Philip Johnston

speaker

376 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Philip Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Building the First Data Centers in Space · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

About 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, it took us quite a while to raise.

So I think we got rejected from at least 20 VCs before we got our first post.

first check on the demo day raise and things have definitely swung around since then um it's become a lot uh easier to raise for deep tech i think i think a number of reasons for that one is people think that software doesn't have a moat anymore which i think is probably accurate

Yeah, that's fascinating, yeah.

I think 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.

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, 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, OK, we're conflicted out.

But towards the end of the round, it certainly came together much faster.

I think...

To be frank, I don't think... So Chathan is our partner.

Chathan's awesome.

Amazing investor.

Yeah, he's great.

I think basically he saw a really, really strong technical team doing something that, if it worked, could be incredible.

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