KoBold Metals

“And so the science of how lithium ore deposits form is incipient. That's really exciting because a little bit of increased scientific understanding can be a really potent differentiator. So potential for big breakthroughs.”

“When our team gets on the ground every day that they're in the field, they are collecting new training data. And they're not just going to places where we have high confidence in what the rocks are, because we're not going to learn anything. We're going to pla…”

“The scarce resource is not lithium or copper metal in the ground. It's actually information. The scarce resource are not the ore deposits. And the scarce resource is the information about where the ore deposits are located.”

“So we, our business is focused on exploration, and it's focused on exploration for a couple of reasons. One is because there's way more value to be created there, and the second is that's where technology can be really differentiating.”

“It is the highest highest grade large copper deposit that is not yet a mine. The average of operating copper mines today is that the concentration of copper in the ore is, is about 0.6%. So if you mine a thousand kilograms of ore, not including the non-ore roc…”

“You have to go on record before you collect the data about what could you observe that would cause you to abandon this hypothesis. This is how we avoid confirmation bias, which is very, very susceptible to it in this business. You come up with an idea and then…”

“Technical success is, is not very helpful. Success is you find something that is really economic to develop, that either we can develop or we can sell to somebody who can develop it, and so if we don't actually have The, you know, so-called social license to o…”

“Oddly, we have a chief philosopher who is an epistemologist. This is Michael Trevins. He wrote a wonderful book called The Knowledge Machine about what is science and how it is different from other ways of knowing.”

“One of my favorite data sets that we use around the world a set of maps from Zambia from almost a hundred years ago, the originals are hand painted on linen. And we got a tip from an elderly geologist on which drawer in the state archives to look in that had t…”

“So Kobold, we target 50 to a hundred million dollars per discovery. That's the goal. That is how, that's how well we want to do.”

“We built our own hyper spectral imaging system in less than a year, we had it flying on a light aircraft and we're surveying areas that we're interested in and we're using it for getting data in 600 colors at dramatically lower cost of acquisition and much, mu…”

“These observations were made by skilled geologists, and the rocks haven't moved, so there's no expiration date on the data, and so you can take data sets like this that provide ground truth and use it for training machine learning models based on modern airbor…”

“With a few million dollars of capital, you can create a hundred to a thousand times return.”

“Anything you can find by traipsing across the ground with your eyes has been found by now, and we need more intelligent ways of looking for minerals in places that are concealed.”