The Iron Man of the Ocean (with Nicolaus Radford) Artwork

Immigrant Unfiltered with Hamza Ali

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Immigrant Unfiltered with Hamza Ali

The Iron Man of the Ocean (with Nicolaus Radford)

April 26, 2023 • Hamza Ali • Season 1 • Episode 7

Episode 07: Find the red line — and then never hit it again.

Nicolaus Radford is a glowing example of what’s possible when you buck the traditional advice of ensuring high grades are your top priority. As a student with a GPA he dare not reveal, he went on to achieve a 14-year tenure at NASA — and since 2014, has been exploring game-changing technologies through his robotics company, Nauticus. In an episode as insightful as it is captivating, Hamza discusses career-building, changing the world while parenting, and burnout with this titan of industry.

If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to subscribe for more inspiring and thought-provoking conversations.

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Hamza Ali: [00:00:00] Hey guys. Welcome back to the Immigrant Unfiltered Podcast with Hamza. I'm your host Today, I have a dear friend, Nicholas Radford. Uh, he's the founder and CEO O of Nauticus. Uh, but more importantly he's a friend of mine, um, that I met through a group that I'm a part of and he, he does some amazing things in my mind.

When I first met him, I actually called him in my mind. So he doesn't know this, he's gonna find this out just now. I called him the Iron Man of Water and, uh, and he, and we're gonna get into that in a little bit. Uh, but before we do, Nick, please give us a brief intro. Uh, and by brief I mean make it as detailed as possible cuz you do some really cool things that I'm sure our audience wants to hear about.

Nicolaus Radford: Wow. Uh, that was too kind, obviously. And, and I remember, um, honestly, I remember meeting you for the first time and that whole group are part of, is just crazy inspirational. Yeah. But your energy is just huge. And you're just fun to be around. You're fun to listen to. Right. You know, whenever you talk and everybody [00:01:00] just is just like so laser focused on, on what's going on with you.

So, and myself equally, it was just, it's, it's so awesome listening to your exploits and how, and how, uh, how successful everything's becoming. So congrats to you as well. Thank you. Um, but I, uh, yeah, my journey kind of moves around a little bit. Um, I, uh, spent like, the first defining moment of my career was spending those first 15 years at, at nasa, and I was very fortunate enough to work with just some of the best and brightest people anyone could just ever hope to be around.

And sort of just like you sort of. Are thinking introspectively mc, man, I gotta up my game. Yeah, these guys are really effing smart and um, and, uh, was in the robotics group and, and so we developed humanoid robotics, you know, robots that sort of look like you and me, and they have two arms in a head and they sort of walk or they float.

And, and, uh, and I left leading that group, uh, at the Johnson Space Center, um, developing [00:02:00] just some crazy stuff. Um, we're trying to think about how we're gonna have robots head to Mars and build habitats with the astronauts. And so we've studied how to get to Mars and how robots and humans would, would have some interplay and how they would coordinate and, um, flew some, uh, flu, flu examples of these devices to the space station.

Um, Just awesome. Just an awesome, awesome time. Very influential. Um, some of the stuff that I worked on, robo, uh, was flown at the Space Station, ended up on Saturday Night Live. It was, uh, parodied by, by, uh, the weekend, um, uh, with, um, Seth and, and, uh, I need to say Seth's last name cause he acts like he's my friend.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's not my friend. Right. You know, Seth, Seth, Seth and his weekend wrap up, or whatever the hell it's called. Um, but it's just hilarious, right? And so it's, it's uh, uh, you know, they, they're, they're doing this thing like, you know, NASA flies this robot to this space station. NASA puts out this press release.

It was Herald was one of these awesome days, blah, blah, blah. And, and he said, you know, uh, and, and [00:03:00] the robots put out a press release and called it phase one. And, uh, you know, it's, that was hilarious. And, and it's just, it was a really influential part of my, my life for sure. But then, I don't know if you know this or not, but you don't make any money in the government.

I actually did not know that, thankfully. Right. We enforce, I thought that's where all the money is, right? Yeah. It no matter how, yeah, you pay a lot of taxes for sure. And yes, it gets sort of sucked off into the ether, but thankfully a lot of folks in government don't get, um, stupid, wealthy and rich and, and uh, you know, they make a good living for sure.

Um, and, and a lot of government agencies, they sort of, um, they really depend on that mission part to make up for, uh, the financial component, right? Yeah. So is that how they keep 'em in? Absolutely. Okay. Right. Yeah, absolutely. You kind of like, you know, God and country and you feel like you're making a difference and NASA is definitely all part of that.

And you know, in fact, in some of the [00:04:00] employment principles right? You can, you know, it's mission, culture and pay. Yeah. As an employer, you know, as you, as you completely understand, you can take one of those away from somebody. Right? Right. You know, if you want to save the whales and you love working with your friends, you don't care that you're paid shit.

Right. But as soon as you don't like the whales or you don't, can't stand your friends, you'll quit. Right? Yeah. And so the government is really good at going, listen, you make okay money, you know, you getting nice house, 2.3 kids, whatever, but the mission and usually the culture of, of the agency you're working at is exceptional.

And NASA ranked way up there, it's usually one of the best places you could work all, um, throughout any of the place in the government. And you received such a tremendous education. And so I became aware, you know, Houston Energy, capital of the world. Um, so there's a lot of offshore influence and as we were doing things at nasa, we would get a lot of visitors.

From energy companies all the way to whoever inevit, you know, invariably [00:05:00] somebody would say, have you ever thought about taking this cool ass space tech underwater? And the first couple times you hear it, you're like, you know, you dismiss it. Yeah. You're like, listen bro, you know, I'm putting shit on the moon.

Okay. Don't, don't, don't, don't distract me with your ocean nonsense or whatever. Right. And, uh, I don't know if something happened, you hear it a couple of different times. I befriended, uh, some people in the energy community and they said, no, seriously. Do you have any idea what goes on underwater? And I, it just, you don't think about it even though it's responsible for the electricity likely coming into this house.

Right. The, the, the internet. The internet, yeah. Cabling 99. Yeah. 99.5% of all data traveled around the world goes through ocean cables. Right. The sustenance, the food that you eat, right? We extract from the ocean. I mean, here's the good news, bad news, right? So, um, world poverty's going down. [00:06:00] Hooray. Uh, but the first thing, um, that people with more disposable income do is they put more protein into the diet.

First protein they turn to is fish. Mm-hmm. Um, and, uh, if we continue fishing the, the world's oceans at the present rate, we will overfish them in the next 40 years. Deplete them of all the usable stores of fish. It's kind of a big deal. Yeah. So, but the ocean is this tremendous economy, multi-trillion dollar economy.

Um, and, uh, sort of been laggard in innovation. Not really been, you know, it's, uh, it's responsible for so much, but yet gets so little attention. Yeah. It's very difficult to develop anything.

Hamza Ali: I mean, I would think I know more about space than I

Nicolaus Radford: do about the ocean. You absolutely do. In fact, so does all the NASA scientists, we know more about this.

And this is, no, this is, this is kind of cliche to say, but it's absolutely true. We know about, we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the surface or the seabed of our oceans. Yeah, [00:07:00] a hundred percent without a doubt. And um, you know how there's like no worse critic on a smoker than an ex-smoker, right?

Having worked at nasa, I might be a little, uh, critical of, of some of their plans. Listen, I mean, I want to go to Mars too. I think it's gonna be awesome, but I also think if we do it in the next 200 years, that's probably okay as well. And, uh, there's a lot of pressing things that we could concern ourselves that have to do with the ocean space, the inner space instead of outer space.

So I decided to dedicate the next. 15 years of whatever epic m um, of my career. I have this thing, I wanna live five lifetimes before I die. Okay. And so every like seven years, you need to sort of molt, reinvent yourself. And even though I did 15 years at nasa, it sounds like I got outta prison. I did 15 years, I was in for 15, right.

Uh, I did 15 years at nasa. I SW had so very fundamentally different jobs, right? It's like you can, so you can see two different epics like this first seven years, the second seven years. And, [00:08:00] um, and so I decided to, I've just decided to dedicate all of my available time, resource, energy, money to, to exploring and expanding a business that can make an appreciable difference in the ocean economy.

Yeah. And um, That is a long ass introduction.

Hamza Ali: Yeah, that is a But it's a good one. And look, it's detailed enough to where people now understand, you know, what you're all about and why I think you're the, you know, underwater Ironman basically. Yeah. That's, uh, how'd you get started in nasa?

Nicolaus Radford: Mm uh, I think I was just lucky as hell.

Um,

Hamza Ali: like, how, how does one even do that? Like, what, you know, do I land on, you know, uh, land into Clear Lake, go with my application? Like

Nicolaus Radford: what's, that's one way you'll probably end up at Space Center Houston, this is a greeter, but, um, I have a friend of mine, um, and she, she was trying to get into NASA for a very long time, and, and so she went, she decided to go work at Space Center Houston, trying to get us close to the space center.

And I was [00:09:00] like, it's not quite the same thing. Right. You know, but, um, I, you know, studied engineering in college. And, uh, I went to Purdue University, which is a little helpful because it's the home of the astronauts, right. So everything, you're just inundated with nasa. Yeah. Everything. Yeah. You were infused

Hamza Ali: in that

Nicolaus Radford: culture almost.

Just you're saturated with it, you're just soaking with it. Right, right. And um, you know, I had little pinups of space shuttles and I mean, I grew up in the eighties, right. I mean, come on.

Hamza Ali: Space is where it's at. Oh, spaces

Nicolaus Radford: was everything. Space cam. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, flight to the Navigator, are you kidding me?

One of the greatest movies of all time compliance. Right, right. It's just an amazing movie. And so just like every kid I was infected with, with sort of that space feeling, space bug, um, did I ever feel that I would ever step foot. At nasa? No, I never did. It was like, um, that I, I did not have an upbringing where that sort of trajectory was even remotely in the cards.

Okay. Um, you know, it [00:10:00] was, I, I don't know. I, gosh, I look back on my life. I'm like, I was like one of the luckiest people to take the path that I did. There's no reason I should have turned out this way. Um, my parents were incredible. Right. Um, both didn't go to college. Um, I was the first person on my paternal side to go to college, so that's, it wasn't just sort of, you know.

Right. We're not talking private money, you know, private school money here right. From the northeast or whatever. Right. My, um, we're talking rural, rural Indiana. Yeah. And um, but somehow I was good in athletics and, um, end up on the track team at Purdue and, uh, was studying engineering, which became very difficult to do both by the way.

Um, I don't know how people in athletics, collegiate athletics do it because it's another full-time job. Right. And I was like, listen, I'm not gonna be on the cover of Wheaties. You know, I'm not gonna make the Olympic team here should probably focus on what the next, I don't know, 45 years of my life looks like as opposed [00:11:00] to the next three.

