Venture Everywhere Podcast: Philip Johnston with Scott Hartley
Phillip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit) chats with Scott Hartley, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures.
Episode 58 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Scott Hartley, Co-founder and MP of Everywhere Ventures talks with Philip Johnston, CEO of Star Cloud (formerly known as Lumen Orbit), a company that aims to deploy hyperscale data centers in space powered by solar energy and passive cooling. Philip shares his journey from academia and consulting to founding Star Cloud, driving a new era of orbital computing amid falling space launch costs. Scott and Philip also discuss the future of AI in space-based computing and the broader impact of shifting data infrastructure toward an off-world economy.
In this episode, you will hear:
How Star Cloud is capitalizing on lower launch costs due to SpaceX.
Star Cloud’s aim to build a self-sustaining space economy powered by Dyson sphere computing.
Addressing power and mass constraints for large-scale orbital data centers.
Developing deployable radiators for thermal regulation in space.
Mitigating potential risks like space debris and nefarious cyber threats.
Driving innovation in low-cost, high-energy space applications.
Balancing private investment with non-dilutive funding sources (government grants, defense contracts).
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:34 Scott: I'm Scott Hartley, one of the co-founders of Everywhere Ventures, and I'm super excited to welcome today my good friend, Philip Johnston. Philip and I have known each other for almost 15 years, going back well before the days of him founding Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit), which we're going to talk about today, to the campus on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at Columbia, where Philip was starting and studying mathematics before going on to a dual degree in public policy and management at Harvard and Wharton.
00:01:03 Scott: And then going on to McKinsey & Company where he helped set up and launch the space agencies of both the UAE and Saudi Arabia. And now today to this incredible new platform, Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit), where Philip is the CEO, where they're building megawatt data centers in space, which take advantage of some of the key elements of space, like abundant cooling and access to abundant energy and many other things that we'll talk about today.
00:01:27 Scott: So Phil, welcome to Venture Everywhere with us.
00:01:30 Philip: Thanks so much for having me. It's quite a journey. 15 years later to be on this podcast with you, so I'm very happy to be here.
00:01:38 Scott: 15 years later and to both have lived and spent a couple of years at the international house in New York City, which is one of the most incredible institutions, students from a hundred different countries gathering together across New York City.
00:01:52 Scott: And what I love about the serendipity of venture capital as well is knowing that you were stationed in Dubai doing a lot of work with the space agencies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. And it was actually a trip of mine to go to the Milken conference in Dubai that led to me pinging you after a couple of years saying, hey Phil, what are you up to these days?
00:02:12 Scott: Actually looking for travel advice and guidance as I landed in the Middle East, only to find out that you were at the helm of a stealth new startup that wasn't yet released. That sounded mind bogglingly interesting. And so that rekindled a lot of the fun that we have to talk about today.
00:02:27 Scott: So walk us through a little bit of your journey. Not everyone has the ability like you've done to lily pad their way from an academic background, studying mathematics, to going to an incredible dual degree program, to then McKinsey, where you were consulting across a number of different fields, but then found this one field of space and future world of space, the vision that people had to set up these space agencies, and then parlay that into a platform and starting Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit).
00:02:55 Scott: Maybe walk us through a little bit of your journey because I think a lot of people seek to become founders, seek to become CEOs of their own startups and don't necessarily know where to go. And I think you've done an excellent job in your career of lily padding your way to these incredibly ripe opportunity zones.
00:03:11 Scott: I would say space today in 2025, I think about the next decade and the incredible new capacity that SpaceX is bringing online, the incredible railroad to space, I think of these railroad lines that are taking gravity out of the equation, reducing the kg price down as close to zero as possible.
00:03:29 Scott: And thinking about what new markets does that unlock and looking at the transcontinental railroad, what new markets did that unlock across America and thinking about that now vertically, what is that going to unlock across the space industry? So maybe walk us through your logic and your journey.
00:03:44 Philip: Yeah, for sure. So the work that I was doing at McKinsey was the catalyst that got me looking at space. What I did then was I went down to Starbase Texas in May 2023, just before the first Starship launch. Just because I was interested in it, I realized what was happening with the launch cost.
