Christian Keil joins Andreessen Horowitz from Astranis to invest in aerospace and defense

storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And up next, Christian Kyle from Andre Horowits. Now, he was at Astronis, but he's got a new gig. He's in the reream waiting room, and we'll bring him in to the TV show. And I'm glad that they didn't take the camera from you on the way out of Astronis. He's still got the fantastic video. So, good to see you. How you feeling?

Feeling great, guys. Oh my god. Look at this. You guys got the the upgraded gong

everything. Everything. We need to ring the gong for you.

The gong for you.

Oh, baby. Here we go.

Ring that app loving gong.

Amazing.

I love it, guys.

Anyway, uh are how are you settling in? What are you most excited about? And where do you stand on data centers in space? data center space. Holy moly. Well, we'll uh we can talk about that if you want to. I'm happy to go deep into it. No, I'm I'm pumped, man. This is exciting. It's a uh it's a a new chapter of the journey, but I think it's been, you know, I'm in the same place, the same ecosystem that I was in, you know, it's the aerospace and defense, it's energy, it's uh hard tech, it's doing things in San Francisco. I'm staying in San Francisco. So, it's a it's an extension of what I was working on before, but I'm like super pumped for it cuz of course very different than operating at a company for however long.

Yeah. Reflect on the journey at Astronis. Uh biggest learnings, how did you change as a as an executive leader, individual contributor over that time? Uh what are your biggest takeaways from that era of your career?

Oh yeah, that that was a massive ch I mean from the beginning I was like, you know, just making my way out of San Francisco. didn't know anything about how this world worked. Um, barely knew about startups. Like I I remember very specifically I thought that I was moving basically to Los Angeles, not San Francisco. I was like, "Oh, I'm from I was from Minnesota. Like I don't know like California. I'm moving to California broadly." Uh, but no, it turns out that San Francisco and LA are quite different places. Um, but I didn't know that at the time. But I so when I moved out here, I didn't know anything about startups. I thought that like my main impression was like I know what Snapchat is. Like I've seen people working in a house by the beach. Sounds pretty fun. let's go do that. Yeah.

Um but then got here and uh dove in as much as I could. I actually started in business school when I came to San Francisco. Um and then when I got to astron um post business school, didn't know what I was doing at all. Started as an IC, moved my way up like kind of as the company was growing, I was growing, became a manager, became a team lead, became a director, became a a VP, whatever. Kind of got to see the whole journey. So, um I don't know biggest learnings like I don't know the the what you see from the outside of Silicon Valley is like kind of very different than what's happening behind the scenes like uh the from things big to small like you know companies announced a fundraising round. Turns out they actually raised that a long time ago. Like uh you know they um they have these big milestones that are uh very like it's very um I've seen how the sausage made it on on that side on the company side of like okay we're going to engineer this like perfect story of like this very grand arc and like that's what we're going to use to go fund raise like that sort of thing. Uh it'll be I think it' be very interesting sitting on this side of the table now of you know having gone through that and what's the uh what am I going to know about the uh what's going on the other side of the table.

Yeah. What's the state of the satellite internet market broadly? Starlink's doing great. Astronis has a bunch of deployments. Jeff Bezos has two products now across LEO and uh the new one from Blue Origin. It feels like it's heating up. ESTs is this public company. It's at 40 billion. Um and there's a lot going on there. like how do you view the market and how do you think it's going to evolve?

Yeah, it's very cool. I mean the the interesting thing is that they just keep coming. These constellations keep coming and coming, man. Like you think that they're saturated and they're like no, you know what we need is one more constellation.

500 more satell.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, I think that um I think that what you're seeing though is that um the same sort of thing that you saw with terrestrial telecom. Like if you look at how the world got covered from the very beginning, Arpanet like you know little universities that are connected just in the west coast of the United States. Then all of a sudden we have the internet that's this global thing that's everywhere and everybody's using it every day for everything. Um it took a lot more than one company to build the first internet. It's gonna take a lot more than one company or any one company to build uh the the internet from space. Like Astronis definitely has a piece of that. Like they're doing dedicated

like effectively sovereign satellites for nation states for big enterprises for um tons of different verticals of customer. They actually announced today they had a sweet deal that they announced today for Oman where they're connecting um the Oman for the first time with a dedicated satellite. So it's just for them very secure, very reliable, which you know is pretty important in uh in in today's world. But um that's that's also quite similar like that the the sort of like let's have enterprisegrade dedicated products like it sounds from my read like first read very quick read of what's happening with the the new Bezos constellation. It sounds like they're going after um maybe like laser comm more than just traditional RF coms, but they're doing something kind of enterpriseish focused whereas Starlink of course is the everywhere consumer product. So um it's exciting like you're going to see a lot more types of satellites out there, a lot of more types of uh services being offered and um we're in the very very very beginning stages of that.

Yeah.

I got to ask do you got a market map in the works? We are we love market maps. I feel like to to come into the firm establish dominance. Drop a market.

Drop a market map

in the first two weeks.

This is there's actually a maybe a market gap right now.

Yeah. No, I want I want I want the Christian I want the Christian Kyle Christian view.

What's on your We have a50. There's a

We had build list. Build list.

