Building fusion to fight cancer ⚛️ | Tom Wallace-Smith

the stakes have to be high. You gotta try and find whatever reason or whatever connecting dot there is because you'll know that the stakes are high. You'll know what motivates you. Naturally, it will be there, which is why you wake up in the morning, why you do what you do, but you just have to articulate it. If you don't articulate it, people will just say, oh, you know, it's interesting, but like, is it really important? So you gotta find that narrative and understand it. And then beyond that, you know, solving that narrative, your solution to the problem and how that changes and disrupts the industry and the a vision for the future. You have to have vision as well to tie into it.

This week's Millennial Master is Tom Wallace-Smith, co-founder and CTO at Astral Systems. Tom is one of the youngest deep tech founders on a mission to disrupt cancer care from the inside out. He started out in nuclear engineering for submarines and then invented a new kind of fusion reactor before ever meeting his co-founder in person. Now he's using Fusion to shake up cancer care and rewrite what's possible for medical isotopes. In this episode, we talk about how to scale a deep tech company and a team remotely, what it takes to get commercial traction and revenue in a moonshot sector, and why protecting your time and mental health is the founder edge no one talks about. Millennial Masters is brought to you by Jolt, fast, reliable web hosting hosting built for founders. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling an app, Jolt gives your project a rock-solid home starting from just £3.95 a month. You'll get 99.99% uptime, support in under 30 seconds, and flexible payment options including Bitcoin and Amex, so you can rack up those points while you build. Get 3 months free at jolt.co.uk. Smart hosting for people building what's next. Tom, welcome to Millennial Masters. How are you today?

Very good, thank you. How are you, Daniel?

I'm great, thank you, and excited to have our fusion chat because I've spent a whole day over a month ago at the time of recording learning about fusion and its practical application and how far fusion energy is. But you You're doing something different, so we're gonna get into that in a moment. But before, I wanted to find out how— you didn't grow up in a startup family. Mum was a nurse, your dad was a social worker, and you told me before that at one point you wanted to be a teacher or an inventor, which is where you got. So how on earth did that turn into co-founding a deep tech startup? What's the story behind it?

Yeah, I think the thing I got from my parents and from growing up in that kind of environment was being focused on a moral mission and definitely being aware that you're sort of, when growing up in a Western world or in the south of England in Dorset, as I did in a suburb, I'm not doing too bad having, you know, a relatively stable upbringing. I felt very privileged. And if you look at the sort of world context of the 7 billion other people that are out there. I felt that that was something that I had to not waste. So I had to do something. And there's a lot of suffering out there and it's definitely worth at least trying to make a difference and have human impact with your life. So that's sort of why throughout my life I've been drawn towards disciplines or activities that have impact. And then it just so happened that I loved physics at the same time. So during the course of my schooling and when I was at university, I was always drawn to physics and drawn to the sort of spiritual/cosmic aspect, you know, looking at the pillars of creation with the images taken by the Hubble telescope or the James Webb telescope. Always found that fascinating. But then the thing that really, really excited me was seeing physics and science in general, the predictive capacity of it applied directly to things that can have human impact. You know, I'm at an event in Berlin at the moment and there's a stage called the Marie Curie stage. Someone who I deeply, deeply respect, mainly because she discovered these effects of radiation and then immediately made something like an X-ray machine that went straight to the front lines and was used to detect fractures and have medical impact on human lives. So I was always drawn to that. Throughout university, I was trying to get involved in international development and get involved with Engineers Without Borders, essentially. And do international development work. And then from there, just kept getting drawn towards more moral missions again and again. When I've been doing work that's not necessarily fully aligned with that, you know, very, very interesting work, let's say for Rolls-Royce submarines, I learn as much as I can, but then again, I always get drawn back towards something that's to do with human impacts. That sort of is the nexus of those two things, and that's, I guess, why I'm in the space that I'm in at the moment.

Submarines are more war machines rather than helping the higher mission of humanity, which was drawing you in. But I guess there's the strong physics foundation there.

Yeah, so it was very interesting working and going on board a couple of submarines. So HMS Victorious and HMS Triumph up at Fazlane in Glasgow. And it sort of dawned on me because they're amazing machines, incredible engineering, some of the best nuclear engineering and nuclear science that's done in the modern world and mostly behind closed doors and not many people know about it. The analogy I use is it's kind of like building the International Space Station, but it has to fight other international space stations and also be undetectable and, you know, launch intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. And when I was working on—

support dozens of people as well, life for dozens of people for long periods of time.

Yeah. Yeah. So amazing engineering feat, amazing work. I remember walking on board HMS Victorious, which is the one that carries, I believe, around a dozen or more, um, nuclear missiles, Trident nuclear missiles. And as it was starting up, I could see at the front of the submarine, the water bubbling and foaming at the front of the submarine and steam coming off on either side of the front of the machine. You could hear it humming and whirring away. I just thought, this thing is a beast. And its main purpose, you know, with all of those nuclear missiles is to wipe out all human life on an entire continent. So it sort of dawned on me then that, is that what I want to be going to work every day? Knowing that that's my, my little two cents for humanity is working on that. That, that's when it sort of dawned on me that I need to find something that uses this expertise that I've, I've gathered in some way that has, has impact. That sort of, I guess, ideologically started me on that, that kind of journey.

And is that how you ended up in Japan where you met your co-founder?

Yeah, so that was during my PhD. So Whilst I was at Rolls-Royce, I was trying to, you know, at the age of, I think I was 21 at the time, I was trying to push as much as I could for them to open up a research reactor, which is the final, the only research reactor that exists in the UK now. We've shut down all of the ones that are open, that were open for researchers to use called Neptune, and it's in Rainsway in Derby, and it's used to test fuel rods for the nuclear submarines. And I remember pushing at the time and saying, it'd be really great if you could open this up to researchers so we could produce isotopes and do science with it because it's the last one left in the UK. And we got as far as a business case, I believe. And then eventually towards the end of my time there, the only thing I managed to change at the organization was getting them to have potted plants in the office. So that's what drew me to do a PhD. And when I was doing my PhD, I was producing isotopes, so making things radioactive with neutrons. And I already knew that the neutron sources in the UK were few and far between. So that's when I looked to get a fellowship at Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. I would get a fellowship., in Japan to work at the Kumatori Osaka Research Reactor, where I could do radiations and, and do research. So that's what drew me there. And whilst I was working in Japan, I was working on particle accelerators for very, very fundamental neutron capture cross-section measurements, very, very fundamental measurements, and then, and exploring production of isotopes for different commercial means. And that's when I was introduced to our chief scientist, Dr. Mahmoud Bakr, who was running a research lab. Sort of nestled in the foothills of, of Kyoto, um, city called the Uji campus. This warehouse was set up after the Fukushima disaster because they shut down half of the reactors in Japan. So they had a bunch of nuclear physicists that had nothing to do, basically. So they needed a place where they could do nuclear physics, where they could produce neutrons and, and, and play around. Uh, so they had this warehouse and they made these very, very compact research reactors called are inertial electrostatic confinement reactors. They've been around since the '50s and '60s. Actually, one of the earliest fusion reactors that actually worked and produced neutrons. So they had a bunch of these small systems. I mean, they're sort of desktop-sized. You can look them up. They're the typical system where if you ever see every couple of years, they say, you know, boy kid genius at the age of 12 makes a fusion reactor in their garage. It's usually an IEC or a FUSER as people call it. But the ones they were doing in Japan were quite powerful. You're talking 10, 12 kilowatts. Of the power going in, liquid cooling, that sort of stuff. So they're doing quite serious nuclear physics with it. And that's when I started to think about, okay, this is really, really interesting. Why don't we have this in the UK? Number one, I wouldn't have to come all the way to Japan to do this. And then number two is long flight, long flight. It's a lovely place. I love Japan. I'm addicted to going back whenever I can, but it would save, would save on the air miles. So, and that's when I was looking at the technology and thinking, This is really, really interesting. But it's, I remember asking the researchers, you know, that the maximum output that they, that they've reached is about 100 million neutrons a second, which is sort of just below what's required to be able to produce medical isotopes, which is what I was sort of thinking about at the time. 'Cause I was aware of shortages and the supply issues, which we can get into if you like. So that was really the, the spawning point of these ideas was when I was working in Japan and I came across NASA research, combined that with the reactor to increase the efficiency and that's when I had the idea for the multi-state fusion reactor that we're, that we're now commercializing Astral. So yeah, the, the, to, to finish that story and to really give credence to my co-founder, Talman, the, the CEO of Astral, extremely serendipitous moment. I wish I'd planned this and I could take credit for, for having, uh, having, having founded myself, but just purely by coincidence, I had this idea for this reactor and, and, and this, and this company. I thought about holding onto it because of the nature of doing a PhD. Sometimes the universities have ownership over your ideas that you produce during your PhD. I had to do a bit of IP taekwondo to make sure that I kept ownership of the IP and made sure my thesis was separate to the work around fusion. So if you read my PhD thesis, it's all about fission nuclear waste and isotopes. So made sure it's separate, which meant that when I went to my supervisor, he said, That's your IP, that's your company. But by the way, that thing that you've just innovated, I know the guy, one of the last surviving people on the planet that's commercialized the architecture already and sold it as a neutron generator over a dozen times globally to the likes of CERN and lots of different institutions. You should talk to him. So that's when we met, I think during COVID it was a Zoom call. So that kind of like dates the fits the period and we got talking and he basically asked me to prove it. He said, okay, combining this lattice confinement fusion, that's the physics with the, with this architecture that I commercialized. He said, I don't want to do the same company again. Show me that there's actually something here. So that's when I made the prototype in my living room at the time, because everyone was sort of locked down.

