GREG PIEFER

>> Craig Gould: Greg Piefer thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Greg, you’re the founder and CEO of Shine, an industry leader in next generation fusion, which has successfully commercialized fusion across multiple applications, including neutron testing markets such as neutron radiography, radiation effects testing and fusion material research. That’s a field that a lot of us probably don’t have a lot of visibility or knowledge of. I think I’m really going to enjoy having you educate us on it because it’s, you’re, you’re doing some really interesting things. But Greg, I love to start these conversations with one common question, which is Greg, what are your memories of your first job?

>> Greg Piefer: Like, first paid job? I think I worked at a bakery in a pick and save. I can’t believe how dirty those places are. Like, I was kind of appalled. I didn’t eat donuts for a while after that. Oh my gosh.

>> Craig Gould: So it’s, it’s not exactly lab like environments.

>> Greg Piefer: No, I mean this was like high school. So you know, way back when I think you go beyond that. Then I got involved at Rockwell and you know, they, they make motor controllers for drives and things like that. So got a little bit more technical as I looked at like college internships. But yeah, high school was sort of the bakery.

>> Craig Gould: Well, in a way you’re still sort of baking up things, right?

>> Greg Piefer: Right, that’s right. We like to create, right?

>> Craig Gould: Absolutely. I think for a lot of people fusion as a term, it’s part of our vocabulary. I think a lot of people don’t really understand the difference between fission and fusion. Why people kind of refer to fusion as the holy Grail? What’s keeping us from attaining the dreams of a fusion driven energy fusion future? Can you kind of real briefly give listeners the really quick tour of what fusion is and you know, what the bigger vision is and maybe your viewpoint on attaining that future.

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, yeah. So starting from the basics, you know, and I’ll say something that’s a bit unpopular in the fusion world. but fission and fusion are both forms of nuclear energy. both are accessing reactions of the nucleus, instead of reactions of the atom or the electrons. And that’s interesting because on a per unit mass. So like for a kilogram of chemical fuel versus nuclear fuel, the nucleus releases a lot more energy when you cause reactions to happen, like 10 million times more energy. So per unit fuel, you know, and if you’re doing nuclear reactions versus chemical reactions, you get about 10 million times more energy. so that’s the whole reason we’re even talking about this, right? It’s like there’s this massive change in terms of access to energy by being able to access the nucleus instead of just the electrons, which is what chemical reactions do. So fission is obviously the form of nuclear energy that we’ve already harnessed. you know, we can walk, we can drive around, we can see fission plants. I think it’s roughly 20% of U.S. electricity, comes from fission reactors. And it’s easy to do. fission happens at room temperature. Actually oddly enough, it happens more easily the colder you are. So, so fission becomes more probable as you get colder. and so you know, fundamentally it’s, it’s a thing that is easy to do. it doesn’t happen in nature anymore, because the enrichment levels of the fuel. So uranium 235 is the most popular fission fuel. There’s just not enough of it, it’s not concentrated enough in nature anymore. but you can enrich it with technologies that we’ve developed which make fission very, very easy. and that’s why we’ve been able to access it first. You know, the drawbacks associated with fission are just like long term availability of fuel, it doesn’t scale and we’ll talk about fusion fuel in a minute and you know, essentially long lived waste and then decay heat. so those are, those are the three things that our fission has going against it. but other than those things, it’s a wonderful way to make energy. It emits no carbon emissions, it can be done cost effectively and it’s scalable for, for present day needs. It’s absolutely scale scalable. And by present day I mean like the next hundred plus years. So, so it’s a great solution. We know fusion, and the reason fission works at room temperature, is because the reaction happens between a nucleus of uranium and a neutron. And to make nuclear reactions happen, you need to get these two nuclear particles very close together. the uranium nucleus has a lot of charge, the neutron has no charge. So it can just kind of mosey its way in there. And if it just happens to get close to it, you get a nuclear reaction. And actually the more time it spends close to it, the easier the reaction happens. That’s why m, if you’re colder, it’s more likely to happen because colder means the neutrons are moving slower, they spend more time in proximity essentially, cause the reaction to happen more easily. so that’s fission and, and why it’s easy fusion. Same deal like you need to get two nuclear particles close together. and in this case, the easiest of those in the fusion world are isotopes of hydrogen. so fusion doesn’t happen with neutrons. it happens only by bringing two, charged nuclei together. The challenge with that is they are both charged. So in the case of hydrogen you’ve got a plus one charge. In the case of hydrogen over here you’ve got a plus one. So you’re trying to bring these together and as they start to approach each other, they repel, and they repel before they get close enough for that nuclear reaction to happen. And we overcome that repulsion by making one or both, of these fuel atoms move quickly such that they close the distance before the repulsion force moves them apart. and, and that’s, that’s it. Like that’s literally how you make fusion happen. What that equates to though is you need them to move really, really fast. 100 million degrees is sort of the speed you need these things having on average to make fusion energy viable as a reaction. So fusion is much harder. So why would we ever want to do it? well, we’d want to do it essentially because we solve those other issues of fission fuel. availability is relatively unlimited and we can’t really conceive of an end to it. If you look out in the universe, it makes all of its energy from fusion. And I would argue that every form of energy we currently have access to is a derivative of fusion. So it’s going straight to the source. from a fuel perspective, doesn’t have the decay heat issues that fission has. And that by the way, is what causes reactors to melt down when they lose power. So you don’t have that meltdown challenge. and there’s the long lived radioactive waste problem is greatly mitigated. so you don’t produce nearly as much of this stuff, if any actually that lasts for millions of years.