00:04:00 Philip: It was coming down quite rapidly. It was about $60,000 10 years ago, and then it came down to $6,000 a kilo with Falcon 9. And the forecast, depending who you believe with Starship, is less than $50 a kilo. So another hundred times cheaper is what they're forecasting now.
00:04:15 Philip: And so I was just interested. So I went down there to have a look around and what struck me about being there, as you mentioned, is it's not just the individual launch cost will be low, but the capacity they're building it for is ginormous. I've been down there three times now.
00:04:27 Philip: And every time I go down, this Starship Gigafactory that they're building is 10 times bigger than it was before. And it's basically a Tesla production line for producing Starships. So it's a massive Gigafactory that will produce potentially three Starships a week within 18 months.
00:04:42 Philip: It's hard for people to understand how much of a step change that is in the capacity for launch. I mean, at least a thousand times more payload to orbit just in that 18-month period. And then three years after that, they're looking at three Starships a day, then potentially hundreds of thousands of times more payload to orbit that we'll be able to deliver.
00:05:01 Philip: So I was just looking at it thinking, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. There's not going to be a shift like this. The only one I can think of that's coming is maybe robotics and also agentic AI. But the three big ones, I'd say, are robotics, agentic AI, and space that's coming over the next decade.
00:05:17 Philip: And space was the one that I was most interested in, to be honest. So we started with the premise of what business will make sense when launch cost is a thousand times cheaper than it currently is.
00:05:28 Philip: And we started by looking at space-based solar, which is not a particularly new concept, but doesn't make sense unless the launch cost is very low. The problem you have with space-based solar is you have a 95% efficiency loss getting energy from space to earth.
00:05:40 Philip: And so we were basically thinking, what are we going to use that energy for once we get it down? And the first use case we were thinking was data centers. And if you look at the forecast, I think in 20 years time, half of all terrestrial electricity consumption will go into data centers.
00:05:54 Philip: And the next logical question was, well, is there a cheap way to get the data center to space? Because if there is, then that would be a much more effective way to do it. You don't lose all of that power. And obviously with Starship, that starts to become possible.
00:06:05 Philip: So then with my co-founders, Ezra, I grew up in the same place with him in the UK. And so I messaged him and asked if what he was thinking about what could be possible with low cost launch. And then we were connected to our third co-founder, Adi, at SpaceX through another friend.
00:06:20 Philip: And so we put together a bit of a white paper outlining the rationale for why all data centers will go to space if the launch cost is low enough. And that seems to have really got some traction in the industry and people have really paid attention to that. And from there, that's what's led us to now launching our first satellite in a few months.
00:06:39 Scott: Incredible. Just the journey. One of the most fascinating conversations I had a few years ago, maybe second only to this was with one of the founders of SpaceX, not named Elon. I asked him the question, which problem are you guys solving? And he said, gravity.
00:06:54 Scott: That was his answer was one word. Gravity. And I said, “Oh my God, this is the single most singular answer to a startup question I've ever heard.” And spoke to the absolutely audacious vision. Talk about being an audacious founder.
00:07:11 Philip: Yeah.
00:07:12 Scott: They have that as the key problem that you're solving. But what he meant by that was to your point, the cost per kg going from $60,000 to $6,000 down to $50, basically bringing that asymptotically to zero to the point that the marginal cost of getting payload to space just goes down dramatically by orders and orders of magnitude.
00:07:31 Scott: And I'd love to hear your thoughts around, as you dug into this market and thought about the various kind of modalities, there are launch delivery vehicles, things like relativity space or some of the other space launch systems. There are last mile delivery tugboats that help get things into particular orbits. There are the various types of sensors.
00:07:52 Scott: Obviously, early optical images was probably the first foray into low Earth orbit with Planet Labs and some of those guys followed by a company I actually advised back in 2014, which was called Spire Global, which took the other sensors that were not optical imagery to AIS for maritime domain awareness and ADS-B for flight tracking and GPS radio occultation for things like weather data.
00:08:16 Scott: But as you thought about this holistic ecosystem, obviously there had to be in your mind thinking a little bit about chipsets, the rise of AI, some of the backdrop of power, the big data trend that we had 5, 10 years ago that people talked about. Big data is only becoming huge data, massive data, even bigger data. It's just exploding in all ways.
00:08:35 Scott: And so thinking about these parameters, how do you guys balance when you're building your first data centers in space? I think one of the key interesting things about space is you have all these constraints.
00:08:46 Scott: You've got weight constraints, you've got power constraints, you've got energy constraints, you've got constraints around how much compute maybe you can do on board or what solar radiation might do to that compute. But walk us through some of those constraints and how you guys are thinking about how these data centers actually will function.
00:09:03 Philip: So the main constraints at the moment are the mass, the power consumption, radiation, and cooling. So most of those will be solved with a lower cost launch though. So radiation you can solve with shielding, which is not expensive if you have low cost launch.
00:09:18 Philip: The mass of that shielding is bulky. But right now, one of the trade-offs that we're making is which altitude we should fly at. So you have what's called the Van Allen belt of radiation, which starts at around 500 kilometers altitude. So if you're flying higher than that, you need a lot more shielding.
00:09:34 Philip: So we've picked an orbit that's very low for the first one, around 350 kilometers in order to minimize the amount of shielding we have necessary on the first satellite so that the chips can operate and function in that altitude.
00:09:47 Philip: The second one is on the power and cooling side of things. We need to basically build a very large low cost, low mass deployable radiator. So if we're talking multiple megawatts, there's currently nothing in space that's dissipating that amount of power. Because you don't have convection or conduction for the chips, you need to somehow get that power off the satellite. And the way that we do that is a very large deployable radiator.
00:10:10 Scott: It's so fascinating because each of these obviously has two sides. So the trade-off between you're a bit lower in that orbital range, meaning you have less radiation from the sun but you have more atmospheric drag, right? So you need more thrust to maintain orbit. Obviously optimizing between all of these really, really complex trade-offs.
00:10:30 Scott: The other question, if you have a large solar array or a large surface area, is there any risk to obviously the constant conversations about debris in space or potential nefarious actors creating things in space that could create catastrophic events? How do you think of those downside scenarios?
00:10:49 Philip: It's very, very important to think to be cautious about space debris and nefarious actors. So the way that we're going about this is what you really want to do is not fly in the most congested part of space, which is the 500 kilometers to 800 kilometers altitude. That's where most of these low earth orbit satellites are flying.
00:11:06 Philip: So as I mentioned, for the first few, we're going to be flying in VLEO, a very low Earth orbit. As the satellite gets larger, the drag obviously increases a lot. And that means that we would need very large thrusters. And that's just going to suck up a lot of the power if we were to stay in that altitude.
00:11:21 Philip: What's nice though is as the satellite gets larger, a lower percentage of the total mass needs to go into shielding because the compute scales with the volume of the satellite, whereas the shielding scales with the surface area. So once we're at a certain size, we'll be flying much higher, around a thousand kilometers.
00:11:37 Philip: And what that means is that we can have much more shielding without it impacting the total percentage mass of the satellite. And also in those later iterations, we're expecting the launch cost to come down quite significantly. And so that again is another factor in enabling us to fly higher.
00:11:51 Scott: When you think about data transfers between objects, so sitting in VLEO, you're sitting below the low Earth orbit satellites that are up a little bit higher in the atmosphere, and obviously well below GEO satellites, which are way out in Geostationary orbit.
00:12:06 Scott: Are you guys primarily solving for terrestrial interfacing with data or is it data interfacing between LEO and VLEO, where those LEO sats are really looking for ground stations, they're looking to download or compute large quantities of collected data in space, and the flyover times don't give them enough bandwidth to really download all of the data. So are you guys catering more to the terrestrial audience or more to the LEO audience?
00:12:31 Philip: So in the first few iterations, where our primary customers are going to be other satellites, particularly, as you mentioned, Earth Observation and military satellites where they're very constrained on the amount of data they can downlink through waiting for ground stations. As the cost comes down, we'll become competitive with terrestrial data centers. And at that point, we'll be running terrestrial workloads.
00:12:53 Philip: So we initially planned to connect directly into the Starlink network using RF, and now as they've announced this product called PLAZE, which stands for Plug and Play Lazer, allows you to connect directly into Starlink with an obstacle terminal. That's how we plan to have our connectivity for the second satellite. On the first one, we don't have that on there yet.
