Sam: Welcome back to the Driving Alpha podcast. I’m your host, Sam Silver Sheen, and today we’re diving into a sector of venture capital that I feel doesn’t get nearly enough airtime—investing at the intersection of innovation and regulation. My guest today is Sal Churi, founder and general partner of Trust Ventures.
Sal brings a rare combination of experiences. He’s an entrepreneur, a legal scholar, and a venture capitalist who believes that some of the biggest opportunities in tech lie in markets that are locked up in outdated regulation. At Trust, he and his team back founders tackling society’s toughest challenges—from affordable housing to clean energy to healthcare access—and then roll up their sleeves to help them navigate the policy standing in the way. Some of their investments include Apron, Base Power, and Oklo.
Sal’s perspective is personal and has been shaped by his family’s history, and is guided by a conviction that removing systemic barriers creates room for innovation to thrive. I’m excited to unpack how Trust Ventures approaches this unique and essential corner of venture. So with that—Sal, welcome to Driving Alpha.
Salen Churi: Thanks for having me, Sam. I’m excited to be here.
Sam: Kicking things off, I’d love to start with your family history—your background. I know your family has left some lands a couple of times and has had to travel and overcome their own barriers. So if you could share a little bit about your personal background and how that’s informed your mission as an investor, I’d appreciate starting there.
Salen Churi: Yeah, I’ll just give a minute on that. My dad is actually an immigrant from Iraq. My dad was born in Iraq, chased out as a little kid, grew up in Israel, and then came over to the States. And, you know, he was not somebody who was highly educated. My dad didn’t finish high school, right?
But he kind of found his way as a car mechanic. And then from there, bought the shop, bought another property, bought another property, and was sort of like, you know, in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I grew up, was a property manager, right? And leased out properties. And from an early age, when your parent’s an entrepreneur, you’re an employee—kind of like whether you want to be or not.
So I grew up doing construction, doing maintenance on these houses, doing odd jobs. But one of the things I observed from a very young age was there were much larger, better-funded real estate operations. And I observed their ability to kind of use the rules, use the code, use zoning to get their way. And I saw my dad, who was not in that position—didn’t have that level of legal sophistication—couldn’t throw lawyers and lobbyists at any problem that he encountered, right? Which is just an advantage that larger companies and incumbents generally in the economy have.
So I kind of grew up with that backdrop. I go off to college, and a bunch of my college housemates and close friends went off and started Uber. So, some of the first employees at Uber—several of the first 20 people—were just my college friends. They started it about when I went to law school.
So I’m sitting in my law school classroom saying, “Guys, this is never gonna work. You’re gonna get shut down.” And they’re all billionaires now—and I’m not. So I learned my lesson from that. And I sort of looked at it and said, “Well, man, what Uber did was just a really fascinating thing,” because they built an unbelievable company, an unbelievable piece of technology driving it, but at its core, it was a regulatory arbitrage, right?
The taxi monopoly had existed for 50+ years. The government just basically decided this is how this industry is gonna operate. And it’s not like technology; it’s not like science. Science and technology improve every day. They’re sort of in this polyphonic conversation where there’s competition—good ideas rise to the top, bad ideas die.
That doesn’t happen in policy. That doesn’t happen in the law. A bad law, once passed, will be there forever until someone does all the work necessary—and it’s quite a lot of work—to get rid of it, right? So bad laws persist. Technology is dynamic—it changes every day. The law is static.
And what you realize is, in those industries that the government really captures, it’s like you’re freezing it in a block of ice, right? I observed this with Uber where taxis were terrible. A lot of people out there right now don’t even remember what it was like taking a taxi. I’m old enough to remember that—and it was terrible, right?
Uber came along and they basically built a $100 billion company in five years by getting rid of a broken regulatory system. They also had to build this incredible piece of technology to leverage that and to show people a better way. But at core, the reason that they were able to go eat that entire market so quickly is because that market hadn’t improved in 50 years because the law froze it in a block of ice.
The insight from that was that when those industries are frozen in a block of ice, if you can melt that block of ice, there’s a lot of value hiding inside. The analogy I like to give is monopolies are like piggy banks—if you can break ’em open, there’s a lot of gold hiding inside.
And so that’s another thing that just stuck in my head. And when you start to see the economy this way, it’s hard to think of anything else. I really became obsessed with this idea.
I go off, I’m practicing law, and then I come back to teaching at the University of Chicago. I am focused on helping low-income entrepreneurs overcome regulatory hurdles, because that was my expertise. And I got involved in Chicago as a law professor at the University of Chicago. I got involved in this campaign to legalize street vending.
