Moments from the frontier


Claude writing all his code sparked the materials idea
Advaith Sridhar, Discovered Materials


What Hop Aero builds: hypersonic point-to-point cargo rockets
Matija Milenovic, Hop Aero


Turning down Boeing to design airplanes at Scaled Composites
Jamie Gull, Wave Function Ventures


Ten years doing technology M&A at Bennett Jones
Graeme Harrison, Augur VC & Simply Silicon


Mitch's NASA work on kilometer-scale structures becomes a company
Pele Collins, Beyond Reach Labs


Growing up on Caribbean islands with math as the constant
Luigi Charles, Thesis


Three teenage years spent on the Riemann hypothesis
Sergio Charles, Thesis


Overseeing Hardware 3 at Tesla during Model 3 production hell
Casey Spencer, Voxel Energy


Learning to fly at Comox Air Force Base at 16
Skyler Chan, GRU Space


Seeding the chips with frontier researchers first
Elias Almqvist, Zettascale


From idea to launch in five months with two people
Ashi Dissanayake, Spaceium


From politics and Wall Street to Harvard's Field X
Matthew Sutton


Switching from aerospace to data centers
Shapol M., Entangl


Why quantum matters to everyone: ammonia, fertilizer and 5% of energy
Brandon Severin, Conductor Quantum


What a data center in space actually looks like
Philip Johnston, Starcloud


Agents did in three weeks what took Akash a year
Advaith Sridhar, Discovered Materials


Jacob's typhoon relief mission and the grounded Ospreys
Matija Milenovic, Hop Aero


What being the responsible engineer at SpaceX meant
Jamie Gull, Wave Function Ventures


Wearing two hats: Augur VC and Simply Silicon
Graeme Harrison, Augur VC & Simply Silicon


The pop-up tent idea and the patented flat-packing structure
Pele Collins, Beyond Reach Labs


What MLE-Bench measures and why benchmarks matter
Luigi Charles, Thesis


From neural architecture search in 2021 to Thesis
Sergio Charles, Thesis


Repurposed Tesla Model 3 and Y batteries as the speed advantage
Casey Spencer, Voxel Energy


How Galactic Resource Utilization became the name
Skyler Chan, GRU Space


Monolith, the in-house cluster researchers can SSH into
Elias Almqvist, Zettascale


Why spacecraft will not need to be perfect anymore
Ashi Dissanayake, Spaceium


The big defrag: how he builds an industry thesis
Matthew Sutton


Rebuilding outdated design data at legacy data center sites
Shapol M., Entangl


Weeks of turning knobs by hand to get halfway to one qubit
Brandon Severin, Conductor Quantum


The top investor objections and a slide for each one
Philip Johnston, Starcloud


Why heat is the main problem in chips today
Advaith Sridhar, Discovered Materials


Hand-carrying propulsion hardware on a 23-hour round trip
Matija Milenovic, Hop Aero


Building the Falcon 9 aft thermal shield for reentry
Jamie Gull, Wave Function Ventures


How a 1998 Kurzweil book set the energy AI thesis
Graeme Harrison, Augur VC & Simply Silicon


Why bigger solar arrays get floppy and slow satellites down
Pele Collins, Beyond Reach Labs


A shared tree of knowledge for all of machine learning
Luigi Charles, Thesis


Why slow experiments are the core problem in ML research
Sergio Charles, Thesis


Why the best grid connection is no grid connection
Casey Spencer, Voxel Energy


The four things that kill you on the Moon
Skyler Chan, GRU Space


Switching from GPUs means installing a driver, not rewriting code
Elias Almqvist, Zettascale


Starting with geostationary orbit, where customers want fuel first
Ashi Dissanayake, Spaceium


Passing on the team that went on to build Cursor
Matthew Sutton


Sending cake until prospects agree to a meeting
Shapol M., Entangl


Automating qubit tune-up, from Oxford to a year in Sydney
Brandon Severin, Conductor Quantum


Why Starcloud launches every year instead of one big bet
Philip Johnston, Starcloud


Thermal pastes matching Dow, Honeywell and Henkel in three months
Advaith Sridhar, Discovered Materials


The hop: vertical takeoff, ballistic arc, re-entry and landing
Matija Milenovic, Hop Aero


His first angel check: Boom Supersonic
Jamie Gull, Wave Function Ventures


The cold email and MFN SAFE that won Beyond Reach Labs
Graeme Harrison, Augur VC & Simply Silicon


Bigger arrays let satellites switch to cheap silicon cells
Pele Collins, Beyond Reach Labs


The agent that called itself a ghost in a shell
Luigi Charles, Thesis


Scoring an experiment before training it, Monte Carlo tree search style
Sergio Charles, Thesis


