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Cheeky Pint · 2 min · Oct 15, 2026

Cheaper ocean access could enable persistent operations

WO

Will O’Brien

Founder & CEO, Ulysses

  • John CollisonHost · Co-founder & president, Stripe

    Sold his first startup, Auctomatic, at 17, then co-founded Stripe in 2010.

About this segment

O’Brien compares ocean development to the American West and space: cheaper access enables a shift from trips to persistent operations. He says approvals have stalled a major Australian seagrass project.

From “The company building underwater drones for $50,000”, Oct 15, 2026. Watch the full episode

“if you could actually go and have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things I think that you can do.”
WOWill O’Brienat 18:07 · Cheeky Pint18:07

Takeaways

  1. Frontiers move from high-value expeditions to persistent presence.
  2. Lower-cost robotics could make more ocean work practical.
  3. Approvals have stalled a major Australian seagrass project.
Watch 2:22 from 16:43

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 21:34Scaling underwater drones requires rethinking the supply chain4:51
  2. 38:12Underwater drones can cost far less than Navy vehicles4:45
  3. 45:52Undersea cables need persistent monitoring3:45
  4. 27:43Underwater robots must compute locally because communications are slow3:27
  5. 31:02Ulysses is building robots to inspect wind cables and cut fishing line2:12
  6. 11:37Seagrass restoration starts with mapping suitable habitat2:57

  7. 16:43Cheaper ocean access could enable persistent operations2:22

Up next · Latent SpacePublic chemistry data can encode the chemist, not the chemistry5:49

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 16:49

    humans need to explore and discover and learn and part of your thesis is uh if i understand this Just like SpaceX, you know, if you lower the cost to orbit, then there's other things you can do. You can do Starlink if you can get things up into orbit cheaply. Similarly, you believe that you can unlock new technologies if you lower the cost of doing things in the ocean? Yes, I think there's this, like, very kind of generalizable framework for how kind of frontiers get developed.

  2. 17:15

    You know, the American West is a good example of this. It's like you have this, like, you know, exploratory period where people go there and go back. And they typically go there and go back for some kind of like very high value reason where the cost of going there, you know, is justified because you're recovering fur or you're getting pelts or something like that. There's a single high value initial use case.

  3. 17:39

    And in space, it's defense reasons. You put satellites up there to watch the Russians. Yeah, so there's like there's this there's this initial expedition period and then you move from an expedition period to Okay, well what happens if you spend more time here and get more and what happens when we not just like gather Like information from here or singular things, but more things and become more persistent in our settlement there So then in American West you have the development of the railroad and then like access becomes way more easy I get all this, you know development of things like California Space, you get reusable launch. Maritime, it's like, okay, if you could actually go and have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things I think that you can do. If you want to go plant a bunch of seagrass, do you get approval from

  4. 18:26

    anyone on that? Or is it just seagrass away? Unfortunately, I think this is one of the saddest things about the environmental movement is this concept of green tape, red tape and green tape. It's like, yeah, that is the single biggest barrier. For example, there is a certain very endangered location of seagrasses in Australia that we would love to do a project, that we've been trying to do a project for a long time, and it would be probably the biggest seagrass restoration project in the world, in a very important location, but kind of banging your head off the wall.

  5. 18:59

    How did you end up in the Chinese prison? This is the topic.