These are folks who are selling tamales or elotes from little pushcarts around the city. It’s predominantly West Side of Chicago, Mexican entrepreneurs, selling to folks on their way to work. This is what they remember from their home country, and it’s an affordable—and I can attest—delicious way to start your day.
And it’s all good until the restaurants team up with the aldermen, which are kind of the city council members in Chicago, to shut these guys down. Because they don’t want the competition. They’re selling tamales at $1; the restaurant sells them at $4. They don’t like that.
And so you see—immediately lit up the neuron in my brain that I was used to from growing up—which is, larger, better-funded incumbent companies just find ways to use the rules to unfairly advantage themselves and to keep competition out, right?
There are sort of two problems within this set. One is outdated rules—that’s like the Uber situation. And then there’s just incumbent-driven industries, which looks a lot like restaurants. These rules persist across industries.
I saw that and I said, “This isn’t right.” I mean, there were people being thrown in jail for selling a tamale to someone who wanted to buy it. Health code? Fine. But that was egregious. We worked on that for a couple years, eventually got a license passed for these folks to sell.
And what I realized, kind of putting these two things together—I had seen this problem set of incumbency and outdated rules constraining innovation. I saw firsthand what was possible if you could bring scalable technologies to solving those regulatory problems through my friends building Uber. And then I saw the impact you can have on a community by actually pushing regulatory change.
So I basically said, putting these things together—what I want to do is find scalable technologies where we’re gonna have more of that broad, global kind of impact, like Uber had, but working on issues throughout the economy.
I sort of became obsessed with this, and I’m doing the talking-head professor thing, but built a program where I was working with dozens of different startups, helping them change regulatory barriers that they faced. And that really was the birth of Trust Ventures.
I was out there telling anyone who listened that the biggest markets in the economy are the most regulated markets, right? It’s things like energy and housing and healthcare. Regulation grows out of crises. You get the building code—“Don’t use wood here because someone’s house burned down,” right?
The industries that touch the most people—the most human industries, like housing, energy—the things that hundreds of millions of people in this country use—are the things that end up getting regulated the most.
As a result, the most stagnant industries are also the most important industries. When you overregulate the power grid, when you overregulate construction, you’re touching 350 million Americans. You’re making housing more expensive for all those people. It’s not like, you know, the regulation of exotic securities.
So I think that was one really important insight. And then the other insight was, you could just change these things. A further insight was, the folks building innovative companies are rarely also the same sorts of people who work on changing policy. In fact, people want to take on these regulated industries, but investors would say, “Well, if you’ve got a regulatory problem, I don’t really want to touch that,” right? “I’d rather invest in something that doesn’t have a regulatory problem.”
So I became obsessed with this, and I realized as I started changing these regulatory barriers for these different companies, that the companies just became a lot more valuable. There was this alpha strategy to be had there.
If you can take something—people want to buy cheaper housing, cheaper energy, etc. It’s not like me betting on Facebook and saying, “I know people are going to want to use this in the future.” I know people want cheaper energy. I know they want cheaper housing. I know they want access to affordable healthcare. That’s easy.
What’s not easy is bringing that product to market because of the law. And if we can help change those rules of gravity, then we can open up some really massive markets. So not only will we get to hunt the biggest game in the economy—the biggest markets—but also, we will be the preferred partner of these startups where we can bring them something that they don’t natively know how to do.
And we very much stay in our lane. We are your policy partner. We’re a capital partner too—we’re a plain vanilla venture capital fund. We invest dollars. We don’t ask for anything in return.
But that really was the founding thesis and what led me to start Trust: that the most regulated industries are the biggest, and they don’t improve because founders don’t have the tools to take them on. So we said, “We’re going to come alongside the founders who are doing that, and we’re going to help add firepower to what they’re doing and help bring those products to market.”
That will not only be great for consumers—who can get cheaper energy, cheaper housing, better Li service, better taxi service, what have you—but also, we can drive the most asymmetric, by-dollar returns of anyone in venture because we get to pick…
I remember I pitched this to Marc Andreessen in the very early days. He said, “What I love about your thesis is all of tech is attacking 10% of GDP, and you guys are attacking the other 90%.” It’s not low-hanging fruit SaaS companies, but if you can get the rules changed, if you can open the door, then you really can attack these massive markets and produce 200x kind of returns.
