AI-Powered Coding & Space Tugboats? Inside the Future of Software & Satellites! | E2099

25:54Sometimes the agent is a little boneheaded and people don't like that experience. It's sort of like the same thing with a freelancer or whatever, like sometimes it'll make mistakes and we continue to sort of improve it. Another thing, we released the mobile app. We released the mobile app. You should check that out too. It's a mobile app where you can just like chat with the agent and you can see the app kind of working in your phone. If you're using Anthropik's model, does that make your economics tough? Or is that a cost that works into the product in such a way that I can think of it financially from a very high, boring perspective as kind of like SaaS?

26:30So a lot of companies in the AI coding space are massively subsidizing the tokens from Anthropik. they're like a mere sort of wrapper over Anthropik, perhaps even losing money on the Anthropik spend. Rapplet is like actually more expensive than many products on the market, if not most. And the reason is, is like, one, we want to provide this agentic experience where it could take arbitrary amount of time to get there. So we're going to provide a quality premium experience. But two, we also have this cloud offering. No one has both sides of it. The AI, you can't really have a lot of margin on right now because otherwise you're going to be very, very expensive, unaffordable.

27:12But cloud businesses are kind of clear what you do. And so we make margin on that as well. So the business picture is healthy right now. It's a concern for the industry as a whole. Like maybe the foundation models are the only people are making money and none of the app layer are making money. It's astounding to me how every three months, the entire perspective shifts from there's no value in the app layer. It's all in the models too. Wow, the models are worthless. All the value is in the app layer. It just swings. Basically, it's, is OpenAI's model the best or is Llama the best right now? Every three months.

27:45I mean, what was really funny is you were talking about how like, you know, back in January, February of 2024, I'm like, yes, but in AI time, that's 10 years ago. That's right. So, I mean, this is a compressed cycle to the point in which it's tough to keep up, even though I get paid literally to keep up. So I might be kind of over my skis here, but Replit Assistant was the AI tool that worked inside the cloud ID and helped you do stuff. Then Replit Agent is the thing we've been talking about. Mostly you prompt it, you keep prompting it, you talk to it. do those two things come together at some point in the future and become a single assistant that is more multimodal than what I currently have?

28:23It feels a little arbitrary to have them split as they are. Again, might be silly, but I'm curious. No, absolutely. You're right. There are a few considerations here. They're trade-off on time and money, so in control. So we still have quite a bit of developers on the platform that feel like agents is taking quite a bit of control from them. I see. Whereas this citizen developer type, kind of like you, is fine with that. Yeah, let it have control. Let it make the decisions. But if I'm a developer at a company and I want to use a certain stack and all of that, I want more control and assistance also cheaper as$0.05 a request.

29:04Versus$0.25, I believe, for agents. Yeah, versus$0.25. And also some people go back and forth with them. For example, I want to tweak UI. I don't want to the 25 cents for tweaking UI and you can do it in system pretty quickly. I think we want to have like a little more variable pricing on agents, a little more variable time limit as well. Like, you know, agents should know if I'm if I'm doing a UI change, I shouldn't have to restart the server and doing all of that stuff. So I think they will converge, but it's going to be quite a bit of work. One thing that LLM is actually still lousy at is classification.

29:38I mean, the reason OpenAI has this dropdown with all these models and all these capabilities is because they can't really know which one you need given a query. I mean, that's the ideal situation, right? Sam talked about it on Twitter. It's like, we're going to put everything together. You don't have to kind of worry about all of this. But the reality is the LLMs are actually kind of bad at classifying these queries today. Talk to me a little bit about the future. I'm not going to ask you for a three-year plan because God knows AI is going so fast, but quarters two and three this year, what are you excited about?

