#49: Christian Kiel - Space Marketing 101, First Principles Thinking, and Getting Smarter in Silicon Valley

Sup nerds, today I have Christian Kail on. He leads marketing at Astronis where they are building satellites. Yup, internet satellites. They are building satellites for the billions of people who have never accessed the internet before. And Christian is a science nerd, absolute science nerd, but he didn't start that way. He started like me, a business liberal arts ideas kind of guy and has became fascinated with science by working in it and has learned so much. So Christian and I talk about everything from marketing and growing on Twitter to really cool deep tech science and how to learn basic shit like batteries and electricity. Because I gotta be honest, I don't know how that stuff works. And Christian has inspired me to learn more and dive deeper into this stuff. I really hope you enjoyed this interview with Christian Kyle. All right, Christian, you are a marketer at Astronis. You've recently tweeted about why marketers should be sent to space. So why should marketers be sent to space?

Marketers being sent to space? I don't know, man. I think, so yeah, I work at Astranis. We build small geostationary communication satellites. It's a, it's like a true hardware deep tech product, which is unique. Like we don't have users that are people. We don't have somebody coming across us on Twitter, finding our website and then putting a shopping, like adding a satellite to their shopping cart and checking out. It's just not something that people do.

Do.

Marketing ends up looking really different for us. We're trying to market ourselves, of course, to recruits, which is the closest thing you have to a normal customer. We want people to want to join Astronis, but we also want to talk to investors, and we want to talk to government folks, and we want to talk to enterprise customers and things like that. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of uniqueness in marketing for space in particular, but just hard tech more generally too.

Yeah, I see Astronis all over Twitter, you and Jason, Carmen, and I have a lot of inspiration. I have a lot of feelings about inspiration, envy. It looks like you guys are just having so much fun. I honestly just, it's so much fun to watch what you and Jason are building.

Thanks, man.

I just jumped in as head of growth at Product Hunt and I'm taking a lot of inspiration from you guys build out the Product Hunt Mafia, right? You guys have your Astronis Mafia, right? That you're building all over Twitter. You're building out this media mafia outlet where people know you guys, like you, they really do know you. So I would love to hear more about that and how you guys got started building out media, the strategy around that for Astronis.

Oh, totally. Yeah. We've, so we've been thinking about this for a while and we've done a bunch of different versions of it, honestly, over time. This most recent version seems to have worked, which is really sweet. We're actually like, I have a podcast personally. Uh, Jason has his own show personally. We have a bunch of content that we put out through Astronis officially. We're doing stuff all over the place, like trying to be very active on Twitter and very engaged in the like broader communities of which we're a part. And I think that was like the core insight that we had was, okay, you can go about it the normal way. The normal way is you put out press releases. The normal way is you like pay these outside content people or whatever, outside film crews, and you hire people on day rates and you have like big fancy shoots in your office like once every year or something. And you pay so much money for those, by the way, that it is pretty expensive to do things one-off. So you can do that. And that is definitely a model that we tried. But I think what we found is that there is a lot of value, not only in having that in-house, because then you can, you know, make your own content. You have complete control. You can do it all every day of the week, the entire year, as opposed to maybe like once or 4 times or 5 times a year. If you have somebody who's in-house and can do all those things. But it's even more than that. It's also you don't. Want to rely too much on corpo Twitter. If your, if your main form of advertising for your company is like tweeting from the of your company's name, like it's just, you're not going to make it. Like, unfortunately, how many people or like how many accounts do you follow personally that are like corporate accounts? Like maybe SpaceX.

Yeah.

Maybe only if they do live streams.

I run product on and it's pretty fun. So that's a good one. And then Beehive, I think is just probably the only other corporate account or one of the only ones because they are hilarious too.

Yeah, but that's the thing. If you're, so if you're a corporate account and you want to succeed, you have to go full meme. Like you have to be the Wendy's account that's like talking about the depression of life or whatever the hell they talk about. Like you can't just be like press releases on Twitter. Like it's just not going to work. Twitter is a conversational platform. It's a place where people go to talk about stuff and argue about stuff and find and learn things unless you're. I have a mental model, which is that unless you are doing one of three things, you are failing in a tweet. You either have to debate somebody or share an opinion that other people could disagree with. You have to entertain them or you have to teach them. And that's probably the order in which engagement is most effective on Twitter. If you do something that people can disagree with or agree with, that's the number one easiest, like the cheapest way to get engagement on Twitter is just to say things that are wrong and then people will debate you and then whatever. Yeah, of course you don't want to do that, especially if you're like more affiliated with your company. So then you probably rely more on the other two, which is entertain and, um, and teach. So if you're not doing one of those things, you're failing. But all of those things really come from a personality at the end of the day on Twitter. Like you're not going to engage with corporate nameless face, like not nameless account. You're going to engage with people like me and Jason who are humans. And this is actually what we love doing. And so we're just vocal on Twitter and people seem to gravitate around that.

Exactly. So when I came in as product at Product Hunt, I took over the Twitter and then they didn't even have the affiliate badges yet. So I gave. Everybody on the team affiliate badges, everybody is immediately recognizable, right? I feel like it started even before the affiliate badges with Morning Brew with the coffee cups. They were really on that early and Workweek with the yellow backgrounds, it's like a similar vibe. And then getting the CEO to tweet more, getting our content people just to start tweeting more and more. And it's been amazing to see the progress. And then because Product Hunt has a huge account, we have 500 K+ followers, I'm able to then retweet our content people's and we've been growing that really fast, growing their accounts. And I think a lot of people running brand accounts are afraid to grow their teammates' accounts. Maybe like, let's just focus on the brand account. But the teammates, it's all, you want the personality at the end of the day. Like people follow business, people follow people on Twitter for the personality and they follow brand accounts now as well for the personality.