Sam: Couple things I want to drill in there. I think first and foremost, there is a narrative around Uber that, you know, they forced regulatory change, right? There were many times that regulators tried to shut them down, kicked them out of the city. And if it weren’t for consumer demand and consumer pull and opening up a new market that everybody had kind of misidentified—you know, a lot of investors passed because of TAM—but clearly there was just something that was… There were a lot of things that were overlooked.
So I’m curious, as you’ve learned more and more about this world, and especially looking at it from an investor’s lens, how do you think about either breaking regulation by force or collaborating with regulators to show them the value that can be unlocked?
Salen Churi: There’s a different approach that you have to take in different industries, right? If you’re dealing with the city council—as Uber was—your approach is going to be really different than if you’re dealing with the FDA or the FAA. These are radically different organizations.
And I also think just like the most important thing is backing founders who want to do it cleaner and better than the next person. You don’t want people who are out there saying, “I’m just going to flout the law, break the law.” You want people who say, “There’s a huge opportunity here. How do we go attack it?”
So I’ll give you just a couple of examples from our portfolio, because I think they’re more illustrative than even the things that led me to start Trust Ventures.
We were some of the first investors in a company called Oklo. It’s a modular nuclear reactor company. We’ve been invested in them since they were a very small startup. Today, they’re a $12 or $13 billion public company.
When we did this investment, nuclear was a very unsexy place to go invest—largely because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the federal permitting body, had basically issued one permit for a reactor. And it’s a variant of an older design. Since their existence, they’ve done very little to move forward the state of nuclear technology.
As a result, you could look at the story of nuclear energy in this country and say: we discovered fire and then put it in a box for 50 years. We split the atom in the 1940s—actually at the University of Chicago. We had these reactors running in the ’60s and ’70s at incredibly low cost.
And then somehow, the industry just got choked to death by stacking safety regulation upon safety regulation.
So we came to it and we said, “Look, there’s a better way to do this.” Oklo’s approach was: we are going to take a new permitting pathway. We are going to create what’s called a combined license application that looks more like a type certification for a 747.
When Boeing makes a 747, they don’t get an individual permit for each one. They get a type certification and then they can mass-produce them. So they said, “We’re going to lower the cost inherent in nuclear.”
It is the most energy-dense material on the planet. By the physics, it should be the cheapest electron you can make. It stopped being that because of regulation. So we took this new pathway.
Now, how did we select that investment? We said, “Look, these guys are the smartest and best in the biz.” They are PhDs from MIT in nuclear engineering. We didn’t pick people who were like, “We’re just going to go break the nuclear cartel and start making nukes and let the government catch up.”
That’s part and parcel of our approach. We start with people who are serious and take safety seriously. Because often regulation exists in areas where there are safety concerns, and it’s important that it is being done in an even safer and superior way to what’s currently the state of the art.
Second, I look for regulatory problems that are fixable and where I am the right size lever to fix it. My team and I cannot go… if you tell me, “Hey, I gotta change American immigration law so we can hire more foreign workers,” I’m going to say, “Good luck, but we can’t help you with that.” That’s way too big a problem for us to solve. We’re not going to get a federal bill passed.
We don’t touch sin industries. So, no gambling, no alcohol—things like that.
We look for places where we are on the side of the angels and where it’s apolitical. This isn’t a red issue or a blue issue. This is something that 80% of people agree about. And there’s usually a narrow interest group that wants to protect their turf. We have to overcome those objections.
That’s how we select the regulatory issues to take on.
We’ve done this work at the federal level—as in the Oklo example—where we helped them get the first permits ever for a Gen 4 reactor, the first test fuel for a Gen 4 reactor, and shepherded through the early stages of the NRC process.
And then finally, with this raft of nuclear executive orders, we got to kind of put a bow on that story for ourselves, where not only have they grown into quite a large company, but we got to watch the founder of Oklo stand in the Oval Office for the signing ceremony of that executive order.
And in that executive order is: “We are going to operate, at both DOE and DOD, new reactor designs.” Oklo was eventually selected for that.
So I think watching that full sweep—going from, “This is impossible; this industry is dead”—it wasn’t dead because of physics. The physics were always compelling. It was always a great way to create power. It’s just that it had been choked to death by regulation.
That’s really the sweep we’re looking for: Where can we take something of massive import? The reason it’s a $12 billion company isn’t because they’ve deployed thousands of reactors yet. They have massive amounts of LOIs, and they’re building their first reactors now.
It’s because people look at that and say, “If this works, it’s one of the biggest companies in the economy.” And the question of whether it works isn’t a physics question—we answered that in 1950. It’s not an engineering question—we answered that in 1960. It’s a regulatory question.