Yeah, that was your project. Oh, but you did it with Ryan. That makes sense. Okay, got it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So like um that hilariously like that that might have been one of the things that precipitated me talking to A6 in the first place was was that list like we put together a truly massive list of like all the companies that we know about that we could vouch for a little bit at least you know like we know that they're a real company doing a real like a real team doing a real project we care about and build.xyz XYZ. You can check it out now. It's just like this big list of um uh a bunch of startups. But yeah, that was that sort of thing. That's that's my best market map. I don't know if I got

I mean the problem is that it's a list. You got to transform that thing into a map. Let's put the dots on a map. It's so easy.

I'm sure. Yeah.

One code prompt and you're there.

Who who should be uh who do you want pitching you?

Oh yeah.

Like what's kind of what's your strike zone stage? I know there's some sort of uh there's different funds at Andre. So, how are you thinking about fitting in?

Yeah, we'll see, man. Like, it's my first day.

Give us answers now.

Yeah, I think that Well, so to answer though, I do think that um aerospace and defense obviously like I know aerospace. I love aerospace. Um I think there's a huge opportunity in space and probably now that I've done this more perfect report and that's out there. That was like a huge amount of my attention, huge amount of my time and just think about all that stuff. I think my next big project is going to be an aerospace sort of thing. uh maybe not a market map but it will be so like a a thesis about how I think the industry is going to evolve um but defense for sure too like astronomist of course had a sizable defense business I spent a bunch of time in DC for that job so I'll be in DC still um as part of this job and um I think it'll be I think those will be the natural places to evolve but AC is cool like it's not you don't get pigeon holes you don't get say like this is your lane stay there do this like that is not the impression at all that I've gotten so far they want me to go explore and to go see what's out there and to uh you know not be more of a generalist than any specialist.

Yeah. Is Astronis at the point where there's like a little bit of a mafia forming already? I know there's like that website for alumni companies of SpaceX founders. Uh is is that where you're pulling your network from or just San Francisco broadly? How do you think about actually meeting founders before they start companies?

Yeah, exactly. I think that it's well there's definitely an Astron Mafia that's starting. Um you know, it's a little bit of an eclectic bunch. She got everybody from like Jason Carmen starting a movie studio to like uh we got people that are you know on the China committee for competitiveness or whatever in the house like we have people that are going to be congressman like I don't know we got a bunch of very but then a lot of founders too and there are a lot of people that are already starting companies or um are about to start companies uh uh some folks that that are upcoming but um so that'll be one way for sure uh the broader internet uh the Twitter sphere you know that just being present there and uh and putting out stuff like more perfect is a good way to um have people come to you through that. Um being in San Francisco, I'm based here in SF and have been super involved in that community too. Um but honestly, I mean totally honestly the the real answer to that question is that like A16Z has kind of different needs for uh uh like finding founders than other funds. Like I think that uh if you're raising around like you want to go to a fund like A16Z and it's we get a ton of inbound that um that we sort through. So from my perspective, like that's an important part of my job, of course. Like I want to get the name out there and I want to put great content that shows that we are really thinking about these things like as intensely or like you know as um we're putting as much dedication to these problems as the founders are almost. But uh I don't think that it's like you know I I I'm not bringing that much unique like you know awesome uh deal that ACZ couldn't have got otherwise. They're they're Z.

Sure. Sure.

Uh highlights from more perfect. What are you what uh if somebody's going to flip through a 346 page slide deck?

What's the best slide in

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you guys you haven't had a time to like review them all on on air yet?

We haven't gone slides.

I won't take any offense. No, it's a it's a cool report though. I It was mostly to to be totally honest. It was like a way for me to dump a ton of context in my brain. like I'd been super focused on aerospace and comms and defense and stuff and I was just very laser focused like deep into that particular problem set but I wasn't thinking about more broadly like what's happening in the world like what's happening in America and so that was the intent like pull back the aperture like think about this broad sense of like okay are things good are things bad like how do you make sense of such a broad question like that how do you think about what's happening in America and this was my answer um I did it basically in like three waves. Wave 1 was 1776 to 1980ish, like wave two is 1980ish to now. And then the the future, like the the distant future, like where are we headed? So those are sort of the three chunks of it. Uh the latter two are actually in the report, more perfect, which you can find at more perfect.te. Uh it's been pretty cool seeing the response to it so far. We've had everything from like the the inevitable like annoying uh typo nitpick responses to people who are like substantively engaging and like really getting a lot out of it which I'm excited about. Um but then the other part of it which I released on Arena Magazine this morning is the earlier chunk like 1776 to call it 1980. Um which is fun as well. It's like you don't you don't think a lot about like what was life like in 1776? or the you know uh

people were living in caves apparently

according to there's this this Tik Tok guy

I manipulated time I I my fir my first day

he's like a hustle guru who basically he sort of misspoke I guess or just doesn't understand history and he he said that people were living in caves 300 years ago which is just obviously ridiculous but

with the dinosaurs too

yeah yeah yeah exactly they were roaming around in 1720 1726 uh Anyway, congratulations on on the new gig. We're very excited. Uh send us all the portfolio companies as soon as you start ripping checks.

What's your estimate on timeline to first term sheet?

End of the day.

First term sheet for end of the day. Let's do it. Let's do it today. Why not?

Why not? Love it.

Somebody shoot some some founder out there is going to be sending this to their co-founder like

I think I I talked to Christian once. I think

dude, there are there there's a lot of that going on right now. There's a bunch of people too who have never met me but still are like effectively holding me at gunpoint in my DMs being like introduce me to Mark Andre now and it's like oh man

a little little aggressive

that's the day two thing

congratulations new gig and thank you for joining TVPad on such a momentous day we will talk to you soon have a great rest of your week

we'll talk to you soon goodbye

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