You had a bit of extra time.

Yeah. Everyone had extra time. You know, you could, everyone got into sourdough and doing up their van or whatever.

Banana bread.

A harder project. Yeah. So I put the system together and shipped it to Dr. Mahmoud Bakr in Japan. I think around May, June of 2021, we got the first data. It looked good. So we founded the company, filed the patent, and then we're off to the races basically from there. Yeah.

So you founded the company, so to speak, remotely before you even met face to face. And that was in a way the magic of that period in time.

It's true. It's true. With Talon, he's actually, he calls himself the original remote worker because he was doing entrepreneurship remotely for an older company in Central Europe from Canada back in the late '90s, early 2000s. I'd met him briefly, but he was in a different role at the University of Bristol. We just sort of discussed about like a joint project basically. But yeah, after that, we only met in person. You know, after we'd founded the company.

How many years later?

I think it maybe was late, late, either late 2021 or early 2022, because obviously COVID would have, would have been a big issue in terms of the lockdowns and travel.

So it was also a big leap of faith then, co-founding a company with somebody you haven't physically met, but you, you had the science and you, you clicked when you, when you spoke remotely from one continent to another.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, it was a big leap of faith, but we, at the founding of the company, we had this conversation that we always tell people where Tawan sort of said to me, this is going to be like a marriage. Okay. We have to trust each other. Anytime there's any issues, we just directly go to each other, talk to each other completely open, completely transparent. And we're total 50-50 partners in everything and we're equal. So you can change my mind. I can change your mind. And we've kept with that. So through thick and thin, it's been great. Even now that we've scaled to get larger, anytime there's a sort of misalignment, because you naturally sort of divide up, especially when you've got such a long distance between each other, you get misaligned. We sort of call it alignment. So if he says something on a decision, I'd say, I'm not sure I agree with you. He's like, okay, explain. I list the bullet points. And then he says, okay, 100% aligned. I get it. And then we move on. So we've gotten very, very quick at realigning and readjusting if there's any sense of sort of stray from a, from a sort of joint opinion on a particular topic.

Um, how often do you get to do that? The, the realignment. I've spoken to other founders who have had co-founders and some of them were telling me they, they have like a proper sit down every 3 months and talk about all their aims and see if they're still aligned on all the core aims that they're trying to achieve, whether it's the finance, whether it's the exit plan, whether it's how to change the world. It's very important to remain aligned with your co-founder, which is what you said as well. But I'm wondering, how often do you get to do that?

I'd say at least once a month. If things are really, really busy, it's at least once a month, but Now that we're traveling a lot and we're going to events, like he was with me in Berlin at this Deep Tech Momentum event, and we'll be traveling again. We'll be at an event in London in early June. So it's becoming multiple times a month. And when we're, you know, staying in the same Airbnb or space, we always have dinner together. And that's exactly the topic of discussion. That's always the tone is very broad level strategy, or we check in with different team members and we say, well, how's so-and-so doing? Oh, I had a really good conversation with so-and-so. They're doing really well. So we tend to check in with each other very, very often. And it's almost the nature of living in different parts of the world sort of means that when we do meet, every time we do have that in-person time together, it's very much precious. So you make the most of it. So the conversation is always rich. It's always about top-level strategy. It's always very, very interesting. And then, you know, when we're apart, it's very much, you know, team meetings and then, you know, one-on-one catch-ups. Sometimes it's all matter of fact going through tasks and sometimes it's a bit broader if we, if we have time. But yeah, making the time and space for those sorts of discussions is essential. Yeah, absolutely essential.

Going back to the science part a little bit, just to give people an idea of what Astral does. Everyone hears fusion and things, moonshot energy project, but you are doing something very different in this space. And I'm hoping you can explain it briefly, like you'd be pitching to a time-poor investor or at a dinner table. What's different about Astral?

Yeah. Okay. So I'll start with the sort of top-level vision and then I'll go, I can dig into the physics. Let's do it. Um, so the main thing is the problem that we're addressing. Okay. So globally. Particularly in the developed world, nuclear medicine has been around for decades. It's a very effective cancer treatment, cancer therapy in particular, where you take a radioactive element, you bond it to a molecule, and it goes and becomes very, very targeted to where the cancer is or the tumor, and it releases the radiation very locally and damages the DNA of the tumor or the cancer cells and, and kills the cancer. So all very good. The downside is, is that radioactive element has a half-life. Usually a half-life of about a week or so, um, which means that it, as you have to ship it internationally, you get lots of losses and you can't stockpile it. So the current state of affairs is, as of 2025, and to be honest, for over a decade this has been the case, there's been big supply issues, there's been shortages. So there's been situations where there's been, uh, no supply for weeks because multiple reactors have shut down, which mean that, uh, people that need cancer treatment don't get it. They get put onto other less effective treatments or they get delayed.

Like chemotherapy instead of radiotherapy. Is that the correct difference?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the current state of affairs. And that, that whole industry hasn't seen, particularly with therapeutics, diagnostics has seen some innovation in the '90s with the cyclotrons that has meant that you've got distributed local supply now. But the therapeutics, it hasn't seen any innovation since the '50s or '60s. Since the invention of the fission reactor, really. Um, and there's 250, around 250 power fission reactors globally. Only 5, I'd say 6 of them actually produce isotopes for sale for, for international export. Uh, and all of them are heavily government subsidized. Uh, and all of them are very old because, you know, building fission reactors went out of fashion in the '80s for obvious reasons. Uh, so what, what's happening now is over the next 5 to 10 years, a lot of those reactors are shutting down. Um, so the problem is isotope supply. The industry's booming, people are getting older, demographics are getting older, and what's happening is, is there's a supply shortage, which is actually a bottleneck in the industry. So that's the main problem that Ashral focuses on is, okay, what else can you use to produce neutrons? You can use fusion. Uh, all of the benefits that people say for fusion power over fission is equally true for using fusion over fission for the, for the production of isotopes. You can build systems within, you know, 6 to 12 months. You can establish a site that can produce fusion neutrons, it can produce radiation. It's licensed in the same way as a cyclotron, and they're in the basement of a hospital, and you can scale, particularly with our technology, very fast. So that's the main focus for us, is to, is the, is our engineering challenge is producing fusion devices that are optimized for the production of isotopes on demand at the point of use. And the overall aim is to increase access and decrease costs. For cancer treatment. A lot of places are underserved, even places in the UK are underserved, as opposed to sort of particular highly mature places like the Netherlands and Belgium and, let's say, Ontario and Canada in terms of access to cancer care. That's really the overall vision of the company and what we're aiming to address. There's a lot of other interesting markets and applications that a device that can do that can also do beyond just medical isotope production, which we can get into later on if you like. But the, in terms of the core technology and why this is a bit of a breakthrough in terms of the performance of the system, uh, I'm sure you probably have heard of magnetic confinement, tokamaks, and other types of interesting devices.

All sorts of huge machines, and that's where there's another big difference, right?

