TikTok Ban, Data Centers in Space… and What's a Vector? | E2073

28:04But the nice thing is, and that's your point, is that thanks to the open source model, there's a wide variety of deployment options. So that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them lighthouse customers. Some people call them whales. To land those deals, your security compliance has to be rock solid. Certificates like SOC 2 or ISO 27001 are the keys to building trust and unlocking these opportunities, but they take time and energy, pulling you away from building and shipping a beautiful, great product.

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29:15Join over 8 ,000 companies, including many Y Combinator tech stars and launch startups who trust Vanta. Simplify compliance and get$1 ,000 off at Vanta.com slash twist. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash T-W-I-S-T. When it comes to thinking about the revenue mix at WeV8, you have stuff aimed at smaller developers and stuff aimed at larger corporate customers. What's driving the majority of revenue growth for WeV8 today? Nothing has changed there when it comes to traditional infrastructure companies. Enterprises, they pay the most from a qualitative perspective. Startups are more quantitative, right?

29:53So lots of startups, but they have smaller bills and the prices, they pay more, right? So it's, that's very, there's nothing new under the sun there. Totally. That's what I figured, but always worth making sure that something unexpected isn't happening. You know, we were joking earlier about the market coming to you and being a little bit early and ahead of a major wave. I presume Weevy, it's growing very quickly. What can you tell us, Bob, about the company's growth last year and what you're shooting for this year? So indeed, we have an open source model. So what's important to bear in mind, if you build infrastructure, that takes time and investment to actually build.

30:27For sure. So we started to monetize halfway through 2023. And we started doing that with our serverless offering, which is just shared resource and those kind of things. That went very fast. And then we started to also get the, yeah, because it's the startups, right? So they're relatively smaller, but they work, you know, they just want to build these new kind of things. They adopt quickly. Yes. But when we released that, when we got to our first million dollars, that was just in an instant with just all these kind of developers. But then something interesting happened because we also got the first enterprise requests in.

31:06But the problem was I didn't have any enterprise sellers. I mean, I now have built last year a whole team. And I remember, so the anecdote that I have there, that was like the first ever enterprise contract, they asked for an SLA. so um i was like how do i get to an slay so i just downloaded one from the web so these developers they already built they were ready to go live and i was talking to procurement oh no not procurement this guy sends me an email and he says like hey come on a call so just so i joined him on a call and he held up like the uh the procurement he said like what's this slay i said what's this i said that's the slay he said you have to promise me one thing he said i'm gonna sign this but never ever show this document to anybody else and then i was like now it's the time to spin up our enterprise skills and now we have an amazing uh team with enterprise um uh sellers and yeah so we saw a lot of growth last year right so and that was because of the enterprises going live as well and that in and that was also related to the fact that a lot of these applications went to production So that is like, that's what happened basically.

32:10And so that's all gone well. It's the good old, old-fashioned story of open source infrastructure project gets adoption, wants to scale up, starts bottom up, enterprise sellers come in. That's again, a very classical story, but it's excited to see this happening. And it's like, there are even database companies, and I will not mention them, but on their earnings goals we are mentioned that's like what do you think about these new kind of players so it's it's amazing what's happening right now and it's a i couldn't be a you know prouder than i am today so it's like we're like we just crossed 100 people so it's fantastic yeah so let's talk about the future then because you mentioned agents and this is the thing that everyone's been been talking about i think if i read the phrase agentic ai one more time i'm going to lose it i think that what we've ended up with is the word agent meaning too many things at once and therefore meaning nothing.

33:08Now, earlier, you set up a very specific mental model of how agents work, which was, if I may, feeding information back into a model after a RAG process, but I may have gotten that wrong. So, Bob, from the WeVA perspective, what is an agent? And is it a real thing or a marketing term? So what an agent is, an agent does something with your data, right? So rather than just presenting it, you give it a prompt to do something with it. So let me give you a simple example we have this concept of call generative feedback loops so when data goes into the database there's an agent that looks at it and you could give the prompt every data object comes in that comes in needs to be written in american english so if you send in a million in american english and one in that's in spanish it will store it as american english right so that's an example of a very tiny simple agent so uh is it a real thing or is it a marketing term the answer to this question is yes so it's absolutely a real thing but of course it's also a marketing thing and i don't mind that too much because it's like a um yeah we somehow need to explain to the world what's what's happening right and then the market kind of consolidates on certain language and that kind of stuff yeah but it's definitely a thing so the steps that we've been taking was like from vector search to Rack, which was a one-way street, to the agents where you create these feedback loops.

