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Back to The 20-Year Bet to Make Fusion Energy Work | Jeff Lawson, with Jeff Lawson.

How Big Is Jeff Lawson's Fusion Company?

Jeff Lawson finished the deals with the lab last summer, basically last September, about a year earlier, and got the company off the ground with 450 million of committed capital. A 50,000 square foot facility is now up in Livermore, and headcount has grown from about five people at the beginning of the year to about 70.

The Livermore work is a set of research streams on how to mass-produce the targets and how to build a very large semiconductor-powered laser. Today the team is doing component-level development on each part of the target and each part of the laser, deciding what each part needs to look like and how the supply chain will work.

In the next phase the company will build prototype-scale subsystems of the power plant, the laser systems and the target assembly line. Around 2030 the goal is to break ground on the first power plant, a gigawatt-scale utility plant meant to power millions of homes.

Transcript

The 20-Year Bet to Make Fusion Energy Work | Jeff Lawson ·

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  5. Why Can Jeff Lawson Wait 20 Years on Fusion?Jeff Lawson can wait 20 years on fusion because a long shot is a luxury he can afford, and he has nothing left to prove.
  6. How Does the Onion Make Money With No Ads?Jeff Lawson says The Onion now has more than 5X the revenue it had before he bought it, and the site runs with no ads. Readers support the paper directly.
  7. When Should a Startup Write Its Values Down?Jeff Lawson says about a year in, or around 50 people, is a good time for a startup to write its values down.
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