And a lot of their growth is attributable to the fact that they have just been answering these regulatory questions. It’s a lot easier to do that when you have founders who are incredibly serious operators, have an unbelievable amount of focus and determination, and are really just kind of indefatigable when it comes to continuing to push forward. They’ve been at this a while. But I think it makes it a lot easier when you have founders who are incredibly focused on safety—and I think you have to have that when you take on an issue like that.
Sam: Yeah, I would say that there’s also—you know, you’re trying to lower energy costs, which no one’s going to say no to—but there’s an incredibly negative stigma around nuclear power. My mother was at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA when Three Mile Island had its near nuclear meltdown and scared a generation of people.
And so, you know, you’re coming up against—you mentioned on one hand you’re looking for apolitical issues—but this could easily be spun into something that is political. So how did you navigate, or how are you continuing to navigate that? I’m not sure how involved you continue to be with the company now that they’re public, but it was definitely something that you guys had to address.
Salen Churi: Yeah, look, I mean, this was one of the biggest things we’ve ever taken on. So I think if you look at Oklo’s design—it is a passively safe design, right? They intentionally tried to melt it down. They ran a predecessor reactor—it’s a fun rabbit hole to go down, Googling “EBR-II,” Experimental Breeder Reactor II. Argonne Labs ran this from the ’60s to the ’80s and put out zero-emission, very, very low-cost energy—like cheaper than Nat Gas in the Permian Basin. It was an incredibly abundant source of energy.
And look, Three Mile Island was an older design. It was an inferior design. So I think what happened there was we had failures like Three Mile Island, like Chernobyl, that just really scared people. And I think they loomed large in the public imagination, right?
That’s not to minimize the dangers, but rather to put it in perspective. By gigawatt produced, nuclear is actually the safest. Every other form of energy also has risk—it’s just a little less visible and a little less visceral.
And so I think our challenge there was really, how do we find a way to bring this into the bipartisan middle? And I think in large part, this has become a bipartisan issue. Folks on the left care a lot about clean energy. Folks on the right care a lot about abundant energy. And I think those two have met in this place where there is broad bipartisan agreement and support for this.
Now, I won’t say there’s nobody who’s against it, right? And certainly, there are questions of where should this go. Putting this on an Air Force base in remote Alaska is a different story than putting it in the middle of New York City. And no one is saying we should just deregulate all nuclear material, right?
I think that’s maybe one of the most extreme examples.
I’ll give you another couple of examples from our portfolio though. We invested in a company called ICON. It’s a 3D-printed home builder. So basically, a large robotic arm can put up the core structure of a house out of concrete in 24 hours—dramatically cheaper than a traditional stick-built house.
We helped them get basically written into international building code, international fire safety code, and get their first permits. We joked that the first permits for this in Austin were kind of artisanal permits. But really, building code and fire safety code were where you had to go.
And when you talk to folks on these permitting bodies, their predisposition is, “Well, the fire code says you’ve got to put the wooden joist this way.” And we’re like, “Well, there is no wooden joist. The whole thing’s made out of concrete. It literally can’t burn.” And they’re like, “Great—but you’ve still got to put the wooden joist this way.”
It becomes necessary—some of these things are not controversial at all. It’s just that when they drafted IBC, when they drafted the local zoning codes, they never contemplated a robot that could put up a house out of concrete in 24 hours.
They also probably never contemplated how much more expensive, per square foot, housing was going to get—or how much of a crisis it would turn into.
And so, I think you have to look at these things where there isn’t much of an interest group that is against an inherently safer design or an inherently superior design. Builders like it better. Buyers like it better. It’s a pretty universal thing.
I’ll give you one more quick example. We invested in an online eye exam company. You can get your eyes checked online. It’s called Visibly. They power the exams at lens.com, Lendable, a lot of these other online eye care retailers.
Everyone loves this, right? Getting your eyes checked is expensive. It’s a hassle. Everyone loves this—except for the American Optometric Association, which is the interest group representing optometrists. They want to keep those exams expensive because that means their folks get paid more.
So in order to successfully get this into market, we had to go change laws, kill bad bills across several different states. It really entailed locking horns with an interest group who was at odds with voters—at odds with most people out there.
We started with folks in the inner city who can’t afford to take a half day off work and spend hundreds of dollars every year to get their eyes checked. Or folks in rural counties— a quarter of U.S. counties don’t even have an optometrist in them, right? So these guys are driving a county or two over to get their eyes checked—which is not what you want people driving long distances to do, of course.
But I think those are the sorts of problems we pick to work on—where it’s just a win-win for everybody, but requires some regulatory complexity and overcoming that complexity in order to get it to market.