34:35So what we see is that the majority of customers started with vector search. So we have a lot of these e-commerce kind of things. We now have a lot of Ask AI features that we're powering. Let me come up with an example. So the Ask AI feature in SuperHuman, for example, that's a great example of that sort of runs on VF8 with a model, then that's Rack. And now we see that people start to build new things with these agents. The reason why that's so interesting was that if you go back in time to vector search, then the devil advocate's argument for what we're doing was like, yeah, this is all great, but isn't this just search?

35:12And that was kind of, yeah, it was kind of true, right? But then all of a sudden, this new unique use case emerged in Rack. And now there's no use, these set of use cases because of what we like to call these agentic architectures are emerging and all of a sudden validating more and more and more and more the existence of what we call these vector databases. So that's why it's so important to us. And that's why we talk about it so much, because we believe that that's a unique value that not from a technology perspective, but from a business perspective that we bring to the world. So, I mean, just to be clear, without vector databases, there is no agentic AI, period, full stop.

35:50Well, okay. So, you know, if you want to open a bottle of beer, you can also use a spoon to do that, right? So it's like, if you want it open, you can always open it. But ideally, you just use beer opener, right? So it can't open. And that's what Defector database does. It just makes it easier to do that. It's built for it. That's why people adopt it and use it. That goes back in time. You mentioned like the famous old school database in existence is Oracle. there's probably somebody listening to this podcast sitting there angry like i can do everything in the world with my old database sure yes but turns out that the majority of developers just want to use the tooling that is built for those specific use exactly and this is the old famous uh comment on hacker news when someone announced dropbox and they're like oh that's just a quick data pull and i can build that myself no one's going to use it well it turns out it's 10 billion dollar company Yeah, but if I may say something about that, we use that one, we use that often internally at WeV8, exactly that thread on Hacker News, but sometimes people like hardcore developers, like the best, the crème de la crème of developers sometimes forget is that not everybody is like them.

37:01And that is a large group of developers that just want to build great software for their own business, for the company they work for. Sure. And they need the help. They need the tooling to do that. And that's where the developer experience plays such an important role. And that can, in my opinion, cannot be underestimated. Bob, can you leave us with just your perspective on where the AI industry is going this year from the kind of like enterprise app perspective? You talk to a lot more people than I do who are probably willing to share more than they're willing to share with me. So in conversations with customers, partners, rivals, and so forth, what do you see happening this year that we should be looking forward to?

37:42So what I really hope this year that we will see is the paradigm shift that we're expecting from AI. And let me explain what I mean with that. Is that the biggest problem in data today, since day one, we're storing data, is master data management. the if i excuse my french the shit and shit out paradigm has not changed but thanks to the agentic architectures for the first time we can have these models they can have an quote-unquote opinion on your data and for the first time as i always like to say we can turn chicken shit into chicken salad based on the data that is the biggest issue we've seen i hope you don't mind me saying i don't have to cut this out but no we have a we have a beep we'll just put that in Yeah.

38:26So, but this is, this is the first time where we're seeing that the biggest problem in data management in general, master data management, that there's a solution at the rise and that's enabled through these agentic architectures. And that's why I'm so excited about it. Am I excited about all that other stuff? Of course, but this is not, this is the paradigm shift. Why does fixing that crap in crap out paradigm change the world? Because to me, we've gotten this far with that chicken chicken salad why do we need this and what will that what will that change for the industry the issue is like yes we've gotten very far but we're not where we want to be so i recently spoke to a cto of a large company and he said if my leadership asks me like how many products did we sell globally last year i cannot answer the question i have the data but it's so such a mess and i cannot have humans try to fix it it data's coming in faster than than the people can fix it yeah i i cannot solve this problem so this is a huge problem but let's not forget that is solving an assistant problem very important but it will also open the door to new businesses and new ways for people to new new products new startups new ideas based on this new paradigm and what that is i don't know because if i would have known i probably would have be running those startups as well.

