MENGENAI EPISOD INI
What if AI's binding constraint isn't smarter models or faster chips - but the megawatts sitting unused inside regulated utilities in every major city?Graeme Harrison, General Partner at Augur VC and Founder & CEO of Simply Silicon, has spent years betting that energy, not compute, is the real bottleneck for AI. Augur was incubating against an "energy AI" thesis before the term "NeoCloud" existed. Simply Silicon, the operating company that emerged from Augur's dealflow, is now building the world's first air‑gapped inference networks for major North American cities - a category of one, for now.Their first site is a regulated district heating plant in downtown Calgary with 12 MW of unused electrical capacity - the kind of deal Silicon Valley money alone could never close. On the fund side, Augur has been first into companies like Beyond Reach Labs (cold‑emailed pre‑demo‑day for an uncapped SAFE), Aero Volta, and Cumulus, underwriting outliers against a worldview Graeme calls "technological determinism."Graeme spent nearly a decade doing technology M&A at Bennett Jones in Canada before launching Augur. He built his first company - Quest Websites - in mid‑90s Saskatchewan as a kid, got wiped out years later on an electronic cigarettes import business when a regulatory change seized his inventory, and went to law school to learn the commercial backbone of how the world actually runs. In 1999 he read Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, and that book has quietly directed every choice he's made since.
In this episode, we explore:- Energy as the Binding Constraint: Why the AI infrastructure race is going to be won by whoever solves power, not compute.- The Cold Email to Beyond Reach Labs: How Augur wrote an uncapped SAFE before demo day and why the founders said yes.- Technological Determinism: Augur's underwriting model - civilizations unlock technologies in a fixed sequence, and the next ones are knowable.- "The Internet Wasn't Built for This": Why current data center architecture can't deliver what regulated enterprises need from AI inference.- The Calgary District Heating Deal: How Simply Silicon co‑locates inside a regulated utility - and why Silicon Valley capital alone can't open that door.- The Death Spiral of Venture Capital: Why generalist VCs reject the deals worth doing, and what conviction‑led underwriting looks like instead.- Don't Die: The Y Combinator rule Augur leans on through portfolio inflection points - and the "teardrop" founder who said no to an early acquisition.- Plus a cameo from Mikey: hired into Augur at 18, now running investor tours at Simply Silicon at 20.Learn more about Graeme:https://deeptech-decoded.com/guests/graeme-harrisonTimestamps:0:00 - Designing the conversation: identity, two roles, Beyond Reach1:05 - Ten years of tech M&A at Bennett Jones2:03 - The electronic cigarette business that wiped him out4:59 - From Quest Websites to law school: learning how the world runs7:16 - Wearing two hats: Augur VC and Simply Silicon9:27 - Ray Kurzweil and the energy‑AI North Star10:43 - Dan Chapman and building the Augur team13:43 - Technological determinism and the Kardashev scale17:23 - The Beyond Reach Labs investment story22:11 - The cold email that became an uncapped SAFE24:35 - $325M in LOIs by demo day25:17 - What was actually on the investment memo27:47 - Investing vs. building: which would Graeme pick?29:44 - Simply Silicon emerges from Augur's dealflow31:31 - Why the internet wasn't built for AI inference36:00 - Recruiting an inference engineer out of AMD40:09 - Inside the Calgary district heating plant deal44:52 - What makes founders pick Augur over bigger checks47:30 - The "teardrop" founder who said no to an acquisition50:49 - Don't die: Y Combinator's most important rule57:00 - Token‑maxing, patent‑maxing, and broken VC incentives1:02:45 - Spotting an 18‑year‑old outlier1:13:00 - The book that gave Graeme his North Star
