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

We're trying not to use space grade rad hard components.

We're trying to use off the shelf, like automotive style components, because it's way cheaper.

And most people have never tested those in radiation chambers.

For a very long time, their reactions was, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

So we actually applied to YC once, and we got rejected.

We then tried to raise, and we tried to raise $2 million at 10 posts on a safe.

It took us three months, and we got rejected from at least 100 VCs.

And then even after YC, when we went out to raise after demo day, I think we got rejected from at least 20 VCs before we got to the first check.

people had a hard time visualizing a world with low-cost launch.

And to be fair, we're still not out of the woods on that front.

Lots of things need to go right with the Starship program for that to make sense.

So that's one thing.

I think it just sounds too sci-fi-y and too...

Yeah, it's a to make this work.

There's a convergence of two factors.

One is the launch costs coming down.

And people have to believe that the second is it becoming way harder to build stuff terrestrially.

Maybe two years ago, that wasn't quite as obvious as it is today.

Now people are like, Okay, well, they're just banned building new data centers in New York, they're going to ban it in like seven other states.

Now that those two things, I think, converge to make it more investable, essentially.

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