founder @ STRisker. Building near real time understanding of what's happening in local gov. Short-term rentals. Data centers. Grid buildout. Future goat herder
Space% being forced to support military, gov, and Mars dreams may materially impact the commerical biz.
It may not even hurt stock long term but it opens the door wider for Rocket Labs.
If I were to recommit us to holding for 3-5 more years this would be the core thesis.
SpaceX employee #13 @_Eric_Romo on why we don't see many Falcon Heavy launches:
"Falcon Heavy is extremely expensive, in part because it's three Falcon 9s strapped together."
"SpaceX has been clear they would prefer not to fly that vehicle."
"And it makes sense—every time they fly one of those, they have to shut down the pad for longer than they would for a Falcon 9."
"So when you look at how much time it takes to launch one Falcon Heavy and how many Falcon 9s they could have launched during that time, it's actually economically better for them to launch Falcon 9s."
" They have to launch Falcon Heavies because they've got big contracts with Space Force. Our government really needs it. NASA really needs it. But in the commercial market, those launches don't happen very often."
This has been one of the most important tweets I've internalized as a founder, through spaced repetition.
Applies even more after 1st interaction. Currently at 3-4 to 1 of no replies with a $275k enterprise deal close to signing.
* does not apply to spammy behavior
Assuming "no reply" = "not interested" can be a costly mistake
Just because someone doesn't reply to your email doesn't mean they're not interested.
Some of the best things that have ever happened to me (investments, deals, network) involved being ghosted many times until a Yes
Still waiting for someone to propose a true Texas sized state park from Palo Duro to Caprock Canyon.
One of the few places in the lower 48 where a state could create one of national park size and significance.
It'd be a crowning achievement for some legislator's career.
Texas ran a $33b surplus in 2023. Voters approved moving $1b of that into an endowment for parks, and now the state is on track to add ~1 new state park per year for a decade.
You love to see it!
Decades long blue dog recruiting pipelines dissolved from '10-14. Replaced by more Ivy league types.
Establishment Rs pipeline fractured after '18.
Low salaries + more companies paying for gov affairs (not only typical lobbyist stuff) pulled additional qualified staff away.
Half of the Democratic staffers are third worldists who think overthrowing America is their moral duty. Half of the Republican staffers are just Classic Nazis.
The staffer class is bad.
Outside of the US, the Middle East has drawn the most data center investment given the combination of cheap power, abundant land, state-backed capital, streamlined permitting, proximity to users, and relative political stability. That's likely over.
The 1989-1991 Millennial Bulge cohort experienced our whole childhoods from the Super Nintendo (1991) to the GameBoy Advance (Summer 2001) as a time of unprecedented stability & prosperity that felt normal
It's hard to explain to zoomers & gen alpha what it was like
@highbrow_nobrow I spent summers around Gerry Spence in his late 80s. Some days he could summon the magic for 4, 5 hours.
A trial at that level? Nah
1-2 days with a partner on national TV? He'd give every ounce he had left for the chance.
We may see levels of oratorical sorcery thought lost.
Data centers are now one of, if not the most, contentious issues we're tracking at city councils and county boards.
Funds and operators are starting to get serious about local and state government affairs staffing.
Shoutout to Jesse Josephs, am independent local journalist, for breaking this before any Memphis or Nashville reporters.
Whether the AI bubble pops or not, there is so much money rushing around that a lot of communities are going to get steamrolled by to good to be true plans.
The small town I grew up in TN has been overrun by a "hybrid decentralized AI edge cloud" company.
Dozens of employees in a fleet of Broncos. Numerous properties with seller financing. Wined and dined foreign investors at a hunting lodge. Even started a school recently.
Product names that could have been a school lunch menu.
I assume they were re-packaging cheap chips as AI ready.
Employees "we don't work all that much til investors show up".
They've missed payroll for a few weeks now, and now TBI is finally on the scene.
This harvest in TN, IL, & KY
I keep wanting someone to buck the million $$$ Deere fleets.
Open source mapping, Starlink, cheap sat imagery, lower robotic and sensor costs.
Some redneck somewhere must be retrofitting a fleet of '80s Cases to run autonomous, 24/7.
It's doable.
🇨🇳 China's fully self-driving electric tractor, the Honghu T70.
It can handle the *entire farm cycle* from plowing to sowing to care to cropping, while collecting real-time data on soil conditions.
It's already hard at work in the fields of Hebei and soon in the whole country.
One of my favorite moments in India this spring was seeing the number of first time fliers from Hyderabad to Goa
My seatmate (early 40s) spent the whole flight in sheer joy and fascination. Videoed 8 ppl before takeoff.
Always give up the window if its someone's first flight.
Learned recently that the communities around where I grew up had 7-12%, similiar at suppliers, of folks employeed in commercial generator production going into 2000.
Thank you random Caterpillar exec from 1996 going all in on Y2K fears.
We should have a statute to honor you.
If you're building in enterprise data/saas and your product has a search feature... take ~30 minutes to log those into a 'searches' slack or spaces channel.
What's being searched for between 7-11 on Sunday night drives the conversation/deal the next week.