YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Nolan

lines on the record: 81
first: 2026-04-14
most recent: 2026-04-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think there's the onshoring piece, but it's maybe even simpler as just vertical integration. So even domestically, you have companies in the nuclear space, the aerospace industry, like defense, many different sectors where subcontracting is the norm and you're going to subcontract a subsystem to somebody who subcontracts the component and then that component has different inputs and the subcontract that all the way down. I think in aerospace at the SpaceX days, it was 30 layers of subcontractors in this one system somehow, I think was the case from the space shuttle, some crazy number of subcontractors. And then in the nuclear space recently, there was one analyst call where a company was bragging about having something like 900 subcontractors and so many that they needed regional organizers of the subcontractors. And on one hand, it's like, okay, clearly what you're doing is really complicated then and there's deep barriers to entry, but every one of those interfaces that crosses another company is.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it was all the classic things there's the Elon algorithm at this point. I don't think it was explicit back then. It was just, hey, we have to get this rocket launched. Let's make sure it works. Let's not overoptimize or have analysis paralysis. Just define what the goal is, come up with a good solution. This looks like a good solution. That's a good plan. Let's run with it. Let's not deliberate for months and months and months over things. Let's just decide and move forward. And if we're wrong, we can always go back because there's extensive testing along the way. So it was really use good engineering principles. Think from first principles. Move fast. Get it to 90, 95%, not 99%. Get operational and you can make it better later. But if we just never launch, if we never get operational, this isn't going to work.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think my takeaway was in industries where you have true believers who are in the government agencies and who have been doing this for a long time. They're there because they wanted to happen. And there's a lot of openness and excitement to working together if the company is credible and cares as much about safety and performance as the agency does.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like you would think collision, then yes, that's an issue, but the way orbits work, it's actually there's some ability to avoid it even if things are off track. The harder thing to really get a handle on was things like thermal and pressure and okay, you've got this vehicle and it has solar panels and what's the heating on the vehicle and what thermal mode is that driving back to the space station and can that handle it So all these interface requirements And so we were working closely with NASA on those And ultimately these were incredibly smart people who believed in space who had been working at NASA for decades and cases despite not a ton of growth in space activity they were there because they believed it and they loved it and the opportunity to work with a company to like okay we have the space station we have this program how do we get you guys to the next step in the milestones how do we collaborate to like make sure this is safe but that it actually happens super collaborative very positive”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My experience through SpaceX was the government wants to work with private industry and wants to solve problems. At SpaceX, I worked on the engine systems under Tom Mueller and did a lot of the structural thermal work on those and helped make sure that they would stand up to the environments and everything and be low cost and high performance. That's ultimately what we were optimizing for. And then once those engine systems were working really well, I moved over to the Dragon capsule. And in Dragon, we were on the NASA COTS program, commercial orbital transportation services. And it was a multi-100 million dollar program to bring back two things, capability of launch to space station and then a first, a cargo vehicle, and then it ultimately a crewed vehicle that could dock with the space station. The last year or two I was there was really focused on Dragon and working very closely with NASA because we were going to go dock with, I guess, the most expensive asset mankind had ever developed. And so the last thing.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my path to understanding the bottlenecks in nuclear energy was having invested in radiant, having met so many other advanced reactor companies along the way. And then all of them said the exact same thing. We're going to make nuclear affordable. We're going to make it scalable. We're going to take this from huge construction projects to factory built. And yet the one thing that's the hardest is not licensing. Everyone thinks the NRC is impossible to get through, but no, it's not that they told us it's actually we cannot get the fuel. The fuel comes from Russia, only Russia makes it. We have to import it. That's quite challenging. And this was even pre-Russia ban. We just need some source of fuel. And so I spent all of 2023 looking into this, trying to understand, okay, of the five steps of making fuel, what's stopping it? Is it all of them? Is it there's not enough uranium? Is it something about the process? And it was the enrichment set. And so look to trying to find a company in the enrichment set to debottleneck nuclear.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just looking at all sorts of different hardware companies. First investment I ever made was a satellite company, Planet Labs, then did a lot of different things that were outside of pure software the last couple years of Founders Fund drifted back towards almost pure hardware by the end and then really energy where we invested in Crusoe energy and understood the whole stranded supply inside of things and what could you do with that and then invest in a company called Radiant, which was the inverse stranded demand. How could you serve that demand? Maybe you could serve it with a small microactor, even if that microactor's output was expensive. The stranded demand had to pay crazy rates anyway for diesel generators in a remote Alaskan village, for example, or an army base. And so that's a good starting point, fitting the whole Founder's Fund thesis of start with a really small market and grow into a bigger market. Like don't worry about your TAM, worry about owning that market and then grow from there.