The Future is Metal - Mariana Minerals | a16z American Dynamism Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:07 Everything that we interact with [music] in the physical world is either mined or it's grown. And unfortunately, we can't grow [music] metals. Whether it's a laptop, whether it's a cell phone, whether it's an AI data center, whether it is a robot, whether it's a battery, whether it's a car, all of that stuff comes from the ground. The entire modern economy is underpinned on metals and minerals.

00:25 [music] 50 years ago, 60 years ago, we made a lot of these metals in the US. We were one of the largest producers of lithium. We were one of the largest producers [music] of copper. And then 30 years ago, maybe a little bit longer, there was this meaningful shift away from making these metals ourselves. We need to mine more copper in the next 15 years [music] than we have in all of human history since the Bronze Age.

00:53 There's a lot of worry about that, but there's no clear reaction by the western [music] mining companies in particular to actually go do it. >> We didn't just lose the capability, we actually fell meaningfully behind. [music] >> Over 90% of the critical minerals we use are refined in China today, which is kind of wild to imagine [music] given that that was a very fast transition just over the last several decades.

01:14 Having an over reliance on any [music] single geographic player reduces our ability to have self-determination [music] and control of our own destiny. >> Obviously, there are many things that matter in [music] national security. Some of them are intangible, but these are very physical. And if you don't have the literal units you need to make something, you physically can't make it.

01:34 And you know, we've seen [music] an increasingly developed coast world, hard power does matter a lot. And so, if you can't get what you need [music] to build things, you can't build them in a very obvious sense. My name is Turner Caldwell. I'm the CEO of Mariana Minerals. [music] From San Francisco originally, went to Stanford. Mechanical engineering background and then spent about a decade at Tesla.

01:54 I [music] started working on manufacturing equipment with our battery cell providers. And when you start working on kind of like the intermediate supply chain, you start to realize that the metals are the things [music] that are actually driving past and are probably the biggest bottleneck. And so I got super excited about that. And if you look at the big industrial sectors, [music] you have automotive and Tesla took that on.

02:11 have the space industry and SpaceX took that on and there's this [music] like minerals industry that no one has yet really taken today's modern technologies and applied it holistically to the industry and so we see a bunch of opportunity to go and attack it. The core thesis of the company is that western minerals companies have lost the ability to effectively deploy [music] capital in order to mine and refine the critical minerals and minerals that we need to power the modern economy.

02:39 And so fundamentally we think that that is [music] a problem both for national security reasons as well more globally and we think the only way to actually address that is you have to be a vertically integrated software first minerals mining and [music] refining company. The [music] real magic of Mariana's product is that it's software that drives fundamental behavior [music] change.

03:02 It's not software for software's sake, but it's software that solves every single one of those [music] tiny paper cuts a thousand times a day across a thousand different people. [music] The purpose of Mariana OS is not to replace people. It is to give them leverage and to give them an expanded [music] impact. Um, basically how do we make a really small talented team do much much more with a lot less.

03:23 And software and machine learning is is the way to do [music] that. It's the only way to do that. It has been very interesting to see the level of support and the level of emphasis [music] that has been placed on the critical minerals industry since January of 2025. And so that's where the momentum starts [music] to build. That level of emphasis started to draw more attention to the company.

03:40 And so we met with Aaron at A16Z [music] decided to pull forward the series A because we had landed on this project in Utah that we're [music] like we should bring this in and we should go and attack this faster than we had initially planned. Sometimes the window presents itself and you have to dive through it. That's what we're doing with Copper One.

04:03 >> We got introduced to Copper One through a different company we were working with that we did some consulting work and helped them with their feasibility study. But at that time, those two companies were considering [music] some kind of transaction. And so we were actually initially hired as consultants to review the operation, think about how to do things differently, [music] which was a good signal from our side that the owners and the team here was interested in innovating and knew they had to do something

04:22 different [music] based on their past experience. So we really consulted with them for about four or five months, had a small team in place, checked out the asset, studied it, [music] saw if there was remaining potential, and then they said, "Look, instead of consulting, why don't you guys buy and run this thing?" And so we said, "Sure." We were like, you know, might as well give it [music] a shot.

04:38 It's a great sandbox for what we want to do. >> Every day for about 150 days, we found a new spreadsheet that [music] was being used to run the operation. And that's just how the industry runs. So it's not like a like the team on [music] site was operating in a poor way relative to the industry. It's just like how the industry operates. So we deployed autonomous hall trucks.

05:02 We started doing it in January. The reason we wanted to do it with two as quickly as humanly possible is because every other company that does this, whether it's a Corey or mine, they take 2 years to do it. They do it across a massive massive fleet like 30, 50, 100 hall trucks. So the time it takes to implement it is really, really long. And more importantly, you don't get the contact with the real world that you need to understand like what is actually [music] going to break.

05:24 So the purpose of the bridge here is to put all of the people who solve those problems in the same room together at the same time. [music] Uh and the reason that's super important is because a mine and a refinery are very very dynamic. >> I've been here since uh 2005. So I started out as a uh as an operator in the early time. uh here there's a there a lot of things are real uh manual like uh [music] the reporting there's a lot of writing stuff on uh on papers and then taking those papers and entering the data on a

05:58 spreadsheet so that's been [music] really nice with with Mariana that's been streamlined very much I think success looks like being able to produce more copper um at e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e econ economically, you know, to to make profit and be able to keep expanding and [music] and to be able to keep running continuously and have a lot of people in the the area here have jobs for for a long time and be able to support their families.

06:24 This San Juan County here in Utah, it's uh I guess the poorest county in in Utah. So, this place and these jobs, you know, means a lot to a lot of people. I would like to see it to the end myself, you know, see it going, you know, going off into the horizon and successful making money and cuz I I'll be gone before a lot a lot of these people. So, I would like to to leave with it on good footing and running good and and uh producing lots of copper.

06:51 >> In America, we're builders. We're a country of builders. We have an independent spirit. [music] We want to prove that we can do it. We want to do it ourselves. And in doing so, we want prosperity for ourselves, our families, our communities, our countries. And Mariana is such a perfect encapsulation [music] of that, that vision and those values. In the long term, you're not going to be able to mine the bottom of the ocean without a really robust autonomy stack.

07:13 And you're also going to have a really hard time mining on Mars or on the moon or asteroids uh without a really robust autonomy stack. That is the autonomy [music] stack that we are building. If you want to build a big impactful company that changes the course [music] of civilization, you have to do things in the physical world. But it it's the combination of the atoms and the bits that enables that.

07:31 [music] It's not like you're not just an atoms company or you're not just a bits company. You have to be both. >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]