Turner Caldwell
Cofounder & CEO, Mariana Minerals. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
1shows
2appearances
47statements
4resolved
3supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Turner Caldwell said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Caldwell: US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply
“The US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply.”
Caldwell: US lacks labor pool required to operate critical mineral refineries
“And we don't have that labor pool here that has that embedded know-how that can walk up to a refinery and quickly get it operating on spec, and then also manage that variability.”
Caldwell: Refineries and mining must leverage automotive autonomy and humanoid robots
“And what we've landed on is that you have to go full bore kind of like leveraging the advances in autonomy in automotive and humanoid robots to go and apply that to refineries and to mining operations.”
Caldwell: Startups should only vertically integrate if their existence depends on it
“You should not be vertically integrating just because you can save five percent or 10% or 20, even 50% on a subcomponent that does not kind of check the box of like, does the company exist or not?”
Caldwell: Reinforcement learning enables fully automated control of industrial plants
“We're at this point where kind of like the compute and machine learning, reinforcement learning Do really enable, enable you to go no humans in the loop and how a lot of these plants are controlled.”
Turner Caldwell: Long mining build cycles trap tech startups in pilots
“But you'll end up doing a lot of pilots and because they don't build enough plants kind of sequentially, like, they'll build one big mine every five years if that. And the, like, there aren't just, there just aren't a lot of opportunities to get into a commerc…”
Caldwell: Reinforcement learning will automate scaling of new chemical processes
“That like scale jump is actually something that we think that RL and will enable with like a pretty meaningful like pace adjustment where you don't need the humans to kind of like fine tune the process conditions around a new process chemistry because the, you…”
Caldwell: US has lost ability to build infrastructure and mineral plants
“The reason that we are so panicked about it right now is because we have fundamentally lost the ability to build large-scale infrastructure, and we have lost the ability to, like, operate complex minerals plants.”
Caldwell: Mariana Minerals uses reinforcement learning to automate mineral refineries
“We're making a big bet on autonomy and refineries, where we use reinforcement learning to actually remove humans from the loop in determining how refineries operate.”
Caldwell: Co-locating plant operators with software engineers beats forward-deployed models
“Sitting the software engineers right next to the operating teams, but Not in like a forward deploy engineer type way where everyone has the same incentives is what's going to yield the best results when it comes to trying to optimize these assets.”
Caldwell: Legacy mining companies abandon autonomous tech projects after short failures
“And I think what we see, at least in, in, in the minerals industry, is, like, folks will give it a shot for a year. You know, people have tried to do autonomy and mining for a long time. And generally a lot of companies will just end up, you know, they'll fail…”
Caldwell: Industrial refining algorithms match consumer tech software models
“And the software space you know, a lot of the underlying optimization algorithms that we're writing for our plants, they look very, very similar to the optimization algorithms that are in dog walking apps and Uber ride optimization underwriting loans ad optimi…”
Caldwell: Musk's aggressive deadlines force teams to prioritize critical paths
“When Elon sets, like, super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately. There's a thousand things that have to happen, but a hundred of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those hundred things.”
Caldwell: Flat organizations are hypercritical for rapid information flow
“I think the flat orgs is, is hypercritical, right? You need information to flow as quickly as possible. You need to democratize access to information. And that's really the purpose of flat organizations.”
Caldwell: Organizational churn and lack of progress cause burnout, not long hours
“I think the thing that actually causes burnout is churn and like a lack of feeling like you're making progress physical.”
Caldwell: Mining pump lead times are 30 weeks in Australia versus days in China
“The supply chain for like a new pump in Australia could take, you know, 30 weeks and getting that exact same pump but with a mine in China, it shows up in, you know, a week or three days.”
Caldwell: Global lithium production capacity must 4x within 10 years
“Lithium, you know, needs to four X in the next, in terms of production capacity in the next 10 years, roughly, in order for the, ah, batteries that we want to build to be built.”
Caldwell: Indonesia accounts for roughly 70% of global nickel supply
“Indonesian kind of like production capacity has scaled to the point where it's now something like 70% of global nickel comes out of Indonesia.”
Mariana Minerals aims to build 10 mineral projects in 10 years
“You know, we want to build 10 projects in 10 years. Those projects will be an increasing scale over time.”
Caldwell: Mariana Minerals aims to build 10 projects in the next decade
“We're building a lithium refinery in Texas with the goal of building 10 projects in the next 10 years.”
Caldwell: Mineral facilities take up to 10 years to reach capacity
“Once you start building, it can take five years to get something built, and then it can take three or three to five years to get something actually operating at rate.”
Caldwell: Operating teams, not technology, limit software penetration in industrial plants
“The gate to software penetration, really not the gate, what sets the rate of software penetration and technology penetration into these plants and into these mines ultimately is the operating teams.”
Caldwell: Mining industry faces 35 years of labor pool attrition
“It's the, you know, for the mining industry, we're in a similar position where we're kind of, we've had 35 years of just meaningful attrition in the labor pool.”
The other half of the tape: Turner Caldwell's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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the a16z Podcast 2
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Turner's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Cofounder & CEO, Mariana Minerals | 2 | 47 | 75% 3/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |