El Segundo is crazy because SpaceX Employee #9 sits next to me at dinner and calls me an idiot, and he’s right.
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Alex Garcia Lautzenheiser
185 posts
Alex Garcia Lautzenheiser
@Alex_Lautz
Aerospace engineer investing in the physical world (before it was The Current Thing) @ https://t.co/oAdqOy5pP7 ⚙️ @Penn✈️🚁🛰️ Survivability @Boeing 💸 @Harvard
Los Angeles, CA Katılım Ekim 2020
208 Takip Edilen278 Takipçiler
SBIR Mills 🏭
“16 companies won 82% of all Navy SBIRs last year” 👀
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@SantiagoPliego Rangeview.com the only credible solution to the Blade Problem.
It’s really a metallurgy problem. Few.
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Hardware Supply Chain
@dessaigne
In Shenzhen, a team can go from design to a new physical part in a day. In the US, that same loop often takes weeks, and that gap compounds.
The overall stack for rapid hardware iteration still doesn't exist in America, and we want to fund the startups building it.
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AI has stopped being a feature and started being the foundation.
We're excited about a new wave of startups rebuilding software, services, and silicon— and pushing AI into the physical world.
ycombinator.com/rfs
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@fcvprzhfgsybj @buildNEBULA will get you domestic PCBs , same-day 👀
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People don't know how bad it is. The US needs to lock in
We've tried working with PCB fabs in the US for some of our PCB manufacturing. Most of them took weeks to months to give us a quote that was 10-15x overpriced
A fab in SZ got us one within 2 days with a reasonable price
Nicolas Dessaigne@dessaigne
To unlock the next generation of US hardware startups, we need a supply chain that can compete with China. If you’re up for building it, we’d love to help!
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Alex Garcia Lautzenheiser retweetledi
@Aeden6007 Aeden huge moment brother so happy for you both
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@kane @kane that someone is @InfinitForm ... Custom-built kernel designed for GenAI. Output is 100% parametric. Optimize based on your mfg method (CNC, casting, etc). Push/pull natively with all major CAD.
^^ these are the foundations for a true mechanical copilot
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Someone will figure out how to do mechanical design with AI, but burning tokens to do basic geometry in Parasolid is not it.
el.cine@EHuanglu
wowww.. Opus 4.7 has automated CAD
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Spot on @MichelleVolz. Sadly history rhymes. Space has this exact same problem: critical for national security, climate, and technology which truly helps all Americans.
Yet all the public sees is Katy Perry doing somersaults in Bezos' phallic rocket.
I wrote about this in Weinzierl's class at Harvard we took together back in 2022, funny enough!
Michelle Volz 🇺🇸🚀@MichelleVolz
This is what happens when you don’t have a message that inspires collective purpose. Without it, AI gets framed as something happening TO people, and fear & politics fill the gap. I’ve been thinking a lot about what a path forward actually looks like, and the answer started showing up in companies like @RadiantNuclear, @MarianaMinerals, @ForterraDrive, @Saronic, @HadrianInc, and others. Whether they realize it or not, they’re offering the kind of unifying vision politicians and tech has largely failed to provide. There are many more like them. If you’re building something like this, I’d love to hear from you.
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INTRODUCING GUNDO GRANTS
Every summer, hundreds of the sharpest students in the country land deep tech internships in Los Angeles. They show up ready to build things that matter. Then they discover LA rent on an intern salary is its own engineering challenge.
We think that's a problem worth fixing.
Gundo Grants are $5,000 housing stipends for 10 of the top deep tech interns spending this summer in LA. El Segundo has quietly become the center of gravity for hard tech in America, and the interns showing up this summer will be the most important people in aerospace, defense, manufacturing, robotics, energy, and beyond in 10 years.
If you're interning at a deep tech company this summer, building something real, and wondering how you'll make the numbers work in LA, then a Gundo Grant is for you!
10 grants. $5K each. Exclusive events. 1 incredible cohort.
Applications are due by May 8th → gundo.house/apply
@8vc | @bantervc | @DiscipulusVent | @LongJourneyVC | @lowercarbon | neverlift.vc | @rhobusiness
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@aaronburnett @JonesBrannon That's a lot of purple :)
at best: I smell a monopsony
at worst: I smell a bubble
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These are just proposed constellations with the FCC. Clearly there will be more. You need to do more handwaving to suggest a curve like this isn’t coming then I need to have optimism that the proposed constellations are coming.
Defense will bridge the gap as the highest paying customer between no and then.
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@JonesBrannon bruhh space is >80% Defense. Even “commercial space” is mostly Govt spending.
