.
2021 interview with Caroline focusing on her origin story.
Good YouTube explainer on Oklo.
GET TO KNOW CAROLONE DEWITTE
Caroline Cochran (now Caroline DeWitte) co-founded Oklo and has served as its Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Oklo Board since its inception in July 2013.
Caroline has been a founder in multiple organizations, and she was one of the youngest recipients of the University of Oklahoma Regent's Alumni Award. Caroline is a former member of the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee and was a panel member at the 9th Clean Energy Ministerial.
Caroline received a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma, and her S.M. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT.
TRANSCRIPT
Caroline DeWitte 0:00
So even if you shut off all the coolant and lock the control rods out of the reactor, you can't even shut it down. It shuts itself down physically through natural phenomena.
Paul Shapiro 0:08
Welcome to the Business for Good podcast, where we spotlight people making money by solving some of the world's most pressing problems. I'm your host, Paul Shapiro, author of a nationally best-selling book on food sustainability and CEO of a company in the same space. On this show, I speak with founders, investors, and thought leaders who prove that doing good and doing well can go hand in hand. The biggest challenges facing humanity are solvable and are often profitable too. My hope is that this podcast informs, inspires, and maybe even helps repel you to build a business that makes the world a better place. I'm glad you're here. Hello, friend, and welcome to episode 197 of the Business for Good podcast. Okay, as always, here is your random wild fact. Did you know that vultures possess a stomach acid so powerful that it mimics battery acid, enabling them to safely eat meat that's contaminated with anthrax, botulism, and cholera? This is why you don't want to get too close to them. Their defense is literally to spit on you, and yes, the saliva will burn you. These birds are amazing animals, literally nature's cleanup crew, taking what is dangerous to us, rotting corpses, and making it their treasure. So the next time you see a vulture, don't get too close, but just say thanks. All right. So now onto the show, which is by the way now available as a video podcast, not only on YouTube but also on Spotify. So, if instead of listening to people talk, you prefer to watch them talk, you've now got video options. Now, if you listen to the show, you already know that nuclear energy is clean, green, safe, and a critical part of the solution to weaning humanity off of fossil fuels. But let me ask you a question: How does a nuclear startup with only about a million dollars in revenue and no commercial power plant become an $8 billion publicly traded company sitting on $3 billion in cash? On this episode, Oklo co-founder and COO Caroline Dewitt explains what investors believe when they're buying Oklo stock: a chance to supply the staggering amount of clean electricity that America will need for AI industry in an increasingly electrified economy. Oklo plans to build and operate compact nuclear powerhouses, including 75 megawatt reactors capable of running on recycled nuclear fuel. Yes, what we now call nuclear waste is Oklo's fuel. The company's journey is nearly as remarkable as its ambition. Dewitt began as a climate concerned nuclear skeptic, then she met her co-founder Jacob Dewitt at MIT and married him. And then the two of them have spent more than a decade building Oklo together. Sam Altman, yes, that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, became an early backer and a longtime board chair, he then helped take Oklo public through a SPAC in 2024. He stepped down as chair in 2025 as the company's explored potential AI partnerships. But an even more unexpected protagonist of this story is President Donald Trump. Although his administration is hardly known for climate action, its executive orders and reactor pilot program helped Oaklo begin construction under an accelerated Department of Energy pathway. Dewitt says the impact cannot be overstated. Oakley recently took a small isotope test from reactor from an empty field to nuclear criticality in less than a year, and is now constructing its first 75 megawatt powerhouse in Idaho. Dewitt also addresses numerous of the challenges the company has faced, including some of the timelines that may have been a little bit optimistic. How so-called fast reactors can recover far more nuclear energy from waste than what we consider waste, at least, and what could justify a multi-billion-dollar valuation in the public markets before meaningful, powerful revenue even exists. As a candid look at the extraordinary intersection of clean energy, Silicon Valley capital, AI's electricity appetite, and presidential power. As always, here are your three key takeaways from this episode: one, Oko plans to turn nuclear waste into abundant clean power; two, investors are betting billions on surging electricity demand; and three, Donald Trump's reactor program dramatically accelerated this startup's deployment. Okay, I'll let Caroline tell you her story. Caroline, welcome to the Business for Good podcast.
Speaker 1 4:09
Thank you so much for having me, Paul.
Paul Shapiro 4:11
Hey, really great to be with you. All right, I have to ask you. There's so many things I want to talk with you about, but I really have to ask you. When you met your co-founder, you were at MIT. You guys started this company together, and eventually you got married. So, if you could go back to Caroline of you know more than a decade ago when this all happened, which would be more surprising to you? How far our Oklo has come, or excuse me, Oklo has come, and where you're now running a multi-billion-dollar market cap publicly traded company, or that you would marry this guy who was your co-founder, which would be more surprising.
