The company building underwater drones for $50,000
Episode publishedPodcast: Cheeky PintCheeky Pint
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We build, robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. We need to it on millions of underwater drones.
Saltwater and the ocean is a very hostile environment. So it's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean. Will O'Brien is the cofounder and president of Ulysses. The company started doing seagrass restoration and is now expanding into everything from mapping the seabed to keeping ports secure. O'Brien's larger ambition is to make ocean operations so cheap and routine to support entirely new industries. Before we get to Ulysses, we have a lot to talk about bus tests, going to Ireland's most innovative company. Just explain the technical innovations for Chri
The Guinness Company, a great example of a business. You know, its growth largely derived from technical innovations, and you don't think of it, you think of just like a pint of Guinness, but the truth is, you know, they were starting an in house research and development team as early as the 1890s, and, you know, a research development team where you would just hire extremely smart people and just say, Come in here and find a problem and work on, much like the...
Wait, they did Xerox PARC in Guinness?
They did. As early as the 1890s.
And it was undirected research.
Yeah, just do what you want. So, and there's many technical innovations that come from it. For example, anyone who's... I studied math in college, and one of the tests from that is the student's t test. This is a, how do you derive either the standard deviation if you know the mean or the mean if you know the standard deviation from a small sample, less than 30. This was a problem in Guinness because you know, one to, of the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness is amount of lipids or fats in hops. So they were having to take up like hundreds of hops to see, you know, is
Oh, so not associate the advance with
Ginnett? Exactly. That's right. Didn't want their competitors to know. Yes. So they're getting better margins, so loads of innovation. There was a project, Project Acorns. Acorns standing for advanced cans of rich nectar, which was the basically how do we put can... How do we make a Guinness at home version. It was the eighties. People were starting to drink less and drink more at home. Price of... The price of a pint was going from a pound to a pound 50. People were up in arms, so they're drinking at home. So they're like, how do we do these things at homes? Initially, the project was called
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