Starlink is the exception to the rule, and is >60% of all sats in orbit.
EO and telecom are the only real markets, and have been since the 1990s.
Remove Starlink, Amazon, and the USG and these hockey stick growth curves look very different.
What else is there to justify all this space-for-space infrastructure??
Brannon Jones@JonesBrannon
@abemurray and I launched a podcast — @thelongfrontier . Deep tech. One topic per episode. Real depth, real science, real engineering tradeoffs. Episode 1 is live! All about the orbital economy and in-space propulsion. We sat down with @JeffThornburg Thornburg (CEO of @PortalSpaceSys , former @SpaceX Raptor architect) and walked through the physics of how we move things in space — and why it's about to change dramatically. The space economy is ~$600B. There are 15-20K satellites up there. And most of them can barely maneuver. We've built the airports. We haven't built the roads. Follow along → @thelongfrontier
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@JonesBrannon Starlink seems to be scaling pretty well without in-space logistics! :)
Jevons paradox 💯 for sure... but how fast? I was totally inspired in 2018 when @tesshatch wrote "Space is Open For Business" - but that was 1 VC fund lifetime ago and space is still propped up by Govt
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And even if EO + telecom + USG is 90% of the market for the next decade, that’s still a market that demands maneuverability, servicing, and refueling to scale… Starlink alone deorbits ~5 sats/day. Defense needs proximity ops and sda. So the orbital economy thesis doesn’t even require new commercial markets, just requires the existing ones to keep growing (which they absolutely will and are)
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You’re missing the #1 justification for king-making: network-effect business models.
Masayoshi Son realized he could weaponize capital to corner winner-take-all markets. (Uber, DoorDash, Alibaba all have network effects.)
I argue kingmaking harms B2G and AI who do not.
Yes the signal is helpful for monopsonies (DoW) and compute is expensive — but does this justify the loss of discipline? @oyhsu @IanRountree
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The only thing I think hasn’t been said in the kingmaking-by-capital discourse — the effectiveness of kingmaking varies a lot with buyer concentration.
The closer a market is to a functional monopsony, the more kingmaking may be a viable strategy. The signal from capital becomes more diluted the more prospective customers there are to signal to.
This is probably why it rarely works in consumer, is a mixed bag in b2b, and a better track record in b2g.
(There are other related aspects of these markets success varies with, most notably how long a sales cycle is and how much capital can help get through that)
ian@IanRountree
We talk a lot about this dynamic internally at @cantos. It’s evident that startups have a significantly harder time fundraising at Series B and later if they haven’t yet picked up a “brand name” by Series A. It’s infuriating for those companies that haven’t yet been king-made—or worse, have a king-made competitor. So how do founders navigate this? 1. Be EXTREMELY selective about your first investors. Don’t take the first money that likes you. You want high-signal, well-networked first checks. Ask pre-seed & seed investors for examples of portcos they’ve helped fundraise and reference with those founders. 2. Have an _exceedingly_ high bar for your early hires and especially co-founders. No roommate that happened to be jobless so would join you. VCs index heavily on the quality of your people. 3. Invest in branding. This one took me a while but your website and your deck have a powerful subconscious effect on investors, talent, customers, and regulators. Think of it as an investment rather than an expense. 4. Call me old-fashioned but most importantly, focus on fundamentals. Build fast, iterate quickly, find early customers, know your regulatory landscape in and out, use your cash wisely. Some king-made companies have gotten big but the trillion-dollar ones were fast to market and shockingly capital-efficient. As for Cantos, we don’t complain when a company we backed gets king-made… but our hearts are with the revolutionaries 🇺🇸
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Great conversation around thermal propulsion tho!! Very cool tech. Speed definitely will be a priority for Defense.
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Turbine blades cannot be manufactured with a standard CNC. Extreme engine temperatures + speed means you must use a nickel-based superalloy like inconel.
Cutting inconel is like cutting rocks. Impossible to get high tolerances.
Casting is the only method & foundries are rare
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Turbine blades are a critical bottleneck to both nat gas generators (data centers) and drone warfare.
🇮🇷 & 🇷🇺 are now upgrading their Shahed drones with jet engines.
So we need jet engine interceptors.
But only ~60 foundries in US can produce blades & backlogs are 18+ months.
Typical SpaceX going vertical to solve supply chain constraints. Few others have the ability to open & operate a new foundry.
TheSpaceEngineer@mcrs987
So, I guess SpaceX is going to be making turbine power generators now...? That are seemingly driven by some form of combustor, if not an entire engine?? To power AI??? At Bastrop Texas?????
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