Huge machines, huge machines that run for seconds. There'll be, there'll be press releases around 1,000 seconds. Pulse of a device, let's say in China or elsewhere. Um, so with what we're doing, the core architecture is, is an industrial plasma-based neutron source, which runs continuously for thousands of hours. So it's, it's built to be operated by an engineer or, or, or a student even, where you have software interface, you plug it into a 3-phase socket, 415 volts, 63 amps, you have a liquid, liquid cooler. Uh, it's about a meter and a half long and 14 centimeters diameter. It just looks like a rod, like a, like a, like a metallic rod. Inside there's a cylindrical plasma, and a lot like a fluorescent light tube, it produces neutrons in all directions, just like a fluorescent light produces photons in all directions. And that system's— that system can run continuously. You turn it on and you can leave it, and it stays at the same output. So some fusion people would call it a long pulse. We just say it's just continuously operational. So that's the basis, that's the fundamental architecture. Now where's the innovation? So if, if you'll allow me to get into the physics, I'll try not to go too, too deep into it. But the, the sort of top-level pitch-style explanation is that if you look at the sun, our lovely fusion reactor in the sky, if you actually do a breakdown of, of where the fusion happens in the sun, uh, you've got this core called the stellar core, which is the smallest 0.8% of the volume. Of the, of the sun, which is actually only about 20 kilometers in, in diameter. It's tiny, tiny, tiny core that produces over 99% of the fusion power in the sun. Yeah. Huge, huge concentration of where the power is, is right in the core. Less than 1% of the fusion occurs in the outer area, which is a lot less dense. That has a density closer to a plasma, and it has a, an energy density closer to like a compost heap. Right. Not a lot of—

slow burner compared to the center.

Yeah, exactly. So what's happening in the core? Why is it different? In the core, the density is about 150 grams per cc. So for material, for metals, it's anywhere between sort of 7 to 20 grams per cc. So it's more dense than any metal that we have on Earth. And not only is it dense, it also has a lot of electrons. I don't know whether you know about solar flares. We see those electromagnetic fields. Fling out solar flares into the solar system. To be able to have big electromagnetic fields, you need a, a conductive core, basically, to, to produce these magnetic fields. So in the core, you have electrons. So in a plasma, the challenge and the difficulty and why the sun doesn't do a lot of fusion in the, in the plasma sort of halo around the outside is because you're dealing with ions. So you've got two positively charged ions. Okay. And if you've ever held two like ends of a magnet and you try and push them together, Reject.

Yeah.

Yeah. The closer you get, the harder it gets. It doesn't get easier as you get close together. It gets harder, right? That's the big challenge and struggle with magnetic confinement and other sort of similar confinement methods, plasma-based methods. However, when you're in the core, it's not just plus plus, you have electrons and electrons are negatively charged. So instead of it just being plus plus, you have this negative potential or screening potential. Which then means it takes less energy for those, uh, particles to get close together, which means fusion happens more readily and it happens at low energies and it happens at a higher efficiency, essentially. So that's what happens in the core of the sun. So how is that similar to our device? Essentially, we're doing the sun but inside out. So we have the plasma in the center, which is the classic IEC plasma, and then around the outside, the metal that faces the plasma is loaded with fusion fuel. So it's loaded with deuterium. To a very, very high concentration, and we tune the metal that's facing the plasma to have a high screening potential. So we, so we're able to increase the efficiency, we're able to sort of pull that efficiency lever that's not available when you're doing pure plasma fusion. So that not only allows us a very high efficiency in terms of power in, neutrons out, but it also affords us a very high density of neutrons. So if your medium for fusion is a plasma or a gas, Obviously it's very, it's not very dense, you know, the plasma is usually less dense than the air that you're breathing right now. Okay. But if you're doing the fusion in a metal, in a solid metal, the amount of neutrons that you can produce per centimeter cubed or per centimeter squared is orders of magnitude higher. So we're typically around 400 million times more dense in terms of the fuel density than in a plasma. So this is critical for isotope production. Many, many other industrial applications, but specifically isotope production because you, you want to have a small target when you're irradiating it with neutrons. Uh, so that the higher the intensity, similar to a laser, the watt per centimeter squared, uh, or, or, or a light, for example, the higher the intensity, the, the more efficient you can produce your isotopes. That's really the, the critical step change difference in, in the technology and, and what we're doing at Astral. But in terms of the phenomena, if I can add around electron screening, it's, it's, it's been around for a long time as a theory in astrophysics to explain what's going on in the core of the sun. But it was confirmed and validated experimentally by NASA and published only in around 2020, 2021. So if you actually look at some of the publications, I think the second publication published by NASA and FISRFC was published around 2021. And then literally 3 months later, we filed the patent for, for Astro. So in terms of going from, uh, sort of brand new experimentally validated theoretical physics that, that's, that's been confirmed experimentally by NASA into a commercial product, we're, we're, we're doing it pretty rapidly. Yeah.

So just so people understand the small-scale kind of like reactor that you, you've built, do you basically sell the reactors or the output of those reactors? Both. Okay.

Yeah. But for different reasons. Yeah. So what we're doing is we're actually, the main business model is the sale of isotopes. So selling the milk and not the cow. That's just because we can build the facility, we can build an array of systems. These are rods, which means you can cluster them together and we can fit 72 systems in an array and you could put your arms around it because it's so compact, right? So we have facilities where we're looking to deploy arrays, produce isotopes, and then we can ship out the isotopes to hospitals or to drug manufacturers. And then suddenly they have supply where they didn't have supply before. Now, the long-term vision of the company, because of the nature of the energy of the neutrons from fusion, you can actually produce isotopes that you can't produce with a fission reactor. So there's a lot of research there. There's the potential for new isotopes that we're not using at the moment that you can suddenly produce very, very close to the patient. So you can explore shorter-lived isotopes, which are better for patient experience and more efficient. You can see more, you can do more clinical treatments per day. And in order to do that, you know, as clever as we are at Astron, as a good team as we have, we haven't got the time to do all of that, all of that experimentation ourselves. Academics are a lot better at doing that, especially when they have different groups of researchers collaborating openly and publishing. So what we're doing is, is we're looking to empower universities and institutions that, you know, can't afford a fission reactor or can't build one because they're quite expensive. Um, but they can get hold of an Astral reactor and that suddenly allows them to start doing, um, nuclear medicine production at small scale where they can practice the radiochemistry, the molecular bonding, and they can start training up, uh, people to be what I call neutron literate.. So they understand radiation, they understand isotopes, they understand reactions. Uh, and it's actually something that, particularly in the UK, and it's happening all over the world, because of these old research reactors being shut down, we're losing those skills. So the idea is, is to get the, to empower these researchers, to give them a reactor. They can start producing isotopes, they can start publishing, and who knows, maybe a new isotope will come through the works that ends up going through the clinical trials and then ends up, uh, being used. Um, And that, that's how we really see we can truly disrupt the industry long term. And this, this, this isn't a new approach. This actually happened before with diagnostics. So in, in the '90s, I believe it was IBA, they commercialized cyclotrons, which is basically a, a device or an accelerator that you plug into the wall, electrically powered, and it produces high-energy protons. So instead of high-energy neutrons, it produces high-energy protons. Suddenly you can put a, high-energy proton device in, in the basement of a hospital. And what happened after that, in, in light of that technology existing, clinicians moved away from longer-lived isotopes for diagnosis, and we ended up with what we have today, which is over 1,000 cyclotrons scattered all over the world in basements of hospitals that produce PET isotopes, positron emission tomography isotopes for PET CT scans for cancer diagnosis and other disease diagnosis. So we want to do essentially to neutron-produced isotopes what accelerators and cyclotrons did for proton-produced isotopes.

On the treatment side, one was on the, on the scanning and detecting it. And this one comes on the treatment side. And if we would be using the analogy of cow and milk you've had earlier, you're also not looking at just selling the milk, but also giving cows to be closer to the source and having healthier, fresher milk for—

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly it. And empowering people to make their own cheeses as well.

I'm sure a lot of people would be able to understand that analogy as well. So Tom, something that you've been doing, basically you've been working in the background on the science and the product and what people would understand from the tech side more, you've been in stealth mode. So how do you hire and scale and grow and get funding in stealth mode? How does it work once you get out of it? Because as far as I understand, you, you've been doing some fundraising, some pre-seed and seed funding and grew your team. And now you're out of stealth mode, which is why you've been getting some press and also one of the other reasons why we're talking about it now.

Yeah, it's a very, very, very good question. So I would say, I would say it definitely helps having some level of maturity to the technology. So having, having a Taemin as my co-founder and having already that, that high TRL basis of an architecture ready to go. I guess it's the product of any good literature review that you've, you're not reinventing the wheel. There's probably something out there similar to what we've already done. You can use as a springboard. And that coupled with building good relationships with people from my end, being the physicist and the tech guy, I love talking about physics with people. I love talking to the nerds and they tend to be the people in big organizations, governments or businesses that the business people ask, should we buy this? Should we buy something? Or should we pay for something? You know, do you trust these guys?

So they're the advisors. So you basically speak the language of the advisors.

