The company building underwater drones for $50,000

Will O'Brien (0:00)

We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. We need to be willing millions of underwater drones.

John Collison (0:06)

The saltwater and the ocean is a very hostile environment. That's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean. Will O'Brien is the co-founder 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, but just getting to Ireland's most innovative company, just explain the technical innovations for Chris.

Will O'Brien (0:38)

The Guinness company, a great example of a business.

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, they were starting an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s. And 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...

John Collison (1:00)

Wait, they had Xerox PARC in Guinness?

Will O'Brien (1:01)

They did. As early as the 1890s.

John Collison (1:03)

And it was undirected research.

Will O'Brien (1:04)

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 students' 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 to, you know, one of the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness is the amount of lipids or fat in hops. So, they were having to take up like hundreds of hops to see, you know, is this a high quality batch or not? And they were losing a few percent per batch, and that means a lot when you're in the high volume, you know, low margin food and beverage industry. So, William C. Lee Gosset had to publish under a pseudonym, the student. He couldn't publish his research that he was doing with Fisher, famously, another famous statistician of the time, in the early, about the 1920s. He published in the first journal of Mathematica, which is now a very famous mathematics journal.

This innovation, this breakthrough he found of how to do like small sample statistics, but he had to publish, and that's why it's called the student's tea test, still to this day, because they didn't want Anheuser-Busch or Heineken or other people to know that they were hiring these researchers to like solve problems for them.

John Collison (2:21)

Oh, so not associate the advanced with Guinness? Exactly. That's fine.

Will O'Brien (2:24)

They 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 make a Guinness at home version? It was the 80s, people were starting to drink less and drink more at home. The price of a pint was going from a pound to a pound 50, people were open arms, so they're drinking at home. So they're like, how do we do these things at homes?

Initially, the project was called Project Dynamite, but as you'd imagine in the 1980s, shipping parcels with the word dynamite on it between London and Dublin would have caused them some concern.

John Collison (2:58)

They got confused on the other parcels.

Will O'Brien (2:59)

Yeah. So they stopped labeling the project Dynamite, they renamed it Project Acorn, and they developed the widget. And the widget was voted above, did you know it was voted above the Internet in the 1990s, top 100 inventions of the 20th century? Marketing is another place where Guinness was really, the Guinness is- The Nigeria thing. Nigeria, the movie, the film industry in Nigeria.

John Collison (3:24)

They produced the James Bond of Nigeria, and people know Guinness is very popular in Nigeria, it's one of the top markets, but it's because they just made a movie where, well, I guess it was Guinness-

Will O'Brien (3:34)

It's the top market, actually.

John Collison (3:35)

Okay. Yeah, it was like Guinness, the top, was it part of the movie or something? It was, yeah.

Will O'Brien (3:39)

But the marketing, I think, is really one of the areas where Guinness was most standout. I think Guinness is good for you as this iconic campaign.