All right, everybody. Welcome back to AI Basics. Yes, this is the show where we go over all the basics and sometimes stuff that's even a little bit more complicated, and then sometimes we dip into science fiction, and science fiction is quickly becoming reality. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of Satlyt. You want to talk about science fiction? He's building software that lets AI run on satellites, right? There's no standard way for satellites from different makers to work together and do large computing jobs. And you're saying, 'Hey, wait a second, JCal, how much compute is out in space?' Well, this is just getting started. So, our guest today, Rama Afullo, is skating proverbially to where the puck is going. Welcome to the show, Rama. How are you, sir?
Thank you so much, Jason. I appreciate it. It's an honor. I'm great. You're good. How are you?
Oh, well, you know, thank you for asking. I always take it literally. I have the greatest job in the world. I get to hang out with founders all day and tape podcasts and invest in 100 startups a year. Well, can you think of a better job? I mean, if it was a government job and they paid me minimum wage, I'd still do it. So, that's a pretty good indication you're doing something well. There's a Japanese term called Ikigai. Have you ever heard this term? Ikigai, Rama?
Yes. Yes. So, for people who don't know, put a bunch of circles together: what you're good at, what you're passionate about, what the world needs, what the world will pay for. And when you start overlapping those and you get all those different circles, sometimes it's a hobby, sometimes it's a pursuit that you do quietly, and then sometimes it's a life. It's a great life. And that's, I think, what we probably both share.
Tell me a little bit about what you're building and why. There's the Ikigai guy. Yeah. As you see there, what you love and what you're good at is your passion. What the world needs and what you love is a mission. What you can be paid for and what the world needs is a vocation. What you're good at and what you can get paid for is a profession. And that Ikigai guy, I mean, that is just what it's all about. I think you fall in here, too. Tell me a little bit about how you came up with the idea, when you started the company. What's the origin story here? Because this is, you know, pretty far out there. Putting computers into space and then getting them all to work together.
Yeah. This is science fiction that's quickly becoming a reality. Yeah. No, I mean, I love that guy. Actually, I just got married this week, and my wife's half Japanese and half Chinese, and we were in Japan earlier this year, and so I think like that center of that Venn diagram as well for my life outside of my professional life, like that works out well. But yeah, getting into this, so it probably starts with family. I'm originally from Kenya. I'm a Kenyan American. My dad's a professor of electrical engineering, and a lot of the work that he did, his PhD was focused on satcom and microwave and satellite technology, right? And my mom's a computer scientist, right? And so she was very much like, she's actually the person who taught me how to copy paste, and that changed my life, right?
Copy paste, very underrated quick keys. Oh, you talk about saving an hour a day, it compounds pretty nicely.
It's revolutionary. Like, I mean, just that concept was next level to me way back when, right? And I mean, I've got two brothers as well, and my older brother always was very entrepreneurial. We were the only people in the block when I lived in Botswana, the only people in the block in the neighborhood who had a CD writer back when CDs were a thing, and he used to like copy CDs for folks and sell them back to people, and I just thought, wow, there's a real need for this thing that he's doing, right? But yeah, to fast track, I mean, my younger brother's a stuntman, he's in movies, and we've always been a very dynamic family. But to come up with this idea, I actually knew what my startup would be called about a decade ago. So, just before I started working for Tesla, I was the third employee of Tesla in Africa, and just before I started that, I thought, well, I want to work in satellites, and back then there was this sort of craze of how you just take a common name and you shorten it a little bit, and that was like the way Silicon Valley made their names for their startups, right? Sure. And I took satellite, and it's actually a back acronym for space and technology analytics, right? And the idea back then was, well, I'm probably going to do something to do with satellites at some point in the future. And then I always thought, well, at the time there was OneWeb, right? And there was more or less the original Starlink, and the work that they were doing was so interesting to me, right? And I've of course always been fascinated by satcom since I was surrounded by it at home. And that really is like, I decided to buy the domain for about the satellite.com, the satellite, a few of them, a few different extensions, bought the AI like four or five years ago. But to fast forward through that, I worked at Tesla, then I worked at Google, and when I was at Google, I was really pitching for Google to push on orbital compute and orbital data centers, and this is just at the beginning of the AI boom. So of course their priorities were specifically terrestrial, how do we make sure that our LLMs are as powerful as what ChatGPT is doing, right? So I understood that, and I left Google and joined SpaceX, and I thought, well, surely they'll take this seriously, like orbital compute will be the next big thing, right? And I was told under no uncertain terms at the time that the last people who proposed something like this are no longer at the company, right? So I said, well, you know what, I think there's a path forward for us here, and I'm going to either stay here and become part of the furniture or leave SpaceX. I was a product manager at Starlink, leave and go and do this on my own. So I opted to leave three months into my time at SpaceX, and I started this just over two years ago, and happy to deep dive from there.