Exactly. So you build relationships with those people. You know, I would actually go back even further and say that the overall vision of what you're doing, that the moral aspect, is isotope supply being a national strategic imperative, you know, everyone knowing someone that's suffered cancer and that being your vision. Also being a younger entrepreneur, for me personally, people want to help you. They want to mentor you, that they want to see you succeed. That helps when you're building those early relationships with people who are potential sort of customers or corporate stakeholders. And then good old-fashioned sales tactics from, from Taman. I mean, I remember we were in a meeting with the National Nuclear Laboratory. This must have been in 2022, I think. And we were just talking because we knew they were looking at maybe having a facility with some neutron sources to do medical isotope production and other interesting research. And Taman says that he smelled blood in the meeting and he just said, how about we do a design study? Would you guys be interested? We can, we've had this initial call. You're interested in the technology. You pay us, we'll write you a big report, 40 pages. We'll do some simulations as to how the system would look, how it would behave. And they said, yeah, sounds good. So that was our first sort of commercial traction was a design study for them to see how the system would look, how it behave, you know, what it could do for them, the different capabilities. And that, to be honest, that document that we produced is huge. We ended up using a lot of that information again and again and again. So that the work that went into that just kept paying dividends because we could then redact it or take chunks of it and use it for other stakeholders and say, oh, the NNL paid for this report. So you can sort of build on that momentum. And essentially the third piece is just because of the technology, there's nothing else out there that can do the same thing. You're sort of, we're sort of head and shoulders above the performance of systems that you can commercially get off the market. So that sort of kept the interest of, of relevant stakeholders and people so that they'd be interested in doing design studies. Or once we got a research contract from the UKAEA through the Fusion Industry Programme, big shout out to the Fusion Industry Programme, that was kind of like an SBIR or SBRI style research contract. So that essentially allows you to have specific milestones. That you then are measured against. So it's not like a research grant where they say, okay, do some work, get some publications. And that sounds good. You have monthly milestones where you have to present work or you have to show them data, show them results or show them a product and then they pay you. So that gave us a really good sort of commercial seasoning, I guess, early on where we had to stick to deadlines. We had to pivot when things went wrong. We had to, we had to, you know, try and save costs. And that ended up with us at our first private facility, which is in Winfrith, an old decommissioned nuclear site in Dorset, where I grew up and very far from Bristol. But there's a good, very good reason for that. And that was because as many people who have startups will probably know, if you try and get space, industrial space, especially fairly large industrial space that we needed to be able to do this, you have lease terms, which are usually, you know, 5 years with a 3-year break. And then when you have only a few hundred thousand or a hundred thousand in cash from a contract, it's not a wise move to get into a contract like that. So we had to find somewhere that was pretty far away, um, that had a, you know, 2-month break. And then it was basically free in terms of the rent. That allowed us to actually have our own space, move on our own timelines, do our own thing, and set up our first bunker, our first reactor. And we got that done on time. Uh, we— that was, that was a novel capability in the UK. It had never been done before like that. Uh, and, uh, yeah, we had a lot of interest from a lot of the national labs and a lot of the, the relevant stakeholders, and we've got a lot of kudos for that. We ended up actually, uh, garnering the interest of, um, Matt Ferrell from Undecided. Yeah, he, uh, he did a YouTube video on us, um, back in 2023, and that, that really led to the funding round in some ways, which I could talk about. It was actually more in, I'd say 2022, and me and Taemin were getting research contracts and we were thinking, you know, do we want to raise money? Do we want to bootstrap the company?

So you weren't really looking at raising money. You were looking directly at getting contracts and running it as, as a business straight on.

Yeah. So at the start of the formation of Astral, we sort of, we spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of company we wanted to be. And, you know, Tauman didn't want to repeat anything he'd done before. We both agreed that we didn't want to be fusion company number 50-something going for energy breakeven and going for big, big experimental milestone after experimental milestone. We wanted to build a commercial company that was market-facing, that was driven by revenue, strong commercial backbone to it because we wanted to have lasting impact. We believe that if you, if you want to have a company that actually has lasting global impact, it has to have a strong commercial backbone. Otherwise, the wind blows too strong and then it's gone. So that was the decision from very, very early on. And we knew that there was a path for us to bootstrap. To be honest, if you can bootstrap and you're fine with it, I would probably recommend it. I've met a lot of senior entrepreneurs that have managed it. But the caveat to that is, is, is, is speed. And to be honest, what happened was, is we heard about a nuclear medicine shortage around Christmas time. It was several months long. And we heard about some people being moved on to less effective treatment. And it really, really touched us in a way where we said, you know, why are we, why are we going slowly by bootstrapping? If we raise money, we can move faster. You know, it might, it might take us 5 years to get there, but if we raise money, it might take us 2. Or less. So that was the decision where we said, okay, I think we want to, we want to do this.

And that was the immediate impact you wanted to make as well through your work.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that, that was the decision that we took that, that, that sort of led to us being like, okay, we should get more coverage. We should get a YouTube video that sort of encapsulates what we're doing, get someone who's fairly well known. So we had Matt Frel come out to video. It's quite funny, actually, when he was here, we, we introduced him to the UK Atomic Energy Authority. He said, oh, you're flying over from the US, you should cover some other fusion stuff while you're here. So he's got this great sort of triplet of videos of us. I think it's First Light Fusion and then UKAEA. And when we're speaking to the UKAEA, we said, oh, Matt Frowe's thinking about doing a video with you guys. And they sort of said, we don't know what to do. We've never had a YouTuber come and cover us before. We're not sure how to handle this. And initially they went back and forth for a while and then they sort of said, oh, I'm not sure about this because. I think they were sort of scared that the YouTuber might do like an exposé that might color them in a negative light. They didn't really trust the guy. And I believe it was Fernanda, who's the head of Jet at the time, sort of jumped out in the email chain and said, I love Matt Ferrell. I want him to come and interview me. I'm a big fan. Get him in, get him in. Since then, they've been doing a lot better social media. But the thing that was really, really important for the funding round was after that YouTube video came out, we had someone from a very high-profile investment firm that's kind of like a Silicon Valley household name firm. And they just moved from Southeast Asia to London and they reached out and said, oh, what you're doing is really cool. I love what you're doing. It's a really interesting approach. Where I am at the moment, funding round you're looking for is too small. You know, when you do Series A, you know, tens of millions ticket sizes, you're not 300,000 or a few million. But what I can do is I can maybe introduce you to some other investors who might be interested. And on top of that, we were doing a pitch event, I believe in London, where we brought, we brought an old reactor that, that, that Talon had sold back 10 years ago that we got off an old, an old customer who wasn't using it anymore. It was sold for dark matter research and it had flown across Italy and the US and all over the place. Still functional. And we took off the outer cowling so you could see some of the interesting components underneath. We actually brought it in a backpack on the London Tube. I wanted to, I wanted to take it out and pose with it, but I feel like the Special Forces might have, um, been alarmed.

It might have caused a bit of an incident, yeah.

But we ended up bringing the reactor to their head offices in London, to that investor's offices, and put it on the table one evening, and we had a few of the investors poking in and taking photos and being like, oh, what the hell's this? Come have a look at this fusion reactor. So even though they weren't on the table as an investor in that round, we built the relationship and the, we ended up getting warm introductions through the investors that they're saying, oh, you should check out Astral, you should talk to these guys. And yeah, the difference in cold introductions versus warm introductions is like night and day. I mean, For a cold introduction, the investor's got their guard up. They're in pitch receive mode. They're very skeptical, very doubtful. They want to find reasons not to invest in you, basically, because they get so many people talking to them. The warm introduction, that person's almost avouched for you in a way where the guard's a little bit dropped and they're saying, okay, how can we make this work? Like, how, you know, even if you're slightly outside of their investment thesis or you're a little bit different. It makes it a lot easier rather than just them saying, I'd rather have less on my plate. I'm putting you in the no bin because it makes things simpler. And what was really interesting about their approach is initially when we were pitching, we do pitch after pitch after pitch, I got maybe one or two a week or something like that. So not crazy pitching. I've met entrepreneurs and co-founders that have done, you know, basically every hour of the day doing pitching. We did quite a lot still, but in the early days when we were pitching, we'd come away from the pitch and be like, introduce us to that investor, but they weren't the right ticket size and they weren't the right thesis for us. Like, Why are they introducing us to the wrong fit? And after we'd been pitching for maybe 2 months, 2 and a half months, then they started to introduce us to people that were the right fit, that were the right thesis. And they'd basically been training us on investors that weren't the right fit as practice so that when we spoke to people that were relevant, the right ticket size, the right kind of investor, we were ready and we had a polished pitch. Whereas if we'd been introduced to them straight off the bat at the start, we probably would have missed the boat and then we'd have gone, oh, these guys don't know what they're talking about, or their pitch was kind of lame. We'd basically been trained unwittingly. We didn't know. It was only afterwards when we looked back, we said, yeah, they were training us.

So what's your learning from pitching? What are your tips and your learning from pitching? Especially a lot of entrepreneurs don't even get to the pitching stage. So obviously in your deep tech space, it would be slightly different and say you had a different application and a different kind, say, to compare to somebody building a SaaS product. It's not something you're doing, but what were your learnings from all those pitching sessions before you got in front of the real match investors?

Yeah. Yeah. I'd say the, um, cause you can, you're so deep in your own field or your discipline as you should be, if you're starting up a company in it. That sometimes you don't see the sort of wood for the trees to some degree. So maybe you go straight into the tech, you go straight into, you take it as granted that you already know why it's so important what you're doing. Sort of as I alluded to earlier, that the mission and the vision is so critical to get right. Like it's worth just spending so much time in what's the story of the company? What's the problem? What's the need? What are you solving? And what's the vision for the future? How are you going to change the world? How are you going to change this industry? How are you going to disrupt it? And then starting with that, you know, we had our personal introductions and we were very natural about, you know, it's chronological. Tam had a longer, uh, he's older than me, so he sort of did his introductory history and then how we met each other. And then we go into what the company is about, what it means. But in terms of the framing of the pitch, you've got to start with the problem. You've got to start with the hook. Why are the stakes high? It's exactly the same thing as in storytelling. Actually, I was at a conference This is quite funny actually. I was at a conference in LA called a NIAC conference, which is a NASA conference where they just sort of take all of their wackiest ideas and they sort of pitch them to some degree to the rest of the people there. And then they make proposals and they see what they can fund. And it's quite a small group. It was in a hotel, I think it was behind a Hilton hotel with no signs outside in a back room that maybe fit about 100 people. And then as people would, because I thought maybe I was in the wrong place. I was like, these people are, this is tiny. This is supposed to be like a big NASA conference. These are really big missions. And then as people started to talk, they were like, oh yeah, I train people. I'm training people for the Mars mission. Or I've been to space twice. I'm thinking, oh my gosh, this is the real thing.

I am in the right place.

Yeah, I'm in the right place. And they actually had this fantastic session where they had, because they're in LA, they got all the female writers. Of Star Trek to turn up and do a panel. So they had all of these writers on the stage, uh, and they had this, they had the longest queue for questions they ever had at one of these conferences of all the NASA scientists wanted to ask questions of the Star Trek writers. Really, really cute because the Star Trek writers were starstruck by the NASA people and the NASA people were starstruck by the writers because they both held each other in such high regard. It was quite cute because all of the NASA people were saying, I've been inspired by the sci-fi that you guys have written. Uh, and then the, the, like one of the writers actually sort of started to tear up because of that. But the point is, is that someone stood up, is actually a guy who's now on our board of advisors, Lawrence Fosley. He stood up and he said, you know, we write a lot of grant proposals at NASA. Do you have any advice on how we should frame our grant writing in terms of how we should frame the way that we write it? And then initially the writers sort of said, I don't know, we don't know the science, you don't really know how that really applies. And one of them actually said, it's just like pitching. It's exactly the same as pitching. Like when we pitch for ideas for movies or ideas for TV shows, it's exactly the same. And she said, and it applies to VC pitching as well, I think, to be honest, pitching for investment. And she said, you've got to have high stakes. Like any, in any story, the stakes have to be super, super high. There's actually a Greek story, I believe, about a challenge. I forget the exact name of it, of trying to get an ant through a conch shell, which is kind of like a little maze, which is an interesting puzzle, right? But in the story, he has to get the ant through the conch shell, otherwise he dies and he's in the middle of an arena, right? So you gotta get the stakes high for people to get interested in the story, right?

Okay.

Yeah. And you, if you watch TV shows, you'll realize this time and time again, there'll be some relatively routine plot, but then they're gonna die if it doesn't happen, or there's this huge, uh, huge stakes. And that's why people watch the TV show, 'cause they think, oh, what's gonna happen? Are they going to die? What's going to happen next? It's exactly the same with storytelling. It's exactly the same with pitching. And what ends up happening is he ends up putting a little bit of honey at the end of the conch shell and then tying a string to the ant, and then that ant goes through. So, uh, essentially when it comes to pitching is you've got to start with your problem. The stakes have to be high. You've got to try and find whatever reason or whatever connecting dot there is, because you'll know that the stakes are high. You'll know what motivates you. Consciously, it will be there, which is why you wake up in the morning, why you do what you do, but you just have to articulate it. And if you don't articulate it, people will just say, oh, you know, it's interesting, but like, is it really important? So you've got to find that, find that narrative and understand it. And then beyond that, you know, solving that narrative, so your solution to the problem and how that changes and disrupts the industry and the vision for the future, you have to have vision as well to tie into it. And then, then to follow up with that really is just the commercial backbone, you know, do you have commercial traction? Are there partners out there that are very respected, that have given their rubber stamp that say, they know what they're talking about. I agree with them. This is a good idea. Yeah.

And I wanted to touch on that because when we, we spoke before, you told me that you're targeting breakeven before a Series A, which is quite rare in deep tech. And I'm assuming this is why being revenue first was so important for you because you also need to show traction as you continue fundraising and scaling.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's just a given for us really is, is, uh, is, is having commercial traction and it's, it's more of a, an ethos and it's actually a bit of a dividing line and a distinction, a very deliberate distinction with a lot of the rest of the fusion power companies that are focused on a very, very respectable mission of, of, of Fusion breakeven in terms of the power plant designs. But for us, the attitude is, is that to get innovation moving fast, the company has to be affected and driven by market forces. And you've got to be market facing. And I think that that's a, that's not just something that you can just switch on at a later stage in a company and go, oh, we're doing something. We've, we've discovered now we understand how this works. Now we're going to become culturally commercially minded. And now we're going to become market driven. It's actually quite challenging to do that culturally speaking. So we wanted it from the outset for people to understand, you know, what are you working towards? You know, try and save money where you can. If something is going to cost too much going through a corporate body doing it, can we do it in-house? Can you be innovative about the approach? That's a, it's a mindset. It's like a mind, a market-driven mindset. So we wanted that from the start, getting the revenue in and having that planned into the financials and planned into how the company is structured and how it works, um, was, was really, really important to us. And, you know, I guess you could call myself, my co-founder, and our head of finance old school because, because a lot of them— I mean, our finance guy is so funny when he, when he hears about these huge, huge fundraisers, um, and he's like, well, they've got no commercial traction. There's no— where's the business model? Where's, where's the revenue? How does that work?

And you hear a lot about them. Yeah.

Yeah. And he, he, you know, he only invests in stocks and shares where you could like look up the finances of a company online and then bases his investments on their financials of revenue turnover, profit, you know, old school stuff. So that's sort of like in our, in our kind of like blood, if you will, as to why we're approaching it in this way. And to be honest, the technology allows for it, you know, that we've got something where you can monetize it in many, many different ways. We do irradiations because the platform, because it's such a high performance, it serves as a platform that, that, that can't be used or is not accessible elsewhere. It's a unique, unique platform where, for example, just a month ago, we developed these flyers, QR codes. So you could scan the QR code of when we're going to these different events with lots of different stakeholders, where they could go on a form. And we have irradiation campaigns happening in September and then Q1 next year. Where users and academics and other fusion companies or interested parties, consultants can bring an experiment to us. We can put it next to our reactor and we can irradiate it and they can get results. And, you know, that's a different way of, of, of monetizing and commercializing and bringing in stakeholders for the infrastructure that we've already got. So yeah, that's the, that's the sort of approach that we have. And, um, and yeah, we're, we're, we're pretty well on track this year to be able to achieve it. But this is the counter to that is talking to investors at the moment. You know, I mentioned that to a very, very high profile, very, very big investor in Germany. I said, my point was kind of, oh, we've got revenue, we're looking for financial break even before the end of the year. So we're not rushing on doing investment. You know, we're not time pressured. There's not a cliff where if we reach that, that suddenly we have to raise money. And then her response was, well, don't you want to scale fast? Because if you think about your hours in your week or your hours in your month that you can spend doing things as a founder, particularly sort of post-seed round, you've got running the company, okay, getting financial revenue in and getting traction and day-to-day operations and logistics and HR or whatever. And then you've got putting effort towards a Series A round.

