Luke Ward
speaker
235 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Luke Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so they haven't grown to anywhere near the scale or capability that SpaceX has.
I would have expected, given the prize and offer here, that there would be more mature companies in this area.
The IPO process is a very sort of rapid and abrupt process.
So the company very quickly comes out with a series of accounts, does a roadshow and tries to convince investors that there's something attractive about the equity here and that they should participate.
But the amount of information and an experience that people have to make that decision is often quite constrained.
By investing in these companies privately over, I think it was eight years, which we've been invested in before it came to IPO, you're able to see how that company behaves in both the good times and the bad times.
You're able to assess how they allocate capital in response to that.
You're able to get insights around how they have thought about the competitive environment in a way that you just don't get access to at the IPO window.
SpaceX has encountered multiple failures on the path to developing reusability and these other capabilities.
Seeing how they made decisions in response to that can help inform the probabilities of success you might put on their future ambitions.
It might inform how you judge the management team and their competence and their ability to deliver on some of these promises in a way that if you'd only got to know the company over the past couple of months, it would be a lot harder, I think, to make a confident decision about that.
We made an investment in a satellite company called Astronis, subsequent to the SpaceX investment.
One of the main reasons there was the learnings which we had around where's the cost curve going over the future.
how attractive might that business model be in the coming years?
How plausible would it be for them to launch their own satellites?
And Astronis is one where they're doing dedicated sovereign satellites for individual countries or users, which is something that
Starlink might not be able to provide.
So it's equally where are the competitive tensions going to be, but also where are the unlocks that SpaceX and other companies are developing such that incremental investments might make sense.
Yeah, they're up in geostationary orbit much further away, but they're better and cheaper than the ones which came before.
But also they have this added element of security and sovereignty where the end user has full control over the system.
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