>> Craig Gould: Fusion has always been kind of this energy moonshot dream, right, that, you know, we can see theoretically that it could be an energy source. But trying to put everything in place to do that would take a lot of time and a lot of money. Am I reading that right?

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, I think so. And I think, I mean frankly, I think fusion’s an evolutionary inevitability. It’s going to happen. it’s just a matter of how long it’s going to take and what level of technology we’re going to need to make it cost effective. So fusion’s coming. It’s, it’s, it’s going to be the way we make energy someday. I very much believe what, what happened in Star Trek is going to happen here, provided we, we last that long as a species. But but so, so it’s coming, but it’s we don’t know how to do it yet today, in, in a way that’s harnessable. So we do know how to m. Make fusion highly exothermic. We’ve done it in, in, in weapons. Right, like nuclear weapons. you can make fusion, make net energy. and I guess you could argue if you could make a 10 kilometer sphere and blow up, you know, fusion bombs in there, you, you could make energy with current technology. But that’s not cost effective or practical. So we’re trying to make this happen in a smaller scale and we have not proven that we know how to do that yet. You know, we’ve, we’ve proven that we can get very, very small amounts of energy out of fusion reactions, but nothing even close to, you know, what it takes us to the amount of energy we actually have to put into it. We haven’t gotten anywhere close. So we’re still figuring out the physics of how to do some of this stuff. And then behind that kind of sit a lot of engineering challenges which are how do you make this cost effective enough to be competitive with other sources of energy? Because if you don’t do that, you don’t scale. And if you don’t scale, nobody cares. People care. I care M, I’m a technical guy. But fundamentally people don’t care if you don’t scale. and that only comes through they’re being competitive and cost effective.

>> Craig Gould: Which I think is the, the really interesting thing for Shine as a business, as a strategy is that you’ve kind of laid out a roadmap that allows you to take those component pieces that you would, you know, ultimately use for that long term goal and figure out how to monetize those today in a way that maybe you can help, you know, self fund towards that goal versus trying to raise an absurd amount of money for something that may or may not pay off.

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah. And I think it’s even more than just like trying to use these revenue streams to fund the business. It’s like literally the proven way to scale deep tech industries is that you find a commercial market that you can be advantaged in. Right. So if, even if it’s a niche market. Right, but you, but you can be advantaged because of your technology and as you build more and more of these systems, you know, you, you make them cheaper and as you make them cheaper you can access new markets. And, and this is, this has happened all the, you know, this has happened with batteries throughout their scaling down and cost curve of now we can build cars. Before we used to build CB radios, right? Like there have been many steps in between solar panels or similar spaces on a similar trajectory right now since the commercial sectors came into it. Interestingly was not on that trajectory before we started selling products, commercially. and you know, EVs are another great example. Electric vehicles have certainly followed that curve. you know, starting with very high price, very small markets and growing into much larger markets at lower price points. So my question is why not do that with fusion? And you can, because there are markets you can access with fusion today profitably. and they may not seem as sexy as the trillion dollar energy tam, but that trillion dollar energy tam is totally worthless if you can’t do it in a cost competitive way with other forms of energy generation, it’s inaccessible essentially. So we found a way to take the current state of the art infusion and to a market that needed it. And that’s the neutron testing market, you know, that you mentioned up front, which includes those three, those three areas. so, and we’re doing that today. And, and by the way, we’ve already accomplished the first step forward which is to make a meaningful decrease in the cost of fusion and then that allowing us to access a newer, larger market. so you know, if we look at the testing market, it’s, it’s great and we’re doing well there, but it’s only you know, a couple hundred million dollar opportunity by 2030. but if you look at you know, scaling fusion, that’s, that’s really not enough money to let you build a company that can, you know, build hundreds of fusion power plants per year. Right? That’s not going to get you the scale you need, so you need to keep going. So we found a way to reduce the cost of fusion almost a thousand fold from where we started. and that allows us now to use fusion neutrons to change matter from low value forms into high value forms. and the biggest market for that at small scale is in making medicine. so actually the building that your listeners probably can’t see but is behind me in my window, is the largest medical isotope production facility in the world. And you know, once we proved fusion could compete at that level, could produce and could be Profitable at that level. We started construction on this, and it will use fusion instead of fission, as a. As the primary way of making isotopes. And that’s, That’s a first, right? That’s a. That’s a really awesome beneficial application of fusion. It’ll improve a billion lives over. Over the. Over the lifetime of the facility, and it’ll make money.

