The Ocean: Earth’s $2.5 Trillion Last Frontier | Will O’Brien, Co-founder of Ulysses
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 111 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Will O’Brien is the Co-founder of Ulysses, building autonomous, low cost robots for the ocean.
Will considers the ocean humanity’s next great frontier. It makes up over $2.5 trillion of economic activity, considering things like fishing, aquaculture, shipping, mining, communications infrastructure, and defense. Yet we know more about the surface of the moon’s of Saturn than we do the bottom of our own ocean.
We talk about Ulysses first product, restoring plant life in the ocean, their modular autonomous underwater robotics platform, advice for anyone selling to governments, crazy businesses that could eventually evolve in the ocean, and why the way we finance startups needs to change.
Will also loves conspiracy theories, and we talk about some of our favorites, and why he thinks people who believe them could make good startup founders.
Thank you to Will’s brother’s Harry and Jacob O’Brien, and to upcoming guest of the show Eoghan McCabe for helping brainstorm topics for Will.
Special thanks to Ramp for supporting this episode. It's the corporate card and expense management platform used by over 40,000 companies, like Shopify, CBRE and Stripe. Time is money. Save both with Ramp. Get $250 for signing-up here: https://ramp.com/ThePeel
Timestamps:
(4:03) Peace offering of Dubai Chocolate
(5:30) Modern internet theory
(7:40) The ocean is the last frontier
(11:53) Ulysses: read/write layer of the ocean
(13:35) The $2.5 trillion ocean economy
(15:14) Current ocean unit economics
(18:50) Starting with seagrass ecosystem restoration
(24:13) Modular, underwater autonomous robots
(27:31) Starting Ulysses with a group chat
(29:51) Raising a Seed from Lowercarbon with no network off a cold calendar invite
(32:24) Economic use cases for ocean robotics
(36:07) Spiritual energy from the ocean
(42:36) First Ramp podcast ad in Irish
(43:21) Floating cities, sub tours, deep sea mining, iron fertilization
(51:47) $10+ billion in shipwrecked treasure
(53:18 Atlantis is real
(59:46) Craziest alien conspiracy theories
(1:01:28) Sinking the titanic to create the Fed
(1:04:19) Conspiracy theory believers are good founders
(1:07:55) How to sell to the government
(1:13:28) Writing a letter to an Irish billionaire
(1:16:00) Finding meaning after living with Monks in Nepal
(1:27:10) Why financial innovation precludes economic dominance
(1:44:01) The SPV peddler business model
(1:46:35) Should we bring back SPAC’s?
Referenced
Ulysses: https://www.ulysses.eco/
Careers at Ulysses: https://www.ulysses.eco/jobs
The Richat Structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure
Jesse Michael’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichels
Brad Jacobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Jacobs_(businessman)
Follow Will
Twitter: https://x.com/willobri
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will0brien
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The ocean is one of the most strategically important domains for the next century. |
| 0:03.2 | There is moments in history where we're defined by what's going on on land. |
| 0:08.1 | And there's moments in history when we're defined by what's going on in the ocean. |
| 0:11.1 | You have like the age of exploration, the age of sail, colonization, these kind of periods |
| 0:15.0 | where like humanities, you know, capability was like very tied to like what we were doing on the ocean. |
| 0:20.3 | And then you kind of come towards like the 20th century where like all of the major wars |
| 0:24.9 | were like fought pretty much over land barring like, you know, a portion of World War II. |
| 0:30.4 | They were fought in deserts or in jungles or in cities. |
| 0:33.0 | From an economic point of view, like economic well-being was like generated in- |
| 0:37.1 | And like factories, industrial production, all on land, all on land. |
| 0:40.3 | And now for a variety of reasons, the focus is turning back towards the ocean. |
| 0:46.3 | Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Albanian Capital. |
| 0:50.3 | Today's guest is Will O'Brien, co-founder and CEO of Ulysses. We're building this autonomy platform with the ocean, autonomous robots to do the most critical tasks in the oceans. |
| 1:00.0 | This conversation goes incredibly deep on humanity's next great frontier, the ocean. |
| 1:06.0 | The ocean makes up over $2.5 trillion of economic activity, considering things like fishing, aquaculture, |
| 1:12.4 | shipping, mining, communications infrastructure, and defense. |
| 1:15.5 | A billion people on Earth rely on is their primary source of income. |
| 1:19.1 | $3 billion is their primary source of protein covers two-thirds of the earth. |
| 1:23.7 | It's a big deal. |
| 1:25.5 | We talked about Ulysses' first product. |
| 1:27.2 | We're storing plant life in the ocean. |
| 1:28.3 | The graph is 35 times better than rainforests, |
... |
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