30:09What are you looking forward to? And what hints can you give us about where Replit might be heading? Agent V2, which is now out for our beta, what we call Explorer users, is a lot more autonomous than Agent V1. It'll do a lot more work per turn, and people are a lot happier at it. The metrics we're seeing, like the deployment metrics, are kind of insane. We'll announce them when we launch the product. So we feel like we're headed towards more and more autonomy. We want to give, again, we want to give customers a choice. oh I want to be sitting in front of my keyboard and do iteration be really fast on that or I want to send this off to do it in the background I want this change or when this app made and I'm gonna say okay you know I'm willing to pay this arbitrary number uh you know of whatever it takes uh and like go build this test it yourself and then come back to me uh when you're done and like if you take 15 minutes 30 minutes an hour you know I don't care just built this thing for me.

31:07So, you know, I sent this tweet earlier today. Hey, would you want Replit to be more autonomous? I always ask questions about our product. I've never seen such an emphatic yes. Like people want more of that because they want to be able to send off requests on their phone and for it to like, for them to go shopping, come back and like their phone is already built. The other thing I'm excited about is being able to unblock people. like sometimes with all of all the products, the cursors, all of that out there, sometimes you just get to a really funky place with vibe coding, what's called vibe coding, where you're not really looking at the code.

31:45You get to a place where actually you can't make a lot of progress. And so we were working through solutions to that. And, you know, it might be kind of, you know, having having like more compute, putting more compute in via reasoning models, maybe even having some concept of a human in the loop. But I think that's a crucial thing to make sure that people never get really stuck and always can make progress. I mean, just to give an example of this, and by no means a diss, but I was having a problem with Replit Agent because it was saying, do you see this? And I kept saying, no, I see a screenshot.

32:20It turns out I needed to open the web view tab. So quite literally, I asked Agent, do you want me to send you a screenshot? And it was like, I don't know. Okay. So I literally imported a screenshot. I'm like, I have no idea if this will work. And then it was like, oh, go to web view and then open that tab and then I sorted it out. But I mean, as a non-developer, I just don't have that built-in sixth sense of knowing what I might be missing. And so I think unstinking people is great. So it sounds like better agents, do it on the go, and then also ways to help people that are less developer-inclined not get stuck.

32:54That's a great mix. And as the models get better, Replic gets better, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the exciting thing about the space. We're just riding this wave. Oh, that's so exciting. Thank you very much. For folks who want to find Replit, what's the URL and what is one role you are hiring for that you're looking for candidates? Oh, awesome. R-E-P-L-I-T dot com. And in terms of candidates, really engineers, AI engineers, platform engineers, front-end engineers, so Replit.com forward slash careers. Have you considered using Replit for Replit? We do a lot. I mean, one of the most exciting things is like one of our HR folks are building a lot of HR tools with the Rathlet, which is wild.

33:33And people keep saying that SaaS is going to be just fine in the AI era. Well, we'll see. Amjad, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Everybody, talk to you soon. All right. We all know if you're a founder or even if you're in a small business, you're thinking about your company 24-7, 365 days a year. That's the life of a founder. This is not clock in, clock out, nine to five gig for you as the business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are. And that's, of course, LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is like your co-founder. They're going to make it so simple for you to post your jobs for free on LinkedIn, where there are one billion members.

34:15You're going to be able to share what you're posting and actually keep all the promising candidates organized in one place. And also, LinkedIn is going to help you quickly write a job and get it in front of the right people. whether you want to post for free or use some promotion to get it in front of even more qualified applicants. So do me a favor. Don't take my word for it. I mean, you should. I know what I'm talking about is where I find my great people. But just understand that 72 % of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it helped them find the best candidates. So find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses already use LinkedIn for hiring.

34:53So here's your call to action. Post your job for free. Why wouldn't you do it? It's free. F-R-E-E. That's a good price. LinkedIn.com slash TWIST. Once again, that's LinkedIn.com slash TWIST to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Twist. This is Alex, and we have yet another Twist 500 interview today. And this is one that I'm incredibly excited about because we are once again going back to space. Yes, we're going to talk to a company called Starfish Space, which I think could have a very large role in making the in-orbit economy more economically viable and therefore more investable and therefore more active.