Trying to, um, be some sort of impression of Dan and Dan. Right. You know, I was actually a decathlete, so, so, uh, NASA was recruiting one day. Um, I started as a, uh, and I just pointed my application and, um, got hooked up with a contractor first. Um, I was not in the co-op program. NASA typically hires through co-ops interns.

Right. Um, I was not, I didn't have the grades for that, by the way. That's another thing we should get into at some. Yeah, let's talk about That was a horrible fucking student.

Hamza Ali: Okay. Like how bad? Cause I was horrible too. So we need to, we need to take compare.

Nicolaus Radford: Yeah. Uh, so bad. I would never publicly admit it ever what my GPA was.

Um, but let's just say that when I went through the contractor ranks and then I was asked to be a federal civil servant at nasa, they had to make an exception. Okay. Alright. They're like, we don't hire people with this low of a gpa. Like, is this a mistake? Like, is this, do you have the [00:12:00] decimal place in the wrong spot?

Right. May is this the number? If like, look at the number upside down might be the number we might accept, but this is the right side up, right? So I don't know what's going on here. And uh, my manager at the time, he's like, I had to submit my transcripts, say, brought me in. They were like, really? I'm like, yeah, I know.

It was, it was a really hard time. Yeah. And, uh, I just was, found so many other things to do in college. I couldn't take tests. It was terrible. But here's the, here was the disconnect. They, I was in charge of everything, right? People looked at me like, okay, um, you know, what are we gonna do? And I was a designer and I had flown stuff to space and I'd built these robots.

And, and so when NASA was coming to hire me direct as a civil servant, they were literally like, okay, we know what you've done, but we see your academic credentials and the two are not aligning. Right. I'm like, listen, you know, didn't you have some bad days too? You know? Yeah. But not four years of bad days.

And I'm like, I listen, I can't take tests. Uh, so they, they hired me anyway and [00:13:00] um, you know, it was pretty good on their part. And, um, but so you get into NASA one of a couple different ways. You can intern there, co-op, um, you come up through the ranks that way. They typically only hire that way. They hand, so there's, I don't know, three, 4,000 civil servants at jsc.

Another maybe seven, eight, 9,000 contractors. Um, they hire two, three, uh, people a year. Yeah. Very selective. Very selective through this sort of professional way in, um, they take a bunch of interns and co-ops and they convert them to full times, right? Probably hundreds. I don't know than the exact numbers, but they hire a handful of people a year and sometimes they don't hire anybody.

And one, you're, um, it took me once I said I want to, um, you know, they, they offer you, they sort of say, Hey, listen, we're sort of, uh, you're, you're on the shortlist to become a civil servant. You're like, Ooh. Right. Um, that was three years. It took. [00:14:00] From, from the initial conversation, from the initial conversation to actually getting hired.

That's how long of a process it is and how hard it is to become a civil servant, which when I decided to then tell my boss I was leaving, um, he was unhappy. The contractor at the time? No, no, no, no. When I became a f, when I was a Fed. Okay. And then I just, and then, you know, and I'm doing my job, blah, blah, blah.

And I, you know, did that for a long time. Um, but this guy had to move heaven and earth to hire me. I, we then got hooked up with a bunch of, um, we were working with a bunch of other. Agencies that work with nasa and I was selected to be part of that as well. Right. You know, screw you g p a. And so I got, I got selected to be part of this very elite group of engineers helping other agencies solve very hard problems.

Hamza Ali: Yeah. Now when you say other agencies, you mean like, like what are you talking about here? I feel like that's code for like, stuff I'm not supposed

Nicolaus Radford: to know. You know, it's, uh, there's so, so [00:15:00] NASA does a lot of good work. And let's just say that those specialized skills, let's just, um, we need to develop a robot, put it somewhere, have it do something.

Tho those skills are just not an everyday agencies. Right. So sometimes they come to NASA and then knock on NASA's door and they'd be like, do you guys know how to figure this out? Yeah. And we're gonna scratch our head. And we're like, I don't know. Um, and so there was a group of us. That got selected to help other agencies solve challenging problems.

Got it. Just think like, you know, intelligence community folks, people that are, um, trying to do stuff somewhere and they need some help. And, uh, I was able to get, you know, a very high security clearance and, uh, work with those, with those, um, groups, which almost kept me at nasa. Like you and I were talking before we started the show.

Um, the mission. Yeah. Uh, you know, and to continue on that when we were talking that, um, second, so it

Hamza Ali: must talking about, sorry to cut you off. It must have actually been hard on you

Nicolaus Radford: to [00:16:00] leave. Oh, it was very hard. It

Hamza Ali: was very, just because I feel like that's such a culture that drove into you. Oh yes. No, even just leaving, I bet there was like, you know, there were feelings there.

Nicolaus Radford: Very much so. And, and uh, um, you know, it's 15 years a big deal. Yeah, right. And um, because you get so bought into the mission and there was the core NASA mission and then there was the other things we were doing. And let me just tell you, when you sort of learn how the world works and you kind of get into that sphere where you're learning about that stuff, you're just like, geez, wow.

And, but it's intoxicating. It's something that you just are drawn into and you will make shit money forever because it's just so compelling to know this stuff and to work on this stuff. And yeah, so it was very difficult, um, because the government had invested a lot of money bringing me up to this level.

And I went to my dad and I told my dad I didn't want the family farm, um, my boss. And, uh, he [00:17:00] was, uh, I mean, extremely upset. Extremely upset to the point where there were, there were legal issues and um, you know, things we could talk offline about. But um, yeah, it was a big deal. It was huge. They were pissed.

And then, then I got pissed and so I hired 25 of people away from nasa. I don't get Christmas cards from NASA anymore. Damn.

Hamza Ali: How does one jump from, I I can't leave this. I know too much, or, you know, I have access to all this information. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And if I, if I leave tomorrow, um, I lose all of it.

Mm-hmm. Not only that, but then go on to founding like, how many businesses have you founded since three? Yeah. So I'll go on to founding three bus different businesses.

Nicolaus Radford: Mm-hmm. Very, all very extremely different

Hamza Ali: companies. Right. And so how does that, how does that even happen? Because at that point, I'm assuming you, you were in my mind when, when I think about it, you are scientist [00:18:00] mode.

You are like, oh yeah, very much. You're, you're going, you know, you're going at, and now you're an entrepreneur. Mm-hmm. And, and usually like, you know, that it's not a flip, flip of

Nicolaus Radford: a switch. So I'm very purposeful in everything that I do. And when I actually quit, I had been planning to quit for probably two years.

Okay. And I said, if I'm going to, if I'm gonna capitalize on the next phase of my life, I need to start prepping not only the relationships. So a lot of the people that I were working with at NASA as I left, I'm still working with, right? And, um, so I, I started prepping all these relationships. I started sort of networking, like on, on steroids.

Um, and I started planning how I was gonna leave the government. And I think everyone needs to really consider life. If life happens to you by chance, you're probably doing something wrong. Now you can get lucky, and there are times in my life I got extremely lucky, [00:19:00] but then you need to recognize that luck, capitalize on it, and, and not waste it.

And, um, the way I do everything in my life is I'm extremely methodical and calculating. And so, with no exception, one of the biggest moves in my life that I was gonna make was well thought out and planned. And, um,

And I knew that what we had developed in space, I think would have long term value to the ocean economy. And I chose to build a technology business, which is very different than a, uh, people can build very just starkly different companies, right? You can bootstrap it, save up a little bit, buy a little more sold than compound it up, right?

Organic growth. Um, or you can, um, have an idea that's gonna take more money than you can probably scrape together over the [00:20:00] next five years to make a step change in an industry. Yeah. And, um, develop something that no one's got the stomach to do. Organize a whole coalition of the willing, they're gonna continue to write tens of millions of dollars of checks over.

A very long period of time and to then increment and show that progress and then come out on the other end with something of tremendous value that that has to even still be commercialized. But people can see holy shit and even follow that you're, you're a hundred million dollars behind this person, and it's almost discourages someone from even trying to compete with you and our business.

We're going up against multi-billion dollar companies, of which I have tremendous respect for all of them. They all have incredible businesses. And I tell people still that I'm building a, i, I have a company, but don't have a business yet. Right. Technology companies, they start like you're titrating that little beaker in high school chemistry class, you know, it's like you're putting those little drops in the thing's swirling and it's still white and you [00:21:00] drop, drop, drop and on your 49th drop and on your 50th drop, it swirls pink.

You have that tipping point and that, that concept is, is so. Real in a technology startup company, cuz you're just gonna pour so much effort, money, resources, human capital into all of this, and then it's gonna hit a critical mass and you're gonna have a tipping point and then you're really gonna have that acceleration.

And that's exactly the stage of the company's in right now. We have, I mean, in, I don't know, in about a six year, seven year period of time, I've probably raised 150 million, um, for this particular effort. And, you know, my career overall, I've probably raised upwards of, I don't know, 2 40, 2 50. And so, um, for different efforts.

For different efforts, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And, and these are all technology development or, or, um, [00:22:00] you know, the, the, the, the fund is a little different in trading electricity, right. Um, but. We're going against multi-billion dollar companies that have extremely deep pockets. And I think they're still, they're finding it a little hard to follow our pace.

Yeah, because

Hamza Ali: you're, you, I mean, you are the founder, you're mm-hmm. You're, you're running the company and generally founders who run companies just have a different desire, different passion, different fire and different risk tolerance. Yeah. And different risk tolerance.

Nicolaus Radford: Um, this is the most defining moment, I think I see it in you all the time, but your appetite for risk is very high.

Yes. It's very high. It is. And mine as well, I can walk on that line and feel very certain about how the path's gonna turn out, where other people around me be like, holy shit, you know, what's coming up? Look what's gonna happen. And I'm like, I know. And I know this is how we're gonna get through it, so just calm the fuck down.

Hamza Ali: Yeah. I go through those every day, every day in my office is a battle. Mm-hmm. Um, and [00:23:00] it's a battle that, you know, ultimately I have to win somehow. Mm-hmm. And, uh, and this is not even the war, you know, this is just a battle and this is a daily battle. Uh, and, you know, you're right. I mean, it's all risk reward mm-hmm.

To hire the risk, to hire the reward. Sometimes I feel like the mission is not, uh, money. Like I feel that NASA culture is almost something that, um, after a certain point in time, uh, kind of catches up to you. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Where I, I like I look at you, I don't think your passion is money to, to be truly honest.

I feel like you have other desires and other pa like reasons for going after this so hard.

Nicolaus Radford: Uh, money's a really convenient byproduct, right. Of doing a good job. Um, and good is defined as real tremendous market value. And my employees and the people that I am, my, I have partners, they, their products are the things we're developing and the services we're putting out in the world.

My product is the company. [00:24:00] And that becomes something that you can center your Holt energy around and that, and that company can be directed to, to handle a lot of different themes. But at the end of the day, my product is the company and uh, I take it exceptionally seriously. Very seriously. Yeah.