Yeah, it starts spiraling. The fundraising is basically ongoing continuously, or at least pitching to a certain extent, because once, once you start scaling, then you have the runway and you already have an idea when the runway would end and you have to continue fundraising.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's not really a pause. There's not really a moment where you can sort of put your feet up and then not, not, not think about it at all. It's, it's really worth keeping in mind basically continuously. But for, for us, it's, it's, it's so, it's so important to actually look at the fundraising, look at the Series A activity almost as a work package that we would resource, project plan out, and, uh, and, and give that out to different team members and divide up the labor as you would any other project or contract that might come in, giving it that same, if not higher priority. 'Cause especially when you've got a lot of things going on, a lot of different projects, you scale up to a large team, it's very easy to just go for whatever's in your face and that is the loudest thing in the day or the email that just came through the inbox. So being very deliberate and having everyone on the same page of what the priorities are month by month means that you can start chipping away at the stuff that matters. So that was important.

That's what I wanted to touch on next because you started Astral as a two-person mission. And now you're pushing 20 staff, most of whom joined you in the last year or so. So I'm wondering why you didn't see coming in that kind of scale up.

What didn't I see coming? Scaling up. There's so many things.

Share some, share some.

Yeah, yeah. I'll share the good, I'll share the good side. So the thing I didn't see coming that was good. Was how satisfying it would be, how deeply, deeply satisfying it would be to have a team of multiple teams of people. So we've got two senior engineers who are doing the manufacturing of the device of the fusion system. We've got two people in our nuclear medicine, director of nuclear medicine and a staff scientist. And then we have the R&D team, which is the largest team at the moment. And then we have operations and admin. And just seeing their own culture develop. And their own relationships develop, and then being able to give them and say, we need this done in the next few months, go ahead and do it. And then they figure out their own project plan, they figure it out, they put in extra hours. I mean, we did a radiation in February that was 55 hours long, and we did it before Thursday, Monday to Thursday, end of Thursday, I believe, a little bit on Friday. But the teams pitched in and they said, okay, We're going to have to start at 8 AM and finish at 8 PM. It's going to be 12-hour days. We'll split up the shifts. We're going to bring in extra help. We're going to, you know, someone's going to bring in their Nintendo Switch in case we get bored when we're running the tests. And that was the really, really groundbreaking campaign that we will be doing some publicity about in terms of different isotopes that we produced during the campaign. But seeing people pull together amongst themselves. I didn't expect how deeply gratifying it would be to see that, I think. But the flip side of that, in terms of putting a team together, you can do as much preparation as you can, I think. And there's kind of a, which is kind of a result of the nature of stealth mode, where the more public you are, I think the more traction you've got in the media or PR. It's a bit easier to attract talent, I think. Um, because they see you're out there, they see you're in the media, they can understand your positioning a bit more.

There's material about you. They get a bit of an idea about the company. If they can't find much about it, then yeah, it's—

so that makes it a bit easier. So they sort of come to you and you can sort of sift through things. So we ended up having to put quite a lot of effort into, um, specific hires where we interviewed over 20 people because at that point we were basically still in stealth mode. So we're basically unknown. We had the YouTube video from Matt Ferrell, but that was basically a year out of date at that point. So it's quite a lot of faith. So we ended up sort of, you know, almost re-pitching in the interview, having people understand the vision, seeing how they responded, um, and trying to understand their personalities hiring multiple people at once and understanding how their personalities might balance out with each other. And one of the things I did is I sort of looked at our team and I said, A, no one's really done this before in terms of hiring this many people and managing this many people and sort of B, we should definitely lean on other expertise. In my career, being young and being in a nuclear field, very complex, tech-heavy field, I've always had to lean on more senior people for advice. So I've never looked to myself and said, I'm a perfect genius that knows everything about every topic. I tend to try and find who's the best person at this within my network and go and ask them for help first. So what I did is I tried to contact through my network, HR experts. So people that were respected in HR and understanding how to build and grow teams in startups. I joined the Bessemer Society, which is a hard tech group in London. So there are a lot of like older entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, and talking to them and just getting advice about how do you decide who you hire. One of the phrases that came through that was, I'd rather have a hole than an asshole in the company. So it's better to have no one in a position rather than having someone that's not a good fit that's going to cause frictional problems. And that was a kind of gospel for us going into the hiring process. And to be honest, I think the turnover, the average turnover rate for startups in this sort of phase is something like 30%. So you're going to have to, like, I've had to fire people. I've had to fire multiple people. It's always unpleasant. It's terrible. There might be tears. Um, it's got to scar you as well as the other person. You might get flashbacks. Yeah, I know that person's, that person's got to be feeling pretty bad today. You know, maybe they've, maybe they're on LinkedIn and they can see how the stuff that we're doing and they're no longer part of the company, but it's the nature of the beast. It's, if you're a startup founder, it's always almost a rite of passage. I've known like a few people, um, uh, in the, in my sort of startup network in Bristol. And I remember sort of sharing with them because they're basically at the same level, if not a few months ahead or a year ahead, which is amazing people to talk to. You could talk to people who are senior, like those old-grade, uh, serial entrepreneurs, very, very useful. But to talk to people that have literally just done it or a few months ahead of you is like gold dust because it's fresh and the startup world 10 years ago.

And it's more relevant as well.

Way more relevant. Yeah, it's way more relatable.

Yeah. And I'm assuming compared to somebody who has done it 15 or 20 years ago, there's new elements in play when we're talking about hybrid or remote work and a range of other things. How do you operate? Do you operate hybrid? Do you have anybody remote altogether?

Yeah, so I've had Talman working as my co-founder from Toronto since the foundation of the company, but he gets up at something like 5 or 6 AM. I know that his kids come in before they go to school every morning, because when I'm in meetings with him, sometimes the kids run in and he gives them a hug and they go to school. So that's sort of in the DNA of the company that we can make that work. So we've got Talman, Uh, Ethan, finance director over in, over in Canada. We've just hired someone else that might be joining in Toronto as well. Um, and then we have our legal counsel, David English. He started off being relatively remote from Oxford coming in, and now he's just moved to New Zealand, which, you know, is a big, big risk, right?

But, uh, to be honest, now when we're doing legal documents, basically a whole day ahead. Yeah. But finance being a whole day ahead is not a bad thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So now, like now we've been doing, um, letters of intent and different contracts and you send it to David and then in the morning he's already gone through it overnight. Um, but the, the thing that's really, really key, particularly for the guys that are remote, when you're in the, when you're in a space working together and you're hands on, you see each other all the time. You're, you're so in the loop. About the tone and the feeling and what's on people's minds. And maybe, maybe the unit's a little bit too hot because it's summer months and, you know, maybe we need to put a ventilation thing in. And if you're not on the ground, you don't know that that's like a priority, right? That sort of thing. So we've made it very, very deliberate. And we have discussions about this sort of thing that people will have check-ins and they have one-on-ones, even just half an hour calls, particularly the ones that are remote. So they understand what's going on. They know how people are doing in the team, uh, and they make time for that and they make space for that sort of check-in. One of the other things that's been extremely useful, uh, in general was we did this, this came from talking to some HR experts or entrepreneurs that know their stuff with this sort of thing is we did an annual performance review in, uh, December. And essentially some people in the company had only been with us for maybe 2 or 3 months. Others a full year, but the process was just so valuable. So, so valuable. So we had people fill out a sort of questionnaire, like, how do you think you're doing? What's your main achievements? What's the main thing you think you could have done better? And then we sat down individually with everyone, either me on my own with them as a sort of line manager or me and Talman together. So Talman flew out, we did a whole bunch of these conversations together around Christmas and in the new year.. And it was just so enlightening to get multiple perspectives, to understand where the gaps were, where things weren't working quite as well as they should. And you can, you can really see in particular sub-teams, in particular groups, you have what almost I call like a positive feedback loop in a group or in a pairing of people where the sum is greater than the individual parts, right? And you get a lot more stuff done. Things are happening a lot faster. So seeing that in a company makes you really understand the benefits of getting it right and having people understand how the other person likes to be worked with. So it definitely drives the company and talking about it openly and giving space to it. There's a phrase that's used called the growth mindset. You've probably heard of this before.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, so hiring people on the basis of that and being able to have their own sort of impetus to solve problems and take things on themselves. Really, really important. So the growth mindset is kind of like being able to self-reflect and say, okay, I may be really good at these things, really good at these things, but I can improve on this and this. And it's not just omnidisciplinary. So it's not just, you know, in general, are you, do you have a growth mindset? It's, do you have it in your, maybe, maybe I don't have a growth mindset in physics or in simulations because I've done a PhD in it. So I feel like I'm a confident in it or something like that. But maybe I've got more of a growth mindset when it comes to soft skills or working with people or being a leader, for example. It's areas where you're able to be vulnerable and you're able to sit down with the people that you work with and say, you know, uh, do you have any feedback in terms of how I'm working on this type of topic, you know, as a leader, or how I'm arranging my time with you, you know, Do you want to meet more? Do you want to meet less? So yeah, that sort of stuff's been really, really useful. And for some people, it comes a lot more naturally, either culturally or because of their personality, and other people it takes more time.

