Atomic Show #318 – Brian Gitt, Business Development, Oklo
Brian Gitt, the Business Development lead at Oklo, visited the Atomic Show to describe his employer’s business model and current prospects. Oklo is an advanced fission and fuel recycling company with an expansive vision for becoming a competitive clean energy supplier. It plans to provide heat and/or electricity as a service from a fleet of small fission power plants that it owns, operates and maintains. Oklo recently became a public company through a SPAC merger with AltC, a special purpose acquisition company led by Sam Altman, a venture capital investor and the founder and CEO at OpenAI. Oklo was founded in 2013 by Jake DeWitt and Caroline Cochran, two MIT nuclear engineering graduates with a vision for building a company that could manufacture and operate smaller, simpler reactors. Recognizing that nuclear engineering skills are not the only ingredient needed to build a company, Oklo founders made an early decision to participate in an entrepreneurial immersion training program at Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator and seed stage venture capital funder. Their unique business proposition for clean energy development was compelling enough to attract serious interest from Sam Altman, who was then serving as the president at Y Combinator. He became one of the company’s earliest investors and began serving as the company Chairman. As Gitt describes, Oklo has spent the past decade preparing for the growth in clean energy demand that is coming from both the energy transition and the growing use of energy for applications like high performance data centers for applications like artificial intelligence (AI). The company also sees huge opportunities in clean energy for materials production, mining and increased manufacturing in places outside of China. For more details, you’re going to have to listen to the show. Please participate in the comment section discussion. I expect that many listeners will find this to be a valuable use of their time. Disclosure: I have a long position in Oklo’s publicly traded stock in my personal portfolio.