I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I grew up on the internet, learning programming by selling scripts online when I was 13, then used all the money I saved to build my first manufacturing business. I saw the fidget spinner trend starting, so I ordered 1k skateboard bearings and a catalog of parts from China to build a RepRap clone, starting a fab in my bedroom. For weeks, every two hours an alarm would go off, I'd wake up if I was asleep, clear the print bed of completed fidget spinners, and start the next batch. Then in the morning before school, I'd spray paint and assemble the batches for the day, run to the bus stops of nearby schools, distribute to my resellers (other kids), sell at school all day, and going home, collect my profits, give commissions, and continue manufacturing. I ended up getting shut down by the county which indeed aided in my radicalization against institutions. When I was 15, I started another business hosting servers for source engine games. At the same time, I started the first private competitive robotics org in my hometown, which is now a top 1% performer nationally. I became the first engineering hire at the ai startup Onder at 17 and built the MVP solo over in under 12 weeks. At 18 I joined jeeny.ai and built a team of 20 engineers, trained them, and brought their product to market in 4 months. I then left and started my own company, and went from concept to products with >10k users twice with swiftink.io and i.inc. This last summer I started sf2, a deep-tech hackerhouse which attracted incredible talent, spinning out companies working on BCIs, intelligent chip design, drone ai, humanoid robots, and rare earth metal refinement. Over the fall I learned rocket propulsion physics to design, build, and test a 500N rocket engine, all accomplished in under 60 days.
My mission is to seed life in the universe via von Neumann probes (an autonomous, self-replicating spacecraft). Life is the only force in the universe that combats entropy and wins. Without this, the universe will eventually die a heat death. Carrying the torch is the most important thing we can do.
I have always known I would spent the majority of my life and energy on building the company to do this. After moving to the bay a year ago via joining The Residency (a hacker house network for talented founders), I was relieved of my "deferred life plan" delusion - succinctly, I decided to drop everything and focus on the real thing, the space company. I'm now full time on it and am seeking $30k to extend my runway to the end of August. I've been self-funding the company and my basic living expenses, and while I've managed to keep expenditure low, runway is at 2 months and I am not at a stage where raising dilutive funding is the correct decision.
The first product we develop will be a financial flywheel to enable the development of self-replicating machines, same as Starlink is for Mars. We are developing an asteroid mining program.
Platinum group metals are necessary for our most critical microelectronics. The problem is, they are running out. There are only 4 countries with mines that are capable of economic extraction, with South Africa controlling over 85% of the market. The best mine globally has a mineral density of only 7 parts per million. Asteroid mining provides an economically strong alternative, with practically limitless scale-up potential. Metallic asteroids have over 90 parts per million of these rare ores, which are worth over $90k/kg. This means that even a mere 20m diameter asteroid is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Near Earth asteroids are actually easier to get to than the Moon. We're building spacecraft to grab these asteroids and bring them back to Earth.
I plan to raise a round of $2.5 million in the summer, which will be used to build the team and launch a near-optical IR targetting satellite. A significant advantage of the platform we're designing is that it is dual purpose, and can be used both to find and categorize our asteroid targets, and a number of missions that space agencies have interest in, namely in-orbit debris tracking. I've been working on the engineering on this for a few months now and have a vetted design. Here is what we're doing in the next six months.