>> Craig Gould: So I guess at the end of the day, right now, you’re. You’re in the neutron production business in a way, right?

>> Greg Piefer: We’re in the fusion business, which involves selling neutrons. Yes. Right.

>> Craig Gould: And so can you talk about that first phase, how even, you know, predating Shine, you know, your. Your time with Phoenix, you found a, way to use this technology in imaging. Right. So can you talk about. Because I think a lot of people probably don’t understand the. The need, for that sort of imaging in an industry like aviation.

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So in a little bit of backstory. So I founded Phoenix actually to do this whole fusion mission, and it was always expected that we would commercialize and scale the test business, and then we would use that leverage to grow into the isotope business. I can actually go back to my first 2008 pitch deck, and it’s all there. but what happened was there were epic global shortages of medical radioisotopes in the early 2010 timeframe. and then the Department of Energy put forth some big grants, and we decided to try to accelerate. and so I actually spun Shine out of Phoenix, because it wasn’t quite ready, to spin out organically, and so we could raise capital against a different story, move that company forward with a different risk profile, different return profile, while Phoenix could still do what it was founded to do more organically. But I always wanted to put the pieces back together. So, one of my board members used to always say, there’s the right way to build a company in the right way to fund a company, and they’re not always the same. And. And that was an example of some, you know, essentially financial engineering of spinning them out and then putting them back together at the end of the day to move faster. so. So that we are all one big happy family again, just as we were intended to be in the beginning. but we had a little bit of a dance in there, so. But. But going back then to the basics, right, like the, the idea of using neutrons for test. So, everyone’s probably familiar with an X ray, X rays can see inside of materials as well known that like lead, fundamentally X ray passes through light materials easily and gets blocked by heavy materials. And so it’s great at seeing contrast. When you want to see heavy inside a light. So you want to see bone inside a skin and muscle, X ray is great. Right? if you want to look for certain defects where you’ve got a heavy material inside of a light material, X ray is great. Can see inside of a package, can see inside of a container, et cetera. where it falls down is sort of the opposite case, where you’ve got something heavy on the outside and you want to see something light. neutrons can typically pass through heavy materials, very, very easily. And we can get involved in the technology of that if you want, but just take my word for it for now. and, and they interact, they tend to scatter very heavily off of light materials and they lose energy very quickly off of light materials. So if you have something, built of plastic or carbon fiber or other advanced materials, neutrons are going to provide more sensitivity than X ray. And then if you put those light materials inside of a heavy container that’s metal or something like that, X ray simply just can’t possibly even work. so those are the applications where neutrons stand out from a first principles perspective in terms of markets. one of the most important markets we’re in right now is like making sure that, turbine blades for jet engines work properly. And by work properly I mean don’t destroy the engine. And, and, and so what’s happened is like we, we in the, in the quest for higher and higher efficiency in jets and, higher performance in jets, we’ve made the engines run hotter and hotter and hotter they run more efficiently the hotter they are essentially. But we’ve gotten to the point now where we’re above the melting point of some of the components in the engine. Okay, problem. We don’t want the engine to melt, right? So one of the things we do is suck cold air in from the front of the engine and we literally pipe it out through tiny little, all the way out through the blade and through the blade tip to keep them from melting in these high performance engines. and these defects are too small and the materials that are used are, are too, interactive with X rays and you can’t see them. so X ray, ultrasound, conventional techniques don’t see them. And the failure rate’s fairly high. So you’d have a lot of engines exploding, if you didn’t do this test with neutrons and neutrons, it turns out, can see these defects all the time. So pretty much every like F35 made needs all of its jet engine parts. Image this way or all the turbine blades, image this way. and they need it every few years they reach a repeat customer because you rebuild the engines in these things every few years. we do some blades for, you know, the A320, things like that. So it turns out there’s a nice little niche market, where neutrons must do the inspection. And it’s an interesting story because historically this was only served by fission reactors. So what we’ve kind of accomplished is we’ve started to try to, or we started to use fusion, and fusion technology to start to replace fission reactors for some applications. And our, our eventual end goal is to do that with energy. so it’s kind of like a nice proof point. and the same is true with, with the next, set of products, which is radioisotope generation. Again, fusion will be replacing, you know, fission reactors as the primary way of making, making radioisotopes as this facility comes online.