Speaker 1 4:42
Well, yeah. So I, you know, actually the marriage came first. So the very earliest ideas were before we were married, but while we were dating, and then and then we got me. So that was like 20 tenish was when we kind of had this early thing, and I think I think a journalist. How it is? We called it like fantasy baseball or something like that, and so we, you know, a group of grad students, which is probably not the most likely set of entrepreneurs necessarily, but we're throwing ideas around. And Jake and I had started dating at that point in 2010, and then we got married, engaged and married in 2011, and and then we started the company in 2013. So definitely the latter in terms of which would I be more surprised by. But but at the same time, like someone's asking me, like, did you expect it to get here? And it's it's kind of like yeah, because you have to to do what we set out to do. So I think there's a lot of optimism, and I read somewhere that entrepreneurs tend to have a lot of optimism. And I guess it was kind of like I wouldn't have tried it if I didn't think we could do it. You know what I mean? So it's it's maybe kind of weird. It's surreal is definitely the word, but it's it's also kind of like okay, yeah, that's just the next step. You know?
Paul Shapiro 5:58
Yeah. Well, because we know each other so well. Ask you a personal question: How has running a company with your own husband been on your marriage? I know when I have tried to do joint projects with my wife, I have found it to be unhelpful to domestic harmony. How about you?
Speaker 1 6:11
I think like very quickly we we had different skill sets, and so very quickly we kind of subdivided out what we owned. But I think the nice thing with having similar, like overlap, some overlapping skill sets, like we're both nuclear engineers and and that sort of thing, like we had some technical, like you know, capabilities that we could kind of pinch hit for each other. So I think that was really probably helpful because, like, when one was kind of you know having a hard time, the other could kind of pick up the slack. I think a little bit. I think generally, like if you're starting a company like this, you're almost married to your co-founders anyway. So I think like early on, people were probably like, "Oh, you know, what's that like? I I feel like I get that question a little less now, but I think like, yeah, I mean, you're you're you're working 24/7 for more than a decade, basically, and so it makes sense in a way to to you're going to be very close with whoever you're co founding with anyway. So I think I think we learn to subdivide and kind of honestly, like our days don't even like our work days don't even overlap all that much, just because we'll be on the same calls a lot, but like we have such different spheres, you know, that we own.
Paul Shapiro 7:26
All right, so let's start from the beginning. Oaklo is the name. It's a very cool origin story. So, briefly, Caroline, why is it called Oaklo?
Speaker 1 7:34
Yeah, honestly, when we first started Oaklo in 20, like late 2012, was when we made our first like kind of proposal for something, and then it was in 2013 that we incorporated. But we had this name, U Power, and it was kind of like this. Oh, it could mean like multiple things, like uranium, but also like you as a person and kind of bringing power to the people and that sort of thing. It was not a great name, I'll admit. Like I think I was, I'll take full responsibility. I think I came up with that name, but we we like the idea of of naming our reactors and not just some acronym. I think a lot in the nuclear industry it was like, you know, I could start naming like AP 1000 or NPR or like just different you know acronyms IFR and you know something like that. And we're like, let's name it like a car, like a name that's pronounceable and and you know more personable, and so we always like the name Oklo. And then as we went along, we're like we just like the name Oklo so much that we want to make it the name of our company. So in I think it was early 2016 we made the switch, and I got really lucky to be able to find all the right domain names and stuff like that for actually a really reasonable price, and so that was kind of fun. Like we're obviously pretty early on at that point still, but to to manage like a company name shift entirely. But yeah, so we I was thinking, you know, if people Google us, like they'll find either about us or they'll find about this natural reactor that existed billions of years ago, which is, I think, like I almost prefer they find the other one because it's such an educational story and kind of lends to like a lot of our naming lends to this idea that radiation in different forms and radioactivity is is natural.
Paul Shapiro 9:14
So yeah, for those not familiar, Oklo is in Africa in the West African nation of Gabon, where There is a multi-million-year-old natural nuclear reactor going on there with uranium deposits, and we talked about this in a past episode with the nuclear influencer Isabel Bameki, who was trying to make it seem like, well, you know, nuclear predates the use of fossil fuels. Of course, that may be technically true, although not necessarily true in terms of it being harnessed by humanity as a major energy source. But yes, but but nuclear reactions do occur in nature without human tampering for sure, and that's where the name comes from. And it's very cool. And I want to ask then not just about the origin of the name of the company, Caroline, but we recently. On Tim Latimer, who's the CEO of Furvo, this geothermal company, they raised they raised billions of dollars in their 2026 IPO. And Tim was an oil and gas engineer before he became a clean energy guy. You, on the other hand, were really a climate concerned person who was actually skeptical of nuclear, but ultimately ended up becoming a nuclear evangelist. So what happened? You know, Tim had this conversion from oil and gas to nuclear. You had a conversion from being a nuclear skeptic to being somebody who loves nuclear. So, what happened for you?
