OpenAI en Argentina: Emi Kargieman, el argentino que lidera el proyecto | Mindset Emprendedor

The human race needs to leave Earth, one way or another. The resources outside of planet Earth are infinitely greater than the resources on Earth. And well, one thing led to another and I ended up building satellites. If in the past infrastructure was trains, ports, highways, and bridges, what does the infrastructure we need to build for the economies of the future look like? Unconsciousness is the best ally of entrepreneurs, right? I mean, not knowing how difficult what you're going to do is one of the best tools. I like to take a long-term view of things, but above all I like to take a long-term view of the impact of what we can create, right?

Thanks for inviting me, Juni.

I'm a kid who grew up in Buenos Aires. Even though I left Buenos Aires more than 12 years ago now, I was a product of the Argentine public school system. As a kid, I always liked taking things apart and breaking things. And I think in a sense I'm still doing the same thing now, many years later. At 9 years old, my parents gave me a computer and I learned to program because there wasn't much else to do, and I was really terrible at playing games—I lost too quickly. So I started programming. I started programming at that time in Assembler and other things. And at 12, 13 years old, I bought myself a modem, which was a little machine that allowed me to connect with other computers in Argentina, around the world, and I basically never looked back. I spent my adolescence basically every night programming and getting into other people's systems with my computer, sleeping in the mornings, and going to school for a little while in the afternoon. And then at 15, I started my first software company. We were building management systems for small and medium-sized businesses. I'm talking about the year, I don't know, '89, '90.

Yes.

Yes, and I ended up hiring some high school classmates. Yes. We were having a great time.

Yes. And then at 19, I co-founded a company called Core Security Technologies with friends, where at first we started doing the same thing we were doing for fun—breaking systems—but so that people could find where their problems were. We were doing penetration testing, which was like breaking the security of systems, and we did that as a service at first, and then eventually we ended up building a penetration testing software company. Core was a bit like my MBA, I'd say, because I started it when I was 19 and when I left I was 30, and we had taken a group of four or five friends who used to meet at a café in Belgrano to a company with more than 400 employees and tens of millions of dollars in revenue. It was a pioneer, a kind of computer security group or community, from which many companies later spun off, and from which many people emerged with spectacular careers. And well, I dedicated my whole life to that, to technology. I always say I never had a regular job—I always dedicated myself to building technology, building things I liked, and solving problems.

Well, when I left Core, the first thing I did—I think it's a common mistake—was I thought the way I could scale the impact of what I was doing was by helping other entrepreneurs. So I decided to create an early-stage venture capital fund called Conca Ventures, along with Johnny Alzul and others. I did that for three or four years. It was an experience—it was a mistake, let's say—it was a very frustrating experience for me. Being on the other side of the table was a bit frustrating. Especially because I didn't really like the deal flow, I didn't like the types of projects that were there. We're talking about 2007, 2008, and we only invested in Argentina. We started with the thesis of investing only in Argentina. Relatively quickly we moved to the region because there wasn't much deal flow in the country. But even when you looked at the region, it was a time when there was a lot of focus on ad networks, a lot of focus on profiling, a lot of focus on advertising positioning—things that to me were very secondary problems. And so I started to get a bit disenchanted with the deal flow and I started building this model in my head of what I believed were the problem areas worth tackling. And well, I started thinking a lot about this intersection between energy generation, food production, and natural resource management—water in particular. And in that intersection, this idea of building a system that would allow us to make better decisions at a planetary scale started to emerge. And well, one thing led to another and I ended up building satellites.

Yes, there's a point where I'm the same kid who used to take apart watches when I was, I don't know, 6 or 7 years old and then tried to put them back together and it never worked out. And the thing is, I always thought from a young age that you have to demystify or desacralize technology in some sense, right? And strip away a bit of the labels with which it's sold to you. They tell you, 'Well, this is used for—I don't know—a watch is used to tell time.' Well, what else can you do with a watch, right? That's been my thinking my whole life. When I was a hacker, that was the thinking, and when I was building my companies, it was a bit the same thinking. How can you take advantage of the technology you have at hand to build things that solve problems, perhaps beyond what people imagine technology can do? And at that moment, when I started thinking about these large-scale problems, I realized we had a ton of technology. When you looked at how much it cost to build satellites at that time—an Earth observation satellite cost 300, 400 million dollars. And clearly, from my point of view, there was no reason for that to be the case. You look at what a satellite is made of—carbon fiber, a bit of electronics, a couple of mirrors. How can it cost 400 million dollars? If I give you a truck and say, 'Here, fill it with technology,' how do you make it cost 400 million dollars? It's impossible.

So I started to realize that a lot of the cost wasn't related to first principles—it was related to the engineering methodologies that were used, the type of contracts, how space technology was a post-war technology, just like computing was. But computing had followed a path of development led by brilliant minds like Steve Jobs, Alan Kay, or Steve Wozniak, who had followed a path of democratization of that technology. And in the space sector, that hadn't happened. And my insight at that moment was that the space sector was ready for the same things that had happened in the world of computing, and who better than a group of people who had lived through the computing revolution to understand what could be applied to the space sector. And that was the origin of Satellogic.