39:47But that is what I'm so excited about. It's going to solve that age-old problem of bad data and it's going to open the door to new products, new solutions, be it in the enterprise, be it in startups, like everywhere. Well, that is a great note to end on because you just told people that might be looking for an idea what to build next, what to go forth and do. That's an enormous possible new opening. yes and also this is the time so do you remember those days that people like there was like you can build these mobile apps or these do you remember that people were like playing around with this thought vividly this is it for ai now start now not next year now it's that's how excited am i i am about this because this is the start of the new paradigm so this is the time to build i am so excited for 2025.

40:37I think it's going to be busy as heck. And I'm also really glad that by having you back on, I got to go back through all my notes about what is a vector and had to... I don't live in your world every day, Bob. Thanks so much for having me. All right. Bob, thank you so much. Thank you. And next up, co-founder and CEO of Lumen Orbit, it's Philip Johnston. Lumen Orbit is a bet that in the future, we are going to put our digital brains in space instead of inside on the ground floor of the local gravity well. If you care about how big a rocket we can shoot up into space and how much it can carry, well, you're going to absolutely love what Lumen Orbit wants to do with lower launch costs and greater launch capacity.

41:18Let's talk. If there's one thing we talked about a lot in 2024, it was the need for more compute to help power our AI future, be it new chips from NVIDIA, new data centers around the world. It was a recurring topic for a reason. We're doing a lot with AI and it's very compute intensive. But when we think about what we are doing to power that compute today, it's worth keeping in mind how much energy goes into the process. So if you take a look at this chart right here, this is a map of the US breaking down each state by how much of their total power consumption data centers use today. Now there's a handful of states in the 10 to 15 % range.

41:57There's one state that's 26%, but most are between one, four, five. However, things are going to change. Here's some data from Bain showing how much the anticipated gain is in energy demands for data centers over the next couple of years. It's going to be exponential, probably, and therefore we're going to need new solutions to help make sure that we can power all the compute we need to build the AI that we want. So what are we going to do to find all of this power? Well, we could turn to Fusion. Some people like Sam Altman think that that is going to be a near-term solution. Some people want to get back to building more nuclear reactors.

42:34But there is this thing called the sun that we can also use to pull out energy. Now, I'm sure you're thinking about solar panels and great farms here on Earth, but what about solar panels up in space, powering data centers that are up in the sky? Well, that's what One Startup is doing, so I want you to please welcome to the show Philip Johnston, the co-founder and CEO of Lumen Orbit. Philip, how are you? Hello, Alex. Thanks so much for having me. A huge honor to be on Twists 500. So I appreciate it. It's a fun project on twist100.com. If anyone wants to go take a look, we're trying to find the, basically the startups are going to have the biggest impact on the world, both in terms of changing how we work and also making a lot of money.

43:11And I think that LumenOrbit could be one of them just because of the sheer scale of your vision. And that's where I want to start, Philip. So when I think about data centers, I think about large nondescript buildings that I drive by. And I think, is that a warehousing facility or a data center? Hard to tell from the outside. You clearly have a different vision. So let's start with where does this idea come from? And then I want to talk about progress made so far. Yeah. So we are building, as you mentioned, very large data centers in space in order to be able to take advantage of the abundant energy, the ability to rapidly, to passively cool in space and the ability to scale.

43:47So the idea came from, we initially were looking at space-based solar. And when you have very low launch cost, there's an argument to be made that that starts to make sense, even with this huge efficiency loss transferring energy from space to space to earth it's not a new concept that's been around since like the 70s or 60s but you know i think in 20 years time the forecasts are that half of all terrestrial electricity consumption will go into data processing so if we can find a cheap way of getting the data sent into space instead of having this 95 efficiency loss using microwaves to transfer the energy down we can just use all that data into all of that energy in space and that's really really where the idea came from so the video we just showed i think details the scale of what you're thinking about because we're not talking about a little bit of compute power in space, and we're not talking about a couple of solar panels.