00:13:11 Scott: As we think about the various sides of the coin with one of these trends, that's really fascinating, like Starbase expanding production, Starship increasing capacity to space, cost per kg going to zero, data centers in space, thinking about the logical unfurling from that cybersecurity in space between machine to machine transactions or LEO to VLEO. If you guys are communicating through RF, are there ways that this is spoofed or jammed, or are there cybersecurity concerns?
00:13:40 Scott: One of the other companies we invested in recently was Rebel Space, which is aiming to solve things around the cybersecurity sphere for in orbit to in orbit, or these various interactions between machines. How are you guys thinking about some of these cyber risks or things if you're housing and transferring large amounts of proprietary data?
00:14:01 Philip: Basically exactly the same way that Starlink works or Starshield, which is the Starlink version for the military, which is just everything is end-to-end encrypted. And then we have what we call confidential compute, which is essentially we can run a workload on our satellite, which even we don't have access to.
00:14:17 Philip: So even we don't understand what that workload is doing because even the workload is encrypted. So we don't need to decrypt the data before we run that workload. So the other nice thing is RF is quite easy to intercept because you can be in any sort of field of view whereas optical is much more difficult to intercept.
00:14:32 Philip: Because if you're flying in between, then it's possible that you're going to be intercepting that signal so it won't get through, which is very easily detectable. And secondly, it's just much, much harder to intercept an optical signal.
00:14:44 Philip: The other thing, in space, anything more than a centimeter cubed can be tracked with ground stations. So if somebody were to be trying to send another satellite to intercept an optical signal, it would be very visible from the ground.
00:14:57 Scott: Interesting. At scale, how do you guys think about the launch slots? What is the primary bottleneck for you guys in a complex build out like Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit)? As a company, how do you think of sequencing? It's such a complex business to build.
00:15:12 Scott: Walk us through some of your day-to-day and how you think about scoping out the sequencing of some of these challenges. Obviously building hardware, pitching for launch slots with SpaceX, which then you have a firm timeline that you have to meet.
00:15:24 Scott: How you think about client development, all of the different pieces of running a startup with the added complexity of hardware, the added complexity of space of software? I guess we'll get into productivity hacks later in the episode, but I would love to know your secret, Phil.
00:15:38 Philip: I mean, in terms of sequencing on the launch schedule, so we're launching our demonstrator in May this year. That's the start of the launch window. It might go up a couple months later than that, but that won't be dependent on us. That's dependent on SpaceX.
00:15:49 Philip: Then we've got our second satellite launch booked for mid-2026. That will be the first commercial offering. We're about 100 times more powerful computer, again, than the first one. And the first one, by the way, is 100 times more powerful GPU compute than has ever been operated in space before.
00:16:02 Philip: So they're cutting the top of the line terrestrial data center grade GPUs will be in that satellite, never been done before. The three things that take the most time are number one, the R&D and assembly and testing of the satellite. Number two, speaking with customers signing LOIs and MOUs, speaking with non-diluted funding sources, particularly government.
00:16:23 Philip: And then number three is hiring and the hiring pieces right now taking up a bigger portion of that than it was a few months ago. So we've been fairly deliberate in our hiring. We've only brought one employee on so far. We'll be looking to make a few more hires in the coming months, but we really want them to be extremely high quality people.
00:16:43 Scott: When you think of non-dilutive funding sources, I think this is one of the key drivers of the space ecosystem are this incredible access to different forms of grants from U.S. Air Force, from TACFI, from the Space Force. How do you guys think of this ecosystem? Do you have anyone on the team focused primarily on grant writing or these applications for non-dilutive financing?
00:17:03 Philip: Me. I am the person. It's quite important to me that the first 10 hires at Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit) are hardcore engineers. I don't want to have any admin people or sales or anything else before we have those because I want them to drive the culture of the company and I want them to be the earliest employees in the company. So we're not going to be bringing on anybody else except for the first 10 employees.
00:17:26 Philip: After that, maybe it makes sense because it is going to be quite a lot of work. But yeah, we're working with an agency. There's a bunch of ex-Space Force people from the procurement arm that leave and then go and help startups with that whole application process. So the other deadlines for that are coming up in a few weeks.
00:17:42 Scott: So both you and Ezra being from the South of England, growing up in Europe, as you were thinking about where to build this company, obviously you had a background working with a ton of incredible connections across the Middle East. I know that between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, there's a large office dedicated to space startups in Masdar City.