>> Craig Gould: So we already know what the demand is for radioisotopes, particularly in the medical industry because those isotopes are on the market, but they’re all predominantly being made through some sort of fission, you know, as a part of a process, that takes place at the location of a nuclear reactor. Right. And you know, what you’re proposing is having, I can see over your shoulder, you’re building a facility to use fusion to create these same isotopes that you know, we start talking about the, the price that we can put on the, the value of these neutrons, their value is incredibly, you know, it’s almost like when you’re talking about, well, wait a minute, you know, a truffle is, is sixteen hundred dollars a pound. You know, the price of these neutrons, by, by weight is, is pretty astonishing. Right?

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, for, for the radioisotopes for sure. I mean, you know, they’re worth like the imaging isotopes are worth order of $100 million per gram and therapeutic isotopes are more like a billion dollars per gram or more. and, and when you think about a gram, you know that’s like a, if you dump a sugar packet in your coffee in the morning, that’s like 2 grams. So you know, if that were the cancer fighting isotope lutetium 177, that would be $2 billion worth of lutetium. So yeah, phenomenally valuable at low scale. And you know from a fusion perspective, we like to think about it in terms of like a per kilowatt hour basis, because our objective is always to get back to that $0.05 per kilowatt hour that energy is worth. and so as we think about the imaging and test business, you get paid almost $100,000 per kilowatt hour. by different. I mean, some customers pay you more than that, for the testing business. For isotopes, you still only get paid a few hundred dollars per kilowatt hour. So as I mentioned, we need to overcome a factor of 1000 improvement in cost to do that. And we did. but that’s still a lot more than 5 cents. Right. So we have a long ways to go, to get to energy, being cost competitive. But, yeah, it makes these phenomenally valuable things which diagnose and treat disease in tens of millions of people every year.

>> Craig Gould: When I was younger, growing up in Texas, when I was, in my early teens, they were building the superconducting super collider in my neighborhood. It was, it was going to pass within like a football field of, of my house, but underground. And so when we started talking about colliding particles, I think of, you know, something the scale of that SSC or cern, but you’re, you’re talking about a similar process, but, you know, on a much smaller scale, you know, something that you can fit in a room. can you talk about how that’s different in, you know, maybe that aha. Ah, moment that or, you know, help you realize, wait, there is, there’s a way that we can do this at, at a scale that I can maybe put in a building.

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, yeah. And I think, like, big difference between these sort of, these sort of systems. So, fusion, even though it needs to be hot. Right. Like, we think of this as hundreds of millions of degrees. physicists use a term called electron volts to, to measure temperature. and fusion, you know, typically you need to be on the order of tens of thousands of electron volts. so, you know, in our case, we’re at a few hundred thousand electron volts to cause the fusion reaction to happen. Something like the superconducting super collider was going into the many, actually tens of trillions of electron volts. So even though we think of fusion is hot, like the super collider was really hot and, you know, hot by like a million times more. So, so, so we’re not talking about that. We don’t need to do that to make Fusion work, thank God. and so we always kind of knew that. But fusion energy, because you need a lot of reactions. So super collider, any of those accelerators, while they’re at phenomenally high energy, they cause very few reactions to happen per second. you know, for fusion power, you need like, you know, 10 to the 20th or more reactions per second to be happening. And you don’t get anything close to that from a super collider. So that’s the, that’s the rub. The other way, you know, it needs to be. You need to confine a phenomenally large number of these particles, even though they’re not as hot. to make fusion energy work, that requires complexity. and today it requires a lot of complexity. And it was way too much complexity for me to get my head around selling it. so, but we, because we were accessing markets and are accessing markets now that don’t need, to produce net energy, I don’t need that complexity. I can build a simpler system and get paid more for it. So that’s. That was kind of. I mean, basically, that’s our innovate. Like, we have awesome technology. We have, you know, hundreds of patents, great scientists here, both in the chemistry and physics, and, engineers galore that are just super smart. But our real innovation is the business model, right? Is that we realize that, like, we can simplify fusion and sell fusion and by doing so, get much better at fusion, and build into complexity over time. Because that’s how we’ve scaled every other successful deep tech business. you know, even, even, even, like Nvidia, right? Like, you know, we weren’t building artificial brains, 30 years ago. We’re making games that played relatively simple computer games and, you know, moving polygons around. And, you know, I bought many of those video cards back when I was young and. But it’s scaled into these phenomenal systems now that are, I don’t know how many millions of CPUs and beyond. And, you know, we’re talking about like 5 gigawatt data centers, right? Data centers that use more power than New York City. and so, you know, but we scaled through products, semiconductors in general, scaled that way. Moore’s Law, everyone’s familiar with Moore’s Law, was fueled by products, you know, solar, going down in cost, fueled by products. Every, everything is essentially fueled by products. Now, I don’t want to eliminate the possibility that there’s some massive scientific and technical breakthrough, that hasn’t happened yet. But could happen that suddenly makes Fusion cheaper. right now I don’t see that. And so although we are doing our own research into that, as are others. but you know, right now we’re just kind of like assuming, hey, we’ll get there with practice.