Hamza Ali: So, you know, you left nasa, just going backtrack a little bit so that the audience knows where we're at.

You found it three companies. Mm-hmm. It's not one company. So obviously you have the company that you took public. We'll talk about that second. Mm-hmm. But you founded three different companies. Mm-hmm. What is the

Nicolaus Radford: timeline? Uh, so I started Nauticus in 2014. Okay. And, um, took my first little bit of investment in 2015.

Took a little bit more investment in 2018, and then during the 2018 round, um, I, my, my graduate work was, was in variable flux mach, uh, electric machine optimization. I know a kid that didn't have a, a GPA to, to even shake a stick at, then goes [00:25:00] on to grad school, um, dealing with electric motors and optimizing them and, and working in the field of variable flux.

And it was a very, it's a very compelling piece of ip. And so I took that out of the first company and raised a whole nother set of funding rounds around that. And, um, that's been going very, very, very well right now. So as an aside, the world has a rare earth material problem, um, north of 90 some odd percent.

Some estimates as high as 98 depending on where you draw the dotted lines around refining and, and the raw materials announced processed and the actual end product is shipped. But China owns probably, or controls rather, 98% of the world's rare earth mineral supply and magnets, and the world's needing a lot of those minerals and materials right now as we build electric cars, batteries, and especially the magnets that generate the [00:26:00] electricity or consume the electricity for propulsion.

So, Rare earth magnets are a huge issue. Do

Hamza Ali: you feel like that's, uh, just cuz we haven't found it anywhere else just yet? Or is that just the way it's gonna be? Well,

Nicolaus Radford: uh, funny enough, the, the world has some interesting deposits of rare earth material all over the place. But China has structured the processing of this, where it's all load roads lead through China somehow.

Now the US could probably create some independent aspects, but it's gonna be really costly, really hard. Um, I mean the irony is rare earth material is actually pretty plentiful. It's just, uh, hard to create into the things that we need it to. So, uh, an electric motor that I was working on, um, doesn't, is, is displacing rare earth material.

And, um, it doesn't use any rare earth magnets has the same performance as a rare earth machine. It's higher efficiency. And I think electric [00:27:00] cars are kind. Probably gonna be a big deal. And so, um, I spun this company out, it's called Jacobi, um, named after one of the old physicists, um, back in the day. Cause apparently that's really popular in the name of company after some, you know, yeah.

Physicists. And, um, but Jacobi has the, the place in history of, of having developed the world's first rotating electric motor, the 1834 timeframe, and came up with a maximum power transfer theorem, was just kind of like what we're doing with Jacobi. And, um, the electric motor's gonna be a big deal.

Hamza Ali: Is this a, the same motor you're gonna use in your other companies?

Is there a synergy there? There

Nicolaus Radford: is. And, um, yes. Okay.

Hamza Ali: Oh, that's

Nicolaus Radford: all we can get out of it. Yeah. So then, uh, it turns out that. Uh, electricity's used a lot of places, right? Who knew? Um, and the renewable impact of the grid and the conventional [00:28:00] grid, they're sort of colliding right now. So you have wind congestion, wind is heavily subsidized, and the conventional grid for reliability, and they just, they just fight each other.

And that creates some very profitable trading dynamics. Okay.

Hamza Ali: So there's like arbitrage

Nicolaus Radford: opportunities. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, um, so I am, uh, you know, we will, don't wanna give too much this way, but there's fixed transmissions rights Okay. Of how electricity's traded around. Got it. And we're in four, uh, north American apparel markets.

Yeah. And

Hamza Ali: now's probably the best time. I mean, as things become more efficient on one end and less efficient on the other,

Nicolaus Radford: you're probably in and, and there's handoffs between the grid and their challenges. Sometimes the wind doesn't blow. And sometimes you want electricity, sometimes the wind blows too much and you gotta offload it, and where do you put it?

Right. We don't have enough battery storage on the grid right now. Right. And so there's a, uh, [00:29:00] there's an opportunity there. Yeah. So there's a, so, so Nauticus Jacobi and, and Rad Capital Ventures.

Hamza Ali: Okay. And, uh, so let's talk about Nauticus now. So initially when we met, you were speaking of taking the company public, which then you did mm-hmm.

Uh, through via spac. Mm-hmm. And, uh, I wanna learn more. Mm-hmm. And I'm sure our audience is curious as to how does one actually get into a place where they get to take a, what, what is that opportunity

Nicolaus Radford: like? Uh, it's terrifying. Yeah. Um, uh, so, so the history of the company during that time, uh, we actually had an acquisition offer on the company, and I was curious how market that acquisition offer was.

And, um, so working with some banking institutions and, and a, a banker, what was the valuation? Could you share? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got a, um, so, so if you pre-money valuation on the company was about 300 million. And, uh, so then [00:30:00] if you look at Cash, the deal was valued about 600 million. Um, all in. Okay. So, um, something that you go, okay, I'm, I'm interested.

Yeah, yeah, I'm listening. And, um, and so, you know, there's, there's a lot of different, so why, right. Um, I wasn't terribly just dead set on, okay, I have to have a public company, but being a public company allows you certain flexibilities and especially with a lot of the clients that I deal with, which are other large public companies, the staying power of a public company gives 'em a little, gives 'em a little bit more, um, comfort that you're gonna be here next year.

So the, the, the offshore industry that I, that I work in is usually dominated by a very lo like the, the payers of that industry. Um, they're huge corporations that don't exactly want to invest the time, the energy of bringing new tech to market if they think the company, you know, isn't gonna be here in six months.

And a private [00:31:00] company, um, with the way you attract funding and how hard it is to commercialize ocean technology, which is very difficult to do and it's very expensive. Um, having a public facing posture increases our staying power in the eyes of these other companies, which are t which are our clients.

Right. And they want to invest. Yeah. And so, um, uh, it's, it, yes, they, um, like the fact that the company's more stable now. And we have, we have a product, um, it's called the Fleet. And that product is comprised of an autonomous surface vessel. It's about 18 meters long. And that autonomous surface vessels optionally crude for the first two years.

We'll have a crew four on it. Um, and it drops off an autonomous underwater robot called aau. So a haut and Aquanaut that pair causes us about $8 million to build. Um, but, uh, bill's out at $8 million a year. Yeah, so we're building a fleet. Um, and, you know, we've built a couple, uh, we have [00:32:00] them coming off the assembly line right now.

Um, my manufacturing's done in Vancouver, um, for the aau and the boats are built in a shipyard in, in the UK in Southampton. And, um, so we're building about 40 million worth of capital equipment at the moment. And so, and as a private company, it's a little harder to get financed. It's a nice, uh, it's a nice investment.

Um, Uh, what's the word I'm gonna find? It's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a ni it's like a bankable idea, right? Hey, this thing I'm gonna build for $8 million, I may get million dollars in year. Mm-hmm. Help me build five. Yeah. Right. Five, five sets. And they're like, okay, I see that. Right. It's a, has a good ROI on it has a good, you know, um, return for the capital you invest.

Um, and as it's core, sorry. And it's built on top of, you know, not only a space flight robotics portfolio that was probably valued at a couple hundred million dollars, but, uh, you know, a hundred [00:33:00] million of honest to goodness, real hard investment that's gone into it. And these are concepts which are non-trivial.

You know, the, the, the, the, the artificial intelligence that these robots are running, their ability to adapt to real world changes and dynamics of doing work underwater, actually intervening, dealing with the seabed, the water column, um, and doing it in the context of very little information exchange between the operator and the robot.

That is, that is not something that you just go, oh yeah, I'll just put this in there next week. Yeah. Right. It's taken us years to develop and therefore this concept, um, in my opinion, is gonna displace a lot of how things are done today.

Hamza Ali: So like, give me an example. Like what, what type of work are they doing?

Mm-hmm. Like, I mean, I saw the video and it seems like they have arms and they can like twist and turn things. Mm-hmm. But what type of work are these robots meant to do? Or where are they and where are they going in the

Nicolaus Radford: future? Yep. So the, [00:34:00] the, the ocean economies, you know, if you think of oil and gas, offshore renewables like wind, um, title.

Fisheries, mining, telecommunications. And then obviously you have the more of the government oriented markets, maybe ports defense, intel, um, infrastructure security, um, which is a huge topic right now. You know, obviously with the war in Ukraine, um, you know, there's Nord Stream pipeline. That little Yeah.

Little funny thing happened here recently. Um, infrastructure security is a big deal and a lot of countries are now going, holy cow, how exposed are we? And um, if you look at the taxonomy of, of, of robot things that are out there right now, and I don't even call him robotic. There's a whole class that's more like heavy construction equipment, what they call a remotely operated vehicle.

So you take a big ship, this ship's like, I don't know, a hundred meters long, [00:35:00] you know, the size of a football pitch mm-hmm. And got 60 people on board. And you want to affect things in the underwater, right? You wanna cut something, you want to plug something in. There's a lot of tooling, gotta clean a lot of stuff.

There's a multi-trillion dollar installed infrastructure of things in the ocean. Think of every oil and gas installation all the way to an offer wind farm that's buried in the sea to all the port security or to all the port and harbor infrastructure. Like it's just a ton of stuff that you've installed that, that the world has installed.

And when you put something in seawater, it starts corroding. Yeah. And you wanna measure that corrosion. You know, when am I gonna have to replace this? Is it gonna fall over? And then you have, look at a lot of the oil and gas infrastructure where there's actual valves that need to be adjusted in position.

Cuz there are these manifolds that are adjusting the hydrocarbon flow. And then you have nets. From offshore. So you remember when we were talking about mm-hmm. You know, if we keep fishing the [00:36:00] world at the rate we are, we're gonna de deplete the usable stores of fish in 40 years. So now you're seeing an exponential boom of sustainable fish farms.

And would you have it that if you want to clean the net, so these fish farms, you take out a gigantic r o v vessel, you drop this r o v off the side of it and you're cleaning, counting fish. These vessels are a hundred, $150,000 a day to operate. Cuz if so many people, the boat's enormous. And it has the world's largest extension cord to drive that little ex, you know, heavy construction equipment piece down there.

Yeah. For three miles underwater.

Hamza Ali: Yeah. And the extension cord is doing what? Just,

Nicolaus Radford: it's just power and data. Data. Fiber optic data up to some monitors on a boat and a, and a dude with some joysticks. It's, it's like, And there's actually, there's several people running the same device. It's literally like watching a, we, you know, using a Ouija board to do brain surgery.

There's one guy's running one arm, another guy's running another arm. There's another dude flying the body [00:37:00] around. They're talking about what they had for breakfast. Right. And this operations $3 a second. Yeah. Okay. So we said, okay, let's get rid of the umbilical. You know, we came from nasa. We understand networking and very sparse data environments.

Um, we probably don't need an umbilical. If you don't need an umbilical, uh, you know, maybe you don't need a ship as big. Maybe you don't need all the infrastructure. Maybe you have a robot that can swim really far on its own and deploy some arms, and then you start just tearing down everything that makes it really expensive.