00:18:00 Scott: There are a number of resources across the region. Did you think about starting this company outside the U.S.? Did you think about launching it in the Middle East or in Luxembourg? And what was it about the U.S. ecosystem that appealed to you or starting this here on the U.S. soil?
00:18:14 Philip: No, we didn't ever think about launching it not in the U.S, to be honest. And the reason is there's a few reasons, but really the number one reason is talent. If you want to get somebody from SpaceX to move to Riyadh, it's not an easy ask. It is possible. It is doable.
00:18:29 Philip: And there are some companies that have done it, but you're talking half a million dollars comp probably. So we're in Redmond, 80% of all satellites launched in the last year were designed and built in Redmond. So it's not like you can find the talent that we are finding anywhere else in the world, really. So that's the real reason.
00:18:46 Philip: The second ancillary reason, which is, I guess, related is the funding sources. If you're in Saudi, there is some funding sources and it's good compared to other countries, but it's nothing compared to the U.S. There’s absolutely nothing compared to the U.S.
00:19:00 Scott: It's interesting because I think that over the last decade, obviously many, many things have shifted, but I would say just from my experience working with Spire in 2014, the main bottleneck at that time was probably launch access.
00:19:13 Scott: And so at one point that company moved from being a U.S. based company to being a Luxembourg based company, because the founder, Peter Platzer, who's Austrian, found that he could obtain more and more launch slots globally, whether through PSLB rockets in India, Soyuz rockets out of Kazakhstan, rockets in the U.S. But because the bottleneck was, I think on the launch delivery side, there was an advantage to being based in Europe where you're more on neutral territory.
00:19:39 Scott: And you could go either way, East and West. Whereas now obviously with just the explosion of SpaceX and the explosion of launch capacity, the bottleneck being extreme talent and hiring and the relationship that, are you finding there's any limitations, whether just through CFIUS or some of the limitations around interfacing with intelligence or national security, to hiring Americans, or having to control your supply chain at all based on some of the limitations around the U.S. side?
00:20:08 Philip: There is, but you would have to go through those problems anyway. So let's say, for example, you're building a satellite in Saudi and you want to launch it in the U.S., then you're going to have to go through all of the ITO stuff to get it into the U.S. from Saudi, whereas we don't have to bother with any of that stuff.
00:20:21 Philip: But it's true that yeah, CFIUS means we can only take money from certain people and certain entities, or we just keep that amount below a certain threshold and that's what we're doing so far. And then in terms of being able to get SBIRs and all the other things we need, a certain percentage of the companies owned by U.S. citizens.
00:20:37 Philip: But it's actually pretty easy to get the O-1 visa and then to get on the green card path. So myself and my co-founder got approved for our green cards within a year, which it's pretty amazing that they actually allow that path for technologies they consider to be critical so.
00:20:51 Scott: I love it. It takes somebody with your background and skillset to say it's easy to get the O-1 visa because it's, I think, for the extreme talented and gifted.
00:20:59 Philip: O-1 is, I'm not even being facetious. The EB-1 is a bit more tricky and that's the one to get to the green card. But O-1 is the back door into the U.S. immigration system. People don't understand this. If you pay a lawyer 30 grand, it doesn't matter what your background is, you will get the O-1. There's so many different criteria you can hit. For example, you can join Forbes Technology Council for two grand. That's one of the criteria hit already. O-1 is super easy to get.
00:21:23 Scott: Hilarious. That's a good hack for anyone listening to this podcast. There you go. That's your on-ramp into the U.S. immigration system. I believe your whole business in many ways is contrarian. Your whole business, the white paper that you guys published, which was shared around the internet, which I think made a lot of waves, that was contrarian in and of itself.
00:21:43 Scott: But is there anything in particular within the space ecosystem that you guys believe fundamentally that a lot of people disagree with or that you've had? These are often, I think, the signs of big market opportunities where you have to be contrarian and correct.
00:21:58 Scott: And if you're not contrarian, the market's probably not that interesting or everyone's already doing it. And if you're contrarian and wrong, obviously, then the second question solves for itself. What is it that you guys are doing that you think really pushes against the grain of even the ecosystem of believers within the space ecosystem?