Totally.

So Product Hunt has a very specific personality. It's a very goofy, funny personality. It really goes back to like the thesis I write about a lot. I write it, write about it a lot. The best marketing doesn't feel like marketing, right? Like your videos feel like YouTube educational teacher, right?

Yeah.

So does S3, just feels like education. And maybe you have investments in that, but it feels like education. And I hope the best marketing doesn't feel like marketing. That's why my book, Memes Make Millions, memes don't feel like marketing. So it's all around the same thesis.

Yes, 100%.

And I think as well, like we've been seeing this, I think for the last few years really, and COVID was like the beginning of it. So we've been seeing this with this tech overcoming the media, right? These tech leaders becoming more powerful than mainstream media outlets and that with COVID And then you see all these tech leaders, Balaji, Sachs, Chamath, whoever growing their Twitters. And then it all feel like it culminated with Lulu's tweet the other day that went super viral, like 18 million views. Views plus about going direct. And it feels like that was like a 3-year, 4-year buildup, all of that to that one tweet.

All of it was definitely the GOAT. That's for sure. Yeah. That was the perfect, it was not only perfectly timed, it was like the perfect message for the per— yeah. At the, on the perfect platform. Like Twitter's the right place to do it.

Yeah.

She's the best.

Yeah. You no longer need TechCrunch. You don't need the mainstream media outlets. You just need your own Twitter and your friends who are able to retweet you and share your message.

Okay. So I have, I have a little bit of different, like a little bit of a differing thought on this. So I have, um, I mostly agree with you, 90% agree with you. I think that it's super important for founders to control their own messaging. It's super important for founders to go direct and to be vocal and to share, like basically the personality of a company, especially the personality of a startup is just the personality of the founder or CEO. And so you really do have to lean on that a lot. I also think that the whole vibe of this techno-optimistic media thing. So me and Paki McCormick wrote, wrote for his newsletter, this piece called Techno-Optimistic Media. And that's basically the thesis, which is you can go direct. It is probably best to go direct. In the early days, you need something to bootstrap you into having some sort of audience. If you literally have zero Twitter followers and you like post the exact text of Lulu's thing as a marketing person, it's going to get zero views. Like it's just, no one's going to see it. Sorry. So you need a way to, to basically get jumpstarted into that and a great way to do it is by talking to people like me. That's self-serving, but whatever. Talk to people like me, talk to people like Paki, talk to people like that have these optimistic, like techno-positive or tech-positive audiences that are already pre-built. So I do think that's really important. Um, but interestingly, I actually think there's still a, like a pretty real role for media in particular for companies like Astronis who our customers aren't really on Twitter. Like we have a global business first of all. So like our people are all over the world, but then also government is a customer like that. DOD dudes aren't like sharing memes on Twitter.

So you're saying legacy media helps make it more qualified?

It can for sure. That's the value. And there are really awesome people in the like legacy media. I think like if you paint any big, huge— there are, there are, of course. And we love to— Silicon Valley in particular loves to be like the media is bad. But there are like Aria at TechCrunch, amazing reporter. She writes a lot of super techno-positive stories. She just wrote one on Terraform Industries, Casey Handmer, who successfully produced methane from atmospheric air and electricity. Only that. Unbelievable. Like, she wrote a really awesome piece about that and was part of the announcement. So there are awesome people out there for sure, especially in the space reporters. They rule.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like they're very rare. Wired is tired. I grew up reading Wired. It's so sad to see what it's become. It really makes me so upset. I've pitched them so many times. I could get into any startup that I want. I co-work out of Andreessen's office. I can't get into Wired. It's very frustrating, very sad to see what Wired's become, but hopefully we could, we could change that. I love to see these new media, new techno-optimistic media outlets because we like, we are becoming that, I think, is the techno-optimistic media. And it's really important and filling the world with good feelings around tech, especially with the fear over AI. A lot of people are scared. Like most normal people are terrified of AI to some degree. And like Terminator screwed us on that one. So it's super important to send the message.

How deep do you want to talk about AI? Like I, so I have a, I almost wrote a book about the, like why people are afraid of technology in the early days. I was like actually pretty close to doing it, but then didn't. I just turned it into this like massively long blog post thing that I might still publish, but I can talk about this all day, man. I have so many thoughts about why. People are afraid of technology and why it's like actually okay.

Why are people afraid of technology?

It's because it's unknown. That's the core thesis is like, if you are, don't know what something is, then you are afraid of it. It was true. And then the book would have focused or the blog post will focus on the 1890s. 1890s was like the coolest period of technology in America, in any history, like even cooler than the last 20 years was the 1890s. Like you started the 1890s, people had horse-drawn carriages. They were like, we were literally the only lighting in cities was like people burning whale oil. Like it was like, and then at the end of the 1890s, literally by like 1900, you had automobiles, electricity, elevators were invented around then. You had like in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the coolest technology demonstration of all time. It was like when Wheaties was introduced. America the Beautiful was written for that show. It was the first time that Pabst Blue Ribbon. It has the name PBR or whatever. Pabst Blue Ribbon because they won the blue ribbon at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Massively influential event, if only for that alone. So it was a really cool time to be alive and to see new technology. And people were just terrified. Like, I think some absurd percent of the US went to the show. It was like 20% of the entire US population went to that show in Chicago. And the most people loved it. It was the first time they ever saw electricity and like actual lighting outside. But it was also a terrifying event for people because it was all this stuff that they didn't understand. You had all these cartoons coming out after the show that were like, electricity is going to seep into your house and kill you. Or saying, and people were actually very rightfully afraid of automobiles in the very early days. The only place you would drive them was out in the farmland or whatever, not in the city. In the city, you had to drive less than, I think it was like 4 miles per hour was the normal speed limit. And so people would go out to the city and just rip or go out to the rural areas and just rip around. Kick up a ton of dust, ruin crops, whatever, kill livestock, have these like crazy accidents where they didn't have any seatbelts, didn't have any headlights, didn't have any like turn signals, like anything. I don't know. I think it's actually adaptive in the early days to be a little bit afraid of technology just because for most people, because they just don't have time or interest to actually go understand why it isn't scary. And it does require a little bit of like rosy glasses to look at technology in the early days and be like, I can see the full promise of this thing and what it can become. So that's a long story short. I think that it's our job as people who are technologists that are building these things to be actively telling people why it will be helpful to their lives, why it will be safe, why they don't need to worry, and why, like, in the future that we see, like, actually will come about. It's our job to tell them that, because not everybody has the time to know how a car works or something.

