Unreasonable Stories

Patrick Walsh and Anish Thakkar are the co-founders of Sun King, the world's largest off-grid solar energy company. Over two decades they have brought solar power to more than 26 million homes across 46 countries, created work for more than 37,000 field agents, and extended over $1.7 billion in financing to customers most banks would never reach. In this conversation with Daniel Epstein, Patrick a...

Dylan Taylor is the founder and CEO of Voyager Technologies, a space infrastructure company that went public in 2025. Voyager is building Starlab, a commercial successor to the International Space Station, and through its Nanoracks business is the largest commercial user of the ISS today, with more than 1,300 experiments run in orbit. In this conversation with Daniel Epstein, Dylan explains why he...

ZincFive is the world's leading nickel-zinc battery company. Its batteries cannot be forced into fire, are over 90 percent recyclable through a smelter-free chemical process, and deliver power in millisecond bursts that lithium cannot match on its own. Nearly 2 gigawatts are deployed or under contract for data centers globally, and the company just launched its first battery cabinet engineered...

Fourth Partner Energy finances, builds, and operates renewable energy for India’s factories. Clients save 30 to 40% on their power bills and pay nothing upfront to switch. The company now serves over 400 clients across 23 states, has raised $475 million, and is building a gigawatt of clean energy a year. Saif Dhorajiwala co-founded the company in 2010 with very little money. They started by buildi...

Heat is responsible for 40% of global emissions and more than half of all energy consumed on the planet. Most of it still comes from burning fossil fuels, and almost nobody is talking about decarbonizing it. Christophe Williams co-founded Naked Energy to change that. Their solar collectors convert up to 80% of the sun's energy into hot water, compared to about 20% for traditional solar panels....

Lisa Dyson has a PhD from MIT in string theory. Her thesis covered rotating black holes, cosmology, and time travel. She is now the co-founder and CEO of Air Protein, a company that makes protein and other food ingredients from CO2, water, and energy. The technology was originally developed by NASA during the Apollo program. The idea was to feed astronauts on long space voyages by recycling the ca...

Jane Chen co-founded Embrace Global as a student project at Stanford in 2007. She moved to India at 25 and spent four years working 12-to-15-hour days to bring a portable infant incubator to market. That technology — a sleeping-bag-like device that maintains 98 degrees for six hours on a 30-minute charge — has now saved over a million babies' lives in humanitarian crisis zones worldwide. In th...

Seventy percent of marine infrastructure worldwide is concrete, and almost all of it is harming the ecosystems around it. Dr. Ido Sella has spent 14 years trying to change that. His company, ECOncrete, tweaks the composition of concrete so that marine larvae — oysters, corals, barnacles — can actually settle and grow on it instead of being repelled. The result: 7x more carbon sequestration per squ...

Most cancers are caught too late, and Ryuichi Onose has spent the last seven years trying to change that. His company, Craif , can detect 10 of the most common cancers from a urine sample, before symptoms, before scans can even see anything. Their accuracy for stage one pancreatic cancer sits at 93%, compared to 37% for the standard blood marker test. Ryuichi was 26 and managing ships at Mitsubish...