What a time to be live. etn is officially one year old, so thank you to everyone who has tuned in along the way!! The main thing happening today is SpaceX spending $8 billion to take on America's biggest mobile networks. Here's your Order of Play.
13:00 - Robert Vis, Founder & CEO at Bird
13:15 - Oana Jinga, Co-Founder & Chief Commercial & Product Officer at Dexory
13:30 - Renato Circi, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of SAVA
13:45 - Dom Hallas, Exec. Director at Startup Coalition
14:00 - Anthony Pompliano, Founder & CEO at Professional Capital Management
14:15 - Steven Wang, Founder & CEO at Dub
14:30 - Nate Soares, President at MIRI
14:45 - Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos, Co-Founder and CEO of Arena
What’s Happening Today
SpaceX has agreed to spend $8 billion on wireless spectrum, bringing Starlink a step closer to competing with America’s biggest mobile carriers.
Elon Musk’s space company is buying Grain Management’s nationwide portfolio of 800 MHz airwaves, which the private-equity firm acquired from T-Mobile earlier this year. The deal still needs FCC approval, but it would help Starlink Mobile expand beyond basic satellite connections in remote areas and take on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile directly.
The new frequencies travel further and penetrate buildings and tree cover more easily, addressing one of the biggest limitations of satellite-to-phone services. Most existing handsets already support the band so customers wouldn’t need a specialist satellite phone. Combined with the 15,000 mobile satellites the FCC approved this week, SpaceX is building towards a service that can compete with conventional networks on coverage.
The announcement sent shares in AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile down around 6% in after-hours trading, while SpaceX rose about 3%. The three carriers formed a satellite joint venture in May, which analysts saw as a response to the threat from SpaceX.
However, Starlink still needs ground infrastructure, such as towers or rooftop equipment, to use the spectrum, and Verizon warned that airwaves alone don’t make a network. Analysts nevertheless expect SpaceX to offer a compelling bundle of Starlink broadband and mobile.
We’re getting into all of it on today’s show at 12 BST.
Daily Op-Ed — Free Rides
Wesley Chan has had a pretty ridiculous career.
He helped build Google’s early advertising system, founded Google Analytics and Google Voice, served as Sergey Brin’s chief of staff, and now runs FPV Ventures. He joined us on Monday’s show, and I could have happily listened to him for another three hours.
Wesley told some great stories from Google’s early days but given all the money pouring into AI right now, the bit that stuck with me was about Uber. He described a $7.85 fare from SFO into San Francisco that was “subsidised by VC dollars”, someone else covering most of the cost, and millions of rides like it.
Uber lost $31.67 billion between 2014 and 2022, and its first full year of profit only came in 2023, six years after Dara Khosrowshahi arrived to steady the ship. They were hardly alone. The Atlantic called it the Millennial Consumer Subsidy where nearly every app you used lost money each time you used it. My generation was raised on it!
But like all good things, the prices went up. Uber's average US fare rose 30% between the start of 2018 and its 2019 IPO, then climbed another 41% by late 2022. The business model wasn't really a mystery. Investors were paying to make these services cheap, hoping that once enough people got hooked the companies could raise prices and make their money back.
As Wesley sees it "compute is the new subsidy". Startups are giving away tokens in much the same way Uber once gave away rides. This week, Anthropic reopened its Claude Startups programme, offering free Team plans and API credits. It received 21 times as many applications in 48 hours as it had in the previous five months. Yesterday Anthropic paused credits and admitted it had "let way too many people in".
Free compute is proving about as popular as a $7.85 Uber ride. Labs wants founders building on their models early and are willing to pay to make that happen. Wesley says when he asks AI startups boasting about recurring revenue whether they’re actually profitable, the conversation tends to move on pretty quickly.
Revenue looks great on a pitch deck, but it’s a different story when someone else is covering your compute bill. Just like Uber, the subsidy can make a lot of these AI companies look a lot healthier than the economics underneath them.
— Lucas
etn. Insight
What if getting power to a remote site was as simple as flying in a blimp and dropping a cable? That’s the idea behind Lattice Energy, founded by EF-backed co-founders Vayu and Grace who pitched their startup on the show just before demo day.
“We are putting solar panels on very high-altitude, very large balloons,” they explained. The team already has prototypes and hopes to run a pilot with a partner by the end of Q4 2027.
Watch the full clip below.
Continental Breakfast
