
space radar slinger @ArrayLabs // editor @PerAspera__us
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Joined February 2018
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did you miss out on SpaceX? relax. there are plenty of other ways to play the space economy. here are some of the best space investors of the last decade:
- operators who bulk-bought Falcon 9 launch slots that they didn't need
- "speculatooors" who sniped and squatted on prime spectrum bands
- landmen who bought within 20 miles of Boca Chica
- hobbyists who stockpiled RD-180s before Congress noticed
- tinkerers with a garage full of noble gases in 2021
- silent partners in studios rendering physics-defying spacecraft
- Rwanda
- Santa Claus (owns land in Svalbard)
what are some other examples?
new imaging mode added to @ArrayLabs roadmap:
Absolute Unit Tip & Cue
BREAKING: A promising new challenger has emerged to fill the launch gap left by Falcon 9’s wind-down:
an Irishman GuinnessBenchmaxxing
SOTA perf in pints-per-podcast-hour
this is lindy, this is leadership. bullish on @Willob and Ulysses
Who would have thought that it took a 29-year-old Irishman to put the teetotalers of San Francisco in their place
I have been training to competitively drink Guinness for decades
I was born for this
Sorry @elonmusk
📐 century
Big news, Texas! We're opening Constellation Park, a new 1.3-million-square-foot manufacturing complex and bringing 2,000 jobs to Hutto, TX, to support TeraWave and Quartz. The campus will house manufacturing for key Blue Origin subsystems, including solar arrays, avionics, telecommunications, and other satellite hardware.
Read more: bit.ly/3VqvxAL
electric to see us directly following Jared at YC's event in DC just a few moments ago... Godspeed @NASAAdmin, great job Andrew, and go team!!!
Ryan Duffy retweeted
Array Labs is a @ycombinator company. Today we're back with the YC community in Washington, DC for "The Startup Industrial Base: Building for the Next 250."
@andrewpetrsonn will be speaking at 1:50 PM ET.
a brave new age for formation flight
birds → fighter wings → nextgen constellations
watch this space :)
📐 supercycle loading....
(Great points all around from Erik!)
Early takeaways from Austin Deep Tech Week:
1. Austin is a serious f*cking city.
SF is still the center of gravity.
LA has built an absolute monster around aerospace, defense and industrials.
But after spending a few days in Austin, I'm increasingly convinced this city has structural advantages that the coasts underestimate.
People I've met here seem to have one primary objective:
Build.
Heads down. Gas pedal pinned to the floor.
Noticeably less obsession with looking important and more obsession with actually making shit work.
Deep tech rewards exactly that mentality.
2. Texas being aggressively pro-business isn't some Twitter talking point. It's an actual competitive advantage.
Heard versions of this repeatedly from founders and investors this week.
Permitting. Regulation. Taxes. Energy. Land. Manufacturing. Expansion.
When you're building software, you can abstract yourself away from geography.
When you're building atoms, geography becomes part of your cap table.
Every additional month waiting on a facility, permit, power connection or expansion is effectively dilution.
Texas understand that speed matters.
3. The coastal migration isn't over.
SF and LA still have unbelievable technical talent density, particularly at the earliest stages.
But the requirements change when a deep tech company starts working.
Now you need 100,000 square feet.
Power.
Testing.
Manufacturing.
Suppliers.
Technicians.
Hundreds of employees.
Suddenly Texas starts looking a hell of a lot more attractive.
And founders here don't seem nearly as worried about convincing talent to follow them as outsiders assume.
4. The next chapter isn't companies moving to Texas. It's companies starting here.
Historically the playbook has often been:
Coast → prove technology → raise capital → expand into Texas.
I think that increasingly becomes:
Texas → Texas → Texas.
More technical founders will move here before starting the company.
More pre-seed and seed companies will originate here.
More headquarters will be planted here from Day 1.
And that's when the flywheel gets interesting:
Talent → startups → capital → exits → experienced operators → new startups.
Once that loop starts compounding, ecosystems become very difficult to stop.
5. Austin feels significantly less distracted.
There is obviously bullshit everywhere. Startups attract grift like flies to shit.