Maybe you operated on, on shore mm-hmm. In your office. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. With a laptop. Why do I gotta deploy somebody to look at some monitors with a joystick? This is the 21st century, my God. And you repackage that into something that. We bill out at $40,000 a day at a 70% margin. So now we compete. So now we're next best alternative pricing, because we would never do 40 or $50,000 a [00:38:00] day because it doesn't cost that much.

Right? But the next best alternative is $125,000 a day. You can use us at 40 where you can use dude over there for 1 25. And they go, no, hang on a second, let's keep talking. And it turns out it's a profitable business. Um, for, for the actual thing. Now, getting it up and going, right? We're in the startup.

We're in the startup cost. Build the assembly line, manufacture the devices, get 'em into the world. We've built, we've had some pre-production units that are in the, that are out in the wild now. And so we said, okay, things are working well. We're gonna base an entire company's arc on this. Let's raise some money.

Let's, let's manufacture a bunch, which we call a fleet. And that's what the company's doing. So, um, in that, in that way, let's say you're gonna have to have some creative finance or not wouldn't say creative. You're gonna have to have some, um, you know, financing techniques that might be hard for a private company to obtain.

Right. [00:39:00] Um, this is a capital intense business. There's no doubt it will take financing and that, uh, aspects of that are just better handled as a public company. Yeah, I didn't

Hamza Ali: even know that. I didn't know that as a public company you could get easier or, you know, I guess more creative financing depending

Nicolaus Radford: on what the business is.

Well, you have a liquid currency now, right? Right. So, um, as a private company, let's say you have an investor come in and they're wondering, okay, uh, in five years you guys might have an exit or you might have a new investor come in. I could see an exit on. Um, as a public company, you can be in and out. You can, you can be like, oh, I wanna invest in this company for the next six months.

I want to take 'em to the next stage, and I wanna get my money out. And so there's a, there's a lot of more, there's a, there's more liquidity opportunities now. I always would like to bring in investors that are long for what we're doing. What we're doing is not gonna happen overnight. Uh, I'm, I'm building a company that has a trajectory, um, which will be [00:40:00] much bigger than this.

And, you know, when I, when I'm even close to finished. Yeah. Um, so I'm looking for people that are like saying, you know, it's funny, I, um, I wrote my first shareholder letter the other day and you know, because your company's

Hamza Ali: still

Nicolaus Radford: fairly new. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We've only been plugged for nine months. Yeah.

So just in time. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Nine, yeah. Seven months. For the share. For the letter. Exactly. So, so we're having our first shareholder meeting, um, in May. And I had to write my first shareholder letter, you know, since we listed the stocks a little down. Yeah. Well the market's

Hamza Ali: not been, that, that's a, it's a timing thing.

Nicolaus Radford: It is, yeah. We were talking about that earlier, right? Timing's terrible. So, um, you know, I did some studying on how to, on how to voice and write the letter and, you know, it turns out in Amazon's life, be Bezos had to write a couple letters where he had, uh, an 80% drawdown. He had two 80% drawdowns and one 90% drawdown.

And I really reflected on that. And I think this is important for everyone, especially an entrepreneur [00:41:00] that has gotta just keep putting one foot in front of the other one. And I know you can appreciate this point, but your stock's not always gonna go up, turns out, and you're gonna have an 80% drawdown day.

One of these times. How you respond in that moment to having an 80% drawdown will make or break what your trajectory's gonna be. That's it is, it is the critical aspect because it is just not all gonna be rainbows and butterflies and roses. If you're gonna create anything of any compelling value and you will be hit with an 80% moment in your life, how do you respond to that moment?

How do you just find that tenacious tenacity to be so convicted about what you're doing? And I read his shareholder letters. I went through all of Bezos's shareholder letters and, and, uh, I came across the one where he just, you know, had a horrible, horrible year. Stock was down 80% and then first, first word of his letters.

Ouch. [00:42:00] And, um, and he was known for just plain speak, transparent. Here's how it is. Yeah. You know, we're building a fantastic company. You know, I, I can't help being thrown out with the market. The company's in such a better position than it was a year ago. He's explains this in his letter and you can just hear the resolve in that man's tone.

And I reflected on that, what that meant for us. And um, and I, I was inspired by that. And I think it's so important cuz people, you know, you, you're, you're of, you're of the, you've got that grit, right? You have that, you know what it's like to just, you know, I know, you know Right. We know a little bit here.

Yeah. We know how inside Yeah. We know the insights. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, uh, I, I think sometimes there's a whole group of people today that want it. So now, and [00:43:00] they don't understand that layer of just sweat that you gotta put in. And the first time their nose comes up against a wet paper bag, they don't, they can't even push through it.

And I'm teaching my daughter, my 15 year old, old daughter who is just incredible. And she'll light the world on fire and I cannot wait to watch it. And then my son, he's three. I got really depressed the other day because, you know, you mentioned this Ironman connection at the beginning. Let me just, you know, I have a dream to be Tony Stark, right?

Yeah. You know, I, I, it's, I'm just not gonna lie, right? I mean, it is just, it's, it's kind of just in me, right? And I realized the other day when I was watching my son, how brilliant my son is. He's three, every parent thinks their son is like a genius. No, fuck that. My son is a genius. Okay? I mean, he's just exceptional on every level.

It is stupid how smart this kid is. He's fluent in Russian already. And um, and I just went [00:44:00] shit. I'm Tony Stark's dad. I'm not Tony Stark. Fuck. I missed it. My son is gonna be Tony Stark. I'm the damn dad. Oh. When I realized that I was, I have a smiled because I'm like, my son is gonna make an enormous impact on this planet, and now my job is to equip him with the tools and resources that he can steward and use to compound what?

Yeah, what, you know, I tried. Yeah. My, my dad who came from an exceptionally poor family, very, very poor and, and, and, and things I wouldn't even want to disclose. He had a very hard upbringing, very, very hard upbringing. My dad was working at the age of 13, 14 and my, and my grandfather was taking a cut, um, a very large cut from my dad's check, just trying to pay the bills in their house.

So he came, um, large family, small house, very difficult. And um, you know, my dad just is in disbelief of what his. [00:45:00] What, what I've been doing. And you, and it's sad. On, on one, one hand, it's sad because he can't, he doesn't have that mental, he doesn't have the mental, like, I love my dad to like you wouldn't believe.

Okay. And, and I, and I love him for what he's done and where he started and where what he's become. But you can just see there's a d he, he could never draw, he could never extend the line. Right. He, he just can't. I remember when I first got my first office space 2014, November, 2014, I'd been working outta my living room, my kitchen.

And I, I'm like, all right, let's, let's get a, and I, and I got an office space. It's probably the, you know, for the whole company was smaller than your office here. Right? Okay. And I got a laptop and my, and my, and I'm paying like 1100 bucks a month for it. And my dad thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever done.

He's like, how are you gonna afford $1,100 a month? He's like, I just don't understand. He's like, where you gonna get that money from? Right. And, you know, [00:46:00] a year, two years later, we're now in 7,000 square feet and we're paying five grand a month. He's like, this is the dumbest thing you've ever, this is, you are just lighting money off our, what are you doing?

How are you forwarding $5,000 a week? Oh my gosh. I don't know. All in, I'm a hundred grand a week. I'm, you know, oh, sorry. Not a week. I'm in a month and now we're like a hundred thousand dollars a month. Yeah. And he just doesn't

Hamza Ali: understand. Yeah. But you gotta do what you gotta do to, you know, to get to where you want to

Nicolaus Radford: go.

Exactly. And, um,

Hamza Ali: and specifically, are you guys manufacturing? Uh, we in that facility,

Nicolaus Radford: uh, our defense work we do. Okay. Um, the things that we do for the Defense Department, we do manufacture, uh, down in Clear Lake. Okay. Our commercial things we manufacture in Vancouver, British Columbia. Um, that's been interesting.

Doing something across an international border [00:47:00] and, um, we'll see how long. Yeah. We'll, we'll, um, yes, it's been phenomenal, but the complexities were, um, not as understood at the beginning as what they should have been. We've got 'em all ironed out. Okay.

Hamza Ali: And is the complexity bringing them in or

Nicolaus Radford: border related at all?

Border, border border, border border, you know, you're going in and outta customs, right? I mean, you just bringing test equipment across the border can, can get it locked up for four days until they figure out what it is. Just so, it's just random. And so it's, it's, it's, we've had to develop quite a cadence to kind of like, um, you know, we've got a well oiled machine now, um, but it hasn't been the simplest thing to, to figure out.

And the boats are, you know, they're being built in the UK. Um, now boats, boats are kind of boats, right? But a transforming, superhuman underwater robot, you know, that's a little different than a, than a boat. Yeah. And, um, even though these boats are, [00:48:00] have a very, have a lot of autonomous features on them, um, they're still just a boat and, uh, a robot that's never been built before.

That is extremely, I mean, outside of a nuclear submarine, this is no lie outside of a nuclear submarine. This is, this is probably one of the most complicated, sophisticated devices ever been built and put in the ocean. It's, it's incredible. And, uh, I'm convinced will absolutely alter the ocean industries.

Hamza Ali: Is that, is that why you have it? Uh, painted candy red?

Nicolaus Radford: No, no, no. That actually I'm a huge Porsche fan. Oh, okay. And, uh, the Porsche GT three RS Lava Orange. Okay. That's what the color is. Which, which the color code is Pantone 1 72 C. Okay. Um, yeah, we pulled that and we paint everything. Pantone 1 72 C.

Hamza Ali: Okay.

That's pretty cool.

Nicolaus Radford: Mm-hmm. Well, I wanted it to be, I wanted it to be reflective of like a sports car in the ocean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Right. Branding is huge. Like, I'm branding is like, you're a branding God. Right. I mean, I hope to one day be as good [00:49:00] at branding as you are. I mean, I'm like a kindergartner when it comes to branding compared to you.

Uh, but, um, branding is a big deal and your image and what you project out, how you, um, how you, how the company view, how the company views itself is, is enormously important. And we're building a very advanced piece of technology that enables us to do what we're doing and needs to be painted of the sports car color.

Yeah.

Hamza Ali: I think if you're, if you're having so much fun, you might as well. Include the color that you love most in it. Right.

Nicolaus Radford: I mean, as far as having fun, the reason our stock ticker symbol is Kit is because, um, I was the biggest fan of Night Rider. I remember. Yeah. We talked about that. Exactly. And I'm like, if, if you can't have fun with your stock ticker symbol, you're taking yourself too seriously.

Hamza Ali: Right. I remember, I think you had told me that you were reserving it or you had just reserved it. I had just reserved it. I think we, I

Nicolaus Radford: had just reserved it and I was shocked when the NASDAQ came back and said, yeah, that's available. I'm like, no way. How is available? This is stupid. [00:50:00] And I'm like, I'll take it.