35:34You know that I'm a science fiction guy, so I'm always looking for companies that are going to take me eventually into orbit. Now, this company isn't that, but it is going to make the process of having people up in space just a little bit easier. So please welcome to the show, it's Austin Link from Starfish Space. Austin, hey, how you doing? I am doing well. I'm excited to be here with you, Alex. Hi, I'm so glad. So I want to talk about Starfish because of all the companies out there, you guys are doing the most like blue collar space thing of all time. You're essentially building, as far as I can tell, the in-orbit mechanics.

36:05So tell me a little bit about the company's vision and where you are today. Yeah, we are. We are kind of blue collar in a way. One of our leads for the auto program, a guy named Cappy, just his title on LinkedIn is Cosmic Garbage Man. Kind of what we do. Uh, but, but the reason why we do this, um, is because I and my co-founder Trevor, just like you, just like people all around the world are incredibly excited and passionate about humans going out into the universe. And to go out into the universe, we get to discover and explore and dream about what's out there. And I think sometimes we get to discover and explore a little bit about ourselves in the process.

36:47so as we do this we've long been driven by large government organizations by nasa paving the way and taking folks to the moon and landing rovers on mars but in the industry we've seen especially over the past couple of decades that sometimes when large traditional organizations are are trying to advance the boundaries of what's capable as we go out in the universe it gets expensive. And it's not always the most efficient development process. And so the reason why Trevor and I started Starfish Space is we said, hey, we have the same dream as so many people that like, let's go out in the universe, let's push the boundaries of what humans can do.

37:29And we think to make that possible, it has to be driven by the economics. Humans have to be getting more value from going into space than what it takes us to go into space. And that's why we've chosen to do Starfish Space as a business, because that really aligns our incentives as an organization with the overall problem. And it drives our approach as a business. So what we do as Starfish Space is we build, as our initial product, a satellite called the Otter, which is designed to grab and move other objects in space. and it turns out that useful and and maybe we'll talk a little bit about why that's useful um but as we do that it's not a unique thing to us nasa sent up a space shuttle full astronauts to do a mission like this which you call satellite servicing in the 1980s so we've been doing it for 40 years there's i bet that was cost effective easy and a very quick mission from nasa you think you're saving a 500 million dollar satellite boy this is going to be a great deal but when you have to send up seven astronauts in a space shuttle to do it not money positive anymore no no definitely net negative uh but but drill in a little bit on what otter is going to do because it has kind of two functions uh in its current design if you will two core missions that we go after with the otter one is satellite disposal so you've got a satellite in low orbit.

38:58It's died. It's just a cannonball threatening your other satellites. Now we'll get it out of the way. Second core focus for us is what's called satellite life extension. You got a valuable satellite. It's run out of propellant. It's drifting away from the orbit it needs to be in. We grab it. We bring it back to the orbit that it needs to be in. But to be clear, to deorbit a satellite, to push it into an orbit where it'll eventually decay and then just break up and kind of atomize itself, what you do is you apply pressure and pushing it down. And when you're trying to increase the life of these satellites, my understanding is that the otter becomes effectively something that latches on and then gently pushes.

39:35So you're either pushing up or pushing down. So you've created like the world's most advanced staircase. Well, and what gets tricky is some of the orbit dynamics is part of this. And this video is going to humorously not follow some of the orbital dynamics. but when you want to go down in space you don't actually push down you push backwards and that drains energy from your orbit and it goes down so essentially you just remove energy and then okay interesting but what would happen if you push down though now I'm curious you just kind of wobble around your orbit and you don't even notice it oh well this is why we have experts on the show ladies and gentlemen so you push back at a satellite or now I presume instead of up you're pushing forward Yes.

40:23Okay. And there are fancy, fancy terms for this, but the gist, Austin, is that there's so many satellites in orbit today and the pace at which we're adding satellites seems to be at an all-time high. So I presume there's more of these dead cannonballs than ever. And also there's probably more people who want to keep their existing satellites serviced and in orbit longer. We're only putting up more and more in space. And that's both because it's becoming more affordable and you see trends like smaller satellites and launch making that happen. And also because of all the value it's providing to folks, whether it's Earth observation, whether it's communication, really tremendous things going on in space.