Sam: I think something that’s unique that you touched on is—it’s not always about deregulation. And I think capitalists and venture capitalists alike get a bad reputation for trying to—or it looks like we’re trying to—deregulate, when in reality, we’re just trying to adjust regulations for the modern era to ensure that it can become a win-win for everybody alike.
And then, you know, one of the things we grapple with here is regime change. As the political winds shift, are we investing in companies that today are in good favor with the powers, and in four to eight years, is that going to change? And what’s that going to look like for our investment? Because we are underwriting to, you know, six-plus years, depending on where you enter the position.
So I think trying to find a way to bring that to the middle ground is definitely informative.
Are you making any investments in GovTech itself—anybody that’s selling directly to the government—or is it really just about where you find regulatory mismatch with the newest technologies?
Salen Churi: It’s the latter. You know, we don’t have any particular comparative advantage selling stuff to the government. I think what we’re really good at is saying, what are the most important things that we as a society are not doing right now because of an outdated regulation?
Something that’s 50+ years old and no one’s looked at it. That regulation couldn’t have taken account of technological change. Or because there’s some incumbent—some bridge troll in the economy—who really wants to keep the world the way it is. Wants to keep things slow. Wants to keep things expensive so that they can continue extracting monopoly rents.
We look at: what are the most important things we’re not doing because of one of those two things? And then—is there an opportunity for us to move those things forward?
I said earlier: the law is static, and technology is dynamic. How do we pull the law into line with where technology is? How do we help the law catch up to where technology is, so that consumers can unlock all those benefits?
Selling stuff to government—you know, GovTech—not really a focus for us because we can’t create any alpha there. We don’t invest in a company because we think we’re brilliant venture capitalists who know better than anyone else. I think we invest because we say: this is an obviously highly valuable thing that there’s a big question about whether you can sell today, and we can be a meaningful part of helping answer that question.
That’s the alpha strategy. It’s—we underwrite regulatory risk before we invest, which no other investor really does. Or they just say, “Look, all I care about is what happens if they win. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.”
But we can get a lot more granular than that. We have a team—world-class regulatory operators. It’s really the core and secret sauce of what we do. We have lawyers, we have policy experts who live in the firm, as well as broad groups of partners that we work with to underwrite that regulatory risk before investing, and then actually de-risking it after investing.
That’s the unique piece of what we do. That’s the alpha strategy. And it’s kind of good for the goose and the gander, right? Because we think it leads us to the biggest companies in the economy—the biggest unexploited opportunities in the biggest markets.
We think it disproportionately will lead us to places where we can have a lever on the outcome. We’re not just betting on outcomes—we’re actually engaging to help make them more likely to come about.
And that’s where we get these—you know, like you said—we invest on six-year horizons. Oklo, in six years, grew its valuation 200x. We have other companies that have grown 100x in two years on the backs of some of these regulatory wins that just opened up markets.
So we are the only folks I think out in market who are kind of underwriting that regulatory risk before investing and then de-risking it after investing—in a traditional venture capital model. We’re not a lobbying firm.
But if you look at our team—our team, you know, half of us have JDs—even our investing team. Half of us are lawyers, right? And the other half are engineers. And some of us are engineers or scientists and lawyers.
We don’t have a lot of, you know, regular finance people here. We’re doing a kind of unique, black magic admixture of investing and policy operating and lawyering and media comms—and we really need everyone at the firm to understand that in a deep way.
And candidly, that’s our value prop to founders. The reason we can get in early to some of the best deals, the reason we can win allocation in really compelling deals, is because founders look at us and say, “Look, you guys solve an actual problem that I have.”
We’re not looking for companies that don’t have this problem. And the founders without problems aren’t looking for us.
But when we find those founders with huge potential and a regulatory barrier, we are an ideal partner for them. And that’s helped us get into the best deals and grow our allocations in those deals over time.
Sam: Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, it goes back to what you said earlier about—you’re a policy partner, right? You come in as an investor, you’re a source of capital, but you’re also a policy partner to your investments. And, you know, one of the coolest things about venture is you can kind of influence outcomes, and this is just one of the many ways that you’re able to do that, which is what gets me excited about VC.
So I appreciate that.
In terms of when you are going—so sticking with nuclear—are you… is part of your strategy to adjust the regulation, find the proper fit, and then make more investments around that space, potentially in competitive businesses, now that you’ve unlocked the gates and you’ve broken up the monopoly and there’s a bunch of areas to find gold? Or is it usually one bet per space?