Yeah. And so for people who don't know the why, why would we want compute in space? I think most people listening here are going to understand it, but you started this before the why existed. So I'm wondering what your why was, because there's a recent why which has to do with, you know, a lot of societal issues, but take us through your why and society's why.
Yeah, sure. So I've always felt like I know a secret within a secret. So the first secret is that we should put computers in space for a number of reasons, right? One of them, like you said, is societal, like folks don't actually want data centers in their backyards. Like that's an issue, right? But then when you look at the problem a little bit closer, there's a number of other issues. There's power budgets and link budgets and the direction of how are we making sure that folks in the most remote areas have the right emergency response, that we're getting wildfire responses, and that you can process data in space. So this is like sort of the edge compute base case here, right? How do we make sure that you can get your data as quickly as possible? Because the single biggest metric in sort of telecoms and space communication in general to measure whether or not we're doing things the right way is the total latency of the system, right? And so...
Which is solved right by getting closer to the Earth. But if I translate what you're saying here to a lay person, you still need to make some decisions up in space as to what to do. So that even if it was just Starlink and Hughes satellite and all the other satellites, they still need to process something on the satellite. So you do need compute in space just for that one use case.
Exactly. And that's the base case, right? And from there you propagate, right? You start looking at, well, what are the things we do on Earth that we've decided we've got to do terrestrially on Earth that actually there's a better use case for us putting up into orbit, right? And it's actually more efficient in the sort of long run as soon as you hit critical mass, but to reach that point there's a lot of different steps you've got to take in terms of the launch capacity, launch capability, thermals, etc., and we can get into that as well.
Okay, so let's get into it. The next base case became, hey, people got scared by AI. Some people in the AI business kind of terrified people with the other side of science fiction, the non-Star Trek side, but the dystopian side, hey, we're all going to lose our jobs and oh my god, there's going to be computers everywhere. And the public said, hey, you know, maybe I'm not so thrilled about these data centers. They generally are aesthetically not pleasing. Sometimes they burn fossil fuels, sometimes they make noise. There's a number of reasons to maybe not like them, and a lot of the reasons have been resolved, but hey, we are where we are in terms of the public's perception of these. And there seems to be some advantage to putting them in space. You don't need, just off the top of my head, to sign a lease with somebody.
Yeah. There seems to be a couple of hundred miles of low Earth orbit available. Low Earth orbit is a bigger circumference than the planet Earth, and that means you have essentially hundreds of thousands, millions of times more real estate just in low Earth orbit. So, and there might be an energy advantage to having access to the sun without the atmosphere.
So maybe walk us through that series of conditions, and then we'll look at your software and some demos.
Yeah, sure. So, firstly, you're pretty well versed, right? So that's quite impressive, right? I think on the 24/7 access to the sun, the idea is to put satellites in sun-synchronous orbit, right? For them to always be facing the sun and always have access to the sun at a much more efficient level, right? Is sort of solving some of the power issues that you might get at a typical data center, right? Where power is probably the biggest limiting factor for compute in general, right? Then there's the sort of link budgets as well that can be solved for, right? But you got to think about like how are you sending the data from satellite to satellite, right? So is it optical inter-satellite links, which is probably the best path, but you've got to also think about where it makes sense to have radio frequency links, but that's a whole different sort of thing to think about, right? But now the societal side, right? So when I was at Google, actually, one of my roles was as a professional cloud architect, as a solutions consultant, right? And you start to understand the impact of having multiple cloud regions in different parts of the world and why that's useful, especially as a security feature. Now think about the way these cloud regions are built is that these are data centers that are in a fixed point. You've got a point of presence you can use to propagate these points, but really they're in a fixed part of the world, and you have to build more of these. Whereas with a data center in orbit, right, you actually can, like these are moving at 17,500 miles an hour in space, right, which is a gift and a curse, right? But because they're moving so fast, you actually have a situation where you can have this data center wherever you want at any point on Earth within 90 minutes, right, at any given point in time.
It's a pretty good commute if you can do it.
Oh yeah. And the advantage there is if it needed to send data down to the Earth, you could do it quicker. Or if you wanted to take pictures of the Earth, I guess you could take it quick. So when we see a spy film and they say, 'Hey, can I get a satellite above that area,' they can do it quite quickly. Yeah. So that's part of it. And if you think about having multiple satellites within a field of view of each other where you can actually relay this data over to them, right, as they're moving, so that's when you hit this critical mass, you actually are able to relay data and send them to the quickest point to send it down to Earth. Got it? Right. But you can also use them as nodes to process your data because it's this aggregated compute module, right, that you end up having in space. And what we're attempting to do is to do this across heterogeneous systems. So systems with dissimilar architectures.
