Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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?
00:26:57 · S1, Philip Johnston
[00:26:57] S1: How did you build such an awesome team? [00:26:59] S0: So my co founders, Adi and Ezra, I... Well, with Ezra, I I reached out to him after being down to Starbase, Texas, I was like, have you got any ideas that would make money if launch cost was 10 x cheaper than it is today? And we started with this space based solar idea with Adi who was introduced to a friend... Through a friend. He he actually had already been thinking about this. He already had registered the domain name stellarcloud.com before. And then with the team, we were just ruthlessly slow at hiring, and, like, picky about hiring. After YC, we'd raised, like 11,000,000 at 40, which is like a decent round in YC. And even then, took us six months to make our first hire. And we've got, like, the most kick ass space engineers, our first hire. We've raised, like, a lot of money now. Even this round that we announced in March, we've raised a much larger round since then. We're still only 20 engineers. Like, the... And we have one commercial guy who came from the Space Force who was working on Golden Dome. We are so picky about who we hire. Like, it is, to a point of being very frustrating, to be honest, but it's the whole game. It's the whole game is having an... A kick ass engineering team.
00:28:08 · S3, Philip Johnston, S2
[00:28:08] S3: What was it like to have this idea, have people sort of poo poo it, like, didn't really get it, and then suddenly, I mean, to have much more commercial validation that, like, you know, Google, SpaceX, the the stalwarts of the industry sort of embraced the idea and realized, actually, like, some crazy percentage of future data centers likely are going to be in space. What was that like to sort of see the the sea change and be early? [00:28:34] S0: It was surreal. So if you go back through my Twitter feed, I've been, like, shouting from the rooftops for the last, like, three years about this. [00:28:42] S3: I'm concerned, but right. [00:28:43] S0: Every day, I would post something about, like, why data center space are gonna be... Are gonna make sense. And then slowly and slowly and slowly, people would start to drop hints about things. Like Elon at one point was like, 99.999% of the energy in the in the solar system is is is from the sun. So I'd repost that, and I'd be like, we need to build data centers in space. Yeah. Like, I would like everything I would find a hook for. Like [00:29:12] S2: I think this is one of the things we see with all the best hard tech founders. You're essentially living in the future and are almost like a prophet that brings the future back to now, us underlayings, the earth that don't quite get it yet. [00:29:26] S0: I'm gonna tell my mom, who's very religious, why she said I'm a prophet.
00:29:26 · Philip Johnston, S2
[00:29:26] S0: I'm gonna tell my mom, who's very religious, why she said I'm a prophet. [00:29:31] S2: But I think that's cool. I mean, and the other thing that's fascinating to me is that your background, if you go in your LinkedIn, is not very legible that you would be in space. But you had a background previously doing software and physics and then went to business, but nothing there that set space. [00:29:52] S0: Yeah. So for people who don't know my background, spent the first five years of my career as a... An engineer on the software side, studied math and physics before that, undergrad and masters. And then I went to McKinsey more on the commercial product side. But I actually ended up doing a couple of projects, with National Space Agencies on different satellite missions, and that's where I really started to notice the launch cost coming down very rapidly. Actually, I had another startup before this. And, yeah, when I left that one, decided, okay, if I'm gonna do another startup, it has to be something I'm, like, very passionate about. And yeah, for my whole life, I've been very passionate about space. Because I don't have a space engineering background, realized, okay, I'm gonna need the world's most kick ass space engineers. And actually, this is where I give credit to YC. I was kind of blindly following the YC advice. I was like, okay. The first thing we need to do before coming up with an idea is get the most incredible space engineers in the world on the team, essentially.
00:29:52 · Philip Johnston, S1
[00:29:52] S0: Yeah. So for people who don't know my background, spent the first five years of my career as a... An engineer on the software side, studied math and physics before that, undergrad and masters. And then I went to McKinsey more on the commercial product side. But I actually ended up doing a couple of projects, with National Space Agencies on different satellite missions, and that's where I really started to notice the launch cost coming down very rapidly. Actually, I had another startup before this. And, yeah, when I left that one, decided, okay, if I'm gonna do another startup, it has to be something I'm, like, very passionate about. And yeah, for my whole life, I've been very passionate about space. Because I don't have a space engineering background, realized, okay, I'm gonna need the world's most kick ass space engineers. And actually, this is where I give credit to YC. I was kind of blindly following the YC advice. I was like, okay. The first thing we need to do before coming up with an idea is get the most incredible space engineers in the world on the team, essentially. [00:30:48] S1: This is before you even knew what you wanted to do in space. All all you knew at that point was that, like, launch costs were gonna come down dramatically, and there were gonna be cool stuff to do in space. Yes. And you wanted to find some space people to do it with. [00:30:59] S0: Yes. Literally. That is literally it. Yeah.
00:30:59 · Philip Johnston, S3, S1
[00:30:59] S0: Yes. Literally. That is literally it. Yeah. [00:31:02] S3: But it wasn't a vibe of, like, oh, can you please build this crazy idea that I No. No. It's like the reverse even. Like, I'm going to figure out the commercial part. [00:31:10] S0: Yeah. Exactly. My pitch to Adi and Ezra was essentially, if you have any ideas that would make sense if the launch cost was 10 x less than it is today, I can figure out everything else around that besides the building the satellite piece. [00:31:26] S1: How did you how did you find them? How did you recruit them? [00:31:29] S0: So Ezra and I had grown up in the same place in The UK. I didn't... I should be frank. I messaged like a a lot of space engineers. Maybe 10 of them took a call, two of them said yes. That's [00:31:39] S3: all you need. You don't need, like, a 100 people to do it. You only need one or two.