40:58But as we put more up there, things that were previously not a problem because space is really big become problems. And also we want to have more capability. If we can interact and recycle and assemble satellites up there, that's more and more that we can do in space and build a space economy. Absolutely. So one thing I've been impressed by, and one reason why I wanted to have your company on our little fun Twist 500 list, and I wanted to have you on the show, is because it seems like your pace has been really quick. Company founded 2019, and in 2023, just four years later, more or less, you guys actually launched a, what I think is a proto version of the otter called the Otter Pup, which is, I believe, the technical term for an otter baby, which is adorable.

41:42I have young kids, so I've read a lot of books like, you know, giraffe, calf, cow. But that mission, when your otter pup made it up into space, didn't go as planned. So can you tell us a little bit about what happened and then the recovery process? Because I think it's an illustrative story for how hard what you're doing is. Yeah. It's hard to start a company. And something that was totally foreign to me in starting Starfish Space and totally foreign to my co-founder. and you put so much of your hopes and dreams into a project and so much of your sweat equity. And then things happen. Things always happen.

42:20And so for us, we spent, we raised our seed round. We spent a couple of years designing and building and testing the Otterpup, a small satellite designed to dock with another satellite orbit. And this is going to prove out all of our key technology and our software. and we are sitting on top of another satellite that is attached to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. And SpaceX does their job awesome and they pop us off into orbit and we're sitting on top of this other satellite and they had an issue. And they had an issue that led to one of their thrusters being stuck open and they drained all of their onboard propellant within a few hours after we separated from the rocket and spun our combined satellite stack up.

43:09And to their credit, they realized this was going on. They took some emergency actions to save us, to give us a shot and popped our satellite off. But that means that our company began our life as a spacefaring company with our satellite spinning at 330 degrees per second. And for folks who don't know, there's only 360 degrees in a circle. So you're spinning around almost every second. We're spinning around almost every second. Our satellite is designed to spin up to two degrees per second. So it was 150 times faster than we were supposed to spin. Well, you wanted to stress test. I mean, stopping you here, Austin, to ask a kind of puckish question.

43:49But when you're doing a demo and a test like OtterPup, what percentage of the mission is you guys learning as a company by putting something up in orbit to actually test? And what portion of the effort is to show other people that you've built something that works? I've always been kind of curious about these early missions and the prove outs and who they're really for. For us, we do it all for our own test and development. And when you're like, we sell to oftentimes other engineers making decisions. And so for us, the marketing or the selling is almost just showing that we've done a good engineering development process and builds their confidence and ups.

44:29Okay, so you're spinning 3 ,000 degrees a second. You guys actually managed to slow it down. Did you slow it down all the way to stationary in terms of spin? Yeah, so it was a month-long journey to get in contact with the satellite, to get it power positive by deploying the solar panels, to get it thermally stable, and to figure out, okay, can we stabilize the satellite? Can we detumble it? And as you're going through this process as a founder, there's a part of you as a founder that's like i don't think this is good for business right now and there's a part of you that is sort of the program manager that that is saying like oh my gosh we put so much effort in this was such a dream mission and now it's now it's at risk and it might not happen and then there's a part of you that is the engineer and the party that's the engineer is like oh man we might have to we might try to save this like this is going to be exciting I can't wait to tackle this problem.

45:29And so in a weird way, you're very stressed out and you're very worried, but you're also really energized for the process. And we eventually adapted some of our simulation and our algorithms to, instead of going to dock a satellite, to use magnets on board the satellite and gently push off of Earth's magnetic field. And over time, stabilized the satellite so that it wasn't rotating anymore. that sounds from my uneducated perspective like a very slow process um it is it is kind of slow but it did end up playing out over just like a week once we nailed the algorithm okay so a week's a week is shorter than I expected but I still wouldn't call a week quick is a week quick in satellite terms takes you over a year to build these things so a week is a week isn't too bad got it okay well this is again slightly puckish but like how much of the company's Capital was tied up in the Otter Pup mission.