I've never talked to somebody who's afraid of AI who actually uses ChatGPT and has used it regularly. Is you use it and it's just the most harmless thing possible. It's like being scared of a puppy. I guess maybe in the future. It's the same with quote unquote AI girlfriends, like people freaking out about that. It's, I don't think anybody's dating ChatGPT out there, but I had a bet.

So as soon as the movie Her came out, I made a bet with my friend when we were watching it in the moment. When was that? It was a while ago. When did Her, Her was like 20 years ago at least. It was back when I was in Minnesota. So it was like. I think it was like 10 years ago, but anyways, when Her came out, I made the bet that someone would date or marry an AI before— I forget the date. It was probably like 2030. And I think that's still true.

I think it actually happened. Yeah, I think it will happen. I actually, so I do these street interviews and I ask people, is having an AI girlfriend cheating? And that is my favorite question to ask because half the people say yes, half the people say no. It's a very polarizing question. And I think there will be divorces because of AI. I think it will be, but it's the same thing. There are already divorces because guys get addicted to porn or because of cheating or whatever. It's like the exact same thing. Same shit, different toilet. People are freaking out over nothing.

I guess I really don't know anything about this AI girlfriends thing. Is it actually, there are sites you can go to and what's the deal?

Yeah. Replica. Replica. R-E-P-L-I-K-A.

Is this dangerous to Google? Should I not search for this right now?

Uh, if you have a company computer, I'd be a little careful, but it's, it's quote unquote AI girlfriend. What's also scary is the AI boyfriends, like Character.AI, um, is actually used mostly by women to basically sext with characters who are like basically fan fiction, right? So you think about early days of Wattpad and all the fan fiction Tumblr girlies. Yeah, that is what Character.AI is now used for. Just talking dirty, talking to Harry Potter, basically.

Classic. Yeah. Classic new use of technology. That's like literally what's happened with everything. VHS and the internet and now AI.

Everything starts with porn and gambling and illegal stuff. Ah, I guess you should be bullish on it then. I do want to talk. So why is the age of software startups over?

Ah, yeah. So I made a video about this. I think that basically there was a time not too long ago when the coolest companies were all software companies. There was actually real technical innovation that was happening in software. And unfortunately, the, this is not true of all, of course, but it's true of a lot of recent startups that are not AI. AI is changing the narrative around this. I made the video like before the kind of most recent wave of LLM stuff. But anyways, the general idea is that there used to be a lot more technical innovation than there is now in software. And so when people say the like classic story, which is like, oh yeah, but like Elon, he like started with. The software companies and then he made Tesla and SpaceX. True, but back in those days, like, it was really hard to build PayPal. Like, back in those days, it was really hard to build the, whatever the one before that was, Zip2, whatever they call it.

Yeah, now you could clone a Bubble template, no code.

Exactly. It would be super, it's like trivially easy to do what was once extremely hard. And that's scientific technical progress.

Yeah, there are templates for clone a Tinder, clone a Twitter. You just pop that thing out.

Exactly. And so it has that for rockets. Yeah, exactly. Not yet. It's like someday, maybe like someday the information for how to build a satellite or how to build a rocket might be so distributed. Like you're actually in satellites, you're almost seeing this. A lot of university labs are starting to make satellites and it's not really that hard anymore. There's enough off-the-shelf components. There's a, there's like standardized sizes. They actually call them like, there's a U standards, like a 1U CubeSat is 10 by 10 centimeters. And so you can just stack them up. Like maybe you need a little bigger one. So you do it like a 3U CubeSat, 3, 30 by 10 centimeters. And it's like standardized and there are parts for these things and you can just buy them. Like I literally, before I started doing the First Principles, which is like a technical deep dives and we talked to founders about how their tech actually works. I started by doing like shitty science experiments basically. And one of those was me trying to talk to the satellite that was launched by the Pope. So the Vatican launched a satellite. Amazingly, the idea was that it would broadcast down a message of hope to all the people of the world. I love this. I was so excited. I was like, this is awesome. I have to try to get in contact. This is how I tried. Like this $30 piece of hardware, RTLSDR.com, shout out, they're awesome. It converts on this end, goes to an antenna, and this end goes to your computer. And it just can convert signals that you receive from a satellite in your backyard to something you can just listen to. So you can use this to listen to radio. I could literally set it up right now and we could listen to radio on it. It would take 5 seconds, but I don't have the right computer cuz I don't have my PC out here. But anyways, but you can use something that's like off the shelf, $30 to talk to satellites in the sky. That's amazing. That's like amazing technology. And it's just so easy now. Like things get easier and they get, they get more democratized or whatever over time. And if you wanna be a successful entrepreneur, do you like, do this or whatever, or do you like, do you build the templated Tinder or do you go try to build brand new stuff? And I think that the value is in the brand new stuff. And that's really where people should be focusing their time and energy and brainpower. And that's why I say SaaS is dead. It's a catchy way to get people to work on that stuff.

I love it. SaaS is dead. Did you ever see Benioff's campaign for Salesforce? He hired like protesters to walk around with signs.

