Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Dr Nick Hawker, Co-Founder and CEO of First Light Fusion, a lower risk energy efficient approach to the power generating process, inertial fusion. You are going to get used to this today and don’t worry, we’re going to walk you right through all these terms. While studying Mechanical Engineering as an undergraduate, Nick became fascinated by the pistol shrimp, which stuns its prey by snapping its claw and sending an air bullet through the sea. For his PhD at Oxford, Nick aimed to unlock the power of this bubble stun gun and after modelling how the bubble contains air heated to more than 5000°C, Nick believed the shrimp’s approach could unveil the secret of supplying the world with green energy. Who knew. First Light Fusion was launched in 2011 by Nick and Co-Founder and supervisor, Professor Yiannis Ventikos. Their mission? To solve the problem of fusion power with the simplest machine possible. It’s very good to have you here. I always like welcoming scientists to this fair place because I find them interesting and they know more than me about their subject. Well, actually, most people know more than me about most things. Tell me, go back to 2011, Nick. You’ve been in the academic world and then you said, ‘hold on a minute, I can convert some of this into something that’s going to do some brilliant good and also make some money’. Is that what happened?
Nick Hawker
Yes, indeed, yes. So, First Light came out from my PhD research, where I was simulating a new process for fusion, so it’s something which hadn’t been explored for inertial before, inspired by the pistol shrimp as you said in your introduction. And I was doing simulations, so I was trying to take this natural phenomena and turn it into something which we could study on a computer and kind of get our head round and understand and the brilliant thing about simulations, if you’re an inventive kind of person, which my supervisor and I both are, is you can tweak it so easily and you can get an answer back so easily. You say, well what if I just change the shape of this so it was like this shape instead of that shape or I just put this bit here, what would happen? And you can get an answer in sort of four hours and so you can do this very rapid iteration and generate ideas really quickly. And that’s what we had at the start, so we had these, these novel ideas and patents and it was kind of a choice. Do we try and go the grant funding route or do we spin out and we go the sort of private equity route? And I suppose years later, the thing I really appreciate is that grant funding predominantly funds or nearly almost always funds incremental research. If you want to do something completely different, it’s quite hard to get understood in that grant funding context and so the easier path for us was to spin it.
Elliot Moss
And had someone explained the difference between that ability of big money, private money being able to drive real change versus the grant funded world which would be different?
Nick Hawker
Well I think Yiannis understood that but I would sort of describe it as the kind of first step on the path. We looked at the first step in both directions and the private equity direction seemed more straight forward and easier and we were going to make more progress. Coming forward ten years now to having a company with ninety people, we didn’t see all of that back then but sometimes you just have to take the next step, don’t you and then you find out.
Elliot Moss
And just for the benefit of me, as much as anybody else, help me understand this inertial fusion piece, this energy bit and how that’s related to the shrimp that you saw doing its business.
Nick Hawker
So the shrimp is the only example of what’s called ‘inertial confinement’ in nature, on earth anyway, a supernova actually is inertial confinement but it’s rather large, so this is the essence of inertial fusion, there’s an implosion process of some kind. So there’s a tiny fuel capsule and the fusion fuel is inside the fuel capsule and you basically squash it really, really quickly and if you squash it quickly enough, you can get to the extremes of temperature that you need for fusion to happen and you get a big pulse of energy release from fusion if you do this in the right way so that, as I say, the shrimp is the only natural phenomena where this happens and it hadn’t really been explored, the dynamics of how the bubble collapse that shrimp produces, how that works and that was my, my PhD was trying to put that into a form that you can simulate and then understand.
Elliot Moss
I really think you ought to be a bit more specific in your focus there, Nick, but anyway, look where we’ve got to. You mention when you were doing your initial research, the research, that you could iterate very quickly and you could change things. There’s something about physics and experimentation that involves iteration. Some people are bamboozled, I was as a kid, other people jump into the joy and the romance of it but in reality, Nick, it’s a lot of trial and error. Is that still the case today?