44:33We're talking about a, I think it's a four kilometer per side square block of solar panels, which I presume is thousands and thousands and thousands of cells. To me, it feels a little science fiction to say that we're going to do this. So I'm curious, are we at the point in which we've sorted out the technology here? And it's more a question of, can we execute this economically? Or is there still some technology risk to what you're doing? That means we still have a lot of things to sort out. The only risk remaining is that the launch cost needs to come down by a lot. So I will say this to investors.

45:08If you don't believe that the launch cost is going to come down by 10x in the next five years, we are not a good investment. If you think it's going to come down by 100x, we're an extremely good investment. And if like Starship PR, you believe it's going to come down by 1000x, then we'll be the world's most profitable company. um so may it be a thousand x i mean honestly i mean i'm here for it uh just because i'm curious about this have you been watching the blue origin new glenn launch delays that doesn't mean that we're not going to get competing heavy launch vehicles i hope right it would be great if we have some competition to starship in terms of the launch cost okay so uh passive cooling in space When I think about space, it's cold.

45:50Humans can't live up there for clear reasons. But is it easy to actually get rid of heat when you're up in orbit? I'm not actually sure about the physics of that, because one thing we know is that data centers do consume a lot of power and make tons of heat. Yeah, no, it's a great point. And the core part of the technology that we're developing is a very large, low cost, low mass deployable radiator. So, I mean, the quick answer is no, it's not super easy. And the reason is if you don't have an atmosphere, you don't have convection or conduction. There's nothing against the laws of physics that stop us doing this.

46:21It just requires a very large, they call it black body radiation to radiate in infrared into deep space. We just have to keep this black panel at around 20 degrees C or higher, and that will radiate a lot of heat in space, 800 watts per square meter. For those folks like myself who look at circuits and outlets and with terror and trepidation, how much is 800 watts? I don't have a good feel for how much energy dissipation that is. Is that a lot? Is that not much? I mean, a typical household light is around 20 watts, depending on if you have LEDs. Another way to look at it is in proportion of the solar panel's generation versus the radiator.

46:59So one square meter of solar panel in space generates around 200 watts, and one square meter of radiator dissipates around 800 watts. So you need about a quarter of the size, the surface area of the solar panel on the radiator side. So we're going to need a four kilometer by four kilometer square of solar panels to power. I believe it's a five gigawatt data center. And then we need a one kilometer by one kilometer square of radiator to dissipate that. Okay. Yeah. That to me is ambitious, but I absolutely love the idea that if launch costs get down low enough, we can at least get everything up there.

47:36Once it's up there, is there a risk that the solar panels are going to get dinged by space debris micro asteroids i i know a little bit about space shielding but you're building an enormous target it feels like up in space so how do you how do you get a safe from little objects that are zipping around so fast to solve the problem of orbital debris either you fly very low or you fly very high so in the first two missions of flying was called velio very low it's around anything like 400 kilometers is very clean orbit you don't really get hit by anything there because there's a low level upper atmosphere so stuff de-orbits naturally and within a few months anyway it's where the iss flies for example the problem with that is you need propulsion so as the satellite is bigger you need more energy going into propulsion so you don't slow down so then once the satellite gets large enough then you can fly very high around 1200 kilometers that also means you're always in the sun which is great um the problem with that is then you're into the van allen radiation belt and so you need more shielding from radiation um that's also very clean there's there's hardly any orbital debris up there because most people are flying in this leo band of 400 to 800 kilometers um so that that's really how you how you go about it But there's a trade-off then between orbital debris and radiation, and it sounds like it's a better solution, a better problem to have in much higher orbits down the road.

