What are you doing differently from Project Loon, or Altaeros super tower?
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.
reply
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?
reply
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 .
reply
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.
reply
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.
reply