46:25So when it was doing the whee, how worried were you about accidentally, I mean, kind of crashing the business just because you had a bad luck on your space tug? You always worry about that as a founder. You're always worried about how is our business going to survive this thing that's going wrong and what can kill our business? We had, as we'd made progress with the Otter Pup and as we'd made progress with customers, we'd gone out to fundraise prior to the launch of the mission. And so for us, fortunately, it wasn't like, man, we have to get something or else we're all out of our jobs. It was, in fact, as soon as it started going wrong, like, all right, well, let's let's talk about what path the business has forward to make sure that we can still succeed in spite of a mission going a little off the rails.

47:07And are you referring to your series A1 round? That was about$29 million. So that particular round that came just before the Otter Pup mission was our series A, the$14 million fundraise. Okay. And so the A1 came after that. Got it. Yes. Yeah. So we ended up raising about$29 million late last year. Now, 2026, you guys are doing your first official mission with Otter. Talk to me about the partner for that and what the goal is. Yeah. So as we sort of pulled rabbits out of the hat on the Otter pup mission, it turns out it built a lot of confidence in our customers that they didn't want to go, hey, this thing is going perfectly.

47:49they kind of assumed it's your first mission it's risky it's not going to happen they just wanted to see us solve some problems and do a good job in the engineering and it led to us signing three major contracts over the last summer to launch otters in 2026 uh and so the first of those was with a commercial company called intel sat which is one of the largest geostationary satellite operators in the world um the second is with the u.s space force and the third is with nasa and so we've got three otters launching in 2026 and that uh is dominating a lot of my efforts right now after this i got to go downstairs and say all right how's the assembly going how's the test going what can i do to help so paint me a picture of your factory floor as well i know you're up in the uh seattle redmond agglomeration um are there three otter pups like in various stages sorry three otters in various stages of um completeness downstairs that you can kind of go see as they're sequentially built?

48:48So we actually work heavily with a series of manufacturers. As we build the otter, there are certain things that are really unique to our satellite that we build in-house. So there's some specific hardware that you go downstairs and you'll see, but you won't see anything that looks like a half-assembled satellite because for many pieces of our satellite, we work with external suppliers. As an example, on our otter pup mission, otter pup never existed at our facilities. It existed at our partner's facilities, a partner called Astro Digital, who is really great to work with on that mission. And we build our hardware, we build our software, we go down and we install it in their facilities.

49:28Allows us to move a little faster. Over time, though, do you think that off-the-shelf parts and their construction will move in-house, or will you guys stay? I don't know what the term here is, but we would call it asset light in some ways, perhaps in a different context? In general, as we do things that are really unique to us, it makes sense for those to be in-house. As we do things that are really similar to what other folks do and buy, then if we work with an outside supplier, we can use their whole supply chain, we can use their reliability, we don't have to upfront all of the non-recurring engineering costs.

50:08So we do see value over the long term of working with folks externally. That actually seems very bullish to me that there is a sufficiently robust value chain in satellite construction that a company like Starfish can simply focus on differentiators, other technology, but then you can kind of like build that on top of what already exists. So you can go from incorporation to space in four years versus an old timeline, I don't know, 40 or whatever it would have been. But it feels kind of awesome that you don't have to build the whole thing in a house, even if it does make for a less good camera shot from the staircase.

50:42It is awesome. It's an awesome set of infrastructure from the satellite manufacturing to folks building radios or cameras or thrusters, even to SpaceX and launch vehicle. Yeah. And hopefully it all grows with us as we continue to do more with otters. So I'm curious about the economics of this, because once you have a satellite in space, every auditor will have its own life expectancy. It's going to be scooting around doing things. Are you guys going to own them as a company or are you going to sell them to, say, a NASA or another company that then will own it themselves? And then if they own it, do you operate it for them?