But, um, that's what I wanted to ask. What's one skill you've had to pick up on the fly that science didn't prepare you for?

There's many things that science didn't teach me, but I wouldn't say that I learned them on the fly during during Astral, during the, during the foundation of the company. But I think, um, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the, how do I describe this? What, I'm not even sure if it's a skill. You might have to help me out with, I'll describe the situations and maybe you can try to diagnose it together. Yeah, we can diagnose it. Yeah. So it's been, it's been several times during, during Astral where, uh, there's been, there's been hard decisions that have had to been made. In terms of, let's say really early on in the foundation of the company or later on with particular partners or people that we're working with, where you have to really defend Astral's interests, right? Where you have to basically stand up for not only yourself, but you have to stand up for the company and you have to be very firm and assertive, right? Particularly as a young founder, you have to be firm and assertive over people that are older than you. More senior than you, right? In other positions would probably be your boss, right? And you have to stand your ground and you have to assert your position and you have to sort of let out, be calm in the face of whatever might come at you in those situations because you never know how someone might react in that sort of position if they've never been challenged in that way before. So yeah, that's been a skill that, yeah, I've definitely gained on the fly within the company that I guess a PhD, some, to some degree, or viva helps with that to some degree in terms of just confidence and defending yourself in a one-on-one or two-on-one or whatever.

That's just a single process through the academic side, but otherwise you wouldn't, you wouldn't go through that. So I'm guessing is in science or at least in academia, you defer to your elders, but here you had to defend and stand your ground when you were being challenged and look after your best interests and or the company's best interests.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the attitude's kind of like being a good steward for the company. You know, I like the term of like servant leaders and the phrase that comes to mind for me a lot is doing the technology and doing the company justice. So seeing it to its absolute formation and to its full fruition. And in many ways, Yeah, you have to make a lot of decisions, especially as a founder where you've got to make sacrifices or you've got to make critical decisions in your life, your personal life, you know, doing 100-hour weeks. It's not easy doing it consistently. Yeah.

And it is something I ask every Millennial Master I speak, I interview. Similarly, I know from my own journey that you have crazy growth times with long hours and that involves sacrifices. So the question is, Tom, what's the biggest sacrifice you've had to make to build Astral so far?

Yeah, yeah, I've, I talk about this so much. So the, the, the, the process was particularly in that, in that sort of era from late 2022 through 2023, when we're building our first private facility, um, from scratch basically, and far away from where I was living in Bristol. So like a 2-hour drive. Me and Mahmoud would do, you know, 12, 16-hour days. Quite a lot of like physical manual labor as well that was involved in like physically building something, building the bunker. And during that period, it was just a given that it just consumed basically my whole life. And whenever I'd see my family or my friends, basically all I could talk about was work. I was basically like aware of that. And then, you know, finding time to see friends, finding time for my, finding time to see friends was hard enough, but finding time for myself was even harder, right? Because, because friends ask, some friends are like, oh, how's it going? Do you want to go, you want to go to the pub or do you want to go and do something? You want to go watch a movie? Whereas finding time for yourself is the hard part. And it really hit home where things started to calm down slightly. We managed to hire in someone part-time to just assist with the admin and running the company and all the mail that you get from the UK government, which just sucks. We got a letter, our first letter from His Majesty the King for our tax was a tax bill for £200,000, which is basically the entire revenue of the company that year. And it was like, you know, as a founder, not really knowing what was going on, you know, your heart sinks and you think, oh my God, this is terrible. Obviously it was a mistake on their part.

You know, you laugh about these things now, but the, the, during that time, you had a brief or not so brief moment of panic though, when you saw it, especially when your finance director on a totally different time zone takes a while to respond, right? There's a few hours of total panic.

Exactly. So, um, so I want to get that framed though, because it's just such a funny, um, document. The point is that it really dawned on me when stuff started to calm down and started to divide up the labor a little bit more and I was able to reflect and suddenly I had a weekend. I got to Friday, 7, 8 PM. Okay, I have a weekend now. I was like, oh, I haven't planned anything in advance. What do I do? And I remember getting my notepad because I write a lot of notes and I write a lot in the evenings as well. Sometimes if I can't sleep. And I'd write down, I'd always write down to-do lists for work, right? That's very, very useful for me. And I literally wrote—

A lot of people tell me that, and they, unlike me, they seem pretty set on paper to-do lists. I like to do mine in my notes digitally because you can, you will, you won't forget your phone, but you might forget your notebook.

Yes, exactly. I could talk about that in a sec, but the the list that I wrote was hobbies. I had to find time in my diary. I literally had to find time, put in an hour to say, remember what your hobbies are.

Block the time.

Yeah, block the time out. And I remember writing lists of like, so what did I enjoy before I started doing this? I did pottery. I think I used to play squash. Yeah. And I had to remember what they were because I'd half forgotten it. And write them down and then start to block them in and start to do them again. And I totally saw during that period how some people just become just horrible people to work with just because of the way that they burden the stress. They go inwards. They never find time for themselves and they just get really, when things go wrong, it kind of sets them off in a certain way. And I was like, wow, I totally see how this happens to people.

I know the feeling because you get so invested into it and you know, you're putting any, every waking hour into it. And if something goes wrong, it feels even more personal and affected than it should be.

Yeah, that's the roller coaster. So the highs are really high, right? Because it's your whole life. But then anytime anything happens, like, you know, letter that is an unreasonably high tax bill, then it hits hard. You get, you just get seasoned to it. You get more used to it. And it's actually quite cute almost when you're hiring new people who haven't been in a startup environment and you and you see them going through the same process and they're reacting to something that they think is a rollercoaster moment. It's like a tiny, tiny blip in comparison to what you've sort of experienced in the past in terms of crunch time and then having to adapt. But yeah, when it comes to note-taking, I've had a bit of a journey. So I used to be, you know, like a good grammar school kid when I was younger with a little diary each day of the week. Get it signed off. I basically kept that all the way through university where I, where I had a, I think it was Muji. I love Muji. It's Muji notebooks where it has one side is the 7 days of the week and the other side is just notes. So I just do what I'm doing during the week and I do a to-do for work and I do it like a basically life admin, separate them out into 2 separate lists.

The chores.

The chores. Yeah. Seeing friends, having fun. And then moving to that, that to digital. It's been tough for me. I sort of struggled. I was like, how do I do this? And then I went for a period of trying to go digital and it just meant that I just didn't have a diary. I didn't have my to-do sorted out and I really saw a drop in the productivity. And now, now I've kind of figured it out and it's not without these technologies. So I have one of these digital notepads.

Is that a Remarkable?

This is a Remarkable. It's not the, it's not the Pro with the different colors. It's just black and white. But what I do is I make notes religiously for stuff. If I'm in a situation where I can hold the notebook like this, if not, then I'm using the notes on the phone. But what I do is when you go to the wider view where you can sort of skim through all the pages, you can actually still see some text. So every time I'm making notes, if there's an action of something that needs to be done, I do like a little, like a big double closed bracket symbol, like two, two big closed brackets. So when I zoom out and I'm skimming through, I do this maybe once a month. I do like a collation of my tasks. I skim back through the month and I do like monthly notebooks. So I go like, for example, I went back through April. I skim through, I go, oh, there's a task. I go into the notes. Yeah. I'll put that into Planner. It's my to-do. And I talk with the team and I make sure that, you know, that's delegated to this person or this person. And that works super, super well for me. And I've been shocked about how much stuff that I've just totally forgotten about that I would have captured.

If you don't take notes, you will easily forget all the tasks.

Yeah.

So that's why a lot of people I've been talking to say their Notes app on their phone is their goldmine and personal assistant in terms of whenever inspiration strikes you, you tend to have your phone on you. Rather than a notebook. And that's where most of the ideas go. And a lot of people have started telling me now as well about voice notes and recording their voice. But with the advances in technology, especially with AI now, and especially on iPhones, you can record your voice note and you get a transcript of it automatically that can live in your notes. So it's much more easily searchable as well. And you don't have to look back through it. So that's another evolution thanks to technology more so, but you seem to be quite set on that paper feeling one way or another.