>> Craig Gould: Tell me about, about location. Because, I mean, if, if I just were to look on paper and say, where would your location be? Well, I would, I think I would kind of assume that you would be near a national testing lab like Lawrence Livermore or Los Alamos, but you’re in dairy Country.

>> Greg Piefer: This is like a cornfield behind me. So literally, yeah, Janesville, Wisconsin. Great community, great people, 60,000 people. Not big, not a national lab. and honestly the biggest challenge with it is not the lack of having a national laboratory, but there’s not a huge amount of, organized capital for early stage companies in Wisconsin. And well, versus like the coasts for example, or, or even Texas increasingly. so, you know, we got here, because we started here in some sense. but that wasn’t what kept us here. we, we were kept here by a very aggressive state, and a very aggressive community that drew us into Janesville. So we started in the Madison area. I graduated from UW Madison with PhD and literally rented a warehouse and started to build fusion systems in it. but, we came, we got to Janesville essentially by the state of Wisconsin. We did, we did a nationwide search for where we were going to build this, state of Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin. Very aggressive and trying to keep us here. They partnered up and put, put together a proposal we couldn’t say no to. and then, Janesville itself did the same. and, and good economic incentives for sure. It’s in a good location in the center of the country. You know, as we mentioned, these radioisotopes are useful for treating disease. But what we didn’t mention is they go away, they decay if you don’t use them. So, you know, the most popular one used in like 85% of all procedures, you lose 1% of it every hour. so, so proximity, good geographic centering, proximity to folks around the country is, is good here. Infrastructure is good here. and then there was just an incredible willingness to adopt what we were. and that was kind of the game changer, like the wild card that Janesville had that nobody else really showed. And it was really because Janesville was going through their own crisis. Ah, at the time, they had lost a GM plant that was the source of most of the Employment in the city, not only the GM workers themselves, but so many ancillary businesses that had supported GM all of a sudden shuttered. And some people thought the city was going to go away. and, but, but Jane so’s leadership didn’t want that to happen, and the families that have lived here for many generations didn’t want that to happen. So they all banded together and they said, we’re going to make this an advanced manufacturing region and just leaned hard into economic development. And one of the things that made me really appreciate Janesville is, number one, they worked really hard to get us here. And number two, the leading citizens, not just the economic development people, called me up and said, we want you. And when you’re a nuclear company with nuclear things around you, even if it’s fusion instead of fission, having people want you is a good thing, right? Like, so it’s becoming more popular, which is good. I think people are starting to realize that climate change and energy security are bigger risks than anything that fission or fusion pose. and so that’s great, but, you know, at the time, nuclear wasn’t necessarily cool. so, you know, having that, that, that warm welcome was a big part of it.

>> Craig Gould: You know, when you, when you have your pitch deck and you say, if we have four phases, we’re. We’re already in phase one. Phase two is five years. Phase three is, you know, 10, you know, 15 years. And then phase four is, you know, 20, 30 years out. And that’s that long range that can be a little intimidating to those capital providers because many of those, at least in the venture space, they want to see a way their, their funds usually, last ten years, right? And so, you know, their ability to either get out or be able to monetize their shares through something with private equity. Is that something you’ve run into in terms of. Has it had to be, you know, part of your mind that the only way I’m going to be able to finance a project that’s 30 or 40 years out is to have these milestones. Can you talk about the peculiarities of your company in trying to fit within the framework of a traditional capital market?

>> Greg Piefer: frankly, it’s the storytelling is the part that’s got to be honed, right? And it’s got to be very clear, because if people look at the end markets and they’re like, well, which one of these types of companies are you? Are you a test company? Are you a medical company? Are you, a, waste company or an energy company, right?

>> Craig Gould: Like because that, that, that affects your evaluation too.

