Christian Keil of Astranis on low-cost high-orbit satellites, new government GPS contracts, and in-house manufacturing content

We'll accept it. I want to see it. Uh, next up, we have uh, Christian from Astronis coming in the studio. Welcome to the stream, Christian. You're technically your second appearance. Second appearance. Cuz he was in the background. I'm going to hit the gong.

I'm going to hit the gong for Christian just because I like you. Hit the gong. Welcome to the show. Look at that. There we go. There. The top down shot of the gong is absolutely It's just like top-notch, guys. 1% better every day. Uh your camera looks fantastic. The lighting looks fantastic. It's very cinematic.

courtesy of Carmen, the guy who set up the original uh astroning team, got us all hooked up, got us the right gear, uh set us on the right path. Yeah, it's great. And the green the green screen that you know AI generated backgrounding top notch. This is actually So this is going to be YC demo day.

So they're setting up right now like in our main area. They're going to put YC because they're right across the street, you know, and so they're put the the demo day is going to be like right back there. Set up all day yesterday. Yeah. We'll we'll we'll see you on Wednesday. We'll be there. Oh, nice. Wednesday. Uh yeah.

So, I mean, we have a lot to talk about. We'd love to just get the the the intro and update from you and then I want to go into uh the the where we are on the Relentless March to create the ultimate uh hard tech vibe reel at some point. But first, G give me the little update on your side. How are things going?

Yeah, things are going really good. It's exciting time for Astronis. So, we build small satellites for high orbits and it seems like the rest of the world is sort of catching on to this being a thing.

Um, we've been trucking away for 10 years at this idea and over those 10 years, you know, we've built a big commercial business. We launched four satellites at the end of last year. Those are getting close, really close to their slot to actually start providing service all over the world.

We have five more that are in the factory. Um, but then the big I mean the real big update, we have a bunch of government contracts that are really starting to take real flight.

Um, so it's everything from just normal communications for the government mission, you know, like same thing out in geostationary orbit dedicated to one spot on Earth, but then also we have this new mission which is resilient GPS, which is super cool.

I think John talked about that last time he was on just saying, you know, we want to take GPS, break it apart into many smaller satellites to make it more resilient and less able for adversaries to take it down or jam us.

Yeah, because there's a ton of GPS uh denial and jamming that's going on all over the world now since unfortunately there seems to be a battlefield on every continent at this point. Um, but that's very exciting. Um, talk to me about uh startup vibrials. Uh, what's been interesting to you? What's been your favorite?

Are we in the post vibriel era? Have we peaked? Yeah, we might be, man. Have we peaked? Uh, yeah. I really like the one from Zipline was cool. I thought that they did like when like the solar punk vibe felt very different. But what what are you seeing? What are you liking these days?

Yeah, it's really interesting because you see these companies that have not raised very much money at all putting like presumably like tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into a a vibe reel to announce them. Like I don't I don't disl I kind of love it but at the same time we would never do something like that.

Launching a vibe reel early in our that's ridiculous to our credit to the credit for the first the first the first vibe reel cost us like $2,000. Exactly. Okay. So this is this is exactly my point. The you can tell when you look at some of these vibels how much money they cost to produce.

and you can tell they weren't done in house and I think that makes a big difference. Like if you're a company that's doing your own comps like you guys are just like whatever rent renting a car that was probably your biggest expense. I don't know. Uh then you make it yourself like an internal thing.

Totally different vibe than like we hired a company. We paid hundreds of thousands of dollars because we want to impress you. Like you can just kind of feel that coming off of the screen when it's not made inhouse, not organic.

And that's that's more what I object to than the like, you know, just making things look nice. There's nothing wrong with making things look nice as long as you're doing it authentically and you're doing it yourself. So best practices for vibe reels for hard tech companies. Uh give me uh what is innovative right now?

So I think that so what we are shifting to is just more authenticity more showing less telling. So we are building we just launched a new astron manufacturing channel. It's pretty sick actually.

Basically, instead of it being like, you know, two dudes yapping away and just like talking about how great their company is, which is like the majority of startup coms these days. And like, you know, the founder sits down in the chair and it's like the big dramatic opening shot like you have.

That's one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum is an hourong video of just cutting metal. And that's what we're trying to do with our Astronis manufacturing channel.

So, we just we've launched like two or three videos, long form videos and a bunch of shorts that are more viby and like get people into the channel. And it's going really well. It's pretty sweet.

We're getting, you know, tens of thousands of views on those first videos on a brand new clean channel, which is exactly what you want to see. Getting some good traction. Totally.

But I think I do think that we're sort of like beyond the like talking talking head like uh wouldn't like oh wow look the CEO is going to talk to like I don't know that's not that exciting anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of companies that will like open- source software packages, but there's something that's almost like higher leverage about just like, hey, we have this engineer who really understands how to use this one machine. Like, uh, let's just put out a video of them talking about best practices for this.