That pro-SaaS signs. That's hilarious.

Yeah, basically like when it was, let me find this, protesters. Yeah, the staged protests that kickstarted the growth of Salesforce. Here we go. Yeah, it was signs that said anti-software. He is such a meme lord.

You gotta be, apparently. Catherine Boyle just tweeted today about meme lords.

What did she tweet?

She just, I don't, I didn't actually read, I just saw somebody repost it with like The words like memelord in it, and then I scanned the tweet and saw the word memelord twice. I think it was like, it was something along these lines of why it's important to control your own message or whatever, but amazing. I love it. No, I said, no, it was the opposite. No, I remember her tweet was about the opposite of that. It was actually like, you have to let your message go a little bit. You can't be too like press releasey. We're just going to control everything. If you're out on the internet, you have to like work with people and let people take over your messaging for you to ride the meme wave.

Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah. One of the amazing things that I've noticed is Catherine has this thesis around serious people, right? She invests in serious people. She works with serious people, but the serious people she works with and invests in are very funny people, but they're working on serious things. They're not working on Tinder clones or AI girlfriends, but they are goofing around, right?

It's just like Anderol, literally. So I just tweeted this like literally yesterday. Anduril, extremely serious company. They're building weapons.

Very serious. Yeah.

Literally weapons. And one of their, one of their drones is called Roadrunner. And the reason it's called Roadrunner is because their competitor, I think it's Raytheon's drone, is called Coyote. So they're memeing. They're calling a drone Roadrunner when they're, uh, when to like chase around and beat the Coyote. And it's, uh, there's also a very serious company. So it is not impossible to both. Be fun and do serious things.

Agreed. Gary Tan, Elon, Marc Andreessen, they're all posting memes, right? Very smart people, but they're still posting memes or being silly. Everybody has a funny side. I think everybody enjoys humor. Everybody enjoys laughing. And so why hide that? Embracing that I think is really important and helps you stand out on the internet. Uh, that's a good—

here's a simple framework to the way to think about it. If you want to be serious, if you want to set your own conversation all the time, if you want to like be fully buttoned up, you can do that. But it's just not what the rest of Twitter is. It's not what the rest of the internet is. And so what you're doing in effect is you are on this massive like ocean liner of a ship and you're just like sticking yourself off the side completely perpendicular to it and just like getting blasted into the wake. Like you can try. To be totally orthogonal to what the conversation is. Or what you can do, and this is like the, what I realized when I started actually trying to get better at Twitter and trying to learn how to do this stuff, is what you want is you want to be mostly parallel to where the ship is headed, but then try to vector it ever so slightly towards the stuff that you want. So if you come out right off the bat and you're like, software sucks. Like you guys need, like everyone who works on software, like you're losers. Like we, but you do it in like a. Press release that you link to and you have people go to your like PR Newswire link to view it or whatever. Like you're just too orthogonal to where the conversation's happening. You're not like actually shifting people there. But if you start close to them, you use the same sort of language as them, you use the same sort of memes or whatever, the same format as them. If you are participating in the conversations that are already happening, but you're like slowly vectoring them towards hardware, then all of a sudden there's the moment. And that's what we're seeing right now. There is a moment right now for sure. Where deep tech is happening. And I think that now people are just talking about it. So it's very easy to just throw stuff out there and it's already in the conversation. So it's allowed. It's like people are expecting it. So they want to see more of it.

Somebody who's done this incredibly well is John Coogan. Started out making YouTube videos a lot about software and then has completely shifted more and more towards hardware, to defense, China, all sorts of stuff. I find it super fascinating. I think you're completely right. You got to start. By embracing the community, hopping in the general conversation, and then shift towards your perspective. And I also think you are 100% right that hardware is having its moment right now. It feels like that is what every VC is talking about. And so I have two questions from this. I have one main question from this. I am terrified of hardware. I am scared. I don't know how to make hardware. I barely know how to make software. I think I could probably code something up. I really, I have no idea how that stuff works. And I know looking into your background, you didn't study engineering, you didn't study science. How did you go on this journey of economics, business, liberal arts-ish to then understanding science at a high level, which watching your videos, you do understand it and looking at what you invest in. Because if I was to, you know, get pitched for startups in nuclear or whatever, I would not do it. I'm just too stupid to invest in it. And I think my brain— I don't think I'm too stupid. I just don't have the right knowledge.

Yeah.

So how do I get— how do I get that knowledge?

Yeah, it's— so this is the core thesis behind the show, First Principles. So Basically, I started off in exactly that, that place. I, when I joined Astronis, which was 5 years ago, I came from just a normal business background. Like I knew a little bit about networking because I had done telecom consulting when I was a consultant, but how much do consultants really know? Like I didn't really know anything that I was talking about. I just knew the words and knew the right concepts and whatever. But when I got to Astronis, I just realized very fast that number one, this is an engineering driven company. What we are doing here is we are building a physical object that we're going to launch into space. That is what matters. It doesn't matter how much cool strategy ideas I can come up with and whatever marketing I do, not relevant in those early days. We are building a physical object. I better learn how that physical object works. So the first thing I did was I literally went to all of the people in the company at the time. It was not that many. I joined as employee 50. There were like 6 engineering teams maybe. So I went to the heads of all those engineering teams and I said, What do you do? How does it work? And I just didn't stop asking questions until I actually felt like I at least had a foundational understanding of what they did. And I turned that into an onboarding guide. And I wonder, do I have it here? I don't even remember if I kept it out here, but it's called How to Build a Satellite for Dummies. And the basic idea of it is how end-to-end, how does a satellite work?