>> Greg Piefer: Well, and, and, and the type of investor that would come in. And, and so if you’re, if you’re trying to be all of these things, like people are just like, I don’t, I don’t know what you are. But you know, we’ve been very successful raising capital and our story is pretty simple. we’re a fusion energy company and we sell to the highest paying customers which at first are not electricity buyers. Right. We’re using fusion energy to do all these things. It’s the same product. We’re just scaling it, you know, and going to, to going to the highest paying customer first. That’s something people understand. and so, and then, and then when you tell them that you have a thesis to invest and grow over time, it’s true. Not everybody likes that. Right. Like some people like very short term focus and optimize for the, for the near term. But increasingly there’s appetite for long term and fusion is one of those areas where you have the potential to build trillion dollar companies. And there are investors who are in fact interested in that. And I, you know, I would point to SpaceX as being a wonderful company that you know, plans to build cities on Mars. That’s not happening in five years. Right. Like, and yet they’ve had no problem seeking huge amount or obtaining huge amounts of investment at massive valuations. Why? Because it’s going to be so incredibly transformative and because they’ve built incredible businesses along the way. Right. They, they started by accessing low Earth orbit with payloads and then low earth orbit with humans. And no doubt they’ll go to the moon next and we’ll do more there. It’s all about scaling and practicing and they’re going to get better and better at it as they go. They already have, gotten much better at it as they go. I think I just saw that, you know, the big, the big rocket just landed successfully recently. So SpaceX continues to grind forward. So anyway, fusion as well as areas where people see it like that, and investors are interested in that. I think for us the difference is we think we look more like a company like that that’s actually generating revenue, practicing providing value along the way versus saying we’re just going to build a million person city on Mars from day one.

>> Craig Gould: Can you tell me about your personal journey as an executive? Because when you started this path you were very a scientist. How has your role changed? What, what have you learned over the years and what has that process been like for you, going from pure science to being a leader, but also your company? Because, the, the company, there, there’s a point where you go from R and D to production. Can you talk about that metamorphosis on both those?

>> Greg Piefer: I think I always kind of had the intuition for business, right, which is fundamentally why in 2008 I pitched the, the multiple markets right to scale. But, but I didn’t have the, I would say the executive presence or executive authority. When I came in, I was very academic, you know, very, consensus driven. Frankly, after going through some ups and downs, you know, just frankly decided like, if I’m going to get blamed for everything that goes wrong, I’m going to kind of do things my way. I’m going to listen to people around me, I’m going to put the smartest people around me I can, I’m going to listen to them and I’m going to make some decisions. and I’m going to do things that way because like I said, I’m m going to take the credit or I’m going to get the blame. And that’s what the shareholders have indeed asked me to do by putting me in this chair. and so that realization came a few years in and then I think the other thing is as the organization scales, the other biggest thing I noticed was as a technical guy who had really good command over the science and over building machines, and I actually built our first machines, wired our first buildings. Like that’s all cool and good. Nothing happens without people and nothing scales without leadership. I don’t know. That’s probably like realization in the last few years is like putting good people around you, having them do the best job they can, you know, staying out of their shorts, but keep it on top of them enough to know that they’re actually good at their job. because you do make a lot of mistakes hiring, But yeah, the organization can’t scale if you’re not all about the people at some point. And I’ve had to become that.

>> Craig Gould: So how do you make it all about people?

>> Greg Piefer: you try your best to hire people who have unwavering, belief in what you’re trying to do, and have similar cultural values to what you’re trying to build in the company. And then those people can help proliferate what you’re trying to do. Right. Like, it’s hard, it’s hard, especially hiring at the executive level because these people have gotten to the executive level because they’re very good talkers, and they’re very good at selling themselves. and, you know, you can talk to references and you can talk to everything, but, you know, we’ve just had, like, a lot of mistakes here. and so, you know, fundamentally, you establish a culture that you want to have, and then you try to put the people in place to actually grow and proliferate that culture. but I think sometimes, like, I don’t. There’s some lessons you can’t learn without making mistakes. And, and this is one of the areas where I think the most painful lessons for me have come in terms of like, who are the right people? How do you build the right culture? I know what I want. Like, I, I, it’s very clear to me what sort of culture I want. but creating it and actually making it live the right way is, it’s hard.

>> Craig Gould: Is the group of employees important in maintaining and fostering that culture? Because, I mean, I’ve heard some corporate stories where there was an inordinate amount of prioritization on hires associated with internal recommendations. Like, we know we have the culture right and there’s a fit, but we have to grow. So we’re only going to look at people that, you know, people inside that know the culture, you know, can recommend that we see this external candidate as being a culture fit for what we need. Do you, do you see some semblance of reality in that, that once you find the right fit, having those people try to attract and replicate that?

>> Greg Piefer: I think when an organization becomes mature, and it’s scaled, maybe you can source a lot internally. I think for us, you know, we do source some of our best people internally and we, you know, we pour gas on the situation and try and like, really make them go, but you’re awesome. And, and so they, they bring in the values and they’re here for the right reasons, you know, them. but you’re missing a huge opportunity to learn, from other parts of the world. And people have experienced things, and we’re certainly going into environments where we, you know, we haven’t been before. So, missing those opportunities to learn is a pretty big deal. learning through experience is insanely expensive. It’s a good teacher, but it’s slow and really, really expensive. And there are some things we have to learn that way. but many things that we don’t. so I think there’s a, it’s really important to keep a mix of, of for us anyway, as we scale external talent that we’re bringing in. To learn things from, particularly at higher levels, and then, you know, to grow. But to continue to grow our own talent as well.