51:17I was trying to figure out where the money flows. Yeah. So we own it and we provide services to customers. And as an example, Northrop Grumman is a company that began providing the first life extension mission in 2019. They're getting paid$65 million to extend the life of a single satellite for five years. If you're building a large geostationary satellite, you can be making$30,$40,$50 million a year. Got it. An extra five years a lifetime is huge. Okay. Yeah. And so if we provide those services and we do so at a cost point that is less than that, we can build a good and sustainable business. You know, Amazon, Jeff Bezos always said that your margin is my opportunity.

52:00My thought is even with space economics where they are just today with launch costs as they are and so forth, $65 million for a single life extension mission seems like a price point that you can beat pretty comfortably and still make a lot of money. you can with the right approach. You have to do it with a small satellite. And that's where a lot of our unique approach as Starfish comes in and our unique technology comes in. Getting two satellites that are moving full speed to gently come together and grab onto each other is really, really tricky. Folks traditionally solve that with a bunch of hardware, but hardware is mass, is volume, and it makes a big, expensive satellite.

52:43we focus on solving the problems with software that can dock much simpler satellites to be able to to do these missions at a price point that closes the business case so this is kind of the three points to the the otter project um cephalopod which is your autonomous guidance and control software uh then the nautilus which looks like a big suction cup as far as i can tell and then i actually don't know how to pronounce the other word cetacean cetacean cetacean which which you wouldn't know unless you've been thinking about whales a lot recently. Well, I've read that word hundreds of times. I never had to say it out loud until right now.

53:21And I looked down on my notes and I went, crap. I don't know how to say that. Anyways, over having to do with whales, over having to do with squids, and then Nautilus, of course, is a famous, you know. Yeah. So those are the three components that come together to make this happen. How hard was it to write code to get these two satellites moving, I don't know, three to eight kilometers a second up there, to come together. It's incredibly hard. And maybe just to frame what we're trying to do, we're trying to take a satellite, even the otter pup is the size of a microwave, and we're trying to steer it into dock using something called electric propulsion.

53:59And electric propulsion gets great gas mileage, but the force that it puts on your satellite is the same force as like a housefly sitting on your hand. Oh, it's even less than I thought. And so we are steering our satellite through space to go dock with another satellite by like strategically putting a house fly on one side or the other at different times. Is that is that effective because drag is so low in orbit? Because if you think about this, that wouldn't work in a higher drag environment. yeah so we do have to do some things to account for drag even in space because the forces are so low and you have to account for the pressure that the sun puts on you just from it like photons and other particles so what the solar wind yes yeah so we have to account for all of that um but and and then you have to predict the orbit dynamics like very precisely very well in advance But if you do that, then you don't have to have 24 different super powerful thrusters hanging off of your satellite.

55:04And your satellite can be a lot smaller and you can close the business case. So why isn't electric propulsion better by now? Is that just limited by physics? Because I feel like I've heard about this propulsion method for some time. And the fact that it's now as powerful as a housefly landing on me, well, it doesn't impress. I feel unimpressed by that. Maybe that's my personal ignorance shining through. But when is it going to be the size of, I don't know, a ladybug's weight on me or something? It's all a power limitation. Because to do this electric propulsion, you have to rip electrons off of xenon atoms.

55:40And you have to accelerate them through a powerful electric field. And they have to get going really fast. Because the faster you throw stuff out the back, the better gas mileage you get. If you use fuel like a rocket, there's all kinds of power and energy just in that fuel. But with electric propulsion, we've got to get it all from the solar panels. And you end up just really power limited from you're getting power from your solar panels and your battery. And then you have to rip off these electrons and launch them out the back. And that forces, I mean, we use dramatically lower thrust than what, say, the state of the art in electric propulsion is just because we have only a certain size solar panel.

56:20So essentially, it's photons in, electrons out. Yeah. Okay. That's actually a pretty... Full xenon atoms out, but ionized xenon atoms. Oh, so you strip the electron off. And then you have to launch both out your back so that your spacecraft doesn't build up a wonky charge. Oh, of course. Right. you can't hold on to all the spare electrons because then you'd have like the equivalent of like a the worst static electricity in space yep so what i love about this is i did not know that the solar wind actually is strong enough to impact um orbits but i think this goes to show that the space is uh is more complicated than enterprise sass but i mean it seems doable people are doing it tell me a little bit about how optimistic you are about startups in the modern space economy and how fast things are progressing.