48:51The amount of compute you can have scales with the volume of the satellite and the shielding scales with the surface area. So as the satellite gets bigger, the total amount of shielding you need as a percentage of the mass of the satellite goes to zero. Essentially, if we have a larger satellite, it's fine to fly higher. So for these small puny ones that we're doing in the demonstration, we're flying very low. once we scale up it's okay to fly high and the demonstrators i believe start to fly as early as may of this year so quickly uh tell us what the first demonstrator will be uh capacity what are you going to be able to show this year once you get it up into space yes there's about a one kilowatt 50 kilogram satellite it's about 100 times more powerful gpu compute than has ever been flown in space we'll have the state-of-the-art terrestrial nvidia chips and that's really the big difference of the first one with what everyone else is doing so normally you would fly radiation hardened these jets and chips from an idea, they're at least 100 times less performant than the state-of-the-art AI training chips that they have.

49:46So you're going to put that up into VLEO, and then we get to have the fun conversation of how do you get the data up and down? Because just thinking about what you want to do, I get the idea of having lots of constantly on solar power. I understand the cooling effects you can probably take advantage of. There's lots of space in space. There's many things here that make sense to me, But you have to get data up and down, which to me sounds very tricky to do at a high speed to allow this to have the kind of throughput I presume you need. So talk to me about how you get information from down here to up there.

50:21Yes. On the first demonstrator, we have three ports of connectivity. So we have a small terminal to connect into the Iridium network. That's another constellation that we've been data through. We have an antenna to connect to customer satellites, and then we have also an antenna to connect to ground stations. It's not great connecting to ground stations because you have to wait until you pass over one. But it's a fairly slow bandwidth. On the second satellite, Lumen 2, which we've got booked for launch in mid-2026, it's going to be the first commercial offering, have about 100 times more powerful GPU compute again.

50:51That one will have an optical terminal, possibly two optical terminals on it, which will allow us to connect both to customer satellites and also directly into the Starlink network, ideally. No contracts signed with that yet, but they announced a product called Blazer earlier this year. stands for plug and play laser, which enables satellite customers to connect directly into Starling. I was going to ask by optical, you meant laser, but I want to double click on something that you said that I didn't know about. You mentioned customer satellites, and that implies to me data from them to your either satellite demonstrator or cluster or data center in space and the ability or demand for compute between in space objects.

51:31I was thinking about this entirely as terrestrial to space to back again. It sounds like there could be a space-based demand as well in terms of your ability to collect data, crunch it, and send stuff back without it ever needing to go all the way down. There very much is, yeah. There's a huge lack of and demand for compute in orbit right now. People have just not solved the problem of putting the high-performance terrestrial GPUs in space. And the initial customers will be, you know, military satellites and other types of Earth observation constellations. and then that enables us to build out the expertise and the capabilities.

52:04And as the launch cost then comes down over the next five years, we have a commercial service that produces more cash than it costs to build for the next few years. And that transitions into, as launch cost comes down, this service that can move almost all data centers to space from Earth. I'm curious about the venture thesis here, because this is going to be hard. This is going to be super, duper, duper hard. It's going to be capital intensive. You're going to have to deal with everything from not only building your own hardware and dealing with contracts with a lot of very large companies and governments, but also, you know, launch schedules and getting capacity and it's the opposite of like enterprise SaaS.

52:37And so I'm curious when you're out there pitching VCs, what element of this is resonating the most with them to engender such an amazing reaction? We're at the intersection of three trends, which I think to some people, some people view as obvious. The first one is huge demand for energy. The second one is huge demand for commute. And the third one is the launch cost about to come down by 100x. These three trends intersecting, there's an inevitability to what we're doing. It's really just a matter of the time frame. And when what we're doing works, it's going to be, you don't have to explain the TAM to anybody.

53:09It's like, well, it's a$10 trillion business, basically. Oh, no. If you can make this work, the TAM is infinite. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I know. I'm with you on that. But one thing we have seen, and we just came out of CES, so we heard a lot of really great announcements from a lot of companies, is that generations of chips improve. I don't know exactly who you're working with, so I'm only speaking for myself here, but NVIDIA has raved about demand for their upcoming Blockwell line, replacing the kind of venerable H100s that are out there. And to me, if I had spent all the money to send up my data center into orbit and then NVIDIA came out with a chip that was, picking a random number here, three times as good, I'm going to be pretty mad.

