"There's plenty of heat available," Deal tells Barnes. "That's free energy, and Mace could use it to set up a water- or sewage-treatment business." Another profit-line suggestion, though it's an unlikely one -- most power plants give off heat, and the obvious opportunity is to provide warmth to buildings, not to clean water and sewage. As it turns out, though, water is one of Deal's obsessions. He sees nuclear power as a means to an end: to address the lack of clean water that leaves huge swaths of the planet mired in sickness, poverty, and even warfare. It's an obsession that drove him in 2002 to start a wind-power company in New Mexico. But unreliable winds, regulatory hassles, and objections from many locals to rows of hilltop wind turbines left Deal discouraged and the company in limbo.
That's when he ran into Otis ("Pete") Peterson, a scientist at the U.S. government's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who had a design for a tiny nuclear plant (and who is now the company's chief technical officer). Deal wasn't a fan of nuclear power, but he wondered if a small-scale generator could be the key not only to green energy but also to clean water. Such a device, after all, could be easily shipped to and set up alongside any small town or village, where it could sit safely underground, cheaply turning out electricity for homes, factories, and irrigation -- along with water-cleaning heat.
Barnes seems delighted with the notion of all that free heat, though it's not clean water he's thinking about. Heat, as it happens, can also be used to power chilling units, which means that Hyperion's plant could reduce the huge costs of cooling a data center's computers. "I hadn't even thought of that," Barnes says.
"Are there particular projects you have in mind?" asks Deal, sensing this would be a good moment to start steering things toward a possible sale.
Barnes explains that a certain very large, very ubiquitous U.S. company is interested in building a number of massive new data centers around the globe, and Mace will likely be putting one up in the U.K. Deal asks what the electrical demands would be and then calculates that Mace would need two reactors. "You'd probably be looking at $90 million, all in," he says. Deal reckons off the top of his head that replacing the power company and conventional backup with his nuclear plant would cut Mace's power costs by two-thirds. He adds that the plant is small enough to be exempt from certain U.K. government regulations, a tidbit that widens Barnes's eyes. "That's significant," Barnes says. "We're under a lot of time pressure."
Deal nods thoughtfully. "Well, we're looking for a few highly distinctive projects to launch with," he says. "A data center might be perfect for us." Deal stands up to conclude the meeting. As he walks Barnes to the door, he adds, "We'll be deciding who we pick in the next few weeks, so I'll need to know soon if you're on board."
Barnes seems pleased to hear that he may have sold Deal on letting Mace be one of the first Hyperion customers. "I'll set up meetings with the right people this afternoon," he assures Deal before leaving.
"I never ask for money. I ask for an emotional commitment. I let someone else nail down the details of the contract. Then I come back in to get everyone feeling good again."
Later, outside the hotel, I spot Deal huddled against a building, dragging heavily on a cigarette. In the meeting, and in his conversations with me, he has seemed constitutionally laid back, focused, and confident. But in this unguarded moment, he seems anxious and distracted. It won't be the first time I see him this way. (He later confesses to me that after one particularly tense meeting, he threw up.) "For the past three years, I've spent nearly half my time on the road, and half of that has been international travel," he says. "I feel like I'm with a band that's playing one small club after another. I find it hard to relax." It occurs to me that making selling look easy is a lot of work for Grizz Deal.
They say that salespeople are born, not made. That rings true about Deal, says his sister Deborah, who oversees public policy and government affairs for Hyperion. Grizz, she says, probably got his sales instincts from his grandfather -- a successful Ford parts dealer who eventually left his business to become a preacher, delivering sermons every Sunday at five churches. Deal himself went as far as becoming ordained but ultimately decided his calling was elsewhere.
After college, a master's degree in geography, and a short stint teaching high school science, Deal landed a job at Los Alamos as a project manager and editor for the lab's technical publications. He noticed that the lab's researchers tended to be as business-challenged as they were brilliant -- and decided that his role would be that of a shepherd, leading the scientists into the light of commercialization. At the time, scientists at the lab were producing software capable of digitizing and compressing highly detailed satellite and medical images. In 1992, Deal created a company called Paradigm Concepts to license the technology. Paradigm limped along until 1995, when Deal raised his first round of venture capital. He changed the name of the company to LizardTech and set out to dominate the market for transmitting and analyzing digital images. Eventually, the company raised more than $40 million and employed some 250. "We raised a lot and spent a lot," says Deal. "Though I couldn't even tell you on what."