And I think that, dude, I don't even know how a fridge works, man. I don't even know how a fridge works or my car. I don't know how this microphone works. Dude, I am living in this world where I don't know any, how anything works because I am too busy on software and writing and all this stuff. And I would need to change that and I don't know how, and I feel so overwhelmed and I feel like a lost little, I feel like a toddler. Subscribe to First Principles. I feel like a toddler confused about the world still, and I need it to end.

I want it to end. So this is, here's the consolation you should have. Most engineers. Understand their discipline very deeply, but really do have the same sort of understanding that you do about all other disciplines. That was what I realized from writing this book. It's okay. When you go through an engineering program, you do get like kind of base level physics and chemistry and biology and mechanical engineering, like whatever. Like you get a base level of stuff, but that base level is actually not that complicated. It's really not that hard to get the base level understanding of whatever, how electromagnetic radiation works, like how do the waves work and what are frequencies and what, whatever, how does that, how do you get an intuition about how those things work? It's not that hard to get an intuition about stuff like thermodynamics, about like how heat works in a system and whatever, how rockets work. And so I, what I basically did is I set out to understand those things right when I started Astronis and I wanted to understand in the context of our company, but then quickly I just got curious and I wanted to understand about more stuff. And so you expand and you say, okay, we buy entire Falcon 9s from SpaceX. Crazy. We do that, by the way. We've done that twice. We've done that now. So it's, we had one launch. The first launch was just a spot on a Falcon Heavy, actually, not a Falcon 9. And then our second launch, which is coming up soon in the summer, we bought our own Falcon 9. Crazy.

Why?

And because we have to launch our satellites into space. Yeah. Basically we don't build our own rockets. So people usually think, wonder that they're like, oh, you build your own rockets to get the stuff up there? No, we use other people's rockets. So for our first launch, we used Falcon Heavy. For the second launch, we have our own Falcon 9 to put 4 of our satellites on and launch them up to space.

And those are— nobody's on those?

Just us. No people. Yeah, correct.

No people.

Almost all SpaceX launches do not have people. They have the Crew Program, which has brought a bunch of astronauts to the space station, but otherwise everything is just like cargo. So it's either stuff that's like cargo going to the space station, bunch of supplies or something, or more often it's carrying satellites. So the vast majority of SpaceX launches have been full of nothing but Starlink satellites. Takes them up to low Earth orbit, drops them off, scatters them about to go off and do their own, find their place in the orbit or whatever, which is crazy. Super cool. But then they also launch our satellites and they launch everybody else's satellites too.

So, and anyways, the point of your satellites, sorry, just to, I want to understand this too. So your satellites get attached to the Falcon and then when they hit a certain point in the sky, they pop off. And go to the right place.

Basically, yes. So like a rocket is not so dissimilar from like a water bottle or a Coke can or something. It's almost entirely fuel. Like the vast majority of what's in a rocket is just a massive fuel tank. And so the walls are actually even thinner than like a Coke can's walls are relative to the size of the thing. But it's a very thin, very huge structure that's just full of usually two kinds of fuel. You have the actual fuel and then you have like literally liquid oxygen because you're making a fire. Fires need oxygen to breathe. You can't like smother a fire. You have to like let it breathe. And so when you're in space, there's literally no air to do that with. So you have to carry your own oxygen with you, which is crazy. But so basically a rocket is just a big fuel tank. And then on top sits the quote unquote payloads. A payload is just whatever it's taking to space. And so launches up, usually like ditches some part of it, just leaves a smaller part of the rocket. That smaller part goes a little bit further with another like smaller with another, it's actually usually larger engine. And then once it's to where it ever wants to go, it like the top of it just opens up and like pops off and then it just reveals just these satellites there. And then the satellites just boop off of the little ring. There's a little adapter ring that's in there.

That's beautiful.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

But I wanted to understand this. I was, yeah, exactly. Leaving its, leaving its seeds out in the, out in space. So no, but basically I just wanted to understand it. I wanted to, I was like, okay, so we're working with them. We're like, we're buying this super expensive thing. I should better, I should understand how it works. And so one of the first videos I did on this new channel, like back before it was First Principles, was how do rockets work? And I just wanted to understand it. So I went and researched it. It's not like all that complicated, especially there's most things are extremely complicated in like the engineering details of how you make them work, but they are actually not that conceptually complicated. Like rockets are not conceptually all that complex. Like you are combining those two types of fuel and you're doing it at super high pressures and you're doing it to accelerate the stuff coming out the back as fast as possible. Simple. But getting that to work is obviously impossible. Like it's really hard to make it work, but you can understand it. You can get a sense pretty quickly for what makes a rocket good versus bad, or what, what are people trying to do when they're engineering a new, or like building a new type of rocket? What are they trying to? Like a new type of rocket engine. What are they trying to maximize? What are they trying to do? And naturally over time, I just did enough of those. Like I, I did this experiment. I haven't done this yet. People are mad about it. There's this kit that you can buy from these researchers at the University of Minnesota. I think it's Minnesota, but they're definitely from Minnesota. But anyways, they, it's a quote unquote robo roach kit. You can attach like this little device to a cockroach. And it allows you to like stimulate their little feelers to make them think that like a wall's on the outside or this side. And so it makes them turn as they're walking around. Like this one is great. People on Twitter are either very interested or very mad at me for this one.

Like you can control the roach?

Yeah, it's, it's not mind control, but it's like, it's, it's the same as like touching the side of your face and then you want to move away from the stimulus.

It's not pain.

It's just like telling it a wall's there.

Where are the best places to get science experiments for an idiot level like myself?

