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Mark Nelson

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68
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2026-03-31
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2026-03-31
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  1. “I think though, you know, on the flip side of this, the last 40 ish years of efficiency gains we've gotten, which have been super important, it's allowed us to kind of look the other way. The real bottleneck in energy generation on the grid, which is just delivery. And we're so bottleneck today on the lines that run crisscross across the country. I mean, it's this very complicated giant organic machine. We probably don't have to talk long about that. Everyone's talked about that plenty. But the grid is breaking. So when we think about just, you know, from an investment perspective, the types of things that we're interested in, it's like, how do we actually go about kind of solving that really complicated transmission and delivery challenge with technology?”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Of GDP, electricity production. Now, it's changing now that we can find more applications, I think, for AI than ever before. And so we're going to see, we are seeing electricity growth outpacing, well, higher than it's ever been before. And that's not just because the benefits of energy efficiency are tailing off, but it's because we're seeing like broad-based demand for more electricity compute, transportation, industrial electrification. It's an exciting time, I think, because electricity as a carrier is like incredibly flexible and is a pathway to a sustainable energy future, whether it's for intelligence or for heating, I see it as a great thing and want to accelerate it.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, high level, we benefited from energy efficiency from the 70s really were really the 80s until like the 2010s. And you saw efficiency everywhere, like an industry with variable speed drives, with lighting, with heating and cooling, progressively more efficient refrigerators and air conditioners. And all of that energy efficiency more or less negated like the growth in energy services because absolutely like the energy services were growing over time in the United States. But like the net electricity delivered to accomplish those energy services stayed basically flat. And the same thing even happened in data centers. It's actually really interesting. If you like look at the efficiency of compute, even with all the AI things that are going on in terms of like flops per watt, it's really gone up an immense amount from like the first data centers to today. And that has allowed, you know, more and more compute capability for the same percentage.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So, yeah, I got convinced that we needed a massive scale up of electricity generation production distribution, transmission, and stuff. And I had seen at the same time that while there's so much innovation happening on one side of the wire, there's really been almost no innovation on the grid side of the wire. And that's where I got the conviction to go after Power Electronics for accelerating electrification, really increasing the scalability and affordability of doing everything that's required to enable electric generation and use. And that's how I found it heron, yeah.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Everyone can't just be like little intelligent generators and microgrids that like mesh together. We don't have that already? Which planet is this? Yeah, like maybe humans were that, I'm not sure. Yeah.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Could not just be the best vehicles, but also affordable vehicles that renewables can come with really affordable storage to help decarbonize the electricity sector. And towards the end of my time at Tesla, I had the opportunity to work on this project called the Master Plan Part 3 project where we were effectively studying, okay, now let's do it for the whole globe. Can we have a sustainable all-electric or largely all-electric sustainable energy future? Is it feasible? Are the resources there? Because the investment reasonable? And the answer was like yes, resounding yes in many ways. And so I. And so the electricity grid needs to grow immensely three to five X, depending on how you calculate and how much intelligence we need to get electricity for. We need a lot, a lot for sure.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah. So a similar story, I guess, and that for me, it goes back to a similar time. So I joined Tesla in 2006. And the reason why I even went there in the first place was because I had done this undergraduate thesis in how to enable New Zealand to meet their Kyoto commitments. If you remember the Kyoto Protocol and they're an island nation, so it's almost like a microgood study in disguise. So what are all the resources there? How can you reduce the carbon emissions from all these different sources? I was focused on transportation in particular and I became convinced that electrification of transport was not just like a way to solve a carbon problem, but actually just the best thing to do from an economics perspective. And that motivated me to come to Tesla. And then over the almost two decades that I was there, all the technologies progressed over those two decades, right? Like the power of electronics became cheaper, the batteries became cheaper, what you can apply these problem statements to just grew in scope, right? We proved that electric vehicles.