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who just want to build, there's lots of places you can build. But if you want to actually start a company, it better be something that you're really passionate about or you think that the problem is really important. So for me, no, enriching uranium never was something I was specifically excited about. I was always into nuclear energy. I always thought that this was a no-brainer. Probably the two things from sci-fi from like the 60s was always the two industries we were supposed to have, not just from sci-fi, but like what our country thought was We're going to be going to space and we're going to be doing things in space and we're obviously going to have nuclear energy. We went from burning wood to chemical bonds and now atomic energy was clearly so much more energy dense and powerful and should be lower cost. Those were always things I was excited about. Never had a specific interest in uranium enrichment, but then through the course of investing in founders fund went from 2010.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The investor seat, I don't think you want to be in love with an idea. I think that's a risky thing because then you're going to try and find a way to express that by investing and you're going to maybe make some compromises on the team because you know this idea is just so good. It's time has come. But then if the team isn't there 90% of the time it doesn't work. Then there's a whole thing, of course, in jockey. Can you swap out the team? But the whole founders one thesis was always that you need the founder to run the company to have this vision and to see it through. From the investor side, I think being in love with that idea is really dangerous and it can cause you to make all sorts of compromises that come back to haunt you and it can cause you to put good money after bad despite the writing on the wall. But I think on the company side, you have to be in love with the idea. It's like not that rational to start a company. There's a lot easier, more comfortable ways to make money if that's the goal. So it's got to be about what the company's doing specifically. I think smart people who want to make money, like there's so many good jobs in the finance world for that or”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, people are just anchoring on the past. Or they're like, oh, last round was this. I guess it should be reasonable compared to last round price. And then in reality, like, okay, all that matters is next round price. How do we make sure the next round's an up round? Like, what are the catalysts going to be for further increases? And so, yeah, you don't get paid as an investor based on how close you were to last round's price. It's ultimately against exit price. But the only thing you have to go off of that's actual data or empirical is the past. And so people are much more anchored on that.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That may be the case. Yeah, if you look at actual dollars deployed, it's probably more the whole concentrated into the winner's strategy. I think the way that that can still be a good strategy, even if the company's popular is A, it's popular, but not as popular as it will be. Or B, this idea that up rounds, it's almost like anchoring on the past versus looking to the future. Peter has said this a bunch of times and has guided the founders fund team to think this way. It was more talked about in the early 2010s, but if you've got a company that was growing steadily, but then there's a big upround, it's probably the case that that up round is not even enough up that if it's like a 2x up round, maybe it should be a 4x up.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that can probably be okay. But for true venture, I think it's dangerous because either it says something about the company's ability to raise capital that they're unable to at market prices. And unless this is the last round that they need to raise or they really are going to be a capital efficient business, that's probably a risky thing. Maybe the team is incredible at debt financing, but terrible adventure financing. And so they're going to switch to debt, and that's going to be amazing. You could imagine a situation like that. But typically, if you're meeting a company and it's a crazy value deal, it's probably just not going to end up being that good is what I've observed empirically.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The low competition thing typically would be associated with lower valuations, but I think that's trying to find value deals in venture is not the right plan. Maybe if you have a very small fund and you can pick up some interesting IP or this company, maybe we'll never be that huge, but this is a really good deal. And you look at multiples and stuff and starts to look a little bit more like PE or something.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market share in different markets was increasing a lot. We did the work, we looked at like every single market, sliced market share, marketing spend, and you could see like all these markets that they were in, they were just taking share and becoming the dominant thing. So you analyze the data and it was like they're winning. It's over they're going to win.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Airbnb was one of these. We did a lot of work on it. At the time, so Founders Fund did a small angel check early on and then did a much bigger check in the next round. And so at the Angel check, it was still the very informal air mattresses. I think there had been some thing where some guests completely destroyed a home and there was a whole bunch of controversy around that. And then the company took a hard stance on that and said, we will reimburse the host and we are professionalizing this. And I think that was maybe the moment that you could tell it was going to go mainstream. And then Foundersman made a huge investment. But if you just look back in the past, you might say, oh, this seems like a niche thing. But if you did the work, you could see a bunch of different trends. You could see the demographics were shifted.