Village Global's Solarpunk
Village Global's Solarpunk is a podcast about technology, space, and defense. We discuss how western society will use technology to adapt to the changing global landscape. We’re inspired by the theme of solarpunk — the mindset of what the planet will look like when humanity succeeds in solving major contemporary challenges through technology.
Episodes
- There is no doubt that we are in the early stages of the space economy, Mo says.
- The cost to go to Mars will be paid many times over by the young engineers who will be inspired by the mission.
- There are three main buckets in the space economy: space for earth (companies creating products for humans on earth via the...
- goTenna was founded after Hurricane Sandy when a brother and sister didn’t know if the other was safe because the cell network weren’t working. It has since grown into the company that it is today, selling to government as well as consumers.
- Ari and Andrea suggest tha...
- The cost per kilogram to get things into space has gone down dramatically over the last several years.
- Satellites have two parts: a payload and a bus. The bus is the actual structure of the satellite and despite all the hundreds of billions of dollars invested ...
- The Small Business Innovation Research program was originally developed as a grant program to allow small companies do innovative research. The gene for cystic fibrosis was discovered from the program.
- If you’re a small company and you get an SBIR contract, you should not count on getting a government contract...
- The US military and its procurement system has been built for equipment that is big, heavy, and hard to replace — things like ships and aircraft carriers and tanks.
- Commercial technologies can contribute to a military with equipment that is more agile, lower cost, and easier to replace.
- People...
- Since the moon landing, we have entered a period of stagnation. Confidence and optimism have declined and culture has entered a repetitive spiral where patterns from the 60s/70s have been repeating themselves.
- Government has become less effective and more gridlocked over time.
- Th...
- Raj and Shield don’t care whether a founding team has experience selling to government, because the firm can help with that. They evaluate the team, the market and the tech when they’re looking at an investment.
- Ash Carter was the first sitting Secretary of Defense to come to Silicon Valley in decades when he visited to ju...
- It can easily take 10-20 years for tech to make its way into the Department of Defense. The Defense Innovation Unit helped speed that process up dramatically.
- Some of the most important technologies being used in the war in Ukraine are commercial technologies. Mike thinks that the Department of Defense should...
- Alex was one of the original team members at Palantir. He says that helping build the company helps him pattern match today to find the best founders.
- Defense investing is not like normal VC investing. The usual model of investing $2M, then $10M, then $30M to give a company momentu...
- There are 17 rare earth metals that are of immense strategic importance. They are used in a vast array of everyday products like consumer electronics, medical devices, electric vehicles, and more.
- China has a strong influence in this space. They have many mines but are even more dominant downstream — they ...
- The secret history of Silicon Valley is that it emerged from the government’s desire to develop advanced technology and weapons in universities during World War II.
- Stanford became a powerhouse in microwaves and electronics post-WWII. People were encouraged to le...
- Every time there has been an acceleration in the speed of transportation in history, high GDP growth has followed.
- A switch to hypersonic transportation would unlock $4T in growth.
- In the future the key differentiator in air travel will be speed, rather than comfort.
- It’s currently extremely expensive to do fligh...
- Peter was “handed the Ferrari of skunkworks” when he came to be in charge of the Rapid Equipping Force. It was a program that handled over a billion dollars to deploy new technologies.
- He became more of an entrepreneur after his time at the REF and that led to starting BMNT.
- Often times procurement in the US mil...
- Startups are the most effective organizations for solving our biggest problems.
- Startups disproportionately contribute to economic growth.
- Governments and startups need to work together, not against each other.
- China has the GDP per capi...
- What kept Hondo up at night was that there was a good idea out there that wasn’t passed on to him and thus wasn’t used on the battlefield.
- A society can’t be secure without prosperity and can’t have prosperity without security.
- The challenge for startups working wi...
- The long-term headwinds that China is facing, including demographic changes, resource limitations, and real estate challenges.
- Why America should raise tariffs on anything made in China where it would be strategically important for those goods to be made somewhere else.
- The state of real estate in China, including the fact that China’s ...
- Why he says peace through trade was the biggest foreign policy miscalculation in US history.
- How US companies have approached operating in China and why Jacob would advise them to proactively work to decouple themselves from the Chinese market.
- Why Jacob would prefer that American laws change to res...
- His thoughts on the markets and the advice he has for founders operating in a market like this one.
- What is driving financial nihilism and how it has changed society.
- Why he’s only investing in founders where their company is their life’s work.
- Bedrock’s investments in hardware and companies making things in the physical world.
- The...
- Bilal’s investing thesis of finding companies building solutions to interesting problems that impact a lot of people.
- Why he’s investing in space and defense companies.
- What keeps him up at night and how his investments are working on those areas.
- Why he’s optimistic about unifying America.
- How to solve the problem of different peop...
- What she accomplished during her time at SpaceX and her journey to starting Epsilon3.
- Whether the biggest contribution of SpaceX to the industry will be all the amazing people leaving to start their own space companies.
- How to get into the space industry if you don’t already have a background in it.
- Why a co...
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