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And not to eat up all the time. I worked on the first Rock Up with Legs called Grasshopper back in 2011. It was a four person team really designing and building the whole team, the whole thing. And we were reporting directly to Elon, like just Elon, to us four, and then building the whole thing. And it was awesome because we did really well. We got lucky a lot of times, but we made a rocket that flew and landed on legs. And then I did all the weird Elon side projects and ideas. So Hyperloop, when he got really serious, I got tapped into that and into the boring company and then Mars Colony design. And in doing the Mars Colony design, I was looking at how do you take starship there, make fuel from what's on Mars, make fuel from ice that's there. And if you do that, you need megawatts of power. And I was trying to do it with solar and getting totally stuck and showing Elon these plans that were like four miracles and we need on a single mission. And it was just ridiculous. And so Elon was like, you probably should look at nuclear. And that's really the jumping off point, right? I started to learn. And then three years later, I founded Radiant.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, I just wanted to work on an important mission and I didn't, I really just cared kind of like polish one stone of this like great big pyramid that is like some lifetime achievement for someone else even, right? That's what I wanted. So yeah, I joined. I did that. I did the first two Falcon 9s. Did the ground system for it entirely, which involved all the permitting also. So this is like launching a rocket from a military base. There's a lot of like regulatory stuff there.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Oh man, yeah, it's a fun story. So I was at SpaceX for 12 years. I joined in 2007, so I joined when they had two failed rockets, no successful rockets. And so I got to work on the first ones that worked.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “No, but I mean, you should know your competition. And the good thing is, like, MIT was doing amazing. Delft did a really awesome as well, though. And I mean, we should learn as much as we can from that.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think they did it three or maybe it was four times, and then they stopped it, which is good. It's for the best, it was exciting. It led to some companies sometimes. There were some startups in, I think it was one really good one in Based out the Netherlands.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, I wasn't roped in that really early stuff. It was more like when it was for real we're going to do it and you had to build it really fast. That's when I got put into it. And just take the voters from just eight months from now, have like people from 23 different countries or whatever it was come. Celia”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, there was a lot of back and forth on what was possible, and could we reuse this or that? And also, a big part of the Hyperloop story, because we published a big white paper, was actually like assessing all the technologies required to deliver the concept, right? Including for my team, it meant looking at slingshot linear motors that would accelerate the capsule in the vacuum. It was all kinds of fun, never explored physics for our team before. I don't know if you had”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So I'm Doug Bernaur. And so we know each other. We were both working for El About 10 years ago, but at two different companies. So I was at SpaceX, and Elon was really excited. He wanted to build Hyperloop. He wanted to put little cars in a vacuum tube and go super fast. And Drew is a VP of R&D at Tesla at the time. And I called him up and was like, Elon says, we need battery packs, we need Model S motor, we need to operate these things in a never-before operated condition. And Drew's like, do we really? And I was like, yeah, we kind of do. But it was kind of like that. And then from there, we did boring company also. There was an idea to do like 30 tons of batteries or something on a trailer to power an entire tunnel boring machine, like one and a half megawatts. So it was a story of power, actually.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Electric power is civilization. Every socket, every Assumes a grid that works. Edison wired Lower Manhattan in 1882. He connected 85 customers across one square mile. The model that followed, centralized generation, one-way transmission, held for more than a century. Now U.S. electricity demand is rising for the first time in decades. Data centers, electrified transport, and reshoring are outpacing the efficiency gains that mask years of grid underinvestment. Generation is not the bottleneck. Delivery is. This episode examines two. Portable nuclear Built in a factory, and solid state power. To rebuild the grid from the edge. I speak with Doug Bernauer, founder and CEO of Radiant, and Drew Baglino, founder and CEO of Heron, alongside A16Z General Partner, Aaron Price Wright”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Grid itself is civilization, right? Electric power is civilization. You can metamorphize the entire grid. Civilization can regrow off of a new architecture of moving power, right? And use all of the free energy that's out there. The sunlight is free. You put up a panel, you're getting it. It's very cool, but also your aim is free. It's in the ground. It's there. You take it and we use it before it just goes away. It makes this completely new way, I think, of thinking about nuclear power. It's just, it's in the options list and it wasn't even before.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “New power is not the problem. Delivery is the problem. The energy services were growing over time in the United States. The net electricity delivered to accomplish those energy services stayed basically flat. So we can take that momentum and bring it into a new problem statement, which is power for data centers, power for industrialization, power for economic growth and prosperity, and for sustainable energy.”

    2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source