I'll take it. Because I was like, you know, I don't want it to be like N TCS for Nica. Right, right, right. And I thought, so our big product is Aqua Out. I was like, okay, A Q N T. That's alls just so stupid. Right. You know, what is the coolest AI like ever. Yeah. Night

Hamza Ali: for sure. And then Night Rider for sure. Like I wasn't even in this country and I used to watch Night Rider at home.

Right,

Nicolaus Radford: exactly. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna go with Kit and our, and our software platform's called Toolkit. All I have to do is just add another tea to the end of it. That's, and I nailed it.

Hamza Ali: And that's it. You got it. So, uh, let's talk about going public, just a little more detail. Mm-hmm. What type of energy, money, uh, process do you have to go through to take a company public, even via spac?

Because apparently via SPAC is like,

Nicolaus Radford: actually via SPACs more expensive. Yes. So let's talk about that. It's more expensive. It's shorter, but you pay for it. Mm-hmm. Um, because you can get it done pretty quickly. Uh, well, as far as on the personal toll, um, it nearly killed me. And that's not an exaggeration. Um, I mean, I [00:51:00] don't, I fly a lot, right?

I travel a lot for business, but this is like once, twice a week. You're in the New York, London, you're out, uh, shopping for investors trying to develop the pipe, right? The pipe part of it, which backstops the, the public money that comes out. Um, Going back to bad timing, um, I just, I had an 18 month old, you know, coming up.

I had an 18 month old son, um, wife's pregnant, right? I mean, it's, uh, I end up having a, a baby during this process. Um, you know, my 15 year old, let's just say, I feel like I kind of messed up a few things of terms of, um, you know, I got divorced when she was five. Um, and when you get divorced, you sort of turn into a grandparent on the, for, as a dad, you know, just, just the way that you start seeing them infrequently.

And, uh, so I have a lot of guilt around that. [00:52:00] Um, and, but I tried to, I tried to really make up for that in some ways, but you know, when my next two kids came, I'm like, I'm not gonna screw this up. I'm gonna just saturate them with time, be there for them and all their stuff. And then like my son's two, and I'm already like gone every week.

He started walking when I wasn't even home. You know, it was, it just, it was just, uh, just a complete cluster fuck of mental anguish in my head as I'm flying around the world trying to, just, the machinery involved in going public, it's just something that you, it will take you months to even understand what you're even involved in.

And then the energy level required to push that over the, over the line. I think everyone should find their breaking point in their life once, find your red line and then never hit it again. I thought I had done that a few years ago, and then I, through the process of, of going public via [00:53:00] a d spac, I couldn't even see where the red line was.

It was so far behind me and I, I was just so out, out beyond it that, um, and so newborn, In the middle of that house nightmare trying to take a company public. Um, it was, it was, it was too much. It was absolutely too much. And at the same time, trying to still run the company, which a technology development company is, is it can be an animal.

And, um, it, it was, it was just, it was killing me, but it's expensive. Um, so the way the process works, right, so a, a SPAC is a special acquisition, special purpose acquisition corporation. And, uh, they be, they rose in popularity four, five years ago. They've been around forever. This isn't some new thing, but when money's free, when interest rates are [00:54:00] zero and there's so much liquidity floating around trying to find a home, certain investment vehicles or or mechanisms start gaining in popularity over the others.

And, um, when money was easy to come by companies, early stage companies could, uh, fast track their way to being publicly traded, which has a bunch of advantages like some of the ones we talked about. So what data is desirous for certain corporations to want to be public? Not everyone, um, but some profiles fit it well, others don't.

And some of them decided to, to go public. Yeah. Via back via spac because it, they actually turned it into a money raising mechanism, not just a mechanism to get put in as a public listing. We're gonna go out and raise a ton of money doing this. Well, the SPAC corporations, or rather the public investors in these SPACs [00:55:00] started becoming wise that the incentives were a little aligned wrong.

That there's a lot of. Service oriented companies that start making a shit ton of money during this process. Banking firms, legal firms, right? And I'm not talking just a little bit of money, I'm talking a lot of money. And so this avenue of cash just starts, it's a river of cash to these organizations that are putting these companies.

And just like everything else, when the incentives are just aligned, not in the most amazing way you over, you start overdoing one side over or the other. Now that doesn't excuse or take away from some of the companies that are really well positioned at the fundamentals to be a public facing company and, um, and the need and ours fits that category.

But yeah, it's hard out run the SPAC moniker and the SPAC aura. [00:56:00] But if you look at the last three years of D SPAC companies versus traditional IPOs that D SPAC companies are trading higher. So it just turns out it's a shitty market. Yeah. And um, and SPACs, because it was a faddish sort of thing that sort of rose in popularity and then crashed, got all the headlines, but you know, how many IPOs happened last year?

Not Yeah, for sure. Not too many for sure. I was getting people calling me going, how the hell did you even get a deal done? Cuz we had a really good deal. There's so many SPACs that liquidated, there's a ton of companies or SPACs that couldn't find targets. There's a bunch of companies trying to go public that actually crater in the middle of the process.

And what helps from us is, you know, our companies backed by actually large public companies, um, significant shareholders or mine are large public companies that, that came in and supported the deal and the transaction in a, in a pretty compelling way. And, um, that's helped tremendously. And it helped. It helped.

Um, I mean, it helped garner the investment, um, [00:57:00] writ large and, um, I think gave a lot of confidence to the company that we're creating. But you can't, you can't escape the NASDAQ when tax sells off, when tech sells off. I mean, shit, Tesla's down 50%, right? Is that all of a sudden a shitty company? You know, you might say it was overvalued, but when you go from zero to 8% on interest rates, it has some rippling effects.

So, um, timing.

Hamza Ali: Timing. It's all about the timing. Timing. Um, let's talk about software. We talked about the product. Uh, you know, I've seen it, I've watched the videos. It's, it's, it's pretty futuristic. Like, like I said, you know, you're building, uh, stark Enterprises for your son is what you kind of mentioned right.

Now. You're gonna leave him with apparently, yeah. Fuck that up. Uh, but to run this on the back end, I mean, you, you know, you briefly said you need a guy with a joystick, but I'm assuming it's a little more No, that's

Nicolaus Radford: the old way. Okay. We run our robots with,

Hamza Ali: with a mouse. Okay. And so [00:58:00] proprietary software include like, we

Nicolaus Radford: employ more software engineers than we do anything else, software, data scientists.

And I feel like that's a whole separate business. Oh God, yes. Oh yeah. So, so, so toolkit our, our platform that runs everything. It's licensable on its own. Okay, got it. Yeah. Makes sense. So there's thousands of these quote unquote robots in the world today. And I call them quote unquote robots because like, like I said, if you saw them, you would think it was just an earth mover machine connected to a huge umbilical running underwater hours.

In contrast is a free swimming transformable, fully electric robot powered by some of the latest and greatest concepts in ai. Has a very high degree of self-directed and self, self-sufficient behaviors that we sort of fly around with a mouse like a pilot would, an airplane. Like a big passenger airplane.

It was, you know, flies on autopilot. Most of the time you think the pilot's doing anything, these guys fall asleep. You know? And so in a, in a similar capacity, we are able to drive and run our [00:59:00] machines with very little human input as opposed to the machine being run by a joystick that is, has every input, uh, of it put down, uh, by an operator, which therefore makes it very expensive.

Yeah. Because you have a huge staff of people running this thing, so you're right 100% that there is exceptionally sophisticated and complex software principles at play. Um, in fact, it's some of the hardest problems, like look at self-driving cars. Let's say I'm gonna develop an algorithm to, um, have a self-driving car not hit a cat.

Well, I could come up with a, a training algorithm. That scours the internet for contextually labeled, labeled images of cats, which are not hard to find. Here's fluffy chasing the red ball. You know, people name their photos, all sorts of crazy shit. And [01:00:00] so through brute force learning techniques, these Silicon Valley brute force training techniques, I could train an algorithm in two seconds to avoid hitting a cat loaded into my self-driving car.

And wa voila. Because the data that you aggregate these, um, training algorithms on is just so plentiful. How much data do you think is just contextually labeled floating around the internet of the underwater stuff,

Hamza Ali: especially deep down. Not a lot. Yeah, I

Nicolaus Radford: would assume so. So some of the hardest machine learning and artificial intelligence problems.

That are being worked on today are in the ocean. So we attract some exceptional talent, cuz these are very, very difficult challenges solving them. Then, uh, it means you've created something of real value and innovation, right? People throw this word around all the time, like it means something. I don't think anybody, most people can't even define what the word means, but to me it means invention, plus commercialization and everybody forgets the last part.

If you wanna invent something, stay in school, you know, [01:01:00] uh, write an academic paper about it. But to innovate means to actually provide commercial value cuz you're changing something that's in use. If it's in use, it means, it means people are paying to use it or they're buying something because of it. To innovate means to alter that ecosystem, not just to invent something new and be, you know, oh, we're innovating bullshit.

You're not innovating. Innovating means altering a completely, you know, commerce ecosystem. So, uh, ocean innovation by definition is something that if you get it right, because of the complexity and the expense, reciprocal to that is the value. And what I love about what we're doing is we're usually, we're going up against pretty traditional incumbents that are now all of a sudden are starting to attach the word robot and robotics to their name.

They're catching up. They're catching up, right. But, um, [01:02:00] but even these companies, I don't think could stomach the real investment required. Yeah. Back to risk.

Hamza Ali: So you, you mentioned AI within your robots. Mm-hmm. And of course, these things are not attached to you. Very little human input. Mm-hmm. What allows this machine.

Uh, to make a decision, Hey, I'm gonna twist this knob. Or, Hey, this looks like a bad wire to cut. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna leave it alone. Mm-hmm. Because that sounds like a big problem. Yeah. Especially with, you know, defense. Uh, like other things that I'm, because you have a lot on the line. Yeah. Uh, with one bad decision.

Yeah. Uh, yeah.

Nicolaus Radford: Um, so we specialize in a particular branch of this called share control. So, or supervised autonomy. So these are not like sentient machines that just run off and go do things willy-nilly. They're instructed. What they're capable of doing is handling the, the realtime dynamics of the uncertainty and the environment.

So like a painting and [01:03:00] welding robot, you know, this, this beautiful Mercedes here. Um, when it was made, you know, there's a welding robot that just sort of welds. A place on the car frame and it's gonna do it no matter whether the car frame's there or not, right? It has no intelligence. It doesn't have any reactive components to, to stopping or welding over here if the frame was moved slightly.

If you take that sort of to its logical conclusion, you and I are extremely adaptive creatures, right? We, we can respond to stimuli, inputs and change our behaviors. There's a bunch of stuff in the middle, and industrial robots sort of are giving way to this thing called service robots, getting a pizza delivered from a driving robot out here.