Caroline DeWitte 10:30
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it was I was just not exposed to nuclear. Like, I guess I was probably a little skeptical. Like, maybe more or less like any any other person, just kind of like, oh, is that safe? You know, we really want to use
Caroline DeWitte 10:46
that. Like maybe up and up until in my undergrad years, when I finally met some people that were very much like proponents of it and nuclear engineers and stuff, and they're like, oh no, it's a silver bullet, and I'm like, how can anything be a silver bullet? Like there's always, always a catch. I was like, I can't believe there's actually a thing that really is pretty close to a silver bullet, and...
Paul Shapiro 11:07
at least the uranium bullet.
Speaker 1 11:08
Thank you. Yes, I should be saying that. Yeah. So I was just, I was like, kept the more I kept learning, the more I kept believing in it and being excited about it and what what it could do, so I made this pivot from mechanical, being a mechanical engineer undergrad, to to taking on nuclear engineering in grad school. So I knew I wanted to go to grad school because this job I really wanted hired Phcs. I wasn't much into research or academia, but really you know was pursuing that and decided to work for a year on basically startups and reapply to grad school, which is when I made that switch and was like, you know what, I'm going to take the plunge and really dive in on nuclear. Very
Paul Shapiro 11:51
cool. All right, so let's get into why this is different. So you call it advanced nuclear. Now, to the skeptic, you know they're going to say advanced nuclear sounds kind of like clean coal to me, right? Kind of sounds like marketing BS. So, what is advanced nuclear, and why is it not the equivalent of clean coal?
Speaker 1 12:08
Well, I think clean coal is an attempt to take something that's fundamentally dirty and make it clean, right? And there, there are there are ways to make it cleaner, right? But I think advanced nuclear is really like a subpart of something that already is what it is. I think we're we're excited about fission and all its you know ways of doing it. There's existing what's called light water cooled reactors, so regular water, and then there's these ones that are basically cooled by all these other types of coolants and sometimes have very different fuel forms, and so they tend to call those advanced. You could get into how Congress defines advance, or this person defines advanced, but basically, I think most people use it as a way to denote something that's not a typical water cooled reactor, like we have the roughly 90-ish, I think around the country operating today. I think one of the things that I do worry is sometimes people say like, "Oh, this new whiz bang thing. But one of the things that's wild is is we're kind of like using a new technology in terms of commercialization, but it's very old. Like it's been demonstrated since the '60s easily, and in fact, the very first reactor to to make usable electricity in the United States was a fast reactor, and and then they went on from that was EBR one experimental breeder reactor one, and then they moved on to experimental breeder reactor two, and that operated from the 1960 s to 1990 s, and that's we are literally using the fuel from that reactor recycled into our first plant. So literally, the beating heart I think of it will will go into our plant. But I think like you know the technology, the fuel shape, the fuel size, the flow, the like just the general makeup of it is almost identical. And so we we know we're not trying to. It's not about to us like some new whiz bang thing. It's it's really about making use of the inherent safety characteristics that were already demonstrated a long time ago. And I think one thing that's really interesting is it was just a little bit before Chernobyl when it when it demonstrated the experiment over your reactor two demonstrated incredible safety characteristics that basically would obviate Chernobyl and a lot of other things. Basically, it shuts itself down naturally if like crazy things happen. So even if you shut off all the coolant and lock the control rods out of the reactor, like you can't even shut it down, it shuts itself down physically through natural phenomena. So we wanted to build on that because not because anything else is unsafe, but because that extra safety means you need less belts and suspenders to keep it safe. And so to us, that meant better efficiency and lower cost.
Paul Shapiro 14:56
Okay, got it. So you're using some terms. I want to make sure everybody. Familiar with you say it's a fast reactor, which is a reference to the fact that it's using fast neutrons rather than slow neutrons. I doubt that's probably more technical than what most people want. But if you want to learn more about that, you can go Google fast versus slow neutrons. You talk about the inherent security of the system, which, as you pointed out, is essentially that this thing will will shut down on its own without the need for any human being to to do that, but to help people understand what it is that you're talking about, Caroline, for someone whose image of nuclear power is like a giant cooling tower that they might see, or maybe they've watched The Simpsons and seen this, like what is the what is physically different about your Aurora powerhouse than from one of those giant water-cooled reactors.
Speaker 1 15:42
Yeah, I think that's another thing too. We intentionally use that language of powerhouse. We were up in Alaska, and we saw some powerhouses, different technology types, and not nuclear. But I thought it was kind of interesting because it's like this is power, like small-scale power in one building, and so early on, we adopted that that language to try to like illustrate that nuclear doesn't need to look exactly like people are used to seeing it look. And again, not to say that that's bad, but and actually, I think a lot of the cooling towers that people assume are nuclear power plants are actually coal power plants. They use also huge cooling towers because it's just an efficient way to Cool water, but we, you know, we are utilizing direct to air cooling. But there's ways of using water cooling and other other things that don't have to use cooling towers. And yeah, it can be much smaller footprint than those. Generally, you know, you're producing less power, but it just, you know, it can look very different, and I think we wanted to illustrate that from an early time that hey, this can look very different and can integrate into communities and kind of actually be an appealing part of a community landscape.