Yes. Absolutely. In terms of doing physical things—supply chains, suppliers, logistics, putting things into space. When you come from the software industry, where launching a product is something you can do sitting in your pajamas at home, launching a satellite requires a different kind of thing. But I think, you know, unconsciousness is the best ally of entrepreneurs, right? Not knowing how difficult what you're going to do is one of the best tools. And I think it's a bit like that. When Gerardo and I set out to build Satellogic, we did it knowing that from first principles what we wanted to do could be done, and that what remained was to solve some small engineering problems. But that belief in first principles, I think, is at the base of being able to tackle these kinds of problems.

What we managed to do was develop satellites that capture high-resolution images with unit economics that are very different from what still exists in the industry today. When we started, as I was telling you, high-resolution Earth observation satellites cost 400 million dollars. We make satellites that cost 500,000 that do the same thing. They're 1,000 times cheaper and do the same thing. We still have an advantage today, 15 years later—a unit economics advantage of 100 times over other companies in the sector. The satellites we make, for every square kilometer of image we capture of Earth, have a cost that is 100 times lower than any of our competitors. This allows us to completely change the way you approach the idea of observing Earth. Instead of having a few high-resolution satellites, we have today a constellation of over 20 satellites. It's the largest constellation of high-resolution observation satellites in the world, and we're growing it. Our goal is to remap the entire surface of the planet every day, so that anyone can make better decisions by seeing what's happening.

Imagine that you can see what's happening anywhere on the planet, or better yet, that real-time view of the planet you feed to an LLM that you can ask questions to. You say, 'Where are all the oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz?' and it tells you, 'Here.' You say, 'Where did they last refuel?' and it answers. You ask, 'How many trees were cut down yesterday in the Amazon and where? What was planted in the last month in Africa that had never been planted before?' Start interacting with the planet by being able to ask it questions about what's happening. From my point of view, it's one of the best tools for strategic decision-making for most industries in the world and for all governments. Being able to understand what's happening in a territory is one of the keys to making better decisions, and that's the problem we're trying to solve fundamentally.

Absolutely. Today we have proptech companies that use our information to do studies or analysis of rental prices or the future of properties in, I don't know, Saudi Arabia. We have companies in insurtech that are trying to develop parametric insurance for agriculture based on the information we generate. There's a huge universe of potential applications for what we do, where we're never going to be the ones creating all the solutions that reach the end customer. Instead, what we do is empower an ecosystem of value-added service providers—companies that take the information we generate and transform it into decision-improvement products across all these industries.

In particular, at Satellogic we're very focused on our mission, which is to democratize access to information about what's happening on Earth to improve decision-making. I think we're still—when I started Satellogic 15 years ago, I saw it as a 20-year project. And today, 15 years later, I think we're well on track to achieve within the timeframe I initially set as a goal this vision of having a complete map of the entire planet every day, and that this information somehow fades into the background, allowing anyone to make decisions—even in a way where you might not even know that the application you're using is using satellite imagery. Just like today, when you use Google Maps, you don't know or care whether there's a GPS satellite behind it. From Satellogic's point of view, that's our main objective—this democratization. We're very focused there. Now, the space industry in general has much greater potential, and that could be an entire podcast someday. But I have this thesis that humanity needs to leave Earth, one way or another. And in the process of leaving Earth, we have to build an economy in space that will be much larger in the long run than Earth's economy. And today we're taking the first steps and laying the first bricks on that path. So it's a super interesting moment.

Concretely, I imagine an economy—in a first stage—in what's known as cislunar space, which is from the Moon to Earth, low orbit to the Moon, including the Moon, and eventually an economy in the solar system. And the reasons—there are many reasons and we can go into detail someday—but the hardest reason for me is purely economic, and it has to do with how we can sustain the economic growth we need to give the entire population of Earth a good quality of life within the ecological limits that the planet sets. That problem isn't solved today. And trying to solve it within the closed system of Earth is very difficult because we need to grow the economy by an order of 20 or 30 times in the next 100 years. And that number is very difficult to sustain within the ecological limits of the planet. So how do we keep growing without destroying the planet? I believe the most reasonable solution is to extend the resource frontier. The best direction in which we can extend the planet's resource frontier is outside the planet. From a space perspective, the resources outside of planet Earth are infinitely greater than the resources on Earth.

No, neither will you.

Well, no. To live on other planets, I don't think so—unless medicine advances too much in the coming years. But to see an economy outside of planet Earth, I do believe we'll have time in our lives to see a gigantic economy outside of planet Earth. My bet is that in the next 80 years, we'll have to develop an economy outside Earth that is equivalent to the current economy of the planet—at least on the order of 100 trillion dollars. So I'll leave it as a bet. If you're still around in 80 years, we can see if I was right or not—if biology, genetics, and longevity treatments are on my side.