Yeah, it is. It's the paper feeling. And it's because I'm, um, this is actually probably a good point around productivity and just general mental health, to be honest, is ever since I was 16, um, I would just not journal to a degree. I've always struggled with sleep, but it's actually only been since last year when I started taking methylated B12 that I've managed to like actually sleep properly. It's probably because I had a deficiency, but recommend it to people. But for, so for 10 years and for maybe even longer, I'd be lying awake at night, my mind buzzing with ideas, not able to sleep. So I'd go over and I'd get a a book out, a notebook, and I'd just start to write and I'd write stream of consciousness and I'd commit to myself that before the end of the first page or the second page, if I was writing a lot, I would have to summarize elegantly the thing that was on my mind and hopefully maybe even conclude it in a satisfying manner. And so it almost turned into these stream of consciousness essays on particular topics that were just stuck in my head. I'm like, okay, why, why is this stuck in my head? What does this mean? How can I describe this elegantly? And I've been doing that for like over 10 years. Part of writing for me is almost like it takes what's quite ethereal in the brain of like opinions or thoughts or ideas, makes them concrete and almost, it's almost final. So you don't have to think about it as much anymore because you've said, that's how I feel about it, and it's done. And for me, it's very tactical, it's very physical. I like doing stuff with my hands, like pottery.

So it's a way to offload your brain. Do you go back through your journal? Some, again, some Millennial Masters who told me they do journaling in one shape or another, they use it for gratitude or for progress and going back through it. How What do you do with your notes besides the practical part, which you already mentioned about collating tasks and turning them into productivity?

Yeah, I have occasionally looked back at my old notes. The ones when I was a late teenager are quite funny. Probably the recent ones.

That's more of a diary.

Yeah. Yeah. But the ones more recently are very, very interesting because sometimes you forget what you've written. And it can be quite helpful to just be reminded of different things. Yeah, in future, I don't know. I don't know what I'll do with them. I've toyed with the idea of collecting them, maybe when I'm older, into some kind of self-help book for people. I don't know. But for me, that's been really, really helpful, that and meditation in particular.

So these are, we're basically touching what tends to be usually among my final questions, your habits and systems to disconnect and/or keep focused and productive. So besides journaling, you said you meditate as well.

Yeah.

What sort of meditation are we talking about?

Yeah. So the origin of meditation in my life comes from, as you said at the start, me wanting to be either a teacher or an inventor. I had this dichotomy when I was doing my GCSEs and then A-levels of, do I want to go into physics or do I want to go into philosophy? Because I really, really loved philosophy. And this was basically—

but they are at opposite ends.

You would think, you would think that. Yeah. But I mean, I, I had a, I had an amazing, there's, I actually applied for a few courses. There's some good courses in the UK at universities that do physics and philosophy together. Very interesting. But my, the teacher that I had, Brian Kreisel, who taught religion and philosophy, that the standard syllabus for the religion and philosophy tends to be Christianity or Judeo-Christian beliefs with something like Islam or Hinduism. But he sort of went off-piste and he said, no, I'm going to teach Judeo-Christian beliefs and Buddhism. That was his syllabus that he had and it was quite rare. And I remember one of the sessions that he had, he was quite an imposing guy. I think he was almost on the UK basketball team, very big guy, very round head, big hands, very softly spoken. He sort of sat at the front of the class and said, okay boys, Today we're going to do some guided thought exercises. Because this is a Church of England school, right now, as of this year, we are not able to do meditation exercises at the school because it will let the devil in, but we can do guided thought exercises. So he had us, you know, close our eyes, visualize different things, not actually try to shut things out, but actually be more present. So actually listen to the sounds that are going on around you more closely. Listen to the sounds of the birds or the sound outside. The sound of your breathing, sensations of touch in your hand. So I think there can be a bit of a misjudgment around Buddhist meditation that it's almost detaching from reality in some way. But I kind of view it for me personally as being even more present. Because actually the things that are affecting you and the stress in your mind aren't real unless you're being chased by a tiger, right? That's a different kind of situation. But in modern day, it tends to be—

not in Bristol.

Not in Bristol, no. Yeah, the zoo's a bit further out now. They've moved the zoo. But, um, the, so you have, uh, this place that you can go where you become more present and you, and you're, you're sort of observing the thoughts that go through your mind, like, uh, clouds over a mountain. You've probably heard that kind of analogy before. So you can, you can start, you can kind of look at the thoughts that are happening on in your mind in third person and you can say, okay, that's interesting that that thought keeps coming up. I wonder why that is. So that's the sort of exercise I do with my writing is, is I do that exercise of emptying my mind and just see what bubbles up and then try to address it or just let it be. So yeah, I've found that useful as a centering exercise and particularly the lectures of Alan Watts, really, really good. I believe they're on Spotify or YouTube. Is it Out of Your Mind? The series Out of Your Mind, the lecture series by Alan Watts. Fantastic. Every couple of years I forget about it. I go, I should probably listen to that again. And I listen to it and it's It resonates with different parts of life again, because, you know, you change as a person and you find it useful in different ways. That and the lectures of Richard Feynman, which are online as well. Awesome. I'd recommend.

Are there any particular books you would recommend to fellow entrepreneurs and deep tech startups? It's also something I ask people and I have a growing reading list as well that I share with all the book recommendations from Millennial Masters, and they'll make it into the show notes as well.

Awesome. Um, for fundraising and for startups, I'd say Venture Deals. You must have had that before. Venture Deals, V-E-N-T-U-R-E Deals. Um, like a little handbook. It also comes with links to blogs as well by a couple of guys who are very well-storied venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. And it's still as true as it was, you know, 10 years ago. It's a relatively old text, but for someone who's totally got no idea about, I mean, to be honest, when I was doing my physics course, I never thought I'd be a guy that would know anything about, you know, ASA safe agreements or, you know, option pools and things like this. But for understanding the language and understanding the meaning and the process and even the history of how all this language came to be, I've found that really, really useful. And I'll probably go back to rereading it again because it's got advice for different stages of company as well. So yeah, definitely.

Yeah, with each round, there's a new set of terminology and then, then you go into dilution and the range of other things as you, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I would, I would really, really recommend before you, before you speak to anyone, an investor or investory, definitely familiarize yourself with the language. Um, because it just takes the conversations to a different, a different level if you can Talk the talk, basically. Otherwise you're sort of, uh, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a bit of a struggle to wrap your head around what's going on if you, if you don't understand the mechanisms. Um, because I, I, I looked at it as a physicist, you know, and, and at this point it's, it's almost formulaic, right? The, the way that you can understand processes and what actually matters and, and what you need to do. But, you know, everyone will interpret it in, in their, in their own way to, to understand it. But yeah, that's, that's, that's what I'd say in terms of the book for directly helping with, with fundraising and entrepreneurship, I'd say. Yeah.

And as a wrap-up question, Tom, now that we've gotten a bit more introspective, I'm wondering what would be the advice you'd be able to give yourself now from 5— to Tom 5 years ago when, when you started. Astral Systems on a kind of a whim with a remote founder and a big idea?

So that would have been 2020. That would have been COVID. So I would have just had COVID in February. Yeah, it's just probably just telling myself it's going to be worth it. It's going to be worth it in more ways than you understand, to be honest. Yeah, don't lose sight of it. Yeah, definitely give yourself a pat on the back when it, when it, when you can. I think you mentioned gratitude before. I think definitely a big thing for me last year was being able to let in the gratitude of what we've achieved basically as a team and how far we've come and what that actually means. Because you can, I think part of being successful in any kind of job is You've maybe got something slightly wrong with you that you don't stop. You don't do something.

It is a trait of entrepreneurs.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't stop and go, oh, I'm good. Let me check out now and I'll put my feet up. So sometimes there isn't that moment of sort of patting yourself on the back and saying, you know, that was a good job rather than just looking back and being critical and being on that could have been better or onto the next thing, onto the next thing. Yeah. Taking that time and space is is really, really important, definitely. And prioritizing yourself, definitely, and your own space. Not prioritizing yourself in like a, like an egotistical, success-driven way, but in a more like emotionally aware way for making space for yourself as an individual to grow independently from what's going on in the company, your own personal growth.

And I think that's a great idea to keep in mind as we wrap up this conversation. So So thank you so much, Tom, for coming on Millennial Masters, sharing your story and some of the wisdom you gathered so far.

Thank you, Daniel. It was a pleasure. It was lovely speaking with you.

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