Paul Shapiro 16:53
And so it's dramatically smaller. You don't need to be adjacent to a river. You're not using water at all, actually, and so this could be placed anywhere, which which leads me to ask Caroline about the way that the vision for this company has changed. Because if if you go back to your initial interviews from let's say 2013, 1415, essentially you were thinking about like one megawatt reactors. That that for for reference, for those not so familiar, that might power like you know 500 homes. You're talking about doing this in small rural remote areas. Now you're talking about doing like 75 megawatt powerhouses, which might power the equivalent of like 100,000 homes. And just for just for reference, you know one of these huge light water reactors that you we were just talking about the conventional ones are doing about you know 1000 megawatts or maybe like up to a million homes, and so you went from really micro one megawatt in rural areas to now you're doing 75 megawatts to power data centers. So if you could go back to Caroline of 2013 and tell her this is what would have happened, how surprised would she be, and why did those changes happen?
Speaker 1 18:02
Not surprised because we always kind of had in our roadmap we'd start small and then build up from there. And I think our vision was kind of like if people have heard the Tesla stories, they started you know building these roadsters by hand in a shopping mall, and then the goal was to get to like a more mass produced, more affordable product, and so our idea was like this is kind of our handmade roadster in a shopping mall. Is this 1.5 megawatt? And there's definitely customers. We knew that, and we knew we had to get to certain milestones on like a what we call a venture scale amount of funding. At least that's what we believed, and I really believe that like the regulator would see the value of like small, like incredibly small, like as small as like some research reactors, inherently safe system, and that would be a way to get our first license under our belt and then move bigger. But funny enough, that's not really how it played out. I think just something new entirely was was just very very hard for a lot of reasons. We could go into that, but what we also saw was the as we were going through the licensing process with this 1.5 megawatt, we saw the customer interest very quickly get larger, and we also were looking at basically a shift in the heat transport. So not that much different of fuel, but if you take, we were start off with heat pipes, and then we moved to a pool, which is more typical of sodium reactors. If for the people who want to look into it more, but more more similar to EBR two, so the the history and the data set that we had that we were utilizing, and so we moved from heat pipes, which are not very efficient. They're they're efficient individually, but corporately, like not that efficient for moving heat out of out of nuclear fuel, and then we use a pool of liquid sodium, which is actually very efficient. And then we move that that moved us from 1.5 to 15. So you actually get 10x of the amount of power of like actually not that much different amount of fuel, and then. We looked at moving again from just a pool that kind of naturally convex to a pool with pumps, and that actually reduces the amount of sodium you need, and you have maybe a little bit of an increase in fuel again to take us to the 75. So it's funny how we just kind of quickly did these evolutions as we kind of saw different appetites, as we had different accesses to funding, and as different regulatory paths opened up to us. So now we are actually actively starting our construction, starting last year actually on our 75 megawatt out of Idaho, which is the same place and the same technology that we always wanted to do out there at Ido, and the same fuel and everything else. But now we have this kind of after going public, we have the capability in terms of funding, and after the reactor pilot program, we have this kind of different capability in terms of licensing moving forward on that. So, yeah, it's it's been an interesting journey, but I think I don't know if I'd say it moved faster or slower than I anticipated, but at least moved along the same trajectory that we were anticipating.
Paul Shapiro 21:08
Yeah, maybe so. It was interesting. In preparation for our conversation, I did listen to this 2021 interview with you, and you said your first plants were were only a couple years away. So your current target, as you said, is now a couple years away from from now, so you know most startup most startup founders often will have more optimistic predictions. It's not that startup founders are misleading anybody, but often they have more optimistic predictions about how fast things will go for them. What did you underestimate in 2021? And you know, before you answer that, I'll mention in a recent episode, we had on nuclear historian Ed Freeman. He has a new book out. It's very interesting guy. This guy's been, you know, studying and writing about nuclear for over half a century now. And his argument is basically that the the what you call advanced nuclear, these new nuclear designs that are inherently safe, as as you mentioned, that they've been in development for decades now, and that he has predicted for some time that it's going to be in the 2030 s when they really come online. You are saying you actually think it's going to be before the 2030 s. So, what did you underestimate in 2021, and why why are you giving it right now?