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because then you start doing the analysis when you kind of already know, oh, I guess we should do the work, but you kind of already know which ones you like. In fact, you should just concentrate into the fewest number of companies possible and don't dilute your average returns by indexing. And then over time, get better at asking the right questions to help harness the intuition. Or like, okay, we should dig into this.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably wasn't even the meeting itself, it was probably just trusting your judgment more. So I think on day one, it was just, okay, I don't know anything. I'm going to take a lot of meetings. Some of these seem good, some seem not so good. We need to do the work because what do I know? I think early on, the intuition was all that you had to go on. And I think it's usually correct. And then, you know, I get probably a little bit better at the job in the next couple years, get better at trying to analyze things, understand it. That might actually lead you astray, I think.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing the Napster thing and then years and years of trying to find the right company that was taking the right formula, I think led to that and led to him seeing the potential of Spotify and why it was the perfect geography to start in and the perfect licensing strategy. And so I think it's often just like a really deep interest in something that's of personal interest to a founder and they believe it should exist. They believe there should be some way to solve this and everyone's done it the wrong way and here's the right way. I think sometimes people are sitting with those ideas for five or ten years.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Airbnb is a classic huge example. When Founder Sundest, it was still crossing from kind of a weird backpacking couch surfing air mattress and someone's living room to what it is today. And so not that many people were that interested in sleeping on air mattresses in people's houses, but that was something that that team was really into. And how do we turn this into something much larger where people can meet each other and have like a really authentic experience when going somewhere instead of just staying in a hotel? That wasn't something many people were thinking about. And yet when you actually looked at it, you realized how big the market could be and if they could cross over to a mainstream thing, it could be huge. That's one example. Sean Parker was on the Founders One team right when I joined and let the Spotify investment and the internal memo or thread on the Spotify investment was just so well reasoned. And it was because of this history of understanding music.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you just get in a stalemate where all the companies maybe get to like oligopoly status, the equation for max profits is just make pricing high enough to the breaking point, collect your cost plus revenue and your margins, and then it never becomes a really compelling thing. So like space launch, for example, to some extent defense, which you see with Androil trying to break that to some extent, infrastructure like the boring company. This is their prime thesis. So I think incumbents stagnated oligopolistic cost plus industries are just prime for this.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different business characteristics. When you meet a founder like that who's working on something like this, usually they're not just going to give you superficial answers to convince you to give them money. The conversations with great companies like that always felt more like this person is really into this thing for some reason. And when I ask them a question, they're not just giving me an answer and trying to bounce back to the surface. They're like, here's the answer. Here's the next question you're going to ask. And let's take you all the way down the rabbit hole. So they like showing you around the space. That's how it felt from the investor seat. If you think about what are the attributes of industries where this is the case, I think a huge portion of them are going to be industries that somehow just stagnated. And I think the thing that's most linked to stagnation is probably being a cost plus industry where there's very little incentive for progress, not much incentive to bring the cost structure down, and therefore you end up with this fixed market size that never takes off.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better or worse, they can draw you into a potentially brute force sort of approach. First few years at Founders Fund, I'm looking for great founders. I'm looking for underexplored ideas. It's just lots and lots of meetings. So from the investor perspective, unless you have things that you're into that you think are underappreciated by the world and you've maybe been really excited about them for a really long time, why does no one think about this? And maybe it's this idea in your head that you just keep digging on and maybe someday you find a company that's actually an expression of that trade, then it's just meeting a lot of people and trying to find what's interesting and what sounds really different and what makes sense from the investor perspective. The attributes are something like, hey, you mean a founder? They seem really smart. They're talking about this thing no one's really talking about. They're telling you why everyone who's thought about this problem either thinks it's impossible or they're all going about it in the completely wrong way. And if you adjust and come at it from a different point of view, it results in a really different solution that has”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two layers of competition. So the avoid competition thing was a huge, huge part of this. That's definitely a lesson learned. But the competition piece is typically understood as the company level competition. And so if there's a trend inherently, you have many companies going after the same trend. You're going to have new entrants. It's become a thing. It's not about one company. It's about the theme. And if there's a theme that's not about one company, then it's about many companies. And so how is it not the case that they'll compete? profit sound to economic equilibrium of perfect competition. So there's that piece of avoid a trend for that reason, but then layer two is if there's a trend, then probably many investors are looking at it and they're pricing it up. Where's your advantage? And so you want to avoid competition on both fronts. And when there's trends, you usually get both fronts.