53:49So how do you handle, essentially just like chips losing their, in market primacy when they're in space. Actually, in orbit, they have a longer lifetime. And the reason is, so you have exactly the same problem terrestrially. So we're expecting four-year life of the chips, but terrestrially, I mean, that's roughly the same as it is. The problem with it on Earth is if you're paying five cents per kilowatt hour for your marginal increase in electricity consumption, essentially in space, our marginal electricity cost is zero. Once we get it up there, and that means that running the chips for longer, five or six years, is more economical than on Earth, because on Earth, there comes a point where you don't want to pay the five cents a kilowatt hour because they're not giving you enough value back.

54:31But in space, they'll always be giving you some value. Because the power is free, so there's no real downside. Actually, we have a table here from the Lumen white paper that I was reading before we jumped on that I think kind of details the economics of this, because I'm sure that some people watching are still thinking, I'd rather just plug an Ethernet cable into an AWS data center. Why would I do all this work? Well, as you point out here, the cost of electricity is enormous when we think about the overall cost footprint over say a 10-year data center lifespan um so walk us through the economics of how actually getting up to space can save lots of money yeah so um maybe i'll talk instead of a 10-year time frame i'll talk about the four-year time frame which is just the life of the chips because then the economics of it are very clear let's say you run a 40 megawatt data center which is what you can fit in one full starship payload base so it's about 100 tons worth of compute solar and radiators and satellite structure.

55:24If you run that for four years on Earth and you're paying, let's say, 10 cents per kilowatt hour, which is the average that data centers paying, that's$140 million just in electricity cost alone versus you can launch it. Yeah, it's crazy. You can launch it depending who you believe. Elon's saying it's going to be $5 million for the launch cost, but even assuming it's$10 million or more, your solar panels are another$5 million and then everything else nets out. So the cost of the chips is the same, cost of the radiators and coolant loops is the same. So instead of$140 million for electricity for four years, terrestrially, you've got $10 million for launching solar in space.

55:55And then, you know, that's the trade-off we're doing. And the real beauty of space is you can scale it. So if you want to build a 200-megawatt data center terrestrially, there's not many places in North America where you can draw that amount of power. Absolutely. It's like two-decade lead time to build that type of energy project. Whereas you can just launch five of our modules, put them, locate them physically in the same place in space, and you're running, in a month, you can be up and running a 200-megawatt data center. And you don't have to stop there. You can go up to multiple gigawatts. And that was the point of the video.

56:20Can you make the four kilometer by four kilometer data center that we showed earlier, just connect to another one and then make it like do four of those and then have eight by eight. And then you could do four of those and have 16 by 16. I mean, this is modular, I presume. We're looking at a design actually now where instead of having all of that compute in one spot in the middle, we'd have it running along a spine and then you can just attach modules to the spine where the solar panels and radius is coming out each side. So you can just keep attaching modules. That's the coolest thing ever. One thing I am curious about, though, is once you get out of a payload bay, you go up to space, you come out.

56:58To me, this sounds like a tent in a bag. You have to take it all apart and put it all together. And I'm not going to lie. I have no idea how that works in space. So how hard is it to unpack the package you send up and turn it into these functioning data centers? And how often will that go wrong and cause a problem? i mean right now that's how all all satellites uh function even ones with large solar panels you know obviously on the international space station have very large solar panels yeah so that that problem is relatively solved in fact my co-founder our cto was previously designing nasa's lunar pathfinder mission and he was responsible for deploying very large solar panels and radiators well very very large for current standards nothing compared to what's coming.

57:41Yeah. Yeah. Cause I've seen those unfurl like wings and it's like, I don't know, several hundred square feet, not square kilometers. I mean, essentially what we're going to be doing is roll unrolling them because, cause it's going to be so large. You can roll that. Yeah. You have these very thin, flexible solar cells. So that's, that's the longer term way that we'll be deploying these. Even on Limit 2, we'll do that. But I would just say also robotics in space and for space construction is coming very soon. Like it will be probably five years before data centers are being managed by humanoid robots.

