This Week in Startups
01:11:42 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:11:42] S1: than neuro. Exactly. [01:11:44] S0: So here we are in LinkedIn, I can't do that unfortunately. LinkedIn is not letting automation of... So this is a message to LinkedIn. Let me use my bot to DM people, but charge me $05 $0.25 every time I do it to throttle it, so not everybody does it. And limit me to 10 times a day or 100 times a day. I don't care what you charge me for the in mails, but since you are letting people pay you to do intros or to DM people who are on the system, why not let my bot do it? Charge me double when my bot does it. Or make a bot yourself. Yeah. Just have agent mail and just be like, hey, this is Jason's agent. Because people are already doing this with other tools that are hacker like tools. Just incorporate it into the platform, throttle the number of people. And if people complain about it, just give the power to those people. On the bottom of it, just say, never want to hear from this again. Or, and then you never hear from that person again. [01:12:45] S1: I I feel like all these platforms that are being so bot and agent hostile, like, it's a losing fight. Like, you you... It's it's over. Like, are gonna have agents. They're gonna have bots. They're gonna wanna access your Reddits or your hacker news or your LinkedIns. Like, there's there's nothing you [01:13:00] S0: can do. You [01:13:01] S1: just... There's... I don't think there's any stock in it. You can become irrelevant or you can let people's agents in. Those are your two choices.
01:13:01 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:13:01] S1: just... There's... I don't think there's any stock in it. You can become irrelevant or you can let people's agents in. Those are your two choices. [01:13:08] S0: Alright. So tell me. What's going on with space? I know Google and Planet Labs are doing an experiment together, and then NVIDIA and SpaceX have their own plans, but they're all going up on SpaceX for rockets, which tries to be neutral about who can use the rockets. [01:13:23] S1: We're talking about Google had the big breakthrough. Their first data center in space is now up and running. It's a prototype satellite from project Suncatcher built by Planet Labs, as you said, carrying four of Google's TPU AI chips. It launched on a SpaceX Falcon nine earlier this month. This is the, the first test that Google did to make sure things were working in space. They asked Gemma four, that's the model running on board, to write a haiku about being in space, and here it is. Blue marble below. Data streams in silent grace. Starlight feeds my core. So it's working. You got the syllables right. [01:14:03] S0: Right. So it's like a hello world. The new hello world is pop... Make a poem.
01:14:03 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[01:14:03] S0: Right. So it's like a hello world. The new hello world is pop... Make a poem. [01:14:07] S1: Right. Right. A haiku for us. Yeah. And so there are real limits. Only one of the four chips can run at a time, and it only runs for about twenty minutes before it runs out of power. They've got two more satellites with more advanced chips planned for 2027. Google is aiming for space data centers that make economic sense in the twenty thirties. So we were just talking about how much Americans hate data centers. They don't want data centers around. Is this a viable option? Can we just blast them into low orbit instead?
01:14:35 · Jason Calacanis
[01:14:35] S0: Absolute... Absolutely viable after three or four iterations. The same way Internet via satellite was viable, but we spent ten years in the wilderness with slow Internet. You know, if you were on a ranch somewhere, you could have a very expensive Internet connection via satellite. It was originally giant satellites, then medium sized, then smaller, huge satellites, whatever they were. And, you know, sometimes I'd rent an Airbnb, you know, somewhere on the edge where they didn't have broadband. And they would give it to you, but, you know, you'd watch one Netflix movie, it would time out and say you hit your limit. Yeah. So they had it, like, limited by a certain amount of bandwidth, and they charge. It wasn't unlimited. So that all changed. And now we sit here with Starlink, and we're like, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And it is. And and there'll be three competitors. Amazon's got LEO, I guess. Mhmm. They're low Earth orbit satellites. It's gonna be a same similar timeline here. We might spend a decade, you know, making proof of concepts and things that can lightly do this stuff, but it really is all based on Starship. Starship has a massive amount of payload. I don't know if it's 10 or 20 times the previous falcons, but it's significantly more. I I actually have been inside that. When they were first making them, I was at Starbase with Elon, and we were standing inside of it, the first prototype that was, like, hand welded together. I mean, and you look up, it's like you're looking into a small office tower. I know how to explain it, but you're looking into a payload that could be 200 people in seats. Yeah. Know? You're looking into a Boeing.
01:16:17 · Lon Harris
[01:16:17] S1: Starship can lift a 100 to a 150,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. That's about four to 6.5 times more than Falcon nine's capacity.
01:16:26 · Jason Calacanis
[01:16:26] S0: Okay. So if it's five times the Falcon launches and they think they can do multiple a day, then this kind of project becomes viable. I believe these satellites are gonna be bigger, more complex, more batteries than the Starlink ones, which I think are are are smaller. But who's this... I mean, these could have Starlink and compute in them. So, like, why would you put the Starlinks out there and not include some compute in them? They obviously have some computers in them. So this will be viable. And then what we're gonna see is people on planet Earth saying, please stop putting them in space. Can I get them in my backyard? Because they want the revenue from it. The real estate cost is free out there for life. Yeah. Free for life. And I think the energy cost out there is gonna be also with solar free for life. So you take those two costs out, and that's the end state. Now getting to the end state, gonna cost tens of billions of dollars, or maybe billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars. But if you're building trillions of dollars worth of compute, if it costs $10,000,000,000 to perfect this technology, well worth it. And maybe it takes four years to pay off, three years to pay off the cost of getting to space. But there's no real estate. There's no permits. There's no issue. And people don't understand the vastness of space, Lon. If you look at planet Earth, like, if you if you just think about the surface area of the Earth, it's huge, right? And most of the surface area of Earth is water. And then there's a bunch of it that's not used,