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of our hardware investments turn out to be pretty good. I think they exceeded all expectations for everybody. Founder Sun first invested in in 2008. And then what it is today, I don't think many people would have predicted, like maybe Elon could have seen it. Inherently, it has to become the scale of company to do that. But I doubt anyone would have expected this sort of outcome this quickly.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was talking a lot about we'd made all this progress in the world of bits, but not in the world of atoms. You could be on your cell phone and it was interesting and then you look around and nothing's changed in 50 years. And so I think he was starting to already think about this probably even more than he was talking about and probably thinking which companies are doing this well. Where would someone who could kind of understand the business world and the investing world and then also the startup world come from?”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like mini layers to this. Number one was it was just avoiding trends, avoiding the herd, thinking for yourself. That was probably layer one. The second part was probably that whenever we looked at any companies, Peter always took a very orthogonal view to most people. So there'd be like layers of abstraction instead of just doing a spreadsheet and trying to analyze this investment. Why don't we think about why are we even seeing this investment? How should we think about this investment from this very different perspective than everyone else? And so sometimes there would be like layers of abstraction that were many layers and you would end up with a really different view on things. It's like really natural to just dive in and start trying to understand the business, but trying to develop a very different perspective on it that would yield some alpha. He probably also thought at the time, I think around 2010 it was all very contrarian. What does no one investing in? What's underappreciated? I feel like that was around the time that”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my thesis was hey, I think there's a huge set of physical world companies that could be really valuable. And this could span biotech, computer chips, satellites, space launch, transportation infrastructure, almost anything that was not digital and that this was a huge opportunity area that everybody was ignoring. And then came across this problem of enrichment of uranium in the US's total lack of capacity in the space. essentially forced me to go start general matter.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in building that. That was 2005 Genesis of Founders Fund, but by 2010, when I was talking to Peter 2011, it was more this contrarian thing of what important companies is no one funding and how can we beat the capital for that. The thing that I focused on when I joined in 2011 was really, yeah, what set of companies are really promising that people underappreciate? And I had just come from SpaceX, which was not yet in 2011. Appreciate it. Appreciated. Four years later, they were landing rockets and it was obvious that all this stuff was going to work from the inside, but the whole world didn't understand it yet.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first or second month of business school to join Square, and so this one path was maybe go join Square. And Keith, who is a Founders Fund for a while, was the person trying to recruit me to drop out and go to Squares. In the meantime, met Peter. I was sitting in a class that he was doing at the law school. This one was called Technology, Sovereignty, and Globalization. There were many different readings. There was things about theory of government, how would technology change the power dynamics around government versus industry. And he convinced me to join his startup in the venture capital space. And the basic premise was VC needs innovation. The incumbents won't do it. And circa 2005, the concept was founder-friendly. If you looked at all the most successful companies, they were founder-run all the way to the end. And so the premise was let's give founders back control of their companies and unilaterally support them.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it was 30 people, it was to me a no brainer to go work there right after college. I interned during college. I saw what it was. It was like, yeah, these guys are going to win. I want to be a part of that. That was an industry that had stagnated for decades. No incumbent was doing anything interesting. They were all just writing government cost plus contracts. The US assumed that space launch was a nation state capability that would never be a commercially interesting thing to do. And it just had to be subsidized forever. And so the result was Cost Plus contracts. layers of subcontractors dozens deep and no ability for anyone to like do something really novel it was going to take a new company so that led me to space x early on and then found my way to founders in 2011 so i was actually at stanford in business school started in 2010 was quickly voted most likely to drop out it wasn't exactly i wanted to get to work i just wanted to do stuff and so i thought about dropping out and actually”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framework has always been just do something that's useful, do something that you feel like you're making a real contribution and using your talents to make some type of positive impact. That's what important problem is there that's not going to get solved otherwise that somehow I can contribute to. I think all three major things I've done have fit that in some way. If we take them one at a time, like, yeah, SpaceX founders find it now general matter. SpaceX, I was just an engineer coming out of undergrad. I had worked at Boeing during college, just saw what the incumbent aerospace industry was like. Didn't want to work in that, didn't believe it was going to change anything. And so aerospace background always wanted to work on rockets, aircraft, asked myself, okay, what's the most exciting thing to do? And it was, I still want to be in the industry. I know the incumbents are not going to make an impact, but there's this new company, SpaceX, that is going to ultimately own the entire space launch industry, which I believe.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source