The Exchanges

Q And I know that was one of your first partners. You talked about that a little bit. So can you just talk about how SpaceX has been expanding Starlink and the ways in which you work together?

A Yeah, I mean, so Starlink is, is really amazing in the sense that it just continues to get better so fast, and I mean that in a few ways. So one is, as I mentioned, they're expanding really fast. They're rolling out in new countries every week in major markets, right? So, um, just as a, as a real recent example, just this last week they launched in South Korea, right? Big market and an important ally for the U.S., so that's a big deal. The second thing is they Are also expanding the types of services that are available. It started that Starlink was just a consumer product, then they brought it to Enterprise, um, and, you know, initially that was used by Enterprise as more as a backup, and now it's being used more as a primary, and that is because the service keeps getting better and better and better as more birds, more satellites go up into the sky, and then each generation of satellite is also better. Not to mention the terminals on the ground, and there's now multiple types of Terminals, including the more recent minis that people really like. Hey, I can put it in a backpack. If I go on a hike, if I'm traveling, I can put it on the ski rack of my car. Perfect internet all the time. And so all that does for us is it gives us more use cases that we can unlock where we say, okay, now that you have connectivity on the oil rig or even, you know, on a farm or a ranch, you know, wh…

AI assessment note: “all that does for us is it gives us more use cases that we can unlock”

Q AI factories have become a hot topic. It's a trillion dollar question now with AI spend. What do you think the state of the market is for AI infrastructure?

A I mean, we are going through a generational boom with AI. We're seeing that with these big, you know, AI labs, the foundation model companies to this point that's really impacted, you know, consumers with ChatGPT and Grok and now knowledge workers. Um, but what we're really seeing now at Armada is that those really powerful models are starting to be applied to operations on the ground at the edge. And I think that's the next big shift that we're going to have to see is that these models, which are doing wonders for, you know, consumers and for knowledge workers, they need to be put in the hands of the people who really need them when you have to make split second decisions that sometimes impact life and death or billions of dollars.

AI assessment note: “we are going through a generational boom with AI”

Q Would you say that you're one of the first partners for these legacy industries to actually start activating their data and using AI? Have they been trying? Have they been looking at other things? What is the progression been like for them and their discovery, or at least like approach into getting into more AI?

A Yeah, one reason why I knew that we were onto something with Armada is that when I was talking to companies that I'd worked with at my previous companies that I built, I was hearing from them that they actually were trying to do this themselves, and they were running into, like, massive scale issues, and they'd have, you know, some, some servers in a closet somewhere, they'd be throwing some GPUs over there, and then they were trying to, like, be IT people, but that's not their thing, right? They don't want to be IT. They want to be, you know, people that are solving a problem, that are, you know, producing energy that we all depend on, that are producing raw minerals, that are producing, you know, products that we love or that are saving lives, you know, from firefighters to first responders to people, you know, to soldiers, right? So we don't want them to have to be IT people and we're helping them kind of take away all that complexity and giving them a scalable solution that they can just use and it just works when they need it to. And what, um, was really interesting to me when I looked into this is that there really was no company that was doing anything like this. And, uh, when I was talking to Trey about it, he said, yeah, that's a good sign because usually the best, you know, the best, uh, companies are ones where there is no real competitor. If you're trying to copy wh…

AI assessment note: “they actually were trying to do this themselves, and they were running into, like, massive scale issues”

Q I have to ask, Are there any crazy edge cases that you maybe have in the back of your mind that you want to solve?

A Edge cases? Is that a little joke there? All right. I'm going to, I'm going to share a story I haven't shared on any other podcast because it's kind of, it's kind of funny. So as we were getting ready to start Armada, I, and literally like I'm working with Trey on the, the term sheet and on the deck that with John on the deck that he can put in front of his partnership. And I am in Santiago, Chile, because my wife and I had planned, like, way long time ago to go to Antarctica, and we had a goal of going to all seven continents, and Antarctica was the last continent. And we go down there, and it ended up being an amazing trip, but one of the things that I learned is that there was literally, like, Starlink had just rolled out in Antarctica, and I thought, how cool would it be to have a galleon In Antarctica. You know, you could use it for research. You could use it for, you know, some really interesting use cases. And so I have a lot of, um, edge use cases. I like to think about the far edge. I could say Antarctica is one example of the far edge. And then, you know, I think what is like the, the edge is going to continue to get redefined the oceans. And then, I mean, we have definitely talked about putting galleons in space at some point. Um, and so the, That is kind of the vision of the company is that we have like a distributed cloud that covers the whole world, you know, and,…

AI assessment note: “I thought, how cool would it be to have a galleon In Antarctica.”

Q You've managed to recruit top one percent talent. You led AppDynamics and DataRobot. Your COO, John Runyon, led Okta through the IPO, and your CTO Pradeep Nair was VP of Microsoft Azure. How did this team form, and what was your recruiting strategy for them?

A The unique thing about Armada is that the mission is so big. The mission is to bridge the digital divide, and When I started to talk to John and, and to Pradeep and to others that we brought in the company, they were just inspired by the mission of the company the same way that, that I was and saw that there was a real need and nobody else is doing it. That's one thing that we talked about from the beginning. The three of us is that like the problems that exist at the edge, whether you're talking about the public sector where you've got remote battlefields, where you have to make split second life or death decisions, or you're talking about, you know, responding to, to To hurricanes or to avalanches like we are doing with the state of Alaska, or you're talking in the private sector about, you know, oil and gas companies that have oil rigs in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico or the middle of rural parts of Canada or Kazakhstan where they don't have any infrastructure and all this data is sort of trapped and you can prevent, you know, accidents that cause people getting hurt or even dying. You can prevent oil spills in the middle of the ocean and the same thing's true in mining and manufacturing and Logistics, whether you're talking about trains or maritime companies. And so we all just saw that there was this massive need and nobody else was going to be able to do it and felt li…

AI assessment note: “they were just inspired by the mission of the company the same way that I was”

Q So why is no one else solving it? I mean, edge computing is not new and large traditional data providers have been around for quite some time. So why is there such a white space?

A There's always been a blocker to AI at the edge, which is the, the infra, the infrastructure. And so I think a lot of people never even really thought about these problems or how they could solve them with the data that's trapped at the edge. But once you have the infrastructure there, it's actually amazing. Suddenly you start thinking about thousands of use cases and as much as possible, we're looking to partner with companies that want to go after those use cases. So if you are an innovative tech company that wants to work with us, please reach out. But sometimes we have to do it ourselves. And I think it will kind of evolve like the iPhone did with, with Apple, which is once you start to show what's possible and like the big problems that can be solved now that this infrastructure is at the edge, Suddenly everybody's gonna be popping up. All these developers wanting to build on top of our stack and solve more problems for customers.

AI assessment note: “There's always been a blocker to AI at the edge, which is the, the infra”