It's going to be super niche, but like that community and from a talent perspective. Exactly. Uh, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's very exciting. Uh, uh, Jordy, anything? Uh because I want to know uh what what I will say on the on this topic, we just had an event here yesterday or Saturday. Um that was pretty sweet.

We had a bunch of manufacturing people from San Francisco all come to the office and like meet in person from like a talent perspective. Yeah. Like selfishly we had a lot of really amazing machinists and manufacturing engineers and stuff like come check us out.

But really it was just to like build a community of these folks in San Francisco. So I mean people often astronomist they like don't even believe me when I say that we're building satellites in San Francisco. They're like, they're like, "Okay, but yeah, but like where do you build them?

" Like, like where do you actually like and we're like, "No, it's like literally down the hall from where I'm sitting right now is where we build our satellites. " But, um, you know, it's cool to get that community together of San Francisco people. There is manufacturing in San Francisco. It is crazy. Yeah.

What are you expecting on the hard uh side from this year's YC batch? I'm sure you've had a little bit of a of a preview. Uh, we're headed over there uh uh tomorrow uh for demo day on Wednesday. No, it's going to be sweet. I mean, I think that Kugan, didn't you tweet this last time?

You were like, uh, out is Uber for eggs and in is like Ander for dog walking or something. Out is is Yeah. Uber for dog walking. In is anderol for dog walking. Yeah. Unbelievable. Uh, precision guided dog walking. Uh, yeah.

It's a Well, you know what's funny is that we talked to somebody about humanoid robots on the on the stream earlier this week.

And he was like, "Oh, well, like in manufacturing context, like it's a lot better to just have a a purpose-built road rod or maybe you want wheels because you're in a manu in a factory and you have smooth floor, so you'll just do wheels.

" Uh, and the one example he gave of a really strong use case for humanoids was dog walking. And there we go. I don't know. What's gonna think if it's not a human walking it? What? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

That seems like the one thing you don't want to outsource in your life is like the couple, you know, the 20 minutes you get to walk your dog and just like enjoy a new idea is an a humanoid robot for like patting your child on the back as they're going to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember last demo day people were trying to I mean this this was at a period I feel like uh about a year ago it became popular to kind of dunk on YC. Oh, totally. It's always been people take cheap shots at them all the time, but uh there were some people critiquing a bunch of YC founders for doing deep tech stuff.

Oh yeah. And it's like well shouldn't isn't that is that not like amazing, right? Like do we notice damned if they knew, damned if they don't? You know what I mean? Like they're getting criticized for doing just SAS and they're getting criticized now they move to like defense tech and and hard tech and whatever.

I mean at some point doing what they think is best and that's like the right call. But I mean as we went through IC like however many years like eight nine years ago and at the time there was like basically no hard tech in the batch except like we were the I think we're actually really one of the first batches.

It was us it was um boom and it was relativity space all in the same and so like that was the first real like hard tech YC foothold. Then nowadays, of course, it's like if you look at their list of requests for startups, it's like 50 to 75% of the entire list is just hard tech, like tech, that sort of thing.

Uh reactions to WWDC? Are you going to be multitasking on an iPad? Do you care at all?

No, I I don't even Did they actually release the like clear bubble thing everyone's complaining about already or is it just like They basically made it they they made they've launched a feature that's effectively like what you could jailbreak your original iPhone to do where a lot of the functionality is effectively uh and the UI is like see-through over a background.

You can put I don't I'm not tracking it. I don't really care. Bullish bullish. Yeah, totally. man. Uh, what are you guys using for expense management these days? What a question. So, we actually recently switched to RAMP. Let's go. Wow. Let's go. I love that. Wow. You put on the hat.

So, I'm uh I'm taking over finance right now. That's one of my jobs. It's I you know, when when I got in there, there was a different expense management system in place and we had to go the the bestin-class uh ramp. So our dogs are barking. Actually, I didn't even buy the hat.

Shout out to Py McCormack for sending me a hat value ad. You're looking at it right here. Yeah. When we when we partnered with Ramp, we only got one hat. He said, "You got to work for the second hat, you know. " Yeah. So, yeah. At least we got the jackets, though. I want I want I want one of those. The jacket's coming.

We We'll bring these up. Uh we'll bring these up to uh the bay. We're going to have a bunch of them. We have 412 hats. They're going to go not to be precise or anything. But you got one with your name on it. Oh yeah. Anyway, um well this was fantastic. Thanks so much for hopping on. Uh we will talk to you soon.

Cheers, Christian. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Good to see you. Uh our next guest is already here in the TVP