Um, you know, it's a big deal. I mean, it's actually a real thing now, right? Yeah. I mean, Domino's, hell has, I think, has a partnership with little, little track vehicles delivering things. You know, Amazon talks about delivering via drone via drones, right? And so, um, there's companies that [01:04:00] will deliver you hotel towels to your door.

Um, Seki is a, is a company that is working on developing. You know, bring the vending machine to your hotel door. Uh, so there's a whole ecosystem of service robotics. I specialize in one where we're using those service robots for the ocean world. So you're usually in and around an environment that was engineered for us or is exceptionally unstructured contrast very much to the factory where everything is structured and put in its place.

And so you can sort of automate some things and not worry too much that someone's gonna move something around. Well, underwater you've got sea monsters and aliens apparently, and fish and sharks and get in the way and, and, you know, completely altered what you might be doing. So couple that to the fact that the, you know, currents three not current, comes along, tries to blow your robot off station, you know, very different than space I might add, um, [01:05:00] except the alien part.

But, so the, all of that complexity. You're talking some of the, the, some of the most advanced machine learning in AI concepts out there to get that robot to operate on its own for periods of time. So this is back to the supervised autonomy. So we, we can control, or, you know, let's say, let's say we have a, a self-driving car.

Let's say we were controlled, uh, with a, with a remote. Well, that car is running with rf. We're, we're, we're con we're communicating with that car through the, you know, something can, the speed of light with RF and then whatever the computational delays, it's almost near real time, right? Underwater, the speed of sound through water is 1500 meters per second, which means if I'm gonna communicate acoustically, which is the only real way of communicating underwater like dolphins and whales, we use acoustic modems to communicate with our robots, which means it takes a packet one [01:06:00] second for every mile.

The robot is away from you. So now one second, one second. So you're operating the robot. Let's say it's two miles underneath you, which is pretty common, four seconds plus some computational delay, plus back to the remote stage. It might be six or seven seconds before you get an update on what the robot's doing.

So it needs to handle a lot on its own. So you give it some instructions. I need you to turn this valve position one, three, you double click on it in the image about what you wanted to do, and then seven seconds later you might get confirmation on what is done right. But in the interim, it's gotta be very smart to handle when the C monster tries to screw it up, right?

So that technology is very, very, very challenging to develop. And

Hamza Ali: is, is there. Are, are you working on a faster way or is the, like, as far as communication, is that part of the problem that is being solved? Or is [01:07:00] it just, uh, you know, being able to The

Nicolaus Radford: tasks, it's why, it's why the old way has an umbilical.

Okay. Right. Just like you're hard lined right down to the robot because no one had the technology to cut it because they did not. So acoustic network, you know, acoustic communication has been around for a while, but not in a way where they're transmitting 3D information about the environment where they're syn, syndicating and exchanging sophisticated commands and, and information back and forth.

Not that at all, but that's what we're doing. Yeah. I mean the, one of the most valuable components of our company is probably our graphical compression technique. So we image the subsea world around us. We put it through a compression algorithm. We send it through an acoustic modem, we reconstruct it at the ui, uh, and the user is able to click on the artifacts and the image that they want to pick up.

Okay.

Hamza Ali: Are these users are [01:08:00] obviously not all in house, the people controlling the machines? Mm, mostly Yeah. They're in-house. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Even with, even like, so what I'm trying to get at is the defense

Nicolaus Radford: department's a little different because the people that are run the service are usually wearing camouflage.

Okay. Right. So, so those folks are, uh, but, but let's just stick to the commercial model, right. Of the company. We are building a fleet to own and operate. We don't sell these, we sell the service. Right? This is a robotics as a service company, which means it takes an enormous initial investment to get the first ones done, get them out into the wild.

We operate the service. Um, we could try to sell these, but I don't think it'd be a great business model. Okay.

Hamza Ali: Because then you'd have to deal with all other types of

things.

Nicolaus Radford: Who would, who would run them? Right, right. So the operators are our staff. Okay.

Hamza Ali: So all remote, all in-house. These guys are operating these machines.

Mm-hmm. And at how many of these are there gonna be like, let's, like, I'm thinking like, based on what I'm hearing [01:09:00] today, like we probably need thousands of these to, to carry out like thousands of tasks in the water. Yes.

Nicolaus Radford: Yes. So our business plan, let's just say over a five year period of time, we think with the right capital we could build a hundred.

Okay. And,

Hamza Ali: and

Nicolaus Radford: it's a multi-billion dollar, right? It's a multi, multi-billion dollar company if we can. And

Hamza Ali: still the demand is way more

Nicolaus Radford: than that. Oh, the, yeah. Globally. Uh, so let's say, let's say if Naus was exceptionally successful, we'll build a hundred. Our competitors, um, the big companies like take, take Oceaneering for example, which I'll loosely classify for this example as a competitor, they have 250 work class ROVs, probably in their height they probably had 350.

We're gonna build a hundred. The market leader of this kind of work, especially in drilling support, is oceaneering without question. And let's just say on average, they, their fleet size is about 300. We're gonna build a third of that over the next [01:10:00] five years. That's, if we went gang busters, which we're probably not gonna build a hundred, that's a fraction of the market, right?

It's because we have turned into, we've turned our device,

we've turned our robot that competes against the day rate of a vessel. So our value of our company will be, let's just, let's say we build 20, right? Um, in my opinion, it's gonna be a story where Tesla has the, has a fraction of the manufacturing capacity of Toyota, but is worth many, many, many times, Toyota, right?

Because the future value of the company is just tremendous. The mark, the stock market is what the, is really what the future value is. It's a representation of what people think you're gonna be valued in the future, not what you're valued right now. Now the mark to market, so to speak, you, you, that's clipped every day, right?

You, you know, as a private company, you're kinda like, I wonder what my company's worth right now as [01:11:00] a public company, you're told that every freaking second, right? It's like, this is what you're worth. This is what you're worth today. This the, this is what you're worth today. This is what you're worth today.

Hamza Ali: talking, speaking about that, what was the valuation when you went public versus today because of the market conditions?

Nicolaus Radford: Yeah. Uh, not as much. Uh, I mean, I are, our, our market cast, probably 200 million from 600. Uh, you know, there's some accounting funnies in there. Okay. Okay. I think our, our, that was our initial out, I think we probably went out at four 50.

Okay. Our, our, our, our I P O D spac. Market cap is probably four 50 and, um, yeah, probably 200, probably half. Okay. Yeah.

Hamza Ali: It doesn't feel good, but, but that's not too bad, based on like, what else is going on in the market? Um, well,

Nicolaus Radford: we've converted a lot of our cash into assets, so it's a balance sheet exercise.

Right, right. So there's that, and then there's what it trades at. Um, [01:12:00] you know, it's, could be worse.

Hamza Ali: Yeah. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is, all right, market's down, timing, you know, for SPACs and the, you know, market in general haven't been like, favorable over the past, you know, I would say 40 months.

Yeah. Guess what? It's a great time to buy. Yeah, well, absolutely. But, uh, you know, I, based on what I'm hearing, I, I feel like you have an end goal. Mm. It's a number. Mm.

Nicolaus Radford: Oh yeah. Oh my

Hamza Ali: God, it's, so, let's talk about that for sure. Cause everybody has a number. Yeah.

Nicolaus Radford: Uh, no. First of all, um, People are like, oh wait, I wanna be a unicorn.

I want a billion dollar company. I'm like, I don't want a billion dollar company. I want a $10 billion company. Are you kidding me? I hunt a hundred percent. Have every I have the raw material of creating a $10 billion company. And even that might be selling it short. And then there's personal objectives.

So those are the best. Those are the best. Yeah. I mean, uh, that's why I've aggressively started tech-oriented companies, tech, [01:13:00] um, listen, I have all the respect in the world for other types of businesses, right? You've been obviously extremely successful. Um, and, and some of the most, uh, I think wealthiest people around are in, are in, have large real estate holdings.

Sure. But, but the, the tippety tip's not even close. Right? Right. Everybody in the top echelon is in tech. And so I view that model and I go, okay, if I'm gonna make a dent in, in Nick's net wealth category, you can springboard quickly in tech. But you know, it's, it's, uh, it's only one or the other, right? It's either like, this is either gonna be incredibly wildly successful, or it is going to just be a disaster.

It goes back to risk. It goes back to risk, right? Yeah. And so now it's trending towards the, the, the, the former, right? The, like, it looks pretty good, the where we're heading, or is there gonna be challenges for sure, but those are just [01:14:00] problems to be solved, right? The fundamentals are what we should be worried about.

We got that part right, right product, right market, right time. There's so much emphasis on the ocean right now. It's, it's crazy. Um, so I love our chances and, you know, I don't want to talk about a number specifically, but I have ambitions. I need to get my little Tony, uh, you know, a good start.

Well-equipped, well-equipped. I want him to be very well-equipped so when he does the mark three, you know, suit, you know, maybe he can, uh, do two of them instead of one. Yeah.

Hamza Ali: I mean, you know for sure. Uh, let's talk about battery technology a little bit. Mm-hmm. Because, I mean, I know you briefly mentioned the electric motors.

Mm-hmm. Uh, obviously these machines that you build are unmanned. Mm-hmm. Meaning they require, you

Nicolaus Radford: know, they have a battery, they have a battery about the size of a Model S battery. So a Tesla model s about a hundred kilowatt hour battery. Aqua not has a hundred [01:15:00] kilowatt hour battery in it. It's the biggest battery for this class of machine in the ocean.

Hamza Ali: And how, how long does that put this machine in, in function or have you have ever had one that just sunk because the battery died or?

Nicolaus Radford: Um, so I got a call, this was, uh, a couple months ago. It's like, I don't know, at night I didn't get a call. Uh, we might have lost one of these things. It's like, what the fuck?

And, um, we got it back. Okay.

Hamza Ali: All right. Well, I guess, uh, I guess that's what we need to know. Do you name 'em?

Nicolaus Radford: You know what, you're the second person in the last, in as many weeks that have been like, so yes, AAU is the brand name. Right. But you name 'em individually. Exactly. Not yet, but apparently we're gonna start because I think, I think that's, if you're, if you're the weather vein of [01:16:00] excellent branding, which you clearly are when you start, when you start naming them.

Yeah. I think

Hamza Ali: not only do you name 'em, you actually like measure their performance, put some KPIs in there, you know. Yeah. That would be, you're fired. That would be so cool. You know, to like everyday track your, your machines and you know, what their success rates. And just, we

Nicolaus Radford: talked about naming, like,

Hamza Ali: and you know, Jimmy's getting old or whatever.

You know, what's wrong with Jimmy today? Jeez. Jimmy's like

Nicolaus Radford: not keeping up. We need to. Yeah, I think that'd be a cool idea. We're going to, we're for sure going to, I thought about naming them, you know, when this came, when this topic came up, uh, our, our marketing graphics person, he's like, what are we naming them?