Speaker 1 22:12
So, in 2021, we had had an accepted license application with the NRC, and they had budgeted literally. You can look it up for two years of review. So we were looking at a two-year time period for for review, after which we could start construction the way it was structured. So and then in 2022, actually, is when our application was denied. So we couldn't start construction, and there's a lot of a lot of reasons for that, but I think like in 2021 it did make sense because once you start construction, and then there's like we we thought our longest lead item we've been mapping out our supply chain for some years now, like was about 18 months. You know, it's but I I would say one of the things that's been really exciting about starting construction. So we brought our first reactor online actually last week. So that was that was really cool to like congratulations. Like we've done this, yeah. And that was a pool type water reactor, small but for isotopes related to isotopes. It's kind of a test or pilot plant for that. So yeah, thank you. But one of the things that we realized we were able to do that in under a year, and that I think really proves out that with a like a regulatory system that's that's efficient, you can actually do things in the time spans we thought we could. Literally from a complete greenfield to building a whole facility, and so it was. This wasn't just a tabletop experiment in a lab. We we we've actually done that too. We've we've taken fields of criticality in a lab before last year, but to actually build up an entire facility from scratch, from greenfield, institute all the policies and procedures, whether it's security, quality assurance, procurement, hire your operators, train your operators, you know, obviously ship fuel, load fuel, all those things along with the regulatory process in less than a year. To our knowledge, it's the fastest that any private company's ever done it in the history of the world. But also, like it shows that it's possible, right? Like we always believed it was possible, and so forth. Now we're also actively building our aurora, like I said, out in Idaho, as we always hoped and anticipated, as much bigger plan. But we're able to carry those lessons learned forward. But I think one of the things that's really important about starting to build and that process to actually hone your deadlines and dates and projections is you're actually starting to exercise the supply chain. You're you're learning the unknown you know unknowns as they say like about like oh you know we didn't realize that this material is now in short supply and this one is very hard to get and we actually have to get in the queue and the queue is longer than we thought and that sort of thing. So I'd say our estimates now are more mature than they were in 2021. But there's there's rationale behind it in 2021. But now we actually you know are even further along to to to be able to kind of pull those together. So and we have some experience under our belt now too, which is which is fun. But you know there's always these unknowns.
Paul Shapiro 25:20
Yeah, fair point. Fair point. Lots of unknown unknowns to to bring back the weight, Don Rumsfeld. Okay, let's talk about your technology, Caroline. So, if you think about these conventional old school reactors that we've been talking about with these huge cooling towers, and again, like what you see in The Simpsons, so it may be a surprise to a lot of people that they only use a small portion of the fuel, and then it's considered spent or what we currently call nuclear waste. You assert that actually it's not waste at all, and that it's actually a good source of energy if you recycle it. So, for a layperson, for a dummy like me, how do you recycle nuclear waste? And then, what do you produce? Waste also? Are you just reusing all of it, or what are you producing as a waste product?
Speaker 1 26:00
Yeah, yeah, no, those are all great questions. So one of I think first of all to kind of set the stage here, I think a lot of people think oh recycling is some some thing that you're talking about doing way in the future, but like I was mentioning, we're actually recycling fuel right now for our very first reactor, and it would come from EBR two, and EBR two actually demonstrated already recycling, so it's not some theoretical thing that we hope to do in the future. It's something that was already done, and we're doing now, and we will do now. We we actually broke ground, I think it was now two years ago, at least a year ago, on our our site in Tennessee for recycling, and we started the regulatory process and all those things. It will take longer for us to get those commercial scales, and a lot of the challenges actually is is just the current infrastructure of how the government is set up to take use fuel from nuclear power plants. They own it basically, and the idea was it's restricted to only go to Yucca Mountain, which nobody has liked. I think for a long time, you know, I think one of the things that's really interesting going on right now is these nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses, where 28 states actually submitted applications to be part of these, which include versions of recycling, disposal, power, isotopes, etc. So to see like states opt in and say we want this in a state versus like people being like ah Nevada you threw the short straw for various reasons and you have to take all the waste for the whole country I think it's interesting to think of a future world where you know obviously high paying jobs and honestly if you see nuclear waste it's very very clean Isabel's done some work on that other influencers have done some work like trying to show like it's literally like these white canisters that are pretty benign. I literally wish I could put nuclear waste in the background backyard. I'm expecting some of my. There's a picture of another woman who's expecting, and she was you know standing right next to them. Maybe I'll try to repeat that. But I think I think it's just important for people to know this is like I think there's this new world. That being said, we're still existing in this world where