Space guns, Congressional apologies, and Google’s checkbook

Top News

• Google paid $2.7 billion to bring back a former employee: How much would you pay to bring one of the authors of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper that kicked off the LLM boom? In Google’s case, about $2.7 billion license tech from a startup to get its founder Noam Shazeer back under its roof. Sure, acquihires are a thing. They just tend to come with a far smaller price tag. Far smaller.

• CrowdStrike apologizes to Congress: With a few months now passed since a faulty CrowdStrike update took down many corporate computing systems involving millions of machines, the company went before Congress to apologize. Cyberscoop describes Congress’s tone as somewhat accommodating, but no tech company wants to make the trek to Washington. You rarely get called up for doing something good, after all.

• Space gun startup closes a new round: No, that’s not a typo. A startup called Longshot Space is building a gun of sorts to take payloads to orbit. It’s a different approach to getting mass into orbit — and if Longshot’s long shot succeeds, we could see the price of moving goods into orbit fall dramatically. The company just secured $5 million more in funding that will, TechCrunch reports, “build a massive, 500-meter-long gun in the Nevada desert to push 100-kilogram payloads to Mach 5.”

Space and Supersonic Travel

The Longshot Space inclusion above nests neatly to a company that I am adding to the TWiST500 today: Radian Aerospace. And Boom, but more on that at the end.

While Longshot Space wants to use a gun of sorts to send mass into orbit, Radian wants to use a related accelerator. But instead of pursuing hypersonic launch like Longshot, Radian wants to accelerate space planes before sending them up into the great beyond.

The gist here is that while humanity has gotten pretty good at quick launch rockets in recent years — thanks, SpaceX! — it’s still very costly to send goods to orbit. Work to lower those costs would unlock a step-function in our species’ ability to get out of our local gravity well. Why Radian and not Longshot for the list? Radian’s space plane testing is making progress, which has me excited. Longshot feels a bit more nascent, but you can bet that it’s on our radar.

Closing, Boom. We had Boom on the show recently, and I thought that we had added it to the TWiST500 because, well, the company has a real shot at bringing faster-than-sound travel back into the market. Startups: Very cool!

— Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2013: Jason and Alex begin the show discussing a viral tweet from Harry Stebbings about venture capital and the balance between luxury and grit in entrepreneurship. They cover Amazon’s return to office policy, its use of generative AI, and the impact on innovation and stock price. They dig into antitrust enforcement in tech, Apple's AI advancements, and end with audience questions about return to office trends and app store rules.

E2012: Jason and Ryan Hudson of Pie.org discuss his experience with Honey, focusing on consumer trust, merchant reactions, and conversion rates. Ryan also covers Pie's vision for consumer ad control, demonstrating their browser extension and exploring the economic and legal implications of ad blocking. The conversation also touches on Apple's privacy stance, funding advice for founders, and the importance of company values.

Startup Legal Basics: Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw covers the challenges faced by distressed companies, including VCs stepping down from boards and the complexities of insider-led down rounds and pay-to-play scenarios. She highlights the legal actions and stockholder lawsuits involved in successful turnarounds, the importance of conducting market checks during financing, and ethical issues in the startup ecosystem.

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