Nick Hawker
Well, yeah, it is, I mean there’s always, there’s always trial and error and there’s always ideas which you think are great but then you test them and they just don’t work as you expect at all and equally, it’s sort of the way around, ideas that you are really not sure about but if you put the right physics in the model, you can have the opportunity to surprise yourself by finding something which you weren’t expecting, if that makes sense. So I kind of, I suppose I think of science in kind of three areas. There’s the experimental side, there’s the theoretical side but really important for First Lights is the numerical side, the simulations and these aren’t just little bits of maths, these are simulations which show emergent behaviour, they capture something fundamental about the dynamics of what’s going on. So our main simulation tools, they basically say well mass is conserved, energy is conserved, momentum is conserved and you set the simulation up in the right way and then it just does what it does. So these are huge engines of discovery, so we actually showed fusion with that process for the first time last year. To get to that point of having one singular experiment which produced some fusion for the first time, it was nearly a 100,000 simulations going into that. So we did the iteration with the simulations, which is a lot quicker and cheaper.
Elliot Moss
Pretty common though, this number of simulations. I remember reading about James Dyson. I remember reading about James Dyson and just looking at all the drawings of his first prototype and there were thousands and he just kept on going, kept on going. Is there a danger that once you’ve alighted on the technology that stop exploring or is that not possible for a guy like you?
Nick Hawker
There’s definitely a risk and very early on in my journey another startup CEO said to me the simple phrase, ‘Disrupt yourself’. You have to give yourself the opportunity to disrupt yourself and so something that we did at First Light for example, we have what are called ‘alternative projects’ and alternative projects, the normal decision making apparatus, me, we are deliberately built out of the process. It is a peer assessment of work to be done, which is proposed by anyone in the team, on anything, as long as it’s aligned with the mission of solving fusion power by the simplest machine possible and they have a pool of time which they can bid into. This is our like famous Google 10% time but it’s our version of it. So that’s the kind of disrupt yourself engine and we’ve had projects that have started there, done some simulation work, done some experimental work, I’ve seen some numbers which have come out and been like what, what, how on earth did you get that pressure? That’s insane, is that right? And then it’s come into the main plan and ended up being like one of our primary focusses, you know, so you, yeah, disrupt yourself.
Elliot Moss
Disrupt yourself, let people play. Stay with me for much more from my guest, it’s Nick Hawker. He’ll be back in a couple of moments. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Natasha Knight invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip, Julie Dean, Founder and CEO of The Cambridge Satchel Company confronts the idea that only a certain kind of person can be an entrepreneur.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Dr Nick Hawker – I’m going to through in the doctor again – Co-Founder and CEO of First Light Fusion, a lower risk energy efficient approach to the power generating process, inertial fusion. The pellet, if you get it right, is going to be able to power, if I read my piece correctly, a home, a normal home for two to three years, in terms of its electricity consumption. Is that correct?
Nick Hawker
That’s right, yeah.
Elliot Moss
I mean that’s obviously bonkers because it’s one millimetre.
Nick Hawker
Yeah, I mean this is how energy dense fusion is so, it’s fully more than a million times more energy dense as a process than any chemical, any chemical reaction.
Elliot Moss
So you’ve solved the problem? Because we’re all worried about fossil fuels, we’re all worried about climate change or about huge amounts of energy being consumed and here you have got a pellet which can do that.
Nick Hawker
Well I think this is interesting because I think it is pretty reasonable to assert that the physics problem of inertial fusion, that the back of that has been broken because there was very significant news at the end of last year from the biggest inertial fusion facility in the world, the National Ignition Facility, where they got a gain greater than one for the first time. They got the self-heating process, the ignition process working for the first time. There’s still science risk, there’s still things to be done, there’s still lots of details but fundamentally, it works. But it’s necessary but not sufficient that the physics problem is solved. You also need to solve the engineering challenges as well and it also needs to be done for a reasonable cost and that’s the barrier on their path forwards and a lot of why we do what we do is, we have very different engineering, much simpler path and much lower cost kit. So, for us, it’s about realising that same process but in a much more practical system.
Elliot Moss
Is this right? Your favourite, one of your favourite quotes, ‘Physics is discovering what is and engineering is creating what has never been’.