>> Craig Gould: Sure.

>> Greg Piefer: I don’t know if that answers your question.

>> Craig Gould: I think so. Let me, Let me ask you about. I think we’re kind of touch on, in a couple of different ways here, but which is trust, right? I guess for you to let go of certain things over time, you’ve needed to develop trust in. In the people that you’re hiring. But those people also need to trust that it’s a safe environment for them to work collaboratively. So can you kind of talk about trust as a concept?

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, I mean, there are those who, would, say, you know, trust is earned and not given. I’m an optimist. That’s why I start businesses. and so I tend to trust people. Like, once I make the decision to hire them, I tend to trust them. And sometimes that bites me in the ass, because I’ve got a lot of things to do. So as soon as I hire them, I’m like, out of their world and into my own. And then every once in a while, things don’t go well and you start to hear about it and you’ve got to dig in a little bit more and get to the bottom of it, and then you can lose some trust. But, most people want to do the right thing. Most people want to add value, most people want to contribute. Not everyone in my experience, but almost all I find where it tends to break down is it’s all about communication. So. So if they’re not. If they’re not told how to win and they’re not told what the scorecard looks like, or there’s not good alignment between what I need and what they want, what they think the company needs, then you start to get people thinking badly about each other. And it goes both ways, right? People can think I’m the biggest, most idiotic CEO if they don’t know why I want to do things a certain way. Or I can be like, good God, how did they make such an incredibly poor economic decision? Right? But they’re playing to. They’re playing to a different scorecard because we didn’t effectively communicate across the organization. So I think more often than not, and actually the vast majority of the cases, if you can effectively provide that link, you can trust people to do a good job. They want to. They’re here for that. Right? Like, they took the job and we hired them, through, you know, through a selection process. So it’s it’s not so hard for me to trust, it. But it is, you know, especially at the executive level, where a lot of damage can happen. Trust but verify is probably the ideal mix. but verification can take a little bit of time. If you’re trying to let people, you know, use their skill set and do what they need to do. I guess that’s the, like, it’s, you know, how fast can you figure out if it’s going well or not? And usually several months.

>> Craig Gould: It sounds like you’re still on the course. like you mentioned earlier, like a pitch deck from 2008 that, you know, these steps are laid out and you’re, you’re executing. is there still the window for innovation? Do you still keep an open ear to the possibility that, you know, we anticipated this viable means of, monetizing and this one and this one. But how do you maintain innovation when you have a pretty good plan for the milestones already laid out?

>> Greg Piefer: Does that make sense? It does totally. And not just technical innovation, but business model innovation. And our markets that we talk about targeting, are pragmatic. They’re not dogmatic. If we had a breakthrough that made fusion energy cost effective, you know, in our view, all of a sudden we would skip some of this other stuff. Like we’d go straight to the end. we’ve also added products where we’ve seen opportunities emerge. So when we started, deploying in the isotope space, we were primarily focused on an isotope called molybdenum 99, which is used in 85% of nuclear medicine procedures. It’s super important. It’s often in shortage. It’s being made in ancient fission reactors that are dying. And it was clear the supply chain would be needed. But, over the last several years, there have been several huge advancements in cancer therapy. And one of the first isotopes to really get traction with these new, smarter therapies. And they literally are like smart bombs for cancer versus, like chemotherapy, which I would call napalm for cancer. there was an isotope called Lutetium 177 that, it was clear was going to be very important. And so, we went out, we talked to some customers about what was important and, hatched a plan to make our own. Lutetium 177 fell into our wheelhouse capabilities. We had, where areas we thought would be advantaged over others. And you know, it was a great way for us, to practice and add a new market, a new product at a time when the Market appeared to need it so, so we will do that as well like happily add products. The recycling business that we’re already starting to move into, primarily targeting recycling uranium and plutonium, separating out rare earths and precious metals and sell. But there are several companies that are innovators on the front of producing like nuclear batteries and things like that. I can think of like Xeno Power, standard nuclear, some others that we’re working with. Well they need radioisotopes from the waste stream to power that. So, so here’s new product for us, right? So it’s got to basically meet three criteria. You know, one, there’s got to be a clear social and economic need to it’s got to be in our wheelhouse, right? Like we’ve got to be advantaged. And three, it’s got to move us toward fusion, cost effective fusion energy. And if you meet those three criteria, we’ll probably get into it. and that’s been true so far.

