Building The Thing You Promised

Musings after a week in LA

This week I got to see Radiant’s Kaleidos reactor, nearly fully assembled, ready to ship out from their El Segundo, CA facility to INL for fully fueled testing. Doug posted an (export control compliant) photo here:

This has been 7+ years in the making, dating back to Doug doing (self-funded) power modeling in his garage. It’s a special thing to see something that was a spreadsheet when we first invested in summer 2020 become a real, tangible thing over 6 years later, with the built version matching the 2020 specs nearly perfectly. While the hardware is impressive, it’s what the hardware represents that is most moving. You don’t build hard things without the right blend of mission alignment, seriousness, and fun. Radiant has all of them in spades. Kaleidos is the physical manifestation of a team with complete mission alignment that takes the promises they make seriously, and has a lot of fun along the way.

This idea that physical hardware represents company cultural strength is something that runs through many of our portfolio companies. K2’s massively successful recent Gravitas mission, Varda’s 6th (!!) capsule re-entry, and Northwood’s globally deployed ground sites are just a few examples of physical manifestations of strong underlying company culture. ARR numbers can be faked, but it’s harder to do that with hardware.

If you’re trying to figure out which companies are likely to make it and which won’t, focus on the ones that Build The Thing They Promised. That’s the leading indicator!