Nick Hawker
Yes, this is a, I don’t know if this is Einstein of apocryphally Einstein but…
Elliot Moss
Which one of those? It must have been him. It must have been him because it’s so, it’s so clever. But that, that’s a really interesting point. So you have, it’s a bit like artificial intelligence, we’re kind of at a moment where it’s going to start doing things but the back has been broken of large language models, the back has been broken of the physics of this. That’s a fantastic place to be. I’m just interested, just stepping back away from the technology for a moment and you’ve talked about, you said three things I think, just before in terms of how you view the experimentation and the numerical piece, what were the other two?
Nick Hawker
Experimental, theoretical and numerical.
Elliot Moss
And numerical. Do you apply that to the way you run the business?
Nick Hawker
Yes, absolutely. So, I want to see all three.
Elliot Moss
Always, in terms of actually how you are building the business?
Nick Hawker
Always. I always want to see all thr… Oh for the business or for the…?
Elliot Moss
Yes. For the business.
Nick Hawker
Okay, for the science. Well, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Not for the science. The science, I assume, you’re doing that but for the business and you now, Nick Walker with your not your technical hat on, not your brilliant physicist meets engineering hat and all that but actually in terms of the way you are building this business. Is it that kind of thing? Is it a petri dish to be played with in the same way?
Nick Hawker
So the thing about fusion and the technology is, it’s a big power plant, so a fusion powered car is an electric car. There would be no need to develop a fusion powered car, we already have electric cars. What we need is fusion generated electricity and then we already have the distribution network for that fuel, right, which is, already exists. So it’s a big power plant and this is part of the problem with nuclear, is that they’re so big because you need to be so big to get the economies of scale to get the price down that every single one is a bespoke, one-off project and that means every single one is basically a first of a kind and there’s loads of problems and there’s loads of cost over run and everything. So we are trying to make our power plant much smaller and we’re trying to come up with a design which is less than a billion to build and if you are in that territory, you can build them quicker and you can learn and you can iterate and you can bring the cost down.
Elliot Moss
But you going from the shrimp to the lab, to creating actually, hold on a minute, this works, is a certain type of business that you need money for. You going to build power plants, is a very different type of business and I guess I’m wondering whether you methodologically look at the world the same way when you go well, I’ve got to build this thing now. It’s a very different discipline, isn’t it?
Nick Hawker
Yeah, I mean our analysis is basically, we can’t build a power plant. If you look at the companies that build power plants, they’re 50,000 and plus employees, right, it’s enormous project management. It would be foolish for us to try and build the scales to do that. What we have in our technology is, the design of our target and that’s a small thing with very complicated behaviour, very complicated physics and a small company can indeed beat the world at cracking a design problem like that. So, our long-term business model is selling the targets to the operators of the power plant. The targets are basically the fuel. So, we’re the fuel supplier and that’s worth 20% of the revenue from the plant, which is a lot. And it’s a high margin business rather than plant building, which is a low margin business. So, yeah, our strategy for rolling out the technology is partnership.
Elliot Moss
An amazing leap, a creative leap to look at a shrimp, a creature, a one-off creature and then take that learning and say, ‘I wonder if I can recreate it’ and actually changing another thing in physics, another, you’ve just discovered something that you can do. Where did this fascination for physics and maths begin Nick, if you can remember? Was there someone in the family that inspired you or were you just that kid that loved to play with things and numbers and making stuff?
Nick Hawker
Well no, I was, I was always good at maths and good at physics and I always wanted to have that practical edge of not just studying it for its own sake. I mean, I’m fascinated in the study of physics for its own sake and actually, it’s one of my hopes is that we find a theory of everything in my lifetime. But I always wanted to have practical impact in the world.
Elliot Moss
Did you though? And I mean you say always, since when? Since what age did you, were you consciously going ‘I want to have a practical impact?’