Ten megawatts in about 200 days against a five-year average
Casey Spencer, Voxel Energy


The hotel as a flywheel for a Moon base and Mars
Skyler Chan, GRU Space


The trade-off: higher latency in exchange for efficiency
Elias Almqvist, Zettascale


Stations that can hold up to 30 metric tons of fuel
Ashi Dissanayake, Spaceium


Backing a founder's will through near collapse to unicorn
Matthew Sutton


Why the two months a year figure is probably outdated
Shapol M., Entangl


Running a quantum company on two-week development cycles
Brandon Severin, Conductor Quantum


Building and launching the first satellite on a $2.5M pre-seed
Philip Johnston, Starcloud


Why the robotic arm helped less than changing equipment
Advaith Sridhar, Discovered Materials


Launching from a 40-foot shipping container
Matija Milenovic, Hop Aero


From space deployables to Talyn, YC and an exit
Jamie Gull, Wave Function Ventures


Why cities need air-gapped inference networks
Graeme Harrison, Augur VC & Simply Silicon


Customer prototypes and a first flight of their own
Pele Collins, Beyond Reach Labs


The agent that went off the rails during MLE-Bench
Sergio Charles, Thesis


How car batteries absorb GPU training spikes without the utility
Casey Spencer, Voxel Energy


Why space tourism is the customer that pulls the industry
Skyler Chan, GRU Space


A team with no roles, from AI research down to silicon
Elias Almqvist, Zettascale


Down to 80 cents and building out of a laundry room
Ashi Dissanayake, Spaceium


The ten-second question about a founder's next company
Matthew Sutton


Running a company with a no firing culture
Shapol M., Entangl


The aha moments behind scaling silicon qubits to a million
Brandon Severin, Conductor Quantum


Processing Earth observation imagery in orbit instead of downlinking it
Philip Johnston, Starcloud


Pausing thermal interface materials for bigger markets
Advaith Sridhar, Discovered Materials


Door-to-door speed versus cargo stored in orbit
Matija Milenovic, Hop Aero


Why he invests in hardware and skips software for hardware
Jamie Gull, Wave Function Ventures


Securing 12 megawatts inside a regulated district heating plant
Graeme Harrison, Augur VC & Simply Silicon


Over a hundred drop tests to qualify Dragon's parachutes
Pele Collins, Beyond Reach Labs


Bring your own data, and why data scarcity limits models
Sergio Charles, Thesis


A 60 megawatt neocloud build and $10,000 land contracts
Casey Spencer, Voxel Energy


A brick-making Moon factory prototype built in six weeks
Skyler Chan, GRU Space


Why spatial reconfigurability was dropped
Elias Almqvist, Zettascale


The call from YC after the fourth application
Ashi Dissanayake, Spaceium


Finding founders before they show up on any VC's radar
Matthew Sutton


Full transparency with no private messages
Shapol M., Entangl


What a thousand logical qubits could actually do
Brandon Severin, Conductor Quantum


Why waste heat will force compute off Earth
Philip Johnston, Starcloud


Pitching more than 100 times in two weeks
Advaith Sridhar, Discovered Materials


Where the Air Force Research Lab contract stands
Matija Milenovic, Hop Aero


What he looks for in hardware founders
Jamie Gull, Wave Function Ventures


How generalist VCs demoralize technical founders
Graeme Harrison, Augur VC & Simply Silicon


How a software pitch to YC turned into a hardware company
Pele Collins, Beyond Reach Labs


Where the 26% efficiency gain over AC comes from
Casey Spencer, Voxel Energy


The four-mission roadmap, from a 10 kg payload to the hotel
Skyler Chan, GRU Space


Meeting co-founder Prithvi at a week-long event in London
Elias Almqvist, Zettascale


Why Spaceium does not plan to refuel satellites
Ashi Dissanayake, Spaceium


How he picks defense companies, and meeting Perseus at YC
Matthew Sutton


Selling to data center owners and operators
Shapol M., Entangl


The worst take: build in space because space is cold
Philip Johnston, Starcloud


Why Hop Aero tests in Oklahoma
Matija Milenovic, Hop Aero


Why space data centers do not math out for him
Jamie Gull, Wave Function Ventures


Hiring Mikey at 18
Graeme Harrison, Augur VC & Simply Silicon


Near-death moments that made him start now
Skyler Chan, GRU Space


Contrarian takes: CUDA is not a moat, LLMs are plateauing
Elias Almqvist, Zettascale


Running 95% of spacecraft tests in-house to iterate faster
Ashi Dissanayake, Spaceium


The long-term vision of running critical infrastructure
Shapol M., Entangl


What a 40 megawatt module costs to build and launch
Philip Johnston, Starcloud