Salen Churi: As a typical matter, we will never invest in a direct competitor to one of our companies. I think that’s sort of like—we pick a horse. And, you know, in the Uber example, if we bet on Lyft or Sidecar rather than Uber, we’re still going to do the regulatory work, even if it disproportionately benefits someone else, right?
You’ve got to believe we can bet on the right horse, right?
And, you know, as a philosophical matter, we don’t go out there and try to change a law to cut a company-sized hole through that law. It’s not what we’re out here doing. We want to open up markets. We want this to benefit consumers. So I think that’s really a philosophical orientation that we have.
We’re never going to try to close the door behind our company.
But looking at markets—so take nuclear as an example. I think nuclear is really an industry that had been stagnant for a half-century and has now just exploded, right? There’s so much excitement.
So I think we will make other nuclear investments, but we will not make an investment that is directly competitive to Oklo, for example. That is one of our large positions.
We will, though, say, “Well, this went from being a technology to being an industry,” and so now things like fuel, and fuel fabrication, and enrichment—we need a supply chain for all these things, right?
And so I think there’s a lot of ancillary opportunities, even within nuclear. And oftentimes, we’ll focus a lot of our time on the grid, for example, as a theme, where we can get more bang for our buck doing policy work.
So we have several companies where they bump up against a grid with broken incentives, right?
One of our largest positions is a company called Base Power. If you know these guys, they’re amazing. I think this is one of the most important companies in the economy. They put batteries on people’s homes.
So right now, you could go out and buy a generator to back up your house when the grid goes down. It’ll cost you $25,000 or $30,000. Tesla Powerwall—same story. They’ll sell you one for, you know, 500 bucks, 700 bucks, and then a small monthly fee, which for the average person is a much easier thing to say yes to.
Now, the thing is, that Generac is mostly laying dormant and unused most of the year. This battery that they put on your house—they continue to own it—they give you that backup benefit. But for the other 360 days a year that they’re not backing up the grid, because the grid’s not down, they’re out there trading the grid.
Meaning: if you look at the price of energy at noon, it’s incredibly cheap, right? There’s a lot of solar. Solar produces and generates energy incredibly cheaply.
The problem is it doesn’t get used. The world runs on baseload power—meaning power that is available 24/7 with perfect uptime. If you run a factory, you can’t have intermittency. Most factories are not set up to produce things between four- or five-hour increments during the day, right?
As a result, most of the energy use has been baseload. And solar and wind—as intermittent (solar being really inexpensive at midday, wind being really inexpensive at night)—a lot of that inexpensive renewable energy gets wasted.
Now what Base allows you to do is say, “Look, I’ve got this massive installed base of batteries.” Because they have this hack to get into market, they have an unbeatable value prop to a homeowner who’s like, “Look, I want to back up my house, but I don’t want to spend $50,000. I’ll just buy this thing for $500.”
And that allows them to get this really widespread build—this massive battery farm. And then that battery, when not being used for backup, can suck up all that 2¢ solar energy at noon and then sell it back to the grid at 6 PM for 37¢.
So it becomes this kind of arbitrage engine that not only empowers the homeowner and solves a really clear, really big problem for them, but…
Sam: I was going to say—I think it’s also, there’s a big part of the story, which is where they started, that you’re missing—just generally about climate change.
Salen Churi: Yeah, exactly. Which is—if you want to make renewables work for people, you have to smooth out the load, right?
Meaning, cheap solar at noon isn’t going to solve emissions problems. Batteries can, though.
So if you think about what a utility does, they’re building poles and wires to move electrons around space. A battery moves an electron in time, not space.
And getting an electron for 2¢ at noon and selling it back to the grid at 6 PM for 37¢—what that does is it makes those batteries look more like baseload. It’s smoothing out the grid.
Not only are you making the grid more resilient—it’s less likely to go down—you’re also creating all this opportunity to use those renewables for much wider-spread purposes.
We did a great job building out a lot of solar. It’s just largely underutilized. Smoothing out the grid allows heavy industry to use solar and wind, for example.
I’ll give you one more example from our portfolio—another large position—called Antora. This is a thermal battery. They are a battery built for heavy industry.
So what they do is, much the same way as Base, they build these batteries that large ethanol producers are customers—anyone who needs a lot of process heat. This isn’t electricity, this is BTUs of heat.
They build a battery out of readily available carbon, and they can heat this battery up to a really high heat point—it’s like a thousand degrees. And this battery can discharge that heat slowly, evenly over the course of a day, so you can use all that really cheap solar to charge it up, get it hot, and then over the course of the day, use it in that industrial use case where they need 100% even-steven heat.