the U.S. government owns the waste, so that's one big challenge to large-scale recycling. Your other question was how much of it can you actually use up, and it's it's this is where you get into a little bit of the nuances of what, like, the makeup of waste, right? Like, it's not just like binary, but there's different types, right? And with different half lives and stuff. And the cool thing about fast neutrons, so they're not slowed down by water, so they're not water cooled. They're going fast, like you said, and they're able to fission a lot more elements than than than slow neutrons or thermal neutrons. So we're able to actually fission the things that these conventional water cooled reactors can't, and that that can be recycled again and again into our our core. Studies have shown that the expected ultimate utilization can be something like 95% of the energy in it, as opposed to five. So it's almost the inverse of of how much energy is used. But it's also the waste that comes out of it that's left. The half life of that is more like a couple 100 years. So after you've already used up 95% of it, there's only a few percent of it left, and then that stuff only lasts a few 100 years, which you know is is very much more human timespan like plausible to store safely, right? Like when you think about storing something safely for 1000s of years, it's like how are we going to do that? But you know, structures that have stood a few 100 years, like that's that's much more easy, so that's kind of the makeup. You can put it in glass. We've talked about like glass bottles that you store for a few 100 years. So it is it is really cool. And I'll stop there in case you have different follow up questions. Yeah,
Paul Shapiro 29:54
yeah, it is interesting, and you know I'm always surprised every time I hear some. Analogy regarding how much uranium is needed for each person on Earth to to for them their their entire life their entire life's energy use right it's like a golf ball size and so you know you think about like how many train cars of coal do you need to power your life as like a regular American consumer and it's a lot whereas then you think about one little golf ball for all 789, decades of your life of uranium, it really is remarkable. Okay, speaking of remarkable, let's talk about some of the journey that you've been on here, because what you started as a student, as I mentioned, is now a multi-billion-dollar market cap company, and one of the most interesting and now famous people, one of the most important people on the planet, was one of the early backers, Sam Altman, who of course is the CEO of OpenAI, the purveyor of ChatGPT. He was the early backer, the longtime chairman of Oklo, of your board of directors, and he took the company public via spec back in 2024. He's now stepped down as chairman in 2025 to clear any potential conflicts of interest for future AI energy partnerships. But I want to talk about this process of IPOing with Sam Altman of all people. How how was how was that process for you, and how has it been running a publicly traded company?
Speaker 1 31:17
Yeah, yeah. You know, I think around the time we we were spacking, it was kind of the the doldrums after the rush. So like, there's this rush of all these spacs. There's kind of this this hype, and and unfortunately, like you know, a bunch of a bunch of companies just spacked that shouldn't have and and collapsed. And it was kind of, I think you know, put maybe rightly or wrongly a bad name on it for sure. So I think we we went through it at this time where it was like you're doing that. Why are you doing that? And we got a lot of questions like that. Reasonable enough. And I remember Sam was doing was working with these different vehicles, and he was like, you know, do it if you think it's the right thing to do. Basically, like he's like, I can't give you any advice one way or another. But I think, I mean, ultimately, like it ended up being the right place at the right time. But there's no way of knowing that when we first embarked on it, right? All we knew was it's very, very hard to get enough capital for such a capital intensive company the way we were doing it with the venture funded rounds, and and what we actually found was public investors felt like much more sophisticated in their ways of doing due diligence than than the venture capitalists that we were working with. So you have to undergo an absolutely tremendous amount of due diligence before you can SPAC or IPO, it was. I think we did seven different types, like seven different threads of due diligence, and many rounds of each one of those. So it was. I was like, I have a whole new respect for anyone who IPOs, and I think part of that, though, and the rigorousness of the auditors was partially because of that somewhat prior spack boom that led to some kind of distrust and so forth. So I think we we had a clear and even higher bar than typical, but I think ultimately was really good rigor for us to to really firm up our you know how we did our financial controls and all those types of things. But ultimately gave us access, which is the whole point to the capital markets in terms of fundraising, which has enabled us to do the things I just was talking about, like building these facilities and stuff like that. So we're building, actively building quite a bit, and so it's been it's been good. But at the time, it was not a foregone conclusion.
Paul Shapiro 33:39
Yeah, you know, you mentioned you were raising all this VC capital, and I did wonder. You know, you were really on the forefront of the nuclear startups that were actually raising money from venture capitalists. You know, people. You know, I mean, I would imagine a lot of VCs, especially back then, they thought this was probably too long of a horizon before you start actually generating revenue. It doesn't seem like a very good fit for venture capital. Why did you change their minds? Like, how much money before before the IPO? Like, how much had you raised from VCs, and what was your argument to them? Saying, "Hey, you know, sometime in the next 10 or 15 years, we might generate revenue. What was the argument for them?