00:22:18 Philip: Well, we certainly were much more contrarian when we released the white paper in September than we are now. When we released that white paper, you should have seen the comments on Twitter. It was like we got pilloried. There was a million views of that video and everybody was like, “These guys are completely insane. This is never going to work. They're never going to be able to do that.”
00:22:34 Philip: In the last few months, it's completely flipped and everybody's come around to our side. Everybody's been quoting Elon Musk and Sam Altman and Bill Gates. They're all saying, yeah, all data centers are going to space. And it's basically becoming not contrarian anymore.
00:22:49 Philip: But what was controversial about it was there's never been a radiator built bigger than the size of a tennis court. And we were saying we would have one kilometer by four kilometer radiator. Now there's nothing against the laws of physics to stop you doing that. It's just a very large engineering challenge. So that's one.
00:23:04 Philip: I think people were more skeptical about the launch cost coming down back then. That was before they did the catch on the tower before New Glenn had flown. And people don't think the launch cost is going to come down anywhere near as fast as we need it to come down. So those are the two main things, is the scale of it, the radiators, and then the launch cost timeline.
00:23:26 Scott: As you think about success for Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit) for the coming lifetime, I would say, building a lifelong type of company with an audacious, amazing vision, and that was the key reason why we obviously believed in you and wanted to invest in the first round of your company.
00:23:40 Scott: But what does success look like for you, even if there isn't an off-ramp that you're running away from the business? At what point will you be satisfied with, wow, we really achieved what we set out to achieve?
00:23:50 Philip: The first part of it is basically all data centers going to space. So if people are still constructing data centers on Earth, the only reason to do it should be because you need a very low latency, let's say less than 20 milliseconds. Once all data centers are being constructed in space, I think we've then achieved our goal on that front.
00:24:07 Philip: The second piece of it is actually enabling a space economy in general. So the technology that we're building is broadly applicable to all high energy use cases in space. Space manufacturing, asteroid mining, space hotels, all of these things will require dissipating large amounts of heat in a vacuum, which is the core technology that we're building, this very large low cost, low mass deployable radiator.
00:24:28 Philip: And so on a longer time horizon, enabling the space economy as a whole is through enabling high energy use cases. And you can think of us basically as a cheap energy source. That's how I would describe us.
00:24:43 Philip: Maybe eventually we start doing nuclear in space, maybe nuclear fusion in particular, because we can mine deuterium from the moon. But that's still going to require dissipating lots and lots of heat. And so this is the core technology. We're like a low-cost energy provider.
00:24:59 Scott: Very, very interesting. On the risk side of the business, as we get to the close of the episode here, what really keeps you up at night? What are the primary fears that you have as you build the company? I'm sure there are many.
00:25:11 Philip: Certainly for the long-term vision, we do need the launch cost to come down. I think the way we try and mitigate that in the short term is by going after this much higher value edge compute work use case for other satellites.
00:25:22 Philip: The first launch will definitely be a scary moment. If we have a failure on the first launch, it's not the end of the world. We have enough cash to get through the second launch, but it would not be ideal. Certainly, we really want that launch to go well.
00:25:32 Philip: And in order to mitigate that, obviously we're doing as much testing as we can on the vibration, thermal vacuum, all of the other types of ways that we can do testing terrestrially. Those are the two biggest risks on the engineering side and then on the commercial side of the launch cost.
00:25:45 Scott: As you guys think about back to this question of latency, I was having an interesting conversation recently with a friend of mine who is a DJ and talking about the difference between having a system with large speakers and amplifiers and all those things versus Sonos.
00:25:59 Scott: That's a number of digital speakers and the interfacing between those two worlds, it leads to too much feedback. And so you have to have a closed loop system on the amp side and then another closed loop system on the Sonos side. And it's really hard to integrate those two things.
00:26:14 Scott: I think of this metaphor in terms of you have high latency compute that's maybe in space or happening in other places and the really low latency stuff that has to happen more on-prem, prem being earth.
00:26:27 Philip: Yeah.
00:26:27 Scott: But just thinking of these close up systems over time where maybe things are optimized, certain things happen in space within the Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit) ecosystem and other things happen terrestrially that have to be much, much quicker.
00:26:38 Scott: It's a really similar problem area. Some of our investments, one of them is Ascend Arc, which is a geospatial satellite company. But the latency from GEO to Earth is still only a few seconds. And I think even though we discount GEO as very under optimized compared to LEO potentially, LEO's have huge fleets of satellites and require upkeep.
