Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:13:54 · S1, Philip Johnston
[00:13:54] S1: When you first told people that you were gonna put data centers in space, what were people's reactions? [00:14:02] S0: For a very long time, their reactions was, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. So the... Yeah. We we we tried to... We we actually applied to YC once and we got... Actually, we had... We then tried to raise and it took... We tried to raise 2,000,000 at 10 posts on a safe. It took three months and we got rejected from at least a 100 VCs. And then even after YC, when we went out to raise after demo day, I think we got rejected from at least 20 VCs before we got to the first the first check. [00:14:30] S1: This is one of these ideas that was, like, extremely unpopular with investors. And if you had believed the... If you had listened to what all the investors were telling you, you would have quit and not ever done this idea. I'm curious. Why did people tell you that they were not investing, and what did they get wrong?
00:14:30 · S1, Philip Johnston, S2
[00:14:30] S1: This is one of these ideas that was, like, extremely unpopular with investors. And if you had believed the... If you had listened to what all the investors were telling you, you would have quit and not ever done this idea. I'm curious. Why did people tell you that they were not investing, and what did they get wrong? [00:14:45] S0: People had a hard time visualizing a world with low cost launch. And and to be fair, we're still not out of the woods on that front. You know, lots of things need to go right with the Starship program for that to make sense. So that... That's one thing. I think it just sounds too sci fi y and to... Yeah. It's a... Make this work, there's a convergence of two factors. One is the launch costs coming down and people have to believe that. The second is it becoming way harder to build stuff terrestrially. Maybe two years ago, that wasn't quite as obvious as it is today. Now people are like, okay, well, they've just banned building new data centers in New York. They're gonna ban it in like seven other states. Now that... Those two things, I think, converged to make it more investable, essentially. [00:15:26] S2: And I think the other thing, after hearing you explain all the engineering and physics, it actually is doable. It doesn't sound like sci fi from first principles. Like, it's actually buildable.
00:15:26 · S2, Philip Johnston, S4, S1
[00:15:26] S2: And I think the other thing, after hearing you explain all the engineering and physics, it actually is doable. It doesn't sound like sci fi from first principles. Like, it's actually buildable. [00:15:35] S0: The reason I had confidence in it, is because we had such a strong engineering team. So if if you have, you know, the world's best space engineers saying this is possible, And to be frank, my background isn't as a space engineer, but, you know, I have full confidence in my two co founders, one from SpaceX, the other was building satellites for NASA. Saying it's possible, you know, it's good enough for me. [00:16:02] S4: Once you had the idea and then, let's say, once you're in YC, how did you sort of break the problem down into, like, a a plan for what to do? Obviously, software, it's pretty... You you you think of your MVP and you launch quickly and you get feedback, but hard to do that with [00:16:15] S0: data centers in space. I have a very tangible piece of advice for all space companies. The first thing every space company should do is book the first available launch they can. [00:16:25] S1: Before they built the thing that they're going to [00:16:27] S0: launch. Before they built the thing. Before they probably even know what they're gonna Booking a launch is such a good forcing function for a space company. So we founded the company 01/01/2024. January 2, we booked the first available SpaceX rideshare, launch. And it was cheap. It's like $300, you know, which [00:16:44] S1: which was... How far out was the launch?
00:16:44 · S1, Philip Johnston, S4, S2
[00:16:44] S1: which was... How far out was the launch? [00:16:46] S0: It was eighteen months out, and then it got pushed to twenty one months out. And we were like, okay. Something is gonna be on that rocket. I'm not sure, 100% sure what it's gonna be at this point, but something is gonna be on that. Yeah. [00:16:55] S4: Oh, that's interesting. [00:16:56] S2: Sounds like the same advice for all the software companies. You just gotta keep launching and launching. Same thing. [00:17:01] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And what what we initially planned to launch was very unimpressive, actually. Was like we were gonna put a Jetson chip, which has been flown on many satellites before, and we were gonna use it for for kind of edge processing and things. We actually had a cofounder change quite early on when we got Adi from SpaceX. Adi was like, oh, that's that's lame. Like, let's let's put an H100 on there. We're like, Adi, you can't put H100 on a on a satellite. He's like, sure you can. The amount of people who said it was physically impossible to run a pack... Like, chip that's that power dense in orbit. Like, people just thought it was, like, literally impossible to run data center grade, you know, GPUs on orbit. [00:17:40] S1: What would have caused it to be impossible?
00:17:40 · S1, Philip Johnston
[00:17:40] S1: What would have caused it to be impossible? [00:17:42] S0: There's two things. One is the thermal side of things. They're they're powered in, so they produce a lot of heat. And the second is they've never been tested in the radiation environment in space. And both of those... So for the first one, like, it's kind of a wacky solution. Like, we submerged the entire thing in this phase change material. So everything on StarCloud one is is submerged in this, like, phase change material. So it's like immersion calling for all of the components, all of the power delivery memory, everything is submerged. Nobody's ever considered doing anything like that in space before. It's not a particularly scalable solution. It's not like you have quite a low duty cycle. You have to wait for it to melt, then then then it solidifies every so often. But it enables us to prove that you can run the H100 in space. The the next one is this director chip liquid cooling architecture that we can run continuously. But, yeah, I mean, I I give full credit to my cofounder Ali for coming out with some pretty wacky and crazy ideas. [00:18:37] S1: To get to a data center that's, like, commercial scale, where you can actually, like, make money on it, it's actually, like, profitable, it's gonna require many steps. How did you, like, think about, like, sequencing out, like, the journey to get there?
00:18:37 · S1, Philip Johnston, S2
[00:18:37] S1: To get to a data center that's, like, commercial scale, where you can actually, like, make money on it, it's actually, like, profitable, it's gonna require many steps. How did you, like, think about, like, sequencing out, like, the journey to get there? [00:18:49] S0: So as I say, first step was book whatever the, like, first launched lowest MVP we can have available. Second step is producing something which is a com... Like a product we can sell to customers. So that's StarCloud two. That's a 10 kilowatt spacecraft that we can sell compute to government and military satellites. And then the third step is the product that we're gonna be able to sell to hyperscale data centers. So that's the StarCloud three. We can... It's 200 kilowatt, three ton spacecraft. That's six meters long. With that, we can fit 50 of them per Starship, so about 10 megawatts of new compute capacity per Starship. And we've just filed with the FCC for a constellation of 88,000 of those, so that means on the order of 20 gigawatts of new compute capacity. Wow. And we can fit up to 10 terawatts, in the Dawn Dust Sun Synchronous Orbit. So that's, like, 20 times the entire US power grid. [00:19:39] S2: For context, what's the largest data center deployment on Earth? Because you're talking about 22 gigawatts. Oh my god. What's what's the largest one here on Earth today? [00:19:48] S0: They're about a gigawatt is the is the largest. Yeah. [00:19:51] S1: What's the timetable for all of this to become real?