Pirates Only

Eric McShane spent a decade in battery research before discovering, during his Stanford postdoc, that startups were the path he had been looking for all along. Together with co-founder Evan, he launched Electroflow in San Bruno to tackle one of the most consequential supply chain problems in modern energy: producing lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, the cheapest and most widely used battery electrode material on the planet. LFP goes into over half of all batteries produced today and 99% of it is manufactured in China. Electroflow's core innovation is a three-step process that produces LFP directly from lithium-containing brine waste streams, replacing the traditional 10-step method that relies on vast evaporation ponds and months of lead time. The target production cost is $3,000 per ton, half the current Chinese market price of $6,000.Fresh off a $10 million seed round and just over two years removed from a napkin sketch, Electroflow is weeks away from deploying its first full-scale electrochemical stack at a real brine site. The demand picture behind that milestone is staggering: Eric projects a 40X increase in global battery capacity between now and 2040, driven by grid and data center storage, electric vehicles, and what he calls the most under appreciated demand signal on the horizon: billions of humanoid robots. The episode goes beyond the technology to cover the equally demanding work of building the company, including how scientists-turned-founders need to rewire their pitch instincts, why over-secrecy about your idea harms more than it protects, and how the WHO hiring method helped Electroflow scale to 16 people without a single firing. The crew has barely lifted anchor.

Chandler Luzsicza spent nearly five years at SpaceX as a propulsion engineer on the Dragon capsule and Starship programs before a brief stop at autonomous vessel company Saronic convinced him to found Galadyne in late 2024. Backed by a pre-seed led by Andreessen Horowitz, his Austin team is applying the commercial space playbook to what he calls an American missile crisis. The numbers are sobering: congressional war gaming estimates suggest the U.S. has three to eight days of critical munitions available for a South China Sea conflict, and replenishing just 20% of THAAD inventory transferred to Israel during a recent conflict could take three to eight years. The cost picture is equally grim, with per-round prices on legacy platforms reaching $13 million before a standard two-shot doctrine doubles that figure.The root cause, Chandler argues, runs deeper than procurement dysfunction. Solid rocket motors depend on a single domestic ammonium perchlorate facility so hazardous that workers who handle it have historically been called "angel pushers," and standing up a new one would take a decade the country does not have. Galadyne's answer is to chart a new course entirely: liquid-propellant systems loaded at the point of use, so the production line handles only inert metal components and can scale toward gigafactory throughput, targeting tens of thousands of units within three to five years. The episode rounds out with hard-won advice for early-stage founders: build conviction from first principles before you pitch, and reach out to tier-one investors far sooner than feels comfortable, because the proof bar at large funds is often lower than founders assume.

Brian Taylor spent 15 years in aerospace before founding Lux Aeterna, including building the first 60 Starlink satellites at SpaceX from zero to launch in nine months, followed by stints at Amazon's Project Kuiper and Loft Orbital. Those three organizations each took a different approach to the same bottleneck: satellites cannot be built fast enough to keep pace with demand. Taylor's insight was that loosening mass optimization constraints on a satellite opens the door to adding a heat shield, and a heat shield enables atmospheric re-entry, and re-entry enables reusability. Lux Aeterna has raised $15 million across two rounds and is fully funded through its first mission, a Falcon 9 rideshare in Q1 of next year, with a full re-entry and landing in Australia.The more consequential argument Taylor makes is not about cost but about lead time. The current two-year cycle from mission conception to orbit forces planners to design for problems they cannot yet see, leaving a vast treasure trove of shorter, time-sensitive missions completely off the table. Compressing that window to six to twelve weeks changes the calculus for defense ISR, rapid compute refreshes, and entire mission architectures no one currently bothers to conceive. Operating out of a 6,000-square-foot Colorado facility with a team of 17, Taylor also covers the company's aggressive AI adoption across hardware and software, why he actively recruits engineers who have experienced in-orbit failure, and the process discipline that separates founders who move fast sustainably from those who just move fast.

Eric Hostetler spent years as a mechanical engineer building cult consumer brands, from Fox Racing motocross gear to Beats by Dre, logging nearly 100 trips to China and absorbing the high-volume manufacturing philosophy that governs those industries. That background turned out to be the map to buried treasure when he co-founded Volund Manufacturing, a Huntington Beach startup building a vertically integrated factory model to produce low-cost jet propulsion systems for attritable munitions, counter-UAS interceptors, and low-cost cruise missile programs. The core insight is straightforward: defense is starting to demand what consumer goods have always required, namely lower cost, higher run rate, and faster development cycles, and the traditional defense industrial base is structurally incapable of delivering that.The problem Hostetler and his co-founder diagnosed at their previous company was a fractured and aging supplier ecosystem where a pool of 20,000 machine shops nationwide collapses to roughly 25 once you filter for aerospace certification, security compliance, and five-axis machining capability, shops so overwhelmed that lead times stretch to 18 months and a $300 part gets priced at $10,000. Volund's answer is to bring those capabilities under one roof, connect CAD directly to manufacturing artifacts and an ERP system through a custom MES, and run the whole operation on a digital backbone optimized for moving fast within the regulatory rails of high-reliability industries. Hostetler's 10-year vision is a network of small, targeted factories modeled loosely on Foxconn's playbook: each one highly efficient at a single product vertical, collectively capable of serving as the manufacturing layer that lets other founders focus on their engineering innovations without building a propulsion team from scratch.

In this episode of Pirates Only, I sat down with Matt Loszak and Yasir, co-founders of Aalo Atomics, the company betting that nuclear power isn't just making a comeback but is about to be industrialized at a scale humanity has never attempted. Matt grew up in Ontario watching smog days vanish when the province shut down its coal plants and went all-in on nuclear. Yasir grew up in Bangladesh studying by candlelight during daily brownouts, watching his country's coastline literally shrink. Both were ready to charge into nuclear right out of university, and both got Fukushima'd. What followed were years in the wilderness: Yasir designing five reactors across programs including Marvel at Idaho National Laboratory, and Matt building and selling software companies while waiting for the right moment to return. When they found each other, the alignment was immediate, same vision, same values, same conviction that nuclear is the ultimate underdog technology.What Aalo is building is unlike anything else in the nuclear space. Rather than gigawatt-scale plants that take 15 years to construct, or micro-reactors suited for military bases, Aalo designed a 50-megawatt pod of five sodium-cooled fast reactors purpose-built for AI data centers. Sodium is 100 times more thermally conductive than water, operates at high temperature without pressurization, and enables thin-walled vessels that can be factory-fabricated in two weeks instead of multi-year pressure forgings. The fuel is commercially available uranium dioxide with no exotic supply chains. The architecture provides N+1 redundancy by design, delivering the 99.999% reliability hyperscalers demand. The urgency is real: the US needs 100 gigawatts of new power in five years just to feed AI data center demand, natural gas is hitting its limits, and nuclear is counterintuitively becoming the answer to NIMBYism rather than the cause of it.Aalo was selected to respond to President Trump's executive order to achieve nuclear criticality by July 4th, 2026, America's 250th birthday. While others in that cohort are running small test reactors into existing buildings, Aalo is going to full-power operation on a 10-megawatt commercial-scale system built from a green field in under ten months, for roughly $70 million in total company spend. After criticality, the roadmap moves fast: a co-located nuclear plant and data center with Crusoe, one of the developers behind Stargate, at the Idaho site, followed by a phased Gigawatt Factory in Texas targeting 100 reactors per year. The long game is bigger than data centers: drive costs down far enough to power developing nations, eliminate energy poverty, and unlock billions of acres of currently uninhabitable Earth for human settlement.