Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:21:16 · S3, Philip Johnston
[00:21:16] S3: In terms of NVIDIA, I mean, are you... How are you partnering with them around chip design? And, you know, are there changes that you have to make to the design to... I mean, as you rescale, like, being... Making it more radiation resistant, or, you know, what does that look like? [00:21:31] S0: Yeah. So we're we're working very closely with NVIDIA. They... We recently announced this Rubin... Space Rubin one chip that we're working with them on. So that's designed for the space environment. We very heavily modified the H100 to make it work in space. So on the mass side of things, we stripped out a lot of things like AC to DC converters, the, the direct... The, cold plates and everything else we sort of stripped out. And then we stiffened the board and made it radiation tolerant. So because of that, were they... They're very interested in, you know, with any people, basically, that have any data on how one of these high powered GPUs operates in space. So, yeah, we're working with them very closely on, designing this new space chip. Because you you can actually do very simple things to make these way more effectively... Effective to run-in space, and so that's what we're doing. [00:22:19] S3: YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early, and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay. Back to the video.
00:22:19 · S3, S2, Philip Johnston, S4
[00:22:19] S3: YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early, and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay. Back to the video. [00:22:32] S2: I think the thing of, getting GPUs to now natively run on DC, you avoid the whole Yeah. Conversion of energy e ACDC because that's what makes solar panels not as efficient. It's the whole conversion. [00:22:45] S0: Exactly. [00:22:45] S2: You lose a lot of power, which [00:22:46] S0: is Yeah. Our solar panels generate DC immediately. So there's no point doing... We we just need DC to DC converters, but that's much better than AC to DC converters. [00:22:56] S2: So you could unlock a bunch of companies also just building GPU data centers using solar power, period. Yeah. Whether in space, under the water, or on earth. [00:23:05] S0: Yeah. I mean, yeah, actually people can definitely use this tech for other things. Yeah. [00:23:09] S3: You talk about StarCloud too a little bit more. Like, is there actually a Bitcoin miner in there as well? [00:23:14] S0: Yes. We will be flying a Bitcoin mining ASIC next next year, which the crypto community is very excited about. There's much more enthusiasm than I was expecting, to be honest, about that. You really love [00:23:26] S4: a good narrative. [00:23:26] S0: Oh, no. The number of people that want me to launch Starcoin. You have no idea. There is actually a StarCloud meme coin, I think, out there. [00:23:35] S3: Yeah. Don't buy it. That's not official. [00:23:38] S0: Do not buy the StarCloud meme coin.
00:23:38 · Philip Johnston, S3, S4
[00:23:38] S0: Do not buy the StarCloud meme coin. [00:23:40] S3: Yeah. Yeah. [00:23:41] S0: So, yeah, we'll we'll we'll launching... We'll be we'll have one of those on there. We'll have a whole bunch more. H one hundreds, Blackwell ship. We're also partnering with AWS on launching the Outpost hardware. That's their on premises server blade that they give to customers to run a local instance of v c two, and that will be useful for... Particularly for our military customers. [00:24:00] S4: Something we were talking about earlier is at YC, we just observed over the last few years, it's been quite hard for hard tech companies to raise funding in general. There's not been much investor appetite for it. It certainly seems to have changed over the last six months. [00:24:14] S3: Great news. Yeah. [00:24:15] S4: From your perspective, I'm curious here, like, how was it raising the seed round in... Sort of during YC and then this huge round you raised from from Benchmark? Just sort of maybe tell us the inside story of kind of how that all came together and and what it feels like being a hard tech founder raising money today.
00:24:15 · S4, Philip Johnston
[00:24:15] S4: From your perspective, I'm curious here, like, how was it raising the seed round in... Sort of during YC and then this huge round you raised from from Benchmark? Just sort of maybe tell us the inside story of kind of how that all came together and and what it feels like being a hard tech founder raising money today. [00:24:32] S0: So when we first raised, end of twenty twenty three, we tried to raise $2,000,000 at 10 post, yeah, that took three months to get together. About a 100 VCs said no. Yeah. Deep tech and hard tech and space were definitely not a cool thing to invest in back then. Then after YC, yeah, we we... It took us quite a while to raise. So I think we got rejection from at least 20 VCs before we got our first, first check on the demo day raise. And things have definitely swung around since then. It's become a lot, easier to raise for deep tech, I think. I think a number of reasons for that. One is people think that the software doesn't have a moat anymore, which I think is probably accurate. [00:25:11] S4: That sort of high... It's funny that the high of mind just switched, [00:25:13] S0: Yeah. [00:25:14] S4: Seemed to me, like, very quickly. It was just like the SaaS stocks. And like, ClaudeCode came out, SaaS stock, public company stocks all went down, and then suddenly it, was a... I I think the, like, fastest I've seen sort of things in the public markets, like, directly affect Demo Day, where suddenly everyone's like, oh, like, we need to, like, invest in hard tech now.
00:25:14 · S4, Philip Johnston, S3
[00:25:14] S4: Seemed to me, like, very quickly. It was just like the SaaS stocks. And like, ClaudeCode came out, SaaS stock, public company stocks all went down, and then suddenly it, was a... I I think the, like, fastest I've seen sort of things in the public markets, like, directly affect Demo Day, where suddenly everyone's like, oh, like, we need to, like, invest in hard tech now. [00:25:30] S0: Yeah. That's that's fascinating. Yeah. I think, yeah, people are just much more open to investing in hard tech now. Yeah. Like, I think we were the first space investment benchmark we've done. [00:25:37] S4: Yeah. Mean, whatever you can share, like, how did that round kinda come together? And and, yeah, what what you think sort of benchmark saw in saw in you guys? [00:25:45] S0: So to be frank, that round wasn't as easy as it looks from the outside. There's a lot of VCs that have big SpaceX positions for one thing. And SpaceX, like, midway through the round came out saying they're doing exactly what we're doing, and it wasn't public then. And so anybody with, a conflict policy then was like, okay. We're conflicted out. But, I mean, towards the end of the round, it it suddenly kinda came together much faster. I think, to be frank, I don't think... So Chetan is our partner. Chetan's awesome. [00:26:15] S3: Amazing investor.
00:26:15 · S3, Philip Johnston, S1
[00:26:15] S3: Amazing investor. [00:26:16] S0: Yeah. He's he's great. I think basically he saw a really, really strong technical team doing something that if it worked, could be incredible. And I think when he came to visit us, you know, he spent a lot of time doing DD on other things, you know, on the backgrounds of all of our... We've got the best and we literally have the best freaking engineering team in the world in Redmond building this stuff, you know, half of them from SpaceX, half from from some of the hyperscalers. So he spent a lot of time with the team. He spent a lot of time. But I I don't think if he'd I don't think if he'd come across a report that said that cooling in space was impossible, that that would have, like, thrown him off. I think he was like, okay. This is a good enough team that they can figure out. [00:26:57] S1: How did you build such an awesome team?