00:26:58 Scott: GEO sit there forever and have maybe a couple seconds of latency or less. So clearly advantages to the low latency worlds on Earth, but they're clear advantages as well to the high latency stuff, that high early latency stuff that may be happening in space. But just wanted to share that metaphor because it kind of reminded me of these two closed loop systems of digital and analog in the audio world.
00:27:20 Philip: Yeah, for sure. Actually, I'll just come back to one point, which I think you asked what our long time vision is. The real long-term vision is to build a Matryoshka brain. Do you know what a Matryoshka brain is?
00:27:32 Philip: Maybe not. It's basically a Dyson sphere hooked up to as much compute as a star system can physically support. So we're essentially the first company ever that's actually, if you extend the logical conclusion of our company out a few million years, you get to a Dyson sphere. So…
00:27:50 Scott: You may have to include the links in the show notes here for those terms. I'll have to read up about those. Thanks for that.
00:27:58 Philip: Dyson sphere is where you surround the sun with as much solar panel as you can.
00:28:01 Scott: Incredible. Well, in wrapping up, I would love to kind of lightning round here a couple of your bits of advice. So book you're reading, a newsletter, a podcast, where do you ingest most of your media from obviously in a fast moving place like space?
00:28:15 Philip: I listen to very standard podcasts like Lex Fridman and I just listened to the Marc Andreessen interview with Lex last night. It was very interesting. I like the Andreessen Horowitz podcast. I like why he puts out a whole bunch of interesting stuff that I find interesting. I don't honestly spend much time reading books. The last book I read was Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson, which I absolutely loved. But I should read more than I do, to be honest.
00:28:40 Scott: If you could live anywhere in the world other than your experiences in the Middle East and growing up in Europe and now living in Redmond, where would you live?
00:28:47 Philip: Manhattan Beach, L.A.
00:28:49 Scott: Come visit.
00:28:49 Philip: I freaking love L.A. I'm absolutely devastated that I don't get to live in L.A. yet.
00:28:55 Scott: And going back to how the heck you keep all these balls in the air and have built this incredible company so far, what's your favorite productivity hack?
00:29:03 Philip: I don't think I'm a particularly good example of somebody who should be followed for. I'm a procrastinator in my nature. If you just take on too much stuff, you have to prioritize and that helps you get the important stuff done maybe.
00:29:15 Scott: Yeah, I hear that. And I guess to that point, when you get overwhelmed by every last thing that's on your plate, how do you unwind or how do you get away from everything? What's your stress reliever?
00:29:26 Philip: To be honest, behind on everything at the moment. I thought I cleared my emails midweek last week and then the following day there's another thousand unread emails. It’s a complete nightmare at the moment. But the way I unwind, I actually do quite enjoy just listening to Marcus House, who's a space podcast.
00:29:43 Scott: Yeah, definitely.
00:29:44 Philip: Yeah, these kind of guys.
00:29:46 Scott: Yeah, to being overwhelmed by the email inbox, one topic we didn't even get into in this short amount of time we had here was coming out of Y Combinator having over 200 venture firms that were interested in your rounds.
00:29:57 Scott: Obviously, just an insane amount of demand. I can only imagine the email inbox overload. And the need to unwind, go to the gym, go to Manhattan beach, whatever it may be. Finally, where can listeners find you if they want to track you online?
00:30:12 Philip: On my LinkedIn. So I'm very easy to find. Philip Johnston, searched that with Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit). Or on X. I've started posting on X more recently. I find it's very hard to build a following on X compared to LinkedIn. Maybe that's because it's a more valuable platform in general so I'm putting a bit more effort in there. I only really started posting there like a month ago. So maybe that's also why.
00:30:32 Scott: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for spending the last bit with us here. We're super proud to be small investors, small part of the journey in Star Cloud (Lumen Orbit). Wishing you all the best and thanks not only for being one of our portfolio companies and founders, but friend of over a decade. And so we're very excited about what you're building.
00:30:49 Philip: Thank you. And we're super happy to have Everywhere Ventures in the company. So you've been very supportive and helpful partner. So I appreciate that.
00:30:56 Scott: Thanks, Phil.
00:30:58 Scott: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.