I'm very excited to share that I've joined @mfvpartners as an investor! I look forward to supporting early-stage founders building deep tech startups in this new role.

BESSENT: “The Fed is turning into universal basic income for PhD economists. I don't know what they do. They're never right … If air traffic controllers did this, no one would get in an airplane.” 🤣

The vision of NASA adopting privately developed “commercial” Earth science missions delivered as services is going to require a dramatic change in philosophy from principal investigators there. Including, but not limited to: - Many narrower missions (vs fewer kitchen sink

incredible : they found the literally least efficient way to fly an aircraft unmanned with the most points of failure possible

For the first time since its launch 27 years ago, all eight docking ports on the International Space Station are occupied. Two Russian Progress, a pair of Russian Soyuz, an American Cygnus, a Japanese HTV-X, and two of Elon Musk's Space X Dragons.

National Security Strategy 2025 was released yesterday. Not a long read at 33 pages, and worth examining for anyone interested in current US priorities:

It’s called Single Sign On because you have to Sign On every Single time

Little known fact is all Varda satellites follow the IRS naming convention. Future flights include 1. W-9 2. 1099 3. K-1 4. 8938 for chinese customers

It’s a special place. At Chicago b-school cohorts competed to donate the most cans to the annual Thanksgiving drive. My 1st year, a cohort won by raising cash to buy containers of staples from a bulk distributor. My 2nd year, competition was for who could buy the most containers

The Earth observation industry will enter the era of “permissionless persistence” in the 2030s: minute-by-minute surveillance of the world’s military assets that can’t be feasibly shot down, obstructed, or outrun. Multi-phenomenology, day/night, all-weather, low-frame-rate

LabView is the most insultingly dog shit software on the planet and sits behind 95% of all scientific discoveries in physics and chemistry.

One area in Silicon Valley just absolutely crushes the government is at the speed of blameless postmortems after an outage like this and the degree to which they help everyone get better.

I’m meeting more + more investors (angels & VCs) who tell founders that they invest at the seed (to get a meeting) but when you look at all the companies they brag about having been an investor in, they actually came in at Series B-D when ‘likelihood of success’ was much more

If building hardware doesn’t humble you, launching hardware into space will

A subtle but important shift in the last decade is that we are now so prosperous that the private sector can now fully undertake projects in industries that used to require governmental scale. Rockets, supersonic aircraft, nuclear fission and fusion, etc. Massive implications.

I just passed on a good business growing reasonably but not explosively and profitably at a reasonable valuation in a low multiple sector. I could not gain conviction that there was an exit that could return my fund. Good team, liked the app, just couldn't move the needle.

The ocean is a multi-trillion dollar economic frontier. It underpins food, trade, security, and climate, and we currently understand and control a tiny fraction of it. The last decade built the infrastructure for space. The next decade will do the same for the sea.

Bezos's people pulled off the task that stalled Ares V as a side quest.

If there was any doubt that we are an Aerospace Republic, there is none now. USA USA USA

Something I've mentioned before: Blue Origin absolutely has a "late-comer's advantage" here and appears to have made some improvements on the SpaceX approach

Let's recap shall we: 1) A second American company demonstrated a launch and landing of an orbital class vehicle 2) Two (not-@SpaceX) companies (@blueorigin and @ulalaunch) launched from the same range on the same day 3) A newish commercial company (@RocketLab now has an