FYI - For Your Innovation

In this episode of FYI, Brett Winton, Daniel Maguire, and Tasha Keeney speak with Devon Papandrew, VP of Business Development at Stoke Space, about building a rocket designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Papandrew explains why recovering the orbital upper stage is the hardest part of the problem, how Stoke's actively cooled heat shield and engine are one and the same, and why the company skipped partial reuse entirely. They also discuss the unveiling of Nova Block 2 and the $1 billion Series E behind it, the Falcon 9-shaped hole opening up as SpaceX turns to Starship, why satellite operators want more independent launch providers, the 24-hour turnaround Stoke is designing for, and the microgravity manufacturing market that only opens once payloads can come back down.

Key Points From This Episode:
00:00:00 Introduction and disclaimer.
00:01:36 Why Stoke Space sits in ARK's venture portfolio, and what the company is building.
00:07:37 Borrowing decades-old actively cooled engine technology and applying it to the vehicle.
00:10:23 How far along Stoke is, with over 11,000 seconds of hot fire on the engine.
00:12:02 Why vertical integration is the winning structure in rocketry today.
00:15:38 Why Stoke skipped partial reuse and went straight at the harder problem.
00:17:48 Flight-proven hardware, Falcon 9's record, and the reliability case for full reuse.
00:20:06 The Falcon 9-shaped hole SpaceX is leaving as it retracts capacity from the market.
00:22:19 Whether the space economy today is really just Starlink and national security.
00:24:47 Microgravity manufacturing, and why coming back down is 10x more constrained than going up.
00:27:15 The technical distance between Starship today and Starship flying at high cadence.
00:29:28 What keeps Papandrew up at night as Stoke moves into higher-consequence testing.
00:39:57 Stoke's target of 24-hour turnaround, and what that demands of every design choice.
00:42:52 ARK's estimate of $300 per kilogram as the point where compute in space pencils out.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett work through what the midterms actually change for AI, separating the data center buildout, where delays may shift timelines roughly 10%, from the harder question of what federal AI regulation would look like and who it would favor. That leads to the sharpest disagreement the show has had in a while: Nick argues the incumbents finally get time to catch up and he would not want to be Anthropic or OpenAI heading into 2027, while Brett argues the economics push would-be competitors into becoming vendors instead. They also dig into whether Google search is past peak, what an AI-native ad unit even looks like, and why the Jensen Huang espionage story could make Chinese open-weight models look radioactive to security teams.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why a data center slowdown could raise compute prices and reshape who captures the margin
The case for and against betting on the incumbents to catch the frontier labs in 2027
Why a hidden instruction in an open-weight model is a Chief Information Security Officer’s (CISO’s) nightmare

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

Elon Musk put a $1 trillion revenue number on SpaceX, and the sell side has been staring at its models ever since. "Roughly five times wrong relative to what Elon said 2028 revenue could be," says Alex Potter of Piper Sandler. "That's absurd."

ARK hosted the call after the calls: a live post-earnings breakdown of SpaceX and Tesla with buy side and sell side in the same room. Cathie Wood, Brett Winton, Tasha Keeney, Daniel Maguire and Sam Korus of ARK Invest are joined by Alex Potter of Piper Sandler, Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, and Aaron Burnett of Mach33.

The group works through the numbers that moved them most: 20 gigawatts of power and cooling lined up for terrestrial compute, one to two Starship launches per week, 2 million driverless miles in eight months, and a 75% full self-driving attach rate on new Tesla deliveries. They debate where the money for all of it comes from, why Pierre Ferragu believes the vision-only approach to autonomy has cleared proof of concept, how Starmind and orbital compute could change the cost curve, and whether the SpaceX and Tesla merger that Brett Winton puts at 90% odds within 18 months actually clears the Tesla shareholder base.

They close on the bear case. Debt markets, regulation, China, execution risk over decades, and the possibility that the merger never happens at all.

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp, joins Sam and Brett with data from 80,000 businesses and over $275 billion in annual spend. His latest research, “Cracks in the AI Thesis,” finds AI spend is extraordinarily concentrated, with 1% of businesses driving 80% of it, and that those heaviest adopters are now slowing their spend even as token volumes keep climbing. Brett pushes back hard: three months is not a trend, prices have halved over the same window, and the gap between the median firm at $15 per employee per month and the top 1% at $7,000 to $10,000 is the whole story. The debate runs from revenue quality and venture capital (VC) -backed concentration risk to where spend could actually land five years out.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why falling prices can make AI spend look like it is slowing while usage keeps rising
Whether concentration in VC-backed buyers is a revenue quality problem for the frontier labs
What the gap between the median firm and the top 1% could mean for competition and private equity

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett open the Anthropic S-1, maybe the most impressive twelve months of revenue growth in corporate history, and debate whether a major AI-enabled cyberattack would be good or bad for the frontier labs. Then Nick breaks down Meta’s $90 billion raise, the filing suggesting Zuckerberg could raise $700 billion before losing voting control, and why the math on monetizing Muse may require Meta to build a bank. Finally, Elon Musk is publicly warning of an extinction event for neoclouds with chips they cannot plug in, and the team asks who that warning is really for.

Key Points From This Episode:
What the Anthropic S-1 reveals about gross margins, research and development (R&D) efficiency, and the risk factors everyone is quoting
Why Meta’s consumer agent math may not reach Instagram-level Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) without owning payments
Why compute now rents above $50B per gigawatt, and what that squeeze likely does to the neoclouds

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94