Nick Hawker
I remember being I think in the Scouts and when people asked me, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ and I’d say I’m going to be an engineer in the RAF and then I realised actually, I was probably more interested in designing the next plane that’s never been designed before than maintaining the ones on the base, which are already designed. So, which is fine, that’s a very good thing to be doing. What fascinated me is, or what motivates me is being off the edge of the map, it’s being in completely unexplored, new territory, where no one has ever been before, every day it feels like fusion. We are talking about ideas and knowledge which literally only exist in humanity’s sphere of knowledge within the walls of First Light Fusion. I always think that’s absolutely amazing and I love it.
Elliot Moss
That’s crazy. And why? Why do you want to be off the edge of the map?
Nick Hawker
What can I say? I feel like maybe I was born two centuries too late to be in a part of the geographical age of discovery. Maybe I’m born two centuries too early to be part of the space age of exploration and discovery, I don’t know.
Elliot Moss
Here you are. It’s just always been the thing and did you, were you a scribbler as a kid or was it, were there equations, what was going on to bring this to life or was it, did you let it sit in your head?
Nick Hawker
I think I was a reader as a kid, so I had a kids’ science encyclopaedia which I would just sit and like flick through for hours, yeah.
Elliot Moss
And so teachers, they didn’t need to bring this out of you, you were already there looking to get to the edge of the map?
Nick Hawker
Yeah, I think so. I mean I, yeah, I was very fortunate to have, in particular, a superb maths teacher, Mr Venables, who’s still around and some really excellent physics teachers as well.
Elliot Moss
Did they? How did they know, I mean I’m just interested and just because we’ve got kids, we’ve you know, lots of children between us. Did they spot in you someone who was just enthusiastic and talented or did you warm to them in the way that they were bringing the subject to life?
Nick Hawker
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Elliot Moss
I’m just wondering. You know, at what point, no, but I’m just wondering whether they saw some talent in this kid called Nick and, or whether you were just, you were just phenomenally gifted without even you know any prompt? I’m just interested in that because obviously when you hire people, do you not look at it the same way? You go well how much of this is going to be, what can I play with here, what kind of talent have I got in front of me? Or do you just find the people with the highest IQ?
Nick Hawker
Well it’s definitely not just about IQ. When we’re hiring and I’m hiring, I’m looking for attitude as much as I’m looking for skills or intelligence or knowledge and I can’t, I don’t know how to describe it but you know when you’ve met someone who really knows their stuff and you can tell within five minutes. I don’t know what it is, without just calling it something, some cliché like X factor.
Elliot Moss
There’s something. The lights are on. There’s something. But is it the way they talk about something or could it just be the way they are, I mean, because it’s a really interesting point about that moment and I think it’s the same for all of us, we know when we’ve found someone who we think’s got something special. Is everyone special in your business? Do they have to be?
Nick Hawker
Well, yes, everyone is special in our business. Everyone is absolute the best of the best. If you took our average IQ, it would probably be, you know, ridiculous but we all have our things that we are good at and our things that we are less good at, so we try and maximise the strengths of what people are good at. So, for our scientists for example, we have what we call the individual contributor track, so you are getting promoted, you are getting recognition, you are getting an increase in your salary but you’re not getting management just because that’s the only way to progress and there are five different streams that we recognise people in for that, so you could be a collaborator, you could be a scientist, you could be an expert. So it’s, I think it’s about trying to create the environment where everyone can give their, give their best.
Elliot Moss
It makes sense to me. Stay with me for my final chat, I believe, with my guest today, it’s Nick Hawker. And we’ve also got some Jacob Collier, another insane innovator, in a good way, he’s right on the edge. That’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
I am with Nick Hawker just for a few more minutes. If you hadn’t gathered, Nick is running a business which is cracking stuff, which is literally as you said, it’s on the edge, it’s doing, on the edge of the map. An amazingly important moment happened, as you said, when you cracked the physics of it. We are now into what could be possible. Tell me about, just first part, your own leadership style. I’ve got a sense of it and if you were listening earlier, you would have got a sense of it too. And tell me where you get some of your inspiration from or the way you think about leadership from because people talk about sport, people talk about music, I’m just interested from your own point of view what that looks like.
