Scott Nolan on Uranium Enrichment, Founders Fund, and Reindustrialising America
Scott Nolan was SpaceX’s 35th employee, spent over a decade investing at Founders Fund, and now runs General Matter, a company enriching uranium on US soil. He talks with Patrick O’Shaughnessy about choosing what to work on, the contrarian logic behind Founders Fund’s best bets, and why rebuilding America’s nuclear-fuel supply chain has become an urgent industrial project.
Key ideas
- Do something useful. Nolan’s framework for choosing work: find an important problem that will not get solved otherwise, and use your talents to help solve it. He applied the same test three times — SpaceX (stagnant aerospace incumbents riding cost-plus contracts), Founders Fund (venture capital needed founder-friendly capital), and General Matter (nobody else would rebuild uranium enrichment).
- Fund important companies no one else is funding. Founders Fund’s contrarian thesis, sharpened after 2010: back the founder running the company rather than swap in a new management team, and avoid trends — a trend draws company-level competition, and once an idea is fashionable, other investors bid up the price.
- America lost the ability to make its own nuclear fuel. Enrichment is the one step in the five-step nuclear fuel cycle — mining, conversion, enrichment, deconversion, fabrication — the US cannot do at commercial scale; only Russia and Europe supply it, and a congressional ban ends Russian imports on 1 January 2028. General Matter exists to rebuild that capability domestically, starting with HALEU for advanced reactors, then low-enriched uranium for the existing grid.
- Capability lives in the iterations of making, not just the design. Nolan draws the same lesson from SpaceX and General Matter: co-locating engineering and manufacturing lets a team trade off interface requirements in real time, whereas subcontracting a process to a separate company — often overseas — calcifies the architecture and exports the very iterations that build capability, not merely the labour.
- Energy is the binding constraint on reindustrialisation. GDP per capita tracks energy consumption per capita almost perfectly across countries, yet US grid capacity has stayed flat since the 1990s while China’s has roughly tripled it. AI data-centre demand has now exposed that gap, and Nolan argues nuclear — safe, clean, reliable base load — is the only source that can meet it at scale, provided enrichment and cost come down.