So there, so Mark Rober actually has some of these. So if you know that he's like a famous YouTuber, he's awesome. He used to be a NASA engineer. He had and used to actually used to work at Apple. People always say that he only used to work at NASA, but he worked at Apple for a long time too. Anyways, he has these little kits that are like super basic experiments that teach you cool stuff. But the most fun ones I've found are all over the place. Like I've just gotten curious about how to do something or like how something works. And then I try and then usually there's something like I, I have everything you need here to build a battery. We could build a battery right now if you want to. You basically just need like different kinds of metal and then you need, uh, I would need to go get salt water to put in between them. But I was like doing this whole thing about how batteries work and trying to figure that out. I like bought a, I bought a multimeter for the first time, which is like a very fancy, fun piece of equipment. It's like the most basic electrical engineering thing. It can measure like voltage or resistance or what have you. But that was really fun. I learned that one. The satellite one is not bad. I haven't made a video about this yet, but the satellite experiment is super fun. It's really fun. You literally just set up like this tiny little antenna in your backyard. It's literally this. It looks like little bunny ears from a, like from whatever, like a TV set. It's this. And this, and then you can talk to our satellite in your backyard. That's it. It's super fun.

You can talk or just listen?

Just listen.

Yeah.

If you wanted to transmit up there, you need a bigger antenna and a more legit setup. But no, it's fun. It's super fun. And the experiments are scattered all over the place. You have to go find them, but they're not that— once you— these are all whatever, kids could do these for sure. They're just fun to learn.

I'm curious, how does Astronis differ from Starlink?

Good question. Yeah. So Starlink is in low Earth orbit. Low Earth orbit is relatively close. It's 300, 500 miles up. It's where the International Space Station is. So if you've ever seen like the International Space Station whizzing in front of the moon, it's like a classic picture that a lot of people have seen. That's because it is orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes or so. And as it's doing that, that means that if you're standing over one place on Earth, you're only going to see it for 2 or 3 minutes at a time. Basically until it just goes out of view and then you have to, you just can't see it anymore. If you're trying to talk to Sallads in your backyard, you actually have to look up the table of like, when is it going to be over my house? And it only happens twice a day because these things, like, they're not only going around you, but they're also like, also orbiting Earth this way. So they're going this way, but they're also moving this way at the same time. Like twice per day or whatever, they ended up over my house and then I can actually see it. And so if you're trying to provide like a continuous service to somebody like internet service, which is what we do and which is what Starlink does, that's annoying. Like, that's why Starlink had launched so many satellites, is because they needed to cover people 24/7 no matter where they were. And to do that, you just have to have a ton of satellites, hundreds or thousands of satellites that are all like able to— once this one goes out of view, there's another one. And so I can just connect to that other one. But we have a different model. Our model is to go really far away from Earth, like 35,000 kilometers away, 20,000 miles away. And when you're that far away, as the Earth is— how can I demonstrate this? As the Earth is rotating, you are rotating with it out there. Like these guys in low Earth orbit are like spinning so fast that as the Earth rotates, it's still, it doesn't really matter. But what we do is as the Earth rotates, we are going exactly the same speed. So from the spot on the ground, it looks quote unquote stationary. We're in geostationary orbit. And so what that means is that you can put up one satellite, literally one, and connects people on the ground. It's much cheaper. It's much more like modular or whatever. We can cover individual customers with individual satellites so they can own their own satellite. Big deal. It's pretty cool. It's, it's something that has a lot of application in commercial and government markets because you can imagine why the Department of Defense would want a lot of smaller satellites as opposed to one big one. There's also for individual customers, they love having like commercial customers that are just internet, like internet service provider people. They like having the control. They want to say, okay, I want to put down service exactly here and exactly there and exactly there. Like from other places, other companies, they're these massive systems. Starlink isn't going to change based on what you want. Sorry. They're just a global system and it is what it is, but we can change. And so it's a cool— there's a lot of different models. This one is a very low cost, very flexible, very like dedicated model as opposed to the sort of like higher cost, like lower latency but shared version that is Starlink.

By lower cost, how much does it cost to get an Astranis satellite? That would just be an enterprise corporate thing that people do or government.

All of our, we only sell the, so start, this is actually like another core difference. Starlink sells to individual consumers. We sell to businesses. So it's not, it's usually not governments. It's not, we have a satellite for, uh, for the Philippines, for instance. We're not selling to the government of the Philippines. We are selling to an international internet service provider in the Philippines. Maybe that person will have government contracts or something, like, that's totally possible, but we're not directly contracting with, you know, the president of the Philippines. We're talking to a company there. But it is very much an enterprise sale. Satellites are very expensive compared to Starlink. A Starlink service might cost you like $100 a month or something. Like, our customers are paying like many orders of magnitude more than that for satellites, obviously.

Starlink, you're not getting your own satellite, you're just getting subscription. It's just internet, really.

Yeah, exactly.

Just so you could go off-grid or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. You buy it, you're basically buying like the dish that allows you to interface with the satellites that are already up there. So it's a, they're very smart dishes. They're super cool because what they have to do is they have to be smart enough to know what is the satellite that's closest to me, which one should I be connecting with? Like, how do I load balance that across everything? How do I make sure that I'm excuse me, like not getting hit by, like the signal isn't being obstructed by trees or whatever. It's, there's a lot of stuff that has to, you have to do that's smart when all the satellites are moving and there's all of them versus us. That's like the easiest. It's like a, literally like a piece of stamped aluminum. It's like you just point it at the sky. It would work just as well if it was like a trash can lid or something like half the time, because it just needs to be conductive and it needs to be roughly able to aggregate signals and it needs to point at a fixed spot in the sky. So you could, maybe I should literally do it with a trash can lid. That'd be fun.

That'd be a cool video. Speaking of videos like that, did you see, I'm sure you saw or were a part of maybe Ben Nowick's Reflect, I think it was, right?

Yeah. Yeah. He's the man. That's, there may or may not be a First Principles coming up that Reflect. They're extremely cool. Yeah.