Speaker 1 34:16
It was too. It was very long, and that's part of why I think it was so hard. It was also because nuclear is such a novel space. Even, even like you know these like visionaries in Silicon Valley and everything like that. I think we definitely you know got got the attention and and and help from you know angel investors. But when it came to actual VCs, like you're talking about, they didn't even know how to do due diligence, and that's where the typical VC funding round a dynamic kind of fell apart because when you have like a lead investor, they handle the due diligence, then you get the others to sign on. It was it was tough to find a VC. A lot of people wanted to play in it, but they didn't want to necessarily be the lead, and they didn't know how to do the diligence, and so. We went through weird things. I've been kind of talking about this. I feel like more lately for some reason, but yeah, we we I remember talking to one, and they were like, "My uncle studied physics. Can you talk to him? And we're like, "Yeah, can you talk to? But that's that's where the diligence was, and that wasn't that was probably the most maybe one of the more egregious studies case studies, but like that's people didn't know. So we we we did a traditional Series A venture led Series A in 2018, and to our knowledge, that's the first first VC led series for a like advanced like a fission startup. So like truly venture-led. There's been some that have had, like, I think like billionaire benefactors. So, like, TerraPower had Bill Gates, right? And like, Kairos has like the father of one of the founders and things like that. So, like, there's been these companies that raised good money, but not through like kind of a typical VC-led round. And now you see it all the time, which is great. Like I think one of the things we've been trying to say for the last 10 to 15 years is like, look, when the private markets get unlocked, that is a rising tide that does lift all boats and can enable, I think, nuclear to get to the the next level. And I think that's being demonstrated. And people are kind of like, take a look because I think people-it kind of happened without people realizing. It's like we went from this place where it just wasn't very investable on the VC side to now there's just more startups than I can count every day. I feel like getting some huge round, and then honestly, I haven't even kept track of all the ones that have IPOed in various ways, so not just the private, like the VC side, but also the public market and the IPO side. And I think we were among the first to IPO too. So it was, you know, we proved out a path that was plausible for these investors.
Paul Shapiro 36:56
Yeah. So you talk about plausible path, and you know, most of the time when companies IPO, they're generally being graded in some way on revenue or EBITDA and some variation of that. Some, you know, going to say 3x revenue or whatever it is. That's how much the company is worth. But you have all these companies now, including including Oklo, that are not tied to that reality, and so you know, I was looking at your public disclosures from just a couple months ago, and so Oakland recorded about $1.2 million of revenue, principally from newly acquired engineering businesses, but 86 million in losses during the past six months. But you're sitting on $3 billion in cash and equivalents like market securities after raising $1.85 billion through stock sales just in the first half of 2026 alone. So, what are investors betting on? It's obviously not current revenue; they're betting on future revenue. Do you have 1 million in revenue and you just brought in 1.8 5 billion through new stock sales? First, what do they what do they think? What what do they see? And then, second, what are you going to spend all that cash on? You got 3 billion that you're sitting on. What are you going to spend on?
Speaker 1 38:06
Yep. Yeah. Yep. No, and I think that's such an interesting discussion, like across the market, right? Is is these these hard tech companies that are are pre revenue or or not profitable, and what are people betting on? And we could probably have a really long discussion about that. I think what we're seeing is is people just know like utilities. You talk to any utility, you look at any grid, with or without. Like people are like, oh, is AI a boom or is it not? I personally, and I think our team doesn't worry too much about that because we just see so much demand for power, whether AI is a bubble or not, and I think like we just see utilities planning for needs that are like doubling their amount of power in the next 10 years. I don't care where they're getting it from; like that's a tremendous undertaking. And so I think I think that's a big just gamble is like, look, the power's got to come from somewhere if they believe that we're plausible or executing on milestones, which we have been. Like you know, it's it's a worthwhile bet. I you know, in terms of valuation, I'm not kind of the the finance geek, but I think like they they look at that as as a reasonable bet, and we've been seeing that from them since you know the last couple years. Really, we were a little bit of a victim of being a meme stock there for a while, but I think I think like there's so many more analysts covering the space now, and I think it keeps maturing. I do think like yeah, we we a little bit our fate was tied to AI, but I think as it matures, I think we'll just see it just tied to how much is the demand for power and how how likely is our execution milestones? Before we went public, the question was like, how how are we going to handle earnings? Right, like this is a known thing. Like how how are we going to demonstrate things? And and so just like you know, being thoughtful around how we communicate different milestones to the market and and how we execute on them is is is something we've had to be really. I think around to maintain momentum, and you know it's a little bit hurry up and wait in some things, but we've been we've been really fortunate to keep the the capital going. So like you you asked, where are we putting it towards? And it's toward these these major projects. There are avenues for government loan guarantees that could help too, or loans. But right now we're kind of pursuing all these different private methods of financing facilities. So I mentioned the one in Texas on isotopes. We've got the the power plant in Idaho. We're also working with a Department of Defense, Department of War, in in Alaska on a power plant there. We signed that big deal that we announced with Meta on power plants in Ohio. So all of those things, the upfront costs. One of the nice things about the Meta deal, but also that we are generally pursuing with most of our customers, is upfront payments that enable us to make some of these upfront capital cost expenditures. The base of which being fuel, but also you know there's others too. But that's probably the single biggest capital cost that that we're kind of investing into. So we're also building fuel facilities, and I mentioned the recycling facilities. So we need a lot of capital, but the the thing is, it just basically transits translates into speed. So getting those going and not having as much limitation on the financial side is really the key to to having that capital and executing
Paul Shapiro 41:27
fast neutrons and fast growth. Okay, so you mentioned the transition from Department of Defense to Department of War inadvertently, and that raises the question of the the Trump policies on nuclear because it's not an administration that is known for its environmental protection policy is quite the opposite. Yet on this issue, it's been very bullish and very supportive of nuclear. So, what policies has the Trump administration implemented that have been either helpful or harmful for you?