58:13And it doesn't take much, a big stretch of the imagination to imagine humanoid robots constructing stuff in space. That does sound a bit sci-fi, I agree, but we don't need that yet. We can do everything by - No, no, it doesn't sound science fiction at all, actually, because it's much easier to have humanoid robots in space than it has to have humans in space. Humans are so fragile. Yes. Like we are just little bags of meat that's shocked by small amounts of electricity and it's water just talking. Like it's not, it's not good uh robots we already have pretty good effectures effect effectuators whatever they're called and um they're not heavy and if we can just charge them we can have yeah oh man i'm so excited this is gonna be this is gonna be so cool like yeah yeah i can't remember i saw this tweet uh maybe it was from mark andres and he's like i was sitting in the shower the other day i was just realizing everything is coming gonna come true like the space column is gonna come true like the humanoid robot's gonna come true so like everything's gonna come true and it is soon it is i'm just so excited about this and we're going to need computing space we're going to need you know varda's working on manufacturing we talked a little bit about launch systems going up it seems that everything's pointing in one very clear direction philip and that does worry me a little bit are there any stumbling blocks that you can see that could dramatically slow down humanity's industrialization of, let's just say, low to higher orbits?

59:37It's all dependent on getting Starship flying frequently, Starship and New Glenn and any other of these types of rockets. If there were to be some, for example, if a large-scale war breaks out with China or somebody, that would be a very bad situation, which is why I think Elon's so keen on doing it quickly, because we're at a very tight window of time now where we can actually do this. but i mean everything all the physics is is uh proven now like starship re-entered um people even until very recently people thought starship wouldn't the math didn't math and it wasn't even possible physically but no we know that everything now is is going to happen well i guess then the question is how how are you gonna make sure you stay ahead of your competition then because the thesis of low launch costs you know solar panel in space and a lower total bill of ownership is going to resonate with a lot of folks because everyone's building and buying data centers i mean I can't go a day without reading.

1:00:28Amazon pledges$5 billion to Tennessee or whatever. How are you going to make sure that you guys stay ahead of potentially state-backed or maybe just like Mag7-backed competitors? I mean, firstly, I do think there'll be a couple of wins. If all data centers are going to space, it's not like just one company is going to be doing that. And it wouldn't surprise me if we see Starlink and Azure or Piper doing this at some point. All of the big hype scalers are going to need this capability. Microsoft, Meta, Google. They don't have Oracle. They don't have Space Arms themselves. So they'll need to partner with somebody like us.

1:01:00But I would say the way that any startup stays ahead is we have a moat in our team. We have the most absolutely kick-ass team from SpaceX and all these MIT grads and all these very smart people working on this. It's very hard to pull together this team immediately. And we're super far ahead now. I think nobody's even close to what we're doing. And then the final moat is it is quite capital intensive. And I think we certainly from the startup in the startup world, we're ahead of everybody in that game. All right. So I'm going to have you back on the show once the first one goes up later this year so we can talk about it and may that launch go well and may everything turn on and beep and boop as it should.

1:01:38All right. It's tricky. It's tricky up there. It's funny how fast something goes from that will never happen to, oh, really? To, of course. Yeah, you wouldn't. So when we put the white paper out, we had quite a few folks sort of being like, these guys are crazy. This is never going to happen. and in the last like three months it's everything seems to change and now it's like an inevitability almost so yeah it's true well I'm really excited about it I can't wait to watch the launch please make a lot of noise about it because I'm hoping that it goes well and you prove that this is possible because there'll be nothing more gosh darn science fiction awesome than several square kilometers of solar powered data center in space that just makes my inner nerd sing Philip so good luck and thank you for coming on awesome thank you so much for having me All right, friends, that is Twist for this fine Friday.

1:02:23We are going to have a packed week next week. There's a couple of things going on at the national level that impact the world of startups. So expect us to be on the move and on the mic. Stick close to Twist. We're on all podcasting platforms. We go live on YouTube and all other digital and social places. My name is Alex, x.com slash Alex. Jason is x.com slash Jason. You are x.com slash my favorite person. And I will see you on Monday. Bye. Thank you.