They're extremely cool. I have shown that video to 4 or 5 different people because A, the concept's really cool. For people who haven't seen the video, check it out. But it is basically satellites in space that reflect the sun's light. That way solar farms can get light during the night. I think that's right.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so the video, but the video isn't boring. It's like YouTube, YouTuber, vlogger, like almost you'd imagine some like dirt biker kind of kid to make this kind of vlog or vlog video. And it's just badass. Like the energy, like I got chills, man. It was so cool. Yeah.

Ben is a master. He's a great example of this kind of thing. Like he started off when he was a kid, like in high school, making science videos for YouTube.

Yeah.

He's whatever, he's 10 years ahead of me, but he was like, and even when he was in high school, he was like building fusion reactors and stuff.

Like I'm not doing that in my videos, but building fusion reactors in high school.

Technically not a fusion reactor. People on Twitter got mad at me about saying that. It's a fuser, but it does do fusion. He did fusion in his backyard as a high schooler. That's pretty damn cool.

That's insane. In high school, I was smoking weed and trying to get girls, making memes occasionally, but that's wild. I am really inspired by this. I went to London Museum, one of the, one of the robot, I don't know, I think it was London Design Museum and just saw all of this technology and was like, I have no idea how this stuff works. And it really pisses me off.

I guess I have a, I think I might do like a challenge around this. I think I might try to do like a Twitter or a YouTube challenge, which is basically learn how your dishwasher works. Like you don't need to, we don't need to hop. We don't need to hop all the way to like rockets. Like literally this weekend, take apart your dishwasher and see if you can figure out how it works. There's not that many parts. It's not that complicated. Like how does the soap dispenser work? What, how does it, why does it disappear? Like why, when I put my thing in the dishwasher and I close the little lid, when I open up, it's not there. Why? Like, how does it disperse? What's going on with those like spinny things? Like how did, how does the dishwasher spin the, the little jets that are shooting up and like spraying water and everything? Like, I don't know. I actually, I've never even thought about it. I'm thinking about it now. So like I can guess, but I don't actually know. I never thought about it. So this is the challenge. Let's figure out how our dishwasher works. Work.

That'd be a really sick weekly challenge, almost very like selective kind of group people, like people just choose to do it and it's almost like an accountability group. We're going to fucking figure out how the world works by taking it apart. I feel like that's what First Principles is.

That is what the show is basically. It's I sit down with a different person every Wednesday and I ask them how their deep tech startup actually works. So we've done everything from like the first 6 episodes I think we've done now. It's everything from an engine that's powered by light, not by like explosions from gas, but like the explosion heats up a thing, like a sodium thing that emits super orange light. And then there's solar cells that capture it. Unbelievably cool. We talked to Guillaume, who is known as Beth Jezos on Twitter.

Can you even explain what that is? Like, I tried reading Beth's paper and my brain hurt.

Yeah, people should watch the episode. It's, it's complicated though. It's basically the simplest way to think about it is that it's not bits. It's not quantum bits, but it's like a secret third thing, which is thermodynamic computing. It's not classical in the sense that you have like deterministic, you plug in the, this electrical signal on this thing and this electrical signal on that and it outputs that other one. It's not like that. And it's also not a quantum computer, which is these crazy, I don't know, whatever, superposition of bits and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We could go into it, but their thing is thermodynamic computing. And the idea is like the thing that does the quote unquote computing is just the random heat noise of the universe. And so you do still do the same thing where you send in electrons to a circuit of some kind, but then you let them get jostled around by the random noise that normally sucks. You're normally trying to get noise completely out of the system. But if what you're trying to do is like, basically, if you want to create a very fast distribution or whatever that you can sample from, that you can pull like data from a distribution, that is what it's doing. And. The reason it's fast is because it uses heat noise as opposed to like basically doing just it all through like deterministic electrical signals. I don't even do, that's the best I can do. That's my very best explanation and people should watch the thing if they want to understand it better.

I will watch it and probably still not understand it.

It's crazy. I know that was probably the, that was probably the one that was like hard. The other ones we've done, we did the first ever episode we did was sweet. It was Astromechanica. Who's this cool startup that just went through YC. They just went through YC Demo Day, literally. It just happened. They just did it. And it's an electric adaptive jet engine. So it like, it's a normal jet in a lot of ways, but then it has a very unique way of being like electrically powered and getting electrical energy from the air that's rushing by them, basically. We did Terraform Industries, which is Casey Hammer's company where he's synthesizing natural gas, like literally from the atmosphere. It's super cool. I didn't know anything about any of these things before I interviewed these people, basically nothing. Like I knew how rockets and jets worked or whatever, cause I'd done that research before, but it's been super fun to just dive into all these and try to pretend like I know what I'm talking about enough to ask questions and to dive in. Cause the gist of the story, the whole point of the thing is like Christian's a dummy. He doesn't actually know what he's talking about, but that means that he can ask the questions that I, the audience, also a dummy, want to know.

That's been my secret for getting into startups and VC. It's just. Lean into my dumbness, man, and ask the questions just like I did in this podcast here was ask the questions. And the really smart people in startups VC are very helpful because they know what it's like to be in your shoes. They respect curiosity. I find it's not like academia where if you ask a question, you get shamed if you don't know the answer. A lot of academia, at least back in school, Silicon Valley, people respect it. Ask the question, be dumb, embrace the dumbness.

Be curious. It's not, it's not dumb. It's curious. It's everyone starts off knowing none of this. And so it's just a matter of when you learn it and how. And I think the fun part of it for me is that I am actually building up like more of an intuition for the stuff over time, which is super cool. It's, I now—

Has that been helping with investing?