I'm like, what are we naming 'em? What are you talking about's? Aqua, not aqua, not serial one. Aquanet number two. Aquanet number three. He's like, no, that's not gonna work. Yeah, that's boring. That's boring. Exactly. And he was thinking, you know, he, we can name em like either islands, like, you know, Galveston all the way to, to whatever.

And I was like, so once the concept came up, I'm like, okay, we'll come up with the right name. I don't know if it'll be Bobo, but it'll, it'll [01:17:00] be, um, it needs to be something. Yeah. Because again, you're the second person. The, we can, I'd look at

Hamza Ali: fighter pilot names. I feel like those would be the most like suiting for something like this.

You know, like Bob, like whatever they are, the common, you know, whatever. You know, I guess you'd have to do a little bit of due diligence. What? What? No,

Nicolaus Radford: they got, they got some pretty good, they got some pretty good ones, you know, like Yeah.

Hamza Ali: Or maybe fighter pilot code names, you know, like Maverick or whatever.

You

Nicolaus Radford: know, we, well, we named, so on Jacobi, we named all the motors and we named them after Top Gun. Yeah. It was Maverick. It was Goose. Yeah, exactly. Goose. The Goose one didn't work very well either. They had to throw it away and, um, yeah, we, we did that. It's a good

Hamza Ali: idea. Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. I need to do it, you know, especially in your, like if you have footage or of them operating underneath, if they had a badge with like a name on, that would be hilarious.

You know what I mean?

Nicolaus Radford: That is a good idea. People have thought about painting, like those old World War ii. Yeah. Um, bomber. Bomber Mosaics on the nose. We thought about doing that. [01:18:00] But yeah, we're building afl. I mean, this is, this is, I get as inspired by this as say, early aviation in the twenties. Right, right.

We're just starting. It's just the very beginning. 5% of the world's oceans have been explored on any level whatsoever. We don't know what's down there. We barely know anything about it. Um, that's, that's just sounds ex amazing to me. Yeah,

Hamza Ali: amazing to me. But the fact that we see footage of newly found like species of like, you know, things that live under there in 20 22, 20 23 is just fascinating.

Yeah. It's like what you never knew this was there. Uh, prior to like, we feel like we're so far ahead and like you said, it's like we know more about space than we do about the

Nicolaus Radford: ocean. Yeah, we do. And it's funded multiples more in space. And again, not gonna get on my soapbox. NASA's an amazing agency. I loved my time there.

All I'm saying is that maybe there's a few problems we should just think of a little bit. It's not [01:19:00] saying shut it down. It's not saying we shouldn't be doing it. I'm saying the ocean space is also important and maybe we can take some of that public investment from the space flight community. Right. And better commercialize it into the ocean world.

Hamza Ali: almost feel like that investment is happening by force because if they don't do it, someone else will. Mm-hmm. And they're just trying to keep up.

Nicolaus Radford: Uh, well the Chinese kick our ass when it comes to this topic. That's, that's public. Okay. That's understood. Um, they, their, their arsenals, um, it's pretty advanced.

And

Hamza Ali: so you would say if we backed off a little bit, it wouldn't like really change

Nicolaus Radford: much. No, we should not back off. I mean, we, uh, I mean, listen, you can read the stuff online. Um, That, uh, it's, um, I mean the US needs to [01:20:00] ensure that it has the, that it, you know, we got surprised by, we got surprised by, uh, the reason the existence, you know, the history of darpa, right?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Um, it's the US' sort of, uh, research arm of the d o d, um, part of its creation was not being surprised by an asymmetric military advantage. Launching a satellite in space was sort of an asymmetric military advantage. Um, when the Russians put Su, uh, when the Soviets rather, um, put Sputnik up, um, caught us off guard and the US started putting measures in place that we wouldn't be caught off guard.

And pretty much every major. Technological leap that you and I get to enjoy every single day can find its origin originations at darpa. Yeah. [01:21:00] And so you would expect that they would keep the pulse on what's, what's cool and what's not cool and all sorts of domains. And I would think they probably understand the ocean domain pretty well.

Hamza Ali: Yeah. So let's go to the seven year, uh, jumps and changes. Mm-hmm. Um, and look, you're having too much fun in your life right now, even though of course it's difficult and there's challenges and all of that. Uh, what are the next seven years looking like?

Nicolaus Radford: So I ha I had, uh, I had a, so I have some objectives by 50. I'm 45, which is crazy to just say out loud and then they've, even saying 50 just sounds nuts. Yeah. To even think about being 50 years old. But I've got some numbers and I'm, that I feel both on net wealth and liquidity that, um, will complete the objectives for the next 20 years after that.

And, [01:22:00] um, I had a, when I turned 40, I, I put a plan in place. Um, got really actually executed that pretty well. Market's down, so maybe it's, you know, gonna need some partial credit on this test. Oh yeah. But, um,

my family is just such a big deal to me. Like I, I don't, everyone is, has some universal, there's some universal truths in the world, right? When it comes to the family. It's just, um, I want to position my life to just extract. The most joy and fulfillment and infuse into my kids an attitude of that's so careful.

Just the [01:23:00] ingenuity, do anything, the respect and appreciation, which is gonna be very difficult to do. Um, I'm just thinking about the way my kids potentially could grow up versus how my daughter grew up. My, which, but, but I mean, my daughter who's 15, you know, I got pictures of her in our very first office and she's acting like she's on the phone at a desk playing an engineer, and she's six.

Right? And I think those, those, all of those beginnings have, has given her such a different view of what she can do, what she can put together. She wants to be a pilot, by the way. She wants to go to the Air Force. And um, and one of the reasons I started flying was to show her it's possible, right? Um, And I took her up with me a couple weeks ago and she was just, you know, grinning from ear to ear, you know, just filming in the back of the, the little piper Archer.

Um, but [01:24:00] um,

what I said earlier is I've built a company, but I haven't built a business. So the next five years of my life will be ex, will be growing the biggest business that I can and, and, and doing the most with it. Whether that's on the mission side, on the, um, the outreach side, I'm a big fan of, of outreach. I was inspired by people that got to me and, and, and I was just mentored.

Right. Um, I think you and I have a responsibility to demonstrate to the people that are up and coming how to better the world. I mean, I really do and. Um, or we don't have any hope, you know, that, that we've got to illustrate to people the right character and what really you can accomplish as a, as a human being.

And it's not, [01:25:00] it's not for everybody. The world wouldn't work if we didn't have people that didn't want to go do what they want to. Well, this can be destructive too, right? I mean, I sometimes, I appreciate some of my employees that, that are very strict with their schedule. That five o'clock hits, they're out the door.

They're out door cuz they're gonna go home, their families. Um, and they're very comfortable with that. And I have a ton of respect for that. Um, you know, I've, they're probably happier than I am, you

Hamza Ali: know? Yeah. But they're not founders. Well,

Nicolaus Radford: they're also, I also have a, and again, this is true for a lot of people, and especially you and, and our breed, is that I can suffer some short-term pain.

And I can invest in this period and then understand the dividends it will pay later. Right. And I can sustain that for a very long time. Yeah.

Hamza Ali: I think this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize is that money doesn't, money may [01:26:00] solve, uh, problems, but it doesn't solve the problems that you want to solve.

Yeah. It solves its own problems. Yes. And you are just a bypass mechanism, uh, to kind of put it where it belongs. Yeah. And this is just going back to talking about our breed. Mm-hmm. Really, I think both for you and I, you know, starting businesses and running different businesses. Uh, ultimately it's not what we take home, it's just what we can solve mm-hmm.

That day. And if we walk out of the office solved, you know, a bunch of problems with a little bit of money, that's fine. Mm-hmm. We, we come back again tomorrow

Nicolaus Radford: to fight. I have been, uh, like I'm intoxicated by trying to do something that's never been down the world. And, you know, maybe I can over stress a little bit, but, um, I, I really, it, it, it just fuels me to go, that's a first.

That would be a world first, that's never been done before. And that fuels me. And if I'm successful at that, there'll be a lot of outcrop that could be financially positive. Yeah. Um, and then once you start seeing your weather veining in the right [01:27:00] direction, okay, how do I then utilize those assets to parlay that into something even bigger?

Right? So like in my second funding round, I was already thinking like, okay, let's start another company. Right? I don't wanna keep this here. It will never grow properly here. Let's split the nucleus and start another company. And now they've got independence. Uh, you know, now you're creating two things, right?

If I had kept that IP at my first company, it would've just, it'd been shuttered. Yeah. It'd been shelved, shuttered. We didn't have time for it, et cetera. Right? And then, um,

Hamza Ali: You found the solution and then you created the

Nicolaus Radford: company. Yeah. I mean, uh, and look,

Hamza Ali: that's, that's, I, I guess a lot of people not, I guess I take that back.

A lot of people actually find businesses that way. Yeah, they do. They found, they find the solution and they're like, oh, this could use a company. Mm-hmm. Um, and this is a business, so let me just do

Nicolaus Radford: it. Yeah. I mean, I caution every PhD scientist out there that their dissertation is not gonna be a business.

Um, but it, it is helpful to have a good [01:28:00] idea. Um, but I have also learned that the idea is just the spark that you gotta add, the fuel, you gotta add the, the oxygen and Yeah. And, and, and you gotta keep the flame going because

Hamza Ali: that's the hardest part by which it is all of it to keep the flame going. It's all of it.

That's, that's

Nicolaus Radford: hard. It's all of it. Yeah. Right. And the people that can keep, keep the flame, they're the ones that ultimately went out and succeed. And, and I, and I tell people, like in sudden I do some mentorship and I do some talks and stuff. And it is, I just see people give up. Like they're, they're people can give up too easily, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's like to really, to really do something of value. Do you understand like the struggle that you're just set to do, like it's part and parcel with the whole concept. Unless you win the lottery, acquiring the kind of net wealth that you and I want to compound isn't something that just comes easy or an overnight.

It takes persistent [01:29:00] work and, and every, and there's so many parts of your life that you understand that in weight training, practicing the piano, whatever, we all understand this methodical practice that it takes to hone and become the best of something, but then some, you know, but whatever. But being an entrepreneur, so many people just think it's just supposed to be this little no, you train at it.

You actually read, you train, you study how, what other concepts work, you put those into practice. This is something that's continuously refined. You just don't happen upon it. And I think there's a whole set of people that don't understand that this is something you have to practice. So

Hamza Ali: I know we're running a little, uh, long on time, but I, I do have two questions that I wanna, I wanna discuss maybe, um, you know, in a little more depth.

Uh, first question is, uh, family. Mm-hmm. Okay. What happens or what type of, of a person does it take to deal with [01:30:00] someone like you? Because I'm, it's a great, yeah, because look, I'm, it's my wife. I'm, I'm just, uh, you know, I'm looking back at my, my family, my wife, and it really takes a special type of person to put up with me.

And so I'm wondering now, you know, since we're the same breed, what is that for you?

Nicolaus Radford: Uh, well, it takes. One to no one. So my wife, who's also a very successful entrepreneur, runs her own, um, brokerage and commercial development firm, uh, gets it and has been really good at playing the long game, but it's not that it's easy, she just gets it.