You’re smelting iron to make steel. You’re producing ethanol. These are high-heat processes.
Cars moving to electric is great—I have a Tesla, I love the Tesla—but that’s like 10% of emissions. Dwarfed by industrial capacity.
And so if you care about emissions, batteries are your best friend. You should want massive deployment of batteries.
But even if you don’t care about emissions, batteries are also a really compelling solution, because they’re just taking an underpriced asset and using it to lower the cost of an electron at 6 PM when everyone comes home and is watching TV and doing their laundry.
Sam: Yeah, I was even thinking—you know, Base Power started in Texas, right? There’s been extreme disruption of the grid there. This is almost a life-saving business. If you have batteries spread out across counties, towns, cities, and all of a sudden the grid goes down, now you have all this extra excess backup power that you can feed through to…
You know, if you need to feed it over to the hospital—from one town that does have power to the other that doesn’t—now they’re starting to build out that grid to make that happen. It was something that I found fascinating about the story.
We at Alpha, we looked at the most recent rounds. It’s not something that was ready for us, but it was a really fascinating company to deep dive into. And I am really excited to track them, and I do think investors have recognized the value prop, just looking at the valuation of the current round.
There’s some real excitement and some real deep pockets that—I think this will become a household name before we know it.
Salen Churi: Look, we’ve been in this company since the very early days. We wrote the first check. It was just us and Thrive.
You know, I think all my tombstone is going to read: “Here lies the seed investor and landlord of Base Power Company,” because they started the company in my old house. I got to be their landlord for the first year or so of their operation as they were growing.
But, you know, we really were there in the trenches with them. And I think if you look at it, the regulatory wins that they’ve put in have enabled something that’s never been done before.
They’re building a new type of battery. The magic is that these batteries are behind the meter, so they can interconnect them immediately.
Right now, interconnect’s a huge problem. You want to start a data center—let’s say you’ve even got your nat gas turbine, you’ve got everything you need. You’re waiting two years to plug in. That’s a big problem.
These guys can turn it on immediately.
And so, you know, this is one of the reasons why in just two short years of existence, this company is now already deploying battery capacity faster than anybody on the Texas grid.
And there are a lot of really sophisticated folks who’ve been doing this for a long time. But they’re just moving with such great velocity, because there’s never been before a company that blends the business model of selling a consumer product alongside being your power company, alongside being what’s called a Qualified Scheduling Entity—or trading the grid.
Those three things have never lived under the same roof.
But that’s really what’s necessary in order to fix the grid. Like, if you look at the secular trends—like I mentioned: the grid.
So like Antora, Base, Oklo—a lot of these investments that we make are thematically similar, where we do a lot of work on the grid.
The grid is in many ways the biggest problem we face. Energy is the largest market in the world, right?
I can incredibly look at you and say, that’s a trillion-dollar market. You look at power companies—they’re dozens of hundred-billion-dollar businesses. And they haven’t innovated in a very, very long time.
And if you look at the grid, you look at energy generation, the scariest chart you can look at is American versus Chinese energy generation since 2000. They have 10x’ed their capacity. We are flat.
And then you overlay the projected AI data center draw on power in 2030—it eats our entire generation capacity.
So like, we’ve got to do something.
The utilities are these big incumbent companies with really outdated incentives. They want to build more poles and wires. Poles and wires are getting more expensive and harder to build. We’re building less of them. We’re building them slower—even though we need them more now.
This is a crazy stat: more of the cost of an electron that you consume is driven by moving that electron around than by generating it. In other words, it costs you less to make energy than it does to get it to people.
That’s a function of those poles and wires.
And if we can deploy greater battery capacity throughout the grid, we can basically just lower the costs. If you think of the grid like a highway that’s gridlocked at rush hour and then empty the rest of the day—you can just move more of the cars to midday. It’s like people working from home.
That’s really the conceit of Base.
But also, you mentioned the valuation—it’s like, this is just one of the most valuable things you can do. This is an unbelievably large market. Load balancing, fixing the grid, building the world’s largest distributed energy trader—it’s hard to see where the ceiling is on that if you can do it effectively.
And these guys are unbelievable operators.
So I think there’s a lot of excitement there, but I think it’s driven by: it’s just the largest market on the planet with one of the most impressive teams operating in it.
And I think the regulatory work—not only to get this company into market and structured originally—but also some of the really encouraging signals.
Like, you know, we helped them get passed a law in Texas very recently, removing permitting barriers to putting these batteries on homes. So all that growth was before they were able to go to Houston and Dallas—the two biggest metros in the state.
