392 sats \ 15 replies \ @Reachableceo 18 Oct 2023 \ on: Starlink - the end of the free internet? Or a new birth? tech
Founder and CTO of suborbital systems here. We are competing with Starlink / Starshield and offering to all customers .
Using high altitude balloons.
High altitude balloons don't sound sustainable. Won't they run out of air? lol
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You should do an AMA. Would love to know more! Will prep some questions for when the time is right
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I would be happy todo so . Not sure how to go about that (is it initiated by mods or ?)
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I would recommend starting a new discussion when you feel ready. May be best coordinating with @k00b though for visibility
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I recommend just spinning up an AMA someday. Tomorrow even. It doesn't require anything on our end. The main principles behind successful ones:
- post it in the morning US (we recommend 10a ct)
- stick around and answer questions as they come in.
- the AMAs that fail the hardest are like 'i am ceo of bitcompany AMA - i'll be back in 5 days to answer' ... no urgency for upzappers and delayed gratification for question askers
- in the discussion post, be sure to give question askers some context on you and suborbital systems and things they might care to know about you
- the more you earnestly engage the more others will
That's it really. I also recommend posting about your plans to do the AMA the day before in the Stacker Saloon too just to give the locals a little heads up.
What are you doing differently from Project Loon, or Altaeros super tower?
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Re project loon , they stole that tech from another organization and lost the court case :)
So , starting with not stealing other people’s tech. Beyond that, we’ve developed an approach to industrial scale envelope manufacturing we believe will work and are fundraising for it.
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So they were shutdown by patent trolls and would have otherwise succeeded, or they couldn't reach a low enough cost, which your envelope process will enable?
What are the biggest hurdles in general and what drives the costs?
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Patent trolls? No. Do some research and you can read the court case etc . :) They tried to rip off a small business. Nasty stuff.
Cost isn’t really an issue for them. They are desperate for any other source of scalable revenue other than the ad business .
As for hurdles and costs etc , right now it’s like any other business. Finding the right talent , partners and vendors .
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The point is, if Google could not pull it off, why would the small business have been able to pull it off?
I suppose what I'm really asking is what are the biggest costs? Is it making the balloons? Is it all the telecom equipment? Is it having to replace the balloons frequently? -- I'm not sure what the lifecycle is like.
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Again, it’s not that google couldn’t pull it off. It’s that they stole technology from a firm that was and is operating quite well.
Do your own due diligence :)
The world is a big place. The telcom needs (and other uses of an airborne payload agnostic platform) is immense.
Opex costs dominate . Our capital stack is …. complex.
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Very cool. My reflex is that sounds insane but there must be some first principles thinking I’m missing.
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Do an AMA right now!
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