Nick Hawker
Yeah, I think music and leadership is a really interesting topic. There’s loads of sports analogies. I kind of get them but I find them very competitive and I kind of don’t like that sometimes. Whereas music leadership and particularly in jazz, is quite interesting so, I actually, when I was an undergraduate, I ran a small band, actually we played Chet Baker’s version of Summertime in that band and a small band, you need to have a coherent vision between all the players but it’s, you might think that it’s one player improvising but it’s not, it’s the whole band improvising all at once and the best small band music is where there’s tension between the players but they still have that alignment on the whole vision, right? And that I think is very like when you have a team of six people in a startup, everyone knows everything and you’re all working towards the same goal, you don’t need to worry about how you communicate information across the business because there’s only six of you so you just talk about it at lunch. And then I also ran a big band in my last year of undergraduate and that’s very different because big band music is dance music for me fundamentally, so you have to have a steady tempo, right but there’s still improvisation, which is obviously a key feature of jazz. So it’s much more that you are providing a platform for the soloist and then you wouldn’t dream of exercising control over what the soloist is doing but you actually have quite a lot of control over it’s exactly this and that time and what the band is doing behind. So it’s kind of, I think there’s a lot of lessons there about empowerment of the scientists and engineers in the business or anyone in the business but kind of the right amount of empowerment, you know, empowerment within a box which works along with what everyone else is doing in the overall direction of the business. I suppose the key thing about music rather sport, is it’s very collaborative.
Elliot Moss
And thinking about, so, and it’s a beautiful way of describing it as you said, that six people, coherent vision but there’s impro going on everywhere and then that movement towards a central force but there’s still, there’s time and pace and all that massively important when you’ve got ninety people, not six. Those ninety people are now moving towards shaping a very different future. I’ve read around that you know that by the 2040’s, we should be able to produce the kind of energy you’re talking about on a large scale, at an affordable price. Is that the direction of travel? Is that where you want this to be for you personally?
Nick Hawker
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Why is our mission statement ‘solving the problem with the simplest machine possible?’ That’s a thesis. It’s a belief. It’s a belief that that is what is needed to get to mass scale, you know meaningful fraction of electricity generated by fusion, is that it has to be super simple or as simple as possible in order to build it out. With the…
Elliot Moss
You must get so jiggly and excited though. I mean, I’m not joking, Nick, if I was you, I’d be like I’m just, I’m you know we are not far away from doing something which is absolutely fundamental to the survival of planet and people, I mean it’s mega. He says, the excited puppy talking to you here.
Nick Hawker
Yeah, of course and if I’m being honest though, the most, the thing which motivates me most is I just believe it can be done and I think I see a way up the mountain and so it’s Edmund Hillary’s famous quote, like, ‘Why climb Everest? - Because it’s there.[‘
Elliot Moss
Good luck. It’s been brilliant meeting you. Really good luck, not just for you but for all of us actually, we all need this to work. It’s been fabulous talking to you. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice, your second song choice we should say…
Nick Hawker
I got a sneaky bonus.
Elliot Moss
You did get a sneaky bonus.
Nick Hawker
My second song choice is Watermelon Man by Herbie Hancock but The Head Hunter’s version and I remember distinctly hearing this for the first time because I’d put the album starts with Chameleon and then I was doing some work and it just went onto the next track and I hadn’t looked at the listing and half way through the track, I was like, I looked up from my work and I was like hang on, wait a minute, what this, this is Watermelon Man isn’t it, what? And that’s why I remember it really strongly.
Elliot Moss
Herbie Hancock there with Watermelon Man, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Nick Hawker, the scientist. Talked about experimental, theoretical and numerical approaches to his science but imagine if you think about those constructs for your own business. He talked about being off the edge of the map. That’s where they like to live, that’s where he likes to live and I think it’s a fantastic mantra. And within that, disrupting yourself, a critical part of that, you’ve just got to keep disrupting, you’ve just got to keep reinventing what you do, you can’t be complacent. And finally, and this is critical for any new business and indeed wherever you are in your journey, I just believe it can be done, and you have to have that self-belief. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.