And the state looked at it and said: this is great for the grid. This is great for ratepayers. It’s making energy cheaper. It’s helping our grid stay up.
Because as you point out, when the grid goes down—it’s not just annoying. People die. There are real costs to that.
And I think folks in government have taken notice of this. Ratepayers feel the pain of their electricity bills. But it’s getting worse, not better. And these are the sorts of solutions that we have to focus on.
And it requires policy change. It’s not just one of the best companies, best teams I’ve ever seen—it’s also a place where they’ve had some significant wins already. And the market’s ready for this.
So we kind of see it as—we’re on the side of the angels helping them on this really important quest.
Sam: Yeah. I think it’s a fascinating story. It’s a really exciting company. And it is wild to think that they are the fastest-deploying battery company on the Texas grid today, right? That stat is a great signal to send to investors, to regulators, to consumers, and I think, like you said, it’s a feel-good story that helps everyone.
Shifting gears a little bit—we’ve talked a lot about energy. But AI is something that is also very front-of-mind for everybody. I’d love to hear a little bit about how you’re thinking about regulation in AI, how Trust is evaluating opportunities, and whether you think this becomes something that looks more like nuclear or more like Uber.
Salen Churi: That’s a great question. I think it’s going to look like neither. It’s going to be its own thing. And I think we’re still in the very early innings of what that regulatory story will be.
What I can tell you is—we have a number of companies in our portfolio that either use AI directly in their core product or rely on a lot of AI infrastructure. And what we’ve observed is that the primary concern of regulators today is around model safety and bias. They’re worried about whether this model is hallucinating. They’re worried about, you know, is it giving different answers to different people?
Those concerns are valid. But we think there’s a whole other axis to think about this problem, which is infrastructure: Who owns the compute? Who owns the data? Who owns the training sets? Who owns the models?
The answer right now is, like, five companies. And what happens when you build entire sectors of the economy on that infrastructure? It’s kind of like building everything on AWS and then having Amazon own your business.
That’s the axis we’re most interested in.
We think open source is going to play a massive role here. We think distributed compute is going to play a massive role. We think that folks are going to be really incentivized to move away from relying on hyperscalers. And that is going to be a hard thing to do, both technologically and politically.
So we’re looking at where the infrastructure layer in AI can be opened up. That’s where Trust is focused.
We’re not particularly focused on building front-end models—we think a lot of that is going to become commoditized over time. We’re focused on the infrastructure and we’re focused on companies that allow people to build on open systems, where the rules are fair and transparent.
Because if you’re building on a closed model and they decide to change the terms on you, there’s not much you can do.
Sam: Yeah, and that’s already started to happen.
Salen Churi: Exactly. And I think that’s where regulators are going to have to start paying more attention—not just to what the models say, but to how the whole system is structured.
If we don’t want to end up in a place where a handful of companies control most of the intelligence layer of the internet, we need to start thinking about alternative models now.
So I think the answer is: it’s not going to be Uber, and it’s not going to be nuclear. It’s going to be something new—and we need new regulatory tools to handle it.
Sam: Yeah, makes sense. And I think one of the hardest parts there is—it’s moving so fast, and regulation tends to move so slow. And it’s global. So if we don’t figure it out here, it’s going to happen somewhere else.
So I agree, infrastructure is definitely an interesting angle.
Just to close it out here: You’ve now been doing this for a little while. What’s the future vision for Trust? And what’s your message to other investors who might be hesitant to touch companies with regulatory hurdles?
Salen Churi: Great question. I think the future vision for Trust is—we are going to continue to be the firm that unlocks the most important opportunities in the most important markets in the economy.
That’s where we want to play. We’re not here to find the next social network. We’re not here to build the next HR SaaS company.
We want to help the smartest, most driven founders in the world solve the biggest, hairiest problems in the economy. That’s the work that excites us. That’s where we think we can create the most value. And that’s where we think the biggest outcomes are going to come from.
For other investors, my message is this: Don’t be afraid of regulation. It’s not a red flag. It’s a moat.
When you help a company change the rules, you’re not just increasing its TAM—you’re making it impossible to compete with.
You’re turning a barrier into a fortress. That’s how you get 100x or 200x outcomes. That’s how you build enduring companies.
And frankly, if we want to solve real problems—housing, energy, healthcare—we can’t afford to sit on the sidelines anymore. We have to engage.
Sam: That’s a great place to end. Sal, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your insights.
Salen Churi: Thanks, Sam. It’s been a pleasure.