But there's noticeably less keeping-up-with-the-Joneses energy here.
Less worrying about who raised what round.
Less optimizing for appearances.
Less obsession with which VC follows you or which dinner you got invited to.
More:
Does the thing actually work?
That cultural difference matters more than people realize.
6. “But the capital is on the coasts” is becoming a lazy argument.
Have you ever heard of a f*cking airplane?
It's 2026.
If you're building a generational company in Austin and a great investor in SF wants into the round, they're getting on the plane.
Great companies don't travel to capital.
Capital travels to great companies.
Austin already has serious institutional capital on the ground alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller funds.
More capital will follow the companies.
It always does.
7. Austin increasingly looks built for where deep tech is going, not where venture has been.
Deep tech is becoming less about a handful of scientists sitting in a Bay Area lab and increasingly about deploying massive amounts of physical infrastructure.
Factories.
Energy.
Robotics.
Defense.
Space.
Advanced manufacturing.
Data centers.
Industrial systems.
Those businesses eventually collide with the physical world.
And the physical world cares about land, power, regulation, labor, logistics and speed.
Texas has a lot of all six.
SF still has the deepest venture ecosystem. LA has built an extraordinary deep tech machine.
But Austin doesn't need to become either of them.
It may be building something fundamentally different:
A startup ecosystem optimized not just for inventing hard technology — but for actually industrializing it.
That's a much more interesting proposition.
Came into Austin Deep Tech Week thinking this was an important emerging hard tech ecosystem.
Now thinking “emerging” might already be outdated.
Ingredients are here.
Talent is coming.
Capital will follow.
Unlike a lot of startup ecosystems I've visited, Austin feels like it actually wants you to build shit here.
That's a hell of a tailwind 🏭🇺🇸
Finally - mad props @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, @Jason_A_Scharf + many others for putting this together & making this a kickass week!
and you thought Silicon Valley migration to Austin was over ?!?
BREAKING NEWS: #ElizabethHolmes is leaving prison and transitioning to a halfway house in Del Valle, TX (near Austin) next August according to a notice sent to victims of her crime.
Ryan Duffy retweeted
We're proud to share that Array Labs has been awarded a contract extension from the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) to continue our study of space-based AMTI (Airborne Moving Target Indication) concepts.
Read more about our work with ONR at the link below.
arraylabs.io/updates/array-l…
Ryan Duffy retweeted
シアトルよりダラスが好きになった。とにかく人が優しすぎる。バスの運転手さんが丁寧に行き先聞いて道案内してくれたり、レストランやスーパーでお客さんが自らおすすめ教えてくれたり、店員さんが我々のお酒を奢ってくれたり、来年絶対うちに来てねって大豪邸に招待してくれたり、いい人しかおらん。
Ryan Duffy retweeted
The butterfly effect is crazy bc a couple people decided a woman was too pregnant to fly and now US Soccer is going to win the World Cup
an ASML EUV machine is school bus sized, made of 100K parts, and weighs almost 200 tons
to move *one* you need to: break it down into parts, pack them in 40 shipping containers, fly them onto THREE Boeing 747s, then take a 20 truck convoy from the airport to the fab, then reassemble it
there are maybe 300 of these machines on the planet
so how does one just 'make its way' into China lol
this is amazing
bringing the Star Trek sickbay scanner to life
a long-lost sibling of what we (@ArrayLabs) are bringing to space... only we're pointing at the planet, rather than a person
this technology has already changed the world - but it is too expensive, too rare, and too gatekept. time to go faster, better, cheaper and bring it to everyone
fun fact, @DavidSHolz got his start at NASA. more overlap here than meets the eye 👀
Ryan Duffy retweeted
Devastating to hear this today. @JoshuaBaer believed in us early, throughly, and relentlessly, as he did with so many others.
Becuase of this radical belief in people, he played a part in helping to father thousands of careers, companies & ecosystems that might not have existed otherwise.
In his honor, go radically beleive in someone today. It's easy, free and the world will be better for it.


