>> Craig Gould: A question that I’m asking a lot of folks these days is like in your case your CEO, very entrepreneurial from the very beginning. But if we’re providing advice to somebody who is mid career vp, SVP and they’re, they’re wanting to make the most of their career, they want to ascend to the C suite, what advice can you provide to somebody like that? And you know, in your case it’s, it’s probably more from the other side of the table, you know, in terms of what do you look for, what, what do you, what do you hope to see in the folks that you provide the most autonomy and delegation to?

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, so I’m going to just like upfront, like if you’re talking about big companies, I have no idea. so when you get into like big mature companies and what drives them, I have almost no experience and I, I’ve hired a few people from those companies and I don’t really understand them. So so that doesn’t. But, but at Shine, you know what I would, what, what I think people need to do is what I used to say was you need to demonstrate very logical first principles and economic thinking. If you do that, I’m going to understand the way you think and I’m going to like the way you make decisions. and that’s still true. Like I think that’s still really important that you’re a first principles thinker. We’re going into, we, we are in an industry that needs to be disrupted. It demands to be disrupted or it won’t succeed. And so, first principles thinking, economic thinking are some of the most treasured, you know, aspects of a person for me. But I think increasingly your ability to lead and manage or put the right people in place to manage, is essential. And, and if you can’t build an organization because the company’s growing quickly, if you can’t build an organization through those tools, through human tools, you won’t scale, you’ll get left behind. And you know, we’ve seen that happen here a few times. and increasingly it’s just like demonstrate, build your soft skills, prove them up, and, and show that you can build and you, and you’re, and be willing to hire. Like it’s important that you hire people that are better than you at what they do. Like, I’m really good at a few things. That almost necessarily means I’m going to be bad at lots of other things. and so I just need to hire people who are way better at, than me at those jobs. So like kind of that humility and just leadership aspects are, as I mentioned, over the last few years have become really important to me.

>> Craig Gould: It seems like as an executive, if you are adverse to conflict, you could find yourself in a sunk cost fallacy thinking, well, you know, I see a problem with this person, but maybe I want to give them more time. Let’s try to find a way to work out in those cases. Like how do you, how do you navigate? Not necessarily the wrong hire, but when you see that someone is now out of their element in, and you need to change from your experience. Is there any easy way to deal with that?

>> Greg Piefer: I mean, for me personally, it’s a simple decision at this point, but you’d want to do it as humanly as possible. You, want to be courteous, respectful, help set them up for a place where they will be more successful than they were here. I think it’s, I think usually by the time you’re at that point, both sides sort of know it ain’t going so good. and so, you know, you can kind of just talk them through that. And it’s. No, it’s not easy. No, as a human being, it is not easy. The decision is easy. The process is painful. and there is no way around that. But, but the best thing you can do is try to make them understand the realization you’ve had because probably it’s gnawing on them a little bit already and that they’ll probably be happier somewhere else and they’ll probably be able to create more value somewhere else. And ultimately that should lead to them being happier and this company doing better and hopefully the company that they end up on doing better. So it’s a clear, logical argument that is fraught with all kinds of human emotion and pain. Yeah. so, but for me, it’s become an easy thing to decide to do. even though it’s not fun and, and if I’m coaching others, I will walk them through some of my own examples because when you know, you know, you’re these, these ideas that you pull people back are very rare. Like corrective action plans, things like that sometimes, but not often. is, is really the. What I’ve my experience has been. Yeah. And not. It’s fine. Not every company is right for everybody. We’ve got to a diverse world of people and companies for people to work at.

>> Craig Gould: Greg, I appreciate your time. If folks wanted to keep track of Shine and the work you’re doing, and maybe somebody out there is listening to this conversation, says, you know what? I think I want to partner, where’s the best place for people to keep track of Shine?

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, keeping track of Shine is like say my LinkedIn page is a great way to do it. I’m pretty active on there. and then the company’s LinkedIn page as well. So, you know, both of those and I, I accept pretty much everyone who wants to follow me, like there’s no issues there. And you know, I talk about the issues the company more, talks about the company’s milestones. So both are great. And then if you actually like, want to do business with Shine, somehow you can reach out to me. But, I don’t get to all my emails frankly, and like doing some research into what, what leader might be the right contact for the, the business that you want to do with us, and reaching out to them directly and figuring it out is probably a better bet. so I guess I’d say that for people who want to do business with us, but if you want to just follow us, you know, right now, LinkedIn and I think, you know, we’re looking at adding, you know, some, some more social media in addition to that. Right.

>> Craig Gould: Well, Greg, again, it’s, it’s been a great conversation. it’s it’s been, an education on so many fronts and I really appreciate you being my guest today.

>> Greg Piefer: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It’s great talking to you, Craig. Thank you.