57:11Because to me, again, uneducated on this, it seems to be going pretty quick. And I'm very impressed and excited, but I'm hoping that that's accurate. I think that there are a lot of startups doing amazing things in the space industry right now. And SpaceX leads the way and what they're doing is really incredible. But you see folks like Rocket Lab, folks like Planet. Firefly freaking landed on the moon recently. I know. That's amazing. How did the second time a private company landed on the moon not become front page news? It's almost like there's something else going on in America right now that could be consuming a modicum of oxygen.

57:51But I saw that and I was blown away. I mean, I grew up on on like I grew up watching Apollo 11, the movie, you know, like I mean, that accomplishment was a moment of like peak national pride. And now some, you know, some for-profit nerds said with love are like, we're going to do it too. That's awesome. It's, it's incredible. And, and I think it's all bringing to bear some of what we hope to bring to bear, which is, well, let's build an economy that gives us a reason to keep going back out into space. And that brings me to my only kind of quasi awkward question for you, which is how do you guys stack up against orbit fab?

58:28We've talked to them. They're cool. They want to do in orbit refueling. and one thing that I'm confused by is just what's the better method? Bringing propellant to satellites and then trying to give them more so they can push themselves or have an otter come by and boop you with its nose and then get you back up? So the OrbitPap folks are actually pretty good friends of ours. I know Dan pretty well. We share at least one investor, maybe a couple of investors and in many ways, a lot of what we're doing is complimentary. That refueling satellites can be great and the orbit pad folks are building these refueling ports, but they don't exist on satellites today.

59:08And so we focus on, all right, we have to go provide services to satellites today. And someday I think satellites will have refueling ports and they will have ports for you to transmit data and power back and forth. And the solar panels will be easy to replace. And you'll just strap on the latest compute capability to add more to the satellite. Like someday that's how satellites are going to work. the otter is a big part of making that possible. Well, I love that you guys aren't in competition because I had a great chat with them and I've really enjoyed you. And so I'm kind of hoping that like, I don't know, space is big.

59:40Maybe we can all be friends and get along and go faster together. Before we go, where can people find the company online? And what is a role you are currently hiring for that you'd love to get the word out about? Yeah, so starfishspace.com, come find us. We're on X, we're on LinkedIn. The big hiring push right now is on the software engineering side. You have to write a lot of software to fly satellites. And you don't have to have written a lot of satellite software or a lot of rocket software. You can be writing B2B SaaS software and you can come in and be an awesome contributor to a satellite mission.

1:00:16And it's not always the perfect opportunity. It's probably a little longer work hours. It's probably a little bit less pay. We try to do our best on those. But it's a mission that is really exciting to be a part of. maybe sometimes more exciting than building a CRM tool. Yeah, I was going to say there's that old Steve Jobs quote, you know, do you want to sell sugar water or come change the world? Well, do you want to add a feature to Slack that users will hate? Or do you want to send cool things to space? So if that's you, talk to the guys over at Starfish. Austin, thank you so much. And when the next launch goes up, please come back on the show.

1:00:50Tell us all about it, what you've learned. And let's get those launch costs down as low as we can. I'm on board with all of that. Thanks for having me, Alex. What a pleasure. A real treat. Wasn't that fun, everybody? I freaking love talking to founders. After all my years of doing this, it has never, ever gotten boring because there's something special about someone who's trying to build the future that gives you just that dose of optimism that you absolutely need no matter what day of the week it is. And speaking of that, don't forget, Twist comes out on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. We go live.

1:01:19You can watch us create the show in real time. We even publish the docket that I put together, thisweekonstartups.com slash docket. so you can see us build the show and you can even follow along with our notes as we tape. My name is Alex, Alex over on X. I'll see you tomorrow. Jason and I are going to be back to go over all the news. I'll see you then. Bye.