Yeah, totally. For sure. At least I now know what questions are relevant for a new person who's trying to do a nuclear reactor and know the questions to ask about how it works and basically what is their particular model, how's it different from the existing stuff. Or if I meet like a person doing a battery company, I now know how batteries work. So it's, I can ask the smart question of like, okay, like you're doing a new cathode. Like I know what that word means and I know that that's actually a problem because cathodes are like most of the cost and most of the weight of a battery or something like. So there's, if you have an intuition, just like even a super base level intuition, you can understand like cool deviations about what these people are doing and innovating a little bit better. And I don't know, it, at the end of the day, it ends up just being a lot of reading. If you want to understand how energy works, pick up this book. This literally, this book, this guy, this book, it's really awesome. Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil.

I don't know how to say his name really, but Bill Gates, Science of Energy, or is it the sociological or what is, what's going on?

It's a little bit of both. It's like a, it's like a more technical and like detailed history. So the, I've only read this middle chapter, which was on how electricity came to be because I was, I'm, I still am making, I haven't released it yet, a video on like how electricity works basically.

Oh, I have no idea how it works. I totally was not paying attention in chemistry class or any of those.

It's fun. It's super fun. You should watch that video when it comes out. So basically I just, I'm using it right now as like a reference book more than I'm actually reading it all the way through. Cause it's like super long and I'm intimidated, but this is how you do it.

I love it. I love it, man. I wonder first principles marketing. What would that look like? Getting down into the psychology of marketing would probably be the base. Understanding why people buy stuff.

I've been thinking about that all the time because I've been trying to get better at Twitter, like trying to figure out what—

You've been killing it, killing the game. Absolutely. And I think you've also been putting out just a very high quantity and quality both, but you've been killing it.

It's been really cool. So literally it started last August, like last August. It's now whatever, it's April now. So that was like 8 months ago or something. That was when I started. And 8 months ago I had 1,500 followers. I had like never really tweeted for real. I like tweeted in that I. Went on Twitter to have fun and talk about the Michigan Wolverines, my alma mater, or like any tech, but it was not focused and it wasn't me actually trying to like tweet good. And then in August, I decided to tweet good because I would, had taken over marketing for Astronis and I thought it was a relevant, like an important channel to learn. And I had this hypothesis that these personal accounts would work way better than corporate accounts. Turns out that was true. And so we grew from whatever, 1,500 to 20,000 now over 8 months. And it was just by treating it like an experiment, seeing what worked, seeing what didn't work, leaning into the things that were working, building community, trying to be super fun to follow and to comment on, like rewarding people for commenting on my stuff in terms of engagement with them.

And Twitter is not a one-way channel.

Yeah, totally. It can't be. If it is, you're going to lose. Like you have to make friends and you have to build community.

That was the big thing when I was applying or not applying when I got introduced to work at Product Hunt, what do you see the Twitter being? And before I came in, the Twitter was a one-way channel to just blah, to shoot stuff out. Dude, we have thousands of makers every single day commenting on stuff and we're not even talking to them. We should be highlighting these makers, engaging them, and also helping them make more money. Let's retweet them. Let's share it. If we want people to love Product Hunt, we gotta help them out. It's not just a one-way.

Yeah, totally.

Entertainment channel like Fox News or NBC. It's not like that anymore.

So no, it's not.

I think that's really huge.

It's so important to understand the actual, like, how the platform works and what is the conversation people are having on the platform. And again, if you try to, like, if you try to do the ocean liner thing, you're just going to get sucked away. There's no way. It's never going to make us like an actual change unless you are mostly aligned with what everyone else is doing and you're just trying to steer them towards towards the things you care about.

I think that would be similar for me, honestly, over the last year and a half of Memes Make Millions and meme marketing in general was like, it was going down that path of marketing is very experimental, humor, et cetera, and seeing people do that and then just coining the term Memes Make Millions and then leaning into that has been the way of going down that path of bringing in my own deviation.

Totally.

I really like that. So everybody like. Learn the standards of the community and you got to learn the rules of the community in order to break them. And whether it's memes make millions or deep tech, got to learn the standards and then figure out your deviation. You can't just come in with your fucking deviation and not knowing how the platform works.

Some people can and they're the outliers, but don't try to be the outlier.

Like, I don't know, they go viral once and then they get shit on and never come back because they're afraid.

But I don't know, the counterexample is like the foundational example of founders going direct, which is Naval. Like if I started tweeting like Naval, I would totally fail, but because Naval's super fricking smart and he did it at the right time and he did it for the right people, he was able to tweet basically like philosopher king, little mini aphorisms. And it a million percent worked. It drove attention to AngelList, which was his startup. His version of marketing was going on Twitter and being a philosopher. Like that is an outlier, man. But so it can work, but you have to be Naval. So it's don't bank on it. Like the way for us. To make it work is to slowly deviate.

I agree. I agree with that. Slowly deviate. I think a little bit of philosopher king every now and then. It's always fun to be a philosopher king. We all aspire to be like Naval in some ways.

Totally. His fingerprints are all over modern Twitter for sure.

100%. I just had Erik Jorgensen on the podcast, author of the—

Love him.

Almanac of Naval Ravikant. Great guy. Fantastic guy. And he's similar in the sense that did not understand deep tech and now is learning and understanding it. So really a message to listeners and from a message to myself is you can understand basically anything if you spend the time figuring it out. And Christian, you are a living example of that, of not knowing jack shit about deep tech and then spending that time reading, researching, and talking to smart people. That's what's so cool about the internet, man, is you could talk to literally anyone and ask them questions. And I'm grateful I got to do that.

Yeah, that's fun, man. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, I really appreciate it. Very inspiring. I need to go buy some science experiments and drive my fiancée crazy. That's my plan for the weekend.

Perfect. Perfect. Make a battery. It's really easy. I'll send you some. You have to have the old pennies though, because you need actual— you can't just have the whatever's in them now. They actually have to be copper.

All right, cool. Send me some Amazon links or whatever links. I'll try to buy them. Dude, thank you so much. This will be going out soon. Really appreciate it.