Space Datacenters | Baiju Bhatt, Aetherflux

Robinhood's cofounder bets on data centers in orbit

Aetherflux is Baiju Bhatt's bet that orbit is where the next energy industry starts, and that GPUs belong there next to the solar panels. Beaming power down loses energy in conversion, and ground data centers take five to eight years to build. Bhatt carries Robinhood habits into hardware, mainly fast failure and design where form reflects function.

Takeaways

• Get failures out of the way quickly. This is Bhatt's core principle for building companies. Robinhood began as an app called Analyst, launched as a stock market companion, and shrank to a simple stock market button. Early VCs doubted the founders' consumer skills. Ti Morse cites Brian Armstrong's view that action produces information.
• Hardware teams need far more disciplines. Aetherflux has about 30 to 35 people across many more engineering disciplines than Robinhood, such as embedded software and thermal engineering. Bhatt says enjoyment makes people go above and beyond and voice half-formed ideas. Ti Morse adds that research links fear to lower creativity.
• Form should natively represent function. Bhatt, who led Robinhood's design language for its first ten years, credits Steve Jobs for this idea. For satellites, power generation and heat dissipation set the shape, and his early renderings showed radiator sheets.
• Government contracts risk slow, costly iteration. Bhatt says he is wary of overconfidence and of long, expensive iteration loops in government contracts. Joe Yaffe recently joined Aetherflux as chief legal officer and chief operating officer.
• A second company brings sober perspective. Bhatt says the sobriety of experience makes existential problems look annoying rather than catastrophic. The conversation touches on Sam Altman's view that existential crises get easier to survive over time. Things will go wrong, and the question is when they get hard.
• Outside creative outlets feed the work. Bhatt built a Shelby Daytona replica from a Factory Five kit over COVID in six to nine months. He calls running a massive creativity accelerant because it induces flow. He plans his days around family time and workouts.

How the Aetherflux bet evolved

1. Bhatt saw energy as the next industry in low Earth orbit and chose government applications, since government incubated GPS.
2. The first goal was power beaming, about a kilowatt from a small satellite. He says a first satellite takes two years, not one.
3. He seeded the company with $10m of his own money for a rideshare and a satellite, ordering it right after leaving Robinhood.
4. Beaming loses energy in conversion, so the idea shifted to putting solar panels and GPUs together in orbit.