And, um,

I mean, I'm a very difficult person to get along with because I have high standards. I've, um, I can be fun though too, right? So, you know, Scorpio, so, you know, to every [01:31:00] extent you could completely think of, I'm a very passionate individual. I love to have a lot of fun and I work really hard. I expect a lot of myself, but I also expect a lot of other people.

And, um, and I want a lot for other people. And like one of my, one of my, um, One of my goals, I've told a lot of people this, one of my goals was to, was to make 20 millionaires at our company. I got damn close, damn, damn close. And I, I was actually advised by some of our bankers when they were starting the deal.

They're like, if you've given a lot of the company to the staff, I'm like, yeah, I know. That's the whole point. How do you think, why do you think they're doing what the hell they're doing? Right? These people aren't working for salaries. So my, my wife similarly understands that we're building the equity of our, of our family.

And so she's the strongest person I've ever met in my life. Some people are like, oh, that's the strongest woman I know. [01:32:00] She's the strongest person I've ever met in my life. Uh, she puts me to shame and just how, how she can be focused on something and, and how she can just lay it all out, lay it flat, go from there to there, get it.

Um, she's

Hamza Ali: part Does she, does she help you make business decisions? Oh God, yes. Your

business

Nicolaus Radford: decisions? Well, Nauticus is a different animal, right. But we have, uh, rad capital is, is um, you know, it's pretty successful in its own right. We know what I'm talking about it. But, um, you know, I've got two stages, right?

I got the thing I'm creating the net wealth from, and then I've got the thing that provides, uh, a lot of, of cash flow. And I think it's really important to have both those that you're trying to figure out. And, um, she's been very helpful in understanding people and, and, um, I remember when we were first dating, [01:33:00] I was, I was just struck, so she, um, she was becoming a partner in her firm at the time.

She's since last started her own company, but she was, she, she became a partner at her firm and I was listening to her. She had a client call her and she's just like, No, that's not gonna work. This is the way this is gonna go down and, and you have to accept this. And then I was just like, holy shit. I'd never heard someone talk in this sort of affirmative imperative, you know, just fucking deal making, blah, blah.

And I was like, wow, this woman is a fucking amazing, you know, it. And I was just inspired in that moment. And I mean, that's just, it's almost, she's very direct. So she's your Eastern European, right? So she's just like, just straight to the point, right? Yeah. Like Middle Eastern women. Oh, yeah. And I, so I've been, I've had to soften up around the edges a little bit, be like, Hey baby, let's, I think you can get more out of this if you don't piss 'em off too much.

You know? And but, but, uh, but as a [01:34:00] consequence, although in her business life, people love doing business with her because she's just so direct, just bottom line, direct, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna get this done. This is how we're gonna do this, how much it's gonna cost you. Oh, by the way, you can't pay this much for it and don't come back with me and offer and low me cause I ain't not gonna do the deal.

I was like, wow. I'm learning a lot here. Right. And so, uh, but it's, it's, we have a, we have a tough household. I mean, the only reason I'm here is because she was, she's just, she put her company on hold for two years. Right. Um, she kept it going in the background, but it didn't grow near what she wanted to.

And, and, uh, and oh, by the way, was nearly raising our kids. Oh. And her parents are here from Belarus and we don't live with them anymore, but we did at the time, um, because of a bunch of things going on. Right. I mean, there's a little conflict occurring in the right, in the world, right now, in the world right now.

And, um, the only reason I survived any of it is because she's 10 times stronger than I am. [01:35:00] Oh, that's awesome. That's great. No, she's, um, I mean, she's the best thing that ever happened to me.

Hamza Ali: That's awesome. Um, last question, uh, and this one's more on leadership and uh, I guess where I'm going with this is do you feel, um, that in order to hype your team or to have them be energized at the level, um, that you want them to be, that your energy also needs to be elevated?

Oh God yes. So if they, if you, if you expect them to operate at like a hundred percent, you need to be at 150%. Oh

Nicolaus Radford: God, yes. I mean, universally I tell people like I'm a, I'm a motivation bank and they come in with their little ATM cards and they swipe from it every day. And I've realized this and they know it when I'm having a bad day because the whole mood of the company is different cuz it just filters down.

And I've really started studying this effect. And so me [01:36:00] continuously cheerleading and keeping a positive image, Has tremendous probably market cap to, to the, uh, effects on the company. And it's very easy to want to descend into griping and complaining and, and humans relate almost through complaining.

It's like how we tell stories and it doesn't do anybody any good. I can tell you a hundred percent. It doesn't do anybody any good. It will not make you any money. It might feel good for five minutes to vent and can have some cathartic exchange. It will never make you any money. Avoid it like the plague.

You have got to maintain and be a positive force. You will do more by elevating the mood of your company and the spirit of your employees than you ever will by complaining about anything. And um, so yes, as far as a leader goes, now that doesn't mean not address things that are hard and doesn't [01:37:00] mean not deal with your lieutenants, your immediate.

Lieutenants and be firm and say hard things with them. But there's a really good way to do that. I mean, there's a professional leadership style way to do that, but as far as the subordinates, the several ranks down in your company, that needs to be very positive. I had an all hands couple months ago and I was just, you know, I was unhappy with how certain things were happening and I was very expressive.

I had so many people come back to me like, it's too negative. Like, you're, that's, you're just, it didn't, it's not gonna have the effect you thought. And to me, I was like so justified. Cause I make mistakes all the time. I just wanna slap their ass and, you know, smacked their hands and rubbed their nose in it, how bad we'd fucked up and, and, uh, and be like, you know, we gotta do better.

And, and I did a little of the rah rah, we gotta do better. But a little too much of the, what the fuck were you guys thinking type shit. [01:38:00] And. Uh, I'd probably change that if I could do it again. And, and it needs to be much more, you have to be honest, but man, there's a, there's a, there's a angle you can bring that from and positive, it's so much more beneficial no matter how hard it is to, to draw that up from inside you.

Hamza Ali: Yeah. I think as a founder, you just get passionate sometimes and you do. And, uh, at that point, I don't care what people say, you, you need to let certain emotions out and, you know, sometimes it may not come out in the right way. Yeah.

Nicolaus Radford: I'm, I make mistakes. I'm saying I'm grading myself and the advice I would give you and my future self tomorrow is don't succumb to that.

Don't succumb to the ease of, of, it's very easy to just let that part go back to practicing. Right. It's really easy just to eat birthday cake all day. [01:39:00] When in fact, you know, you should be eating healthy practice, eating healthy at work practice, not eating too much birthday cake with the staff. Yep. I'll take that.

Hamza Ali: I'll take that advice unless it's real birthday cake. All right, thanks Nick. Look, um, ham, this was awesome. This was awesome, man. I had a great time. This so much fun. This was so much fun. I think this is the most that we've ever talked and it's weird cuz we talk, you know, face to face and yeah, we talk enough and, and here we are chatting about like, everything, everything, everything.

Uh, but look, it was great having you here. I'm really proud of you and thank you. Really. I do think you are gonna be Ironman. Thank you. Uh, or your son now is gonna be a Ironman. Uh, so, you know, and I, and I'm, and I'm a hundred percent confident, uh, that you will accomplish everything and even more, uh, just because of the cool person and your nature, you know?

And, uh, that means so much. And you know, uh, and of course, uh, you know, the group that we're in, everybody is just. Just crazy, [01:40:00] crazy. Just the stories that you hear. Oh, it's insane. Uh, especially for someone like me who hopped off a plane, came to this country and then, you know, got got to be part of this crazy group.

You know, the first time I actually applied to be part of the group, uh, I don't, I didn't make it Really? Yeah. I didn't make it. My net worth wasn't like, uh, quite there, quite there. Uh, you know, I tried, but it, it didn't work. You've, you've since destroyed that number. So anyways, it was just a, you know, it's just a, it's a life changing experience.

Mm-hmm. And the relationships are just

Nicolaus Radford: life changing as well. Oh, they are. Uh, you know, not to keep going on this, but, um, I was really Okay. Really, another networking group. Holy cow. This one's got a hell of a yearly fee. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember, uh, one of the meetings that I was attending, um, uh, one of our friends, you know, won't give his last name, but, um, Ash.

I was like, it's the cheapest thing you'll ever pay. [01:41:00] Yeah. I'm like, what are you talking about? Who is this guy? He's like, if you're not learning, compounding that and seeing tenfold returns at least Yeah. Then you're just not doing it. Right. Yeah. That's on you then it's on you. Right. And holy cow was he so right.

He is. Yeah. He was so, he nailed it. Exactly. It's a group. It's one of the best group of people I've ever seen in my life. They're, they're all inspiring all of them. Right.

Hamza Ali: You know, I've taken a

Nicolaus Radford: year off, so I was gonna ask you.

Hamza Ali: Yeah. So I've taken, so I have, I don't know if you know this, but in 2019, I exited my portfolio mm-hmm.

Yes. To another, to a person that I identified. No, I know. Yeah. Jack brought into the group. Yeah. So I exited my portfolio and then I, I had an exit outside of my portfolio. Went back into business. Mm-hmm. Uh, but this time went back really into like running my business mm-hmm. Again. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And had sworn I was never gonna do that.

But, you know, such as life, I [01:42:00] guess. But

Nicolaus Radford: you've also Yeah. This has Yeah. Become front and center Yeah. In your life right now. Yeah, for

Hamza Ali: sure. So, you know, we have a bunch of things. I have about six different initiatives that I'm running together, and all of them are in startup mode. Yeah. Like, literally it's startup

Nicolaus Radford: mode, right.

Oh, and so talk about time. Yeah. You know how hard it is to show up once a month at this thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like, I, I, in fact, I didn't go, I haven't gone twice this year. Yeah. Cause I'm like, guys, I'm,

Hamza Ali: so, I, number one, I couldn't, uh, I couldn't go. So I, last year I attended one meeting out of 12.

Oh gosh. Um, and this year I literally have no time also. Um, I, I just need to be focused on mm-hmm. Like what I'm doing. And so I had to call Rick and I was like, Hey, look man, this year is not my next year. I'm back because it's gonna be a little, you know, it's gonna be a little easier and I'll have all the right people in the right place.

Mm-hmm. And hopefully by then I'm ready to go. But this year is just super, that's, you know, how super difficult

Nicolaus Radford: That's so responsible though. Yeah. I mean, [01:43:00] that's, that's a hard thing to do. Yeah, for sure. It's hard saying no to stuff, but I mean, that's some conviction. Yeah. And good on

Hamza Ali: you. Yeah. And so that's awesome.

You know, uh, really just focusing on running the businesses. Mm-hmm. Once they're, hopefully once they're all settled, you know, then, then we're good. Then I'm on autopilot. Uh, but until then I need to be front and center. I get it. Yeah. I get

Nicolaus Radford: it.