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 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

And...

I think when he came to visit us, he spent a lot of time doing DD on other things, on the backgrounds of all of our... We've got the best... We literally have the best freaking engineering team in the world in Redmond building this stuff.

Half of them from SpaceX, half from some of the hyperscalers.

So he spent a lot of time with the team.

He spent a lot of time.

But I don't think...

I don't think if he'd come across a report that said that cooling in space was impossible, that that would have thrown him off.

I think he was like, okay, this is a good enough team that they can figure it out.

How did you build such an awesome team?

So my co-founders, Adi and Ezra, well, with Ezra, I reached out to him after I'd been down to Starbase, Texas, and I was like, have you got any ideas that would make money if...

Launch cost was 10x cheaper than it is today.

And we started with this space-based solo idea with Addy, who was introduced through a friend.

And he actually had already been thinking about this.

He already had registered the domain name Stellacloud.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 million at 40, which is like a decent round in YC.

And even then it took us six months to make our first hire.

And we've got like the most kick-ass space engineer as 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.

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