Speaker 1 41:52
Yeah, I mean, you know, so a little over a year ago, President Trump signed these executive orders that related to making the the licensing framework more modernized, and also around building this this reactor pilot program that I alluded to. I'll be honest, like you know, at the time, I I didn't know none of us knew how that would shake out, right? I was maybe forever an apologist of working with the the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because I've done it so long. If nothing else, it's kind of the devil you know. But we we had had some really positive interactions with them, and actually, right as we were selected for the Aurora to join the reactor pilot program, we had just completed a readiness review with the NRC for our application, the first part of our application for the Aurora, and it identified no gaps to submission. So basically, they were saying, "Hey, your application is will be accepted. It's good to go. So we're literally like weeks into that, and literally like making a decision about which which path to go down. And so it was not a for that was another thing that was not a foregone conclusion. But I think I think what we saw was the the fundamental structure of how they built that reactor pilot program was was really smart because they took they allowed for DOE working with NRC to do reviews of reactors and I think it gives I think what the NRC was always facing is this this challenge of doing the first one and DOE's done so many different advanced reactors small reactors, over the years, and arguably many more on the advanced reactor side than the NRC has done. And so, I think the NRC is getting to watch and learn in kind of safe space. The other thing that I think is really valuable about it is that it allowed for construction early as basically a contractor to the Department of Energy, and so we were able to start construction late last year on a couple reactors, and now one of them's complete. Another one's going to take a while, a couple years. But I think like that has enabled us to to learn so much. So I can't overstate. You asked about the impact. I can't overstate the impact of of starting that reactor pilot program. We're not the only ones, too. Like several others have done great things, and but you know for us specifically, getting that under belt and getting that started was really key to kind of getting over I think a hump that was we had been stuck at for a long time.
Paul Shapiro 44:13
Remarkable to me because again the administration has not been known for its concern about climate, and that's obviously not why they are backing nuclear, but it is one of the issues where people on the left who are concerned about climate and the Trump administration should find common ground on on an embrace of nuclear electricity. So, hopefully, that continues. Caroline, let me ask you about resources. You guys started in Y Combinator. You have now gone from you know an idea in grad school to a publicly traded company with an $8 billion market cap as we record right now. What resources have been useful for you in this journey? If somebody's looking behind, like man, Caroline, what an inspiration! I wonder how I could do something great like she's done. Is there a resource or more? Than one resource that you would recommend they check out.
Speaker 1 45:02
I do think like the the time at Y Combinator was really helpful, and now they made all that like public. I think publicly accessible, so a lot of people can learn the same kind of recommendations and lessons learned that that that experience gave us. So I think I think I'd point to that basically to focus on what is your product, and what is what does your customer need and want? And so we always had, I think, kind of baked in that idea, and I think it was formative for us. So I'd recommend that. And other than that, I don't know the School of Hard Knocks.
Paul Shapiro 45:34
Okay, we'll definitely link to the Y Combinator free resources on their website on our website@businessforgoodpodcast.com, School of Hard Knocks. I don't know that that seems easier to get into than Y Combinator. Finally, Caroline, you have been an entrepreneur now for pretty much your entire adult life. You are going to be doing Oklo for some time, so I imagine though that there are other ideas that you might have thought of or come across that you hope somebody else will deploy. So you're stuck doing Oklo. What do you hope somebody else will do to build a better world?
Speaker 1 46:08
Yeah, I my mind keeps going back to reformulating how our health system attacks mostly bacterial but also fungal infections. I think it's it's such a recurring issue. It's not only like a cosmetic and more simple issue, I guess, like less life threatening and also very life threatening issue. Like it it may be the ultimate thing that people succumb to, like in the hospital or nursing homes. And so, I just I just I look at that and I think, why can't we be more holistic about that? So I think I think about targeted probiotics especially and I know there are people doing it but I think whatever they're doing it's just not getting across so certain days I'm like maybe maybe I could do that on the side but I do care a lot about that I think that'd be that'd be really great yeah
Paul Shapiro 46:58
yeah there are many ideas I wish that I had more time to do on the side as well, but I hope that either you or somebody else will get to get to do this, so we don't have a Last of Us event where fungal infections actually cause some type of apocalypse for humanity here before Oko can be servicing us with Queen Power with fast neutrons into the future. So, Caroline, congratulations on all of your success with Oklo, I'll be rooting for you hard from the sidelines, and hope that one day I get to enjoy the benefit of clean electricity created by one of your advanced fission reactors.
Speaker 1 47:32
Thank you, Paul. Love your podcast. It's so awesome to be on it.
Paul Shapiro 47:35
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