The Kook Report - The $ASTS DD

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: You know those tiny back-to-school emergencies that somehow become your problem? That's why I love Uber Eats. You can order school supplies, snacks, and lunchbox essentials for $5 or less. So when your kid casually drops, I don't like peanut butter anymore, or, I need 5 green highlighters for a project due tomorrow, Uber Eats has you covered. Get everything you need for back to school today from your favorite brands like Aldi and Staples on Uber Eats. Order now. Ends 9/7. $5 or less before taxes and fees. Select items only. Availability varies. See app for details.
[00:01:02] Speaker C: Okay, so tonight we are going to talk about the DD until launch happens. So many of you have probably thought about one day reading the DD, but probably have never done it. And frankly, I can understand why. When you get a big PowerPoint, you are probably going to think that you would mean well, but ultimately we all kind of know how this ends. You don't read it. So I'm going to read it to you until we launch. So on one screen, I'm going to be having the official ASTS Countdown, which says live in 79 minutes. And then once that happens, please flip over to ASTS and let's watch a good launch. But in the meantime, I feel really awful that I didn't go to Orlando. I've been kind of sick. I have a massive amount of travel coming up in the next couple days. And so last time doing the overnighter really killed me, but And Pan Man's got this one. I think what we'll try to do is always make sure one of us can go so that someone is buying the Dr Pepper and the plantain chips, and from there the culture will persevere. So let's get into it. The first slide we have is a funny overview. If you like Calvin and Hobbes, which I do, this was sort of trying to explain it to a child. And ultimately, what drives all of this is really trying to keep the memory of Steve Larison alive. He really helped a lot of us. develop the conviction in the investment. It was really Steve Larison and Katzie, and then Anpanman and I prodding these guys to push each other. And we were flies on the wall trying to feed them interesting stuff to think about that allowed us in the early days to really develop the conviction in this investment. So executive summary really speaks for itself. We can move through, but it's always important when you have an investment to actually think about what are you doing? Why do I own this? And the starting point is to be able to explain it in one sentence. And so ASTS is doing something that's pretty simple. And one thing I always liked about this investment initially was the elevator pitch is very simple. It allows you to connect your phone anywhere. And I was just reading, I'm almost done with this book called Streetwise by Lloyd Blankfein, and it's a really good book. And he was talking about the job as the Goldman CEO, where one of the most stressful things for him is he'd get on an airplane for 12 hours, and this was before Wi-Fi existed on flights. And as you can imagine, the CEO of Goldman Sachs being offline for 12 hours, he had no idea what was going to hit him when he landed. And that was the most stressful thing for him. And so very few of us are the CEO of Goldman Sachs, But I think we all have varying pressure points about what happens when we're not connected. And obviously the easy thing to communicate the value of this technology is what happens if you're stuck somewhere and you need to call. So that is a visceral pitch that people can understand, but it goes much broader than that. And so when you are able to commercialize low-cost, low-friction satellite broadband, the use cases are gonna be incredible and far beyond the simple use case of, I'm going for a hike in Yosemite. That's really the way to get people initially interested, but that by no means is my expectation of what actually is gonna drive the investment. So the thesis is that the company has achieved many milestones over the past couple years, It's materially de-risked itself in many ways. A lot of us were investors ahead of those risks, so we took the view that we would get paid for the de-risking. One of the great ironies of investing is sometimes you can invest well ahead of the de-risking event thinking you're going to be compensated for it, but in a lot of instances, after the thing has been largely de-risked, it's usually more clear in hindsight. you can still buy that thing and have an astounding return even though it looks like it's gone up a lot. And so, and Panmana and I would talk a lot about this. Admittedly, neither of us could help ourselves. And so despite having a lot of experience with these things and knowing like we could probably wait until BW3 is launched, we could probably wait until they have some regulatory approval, we could probably wait for this and that. Neither of us had the ability to actually wait. And so the best-laid plans of men often go awry. But the fact remains, here we are, and the company is massively de-risked compared to where I made my first investment. And the stock has gone up, but has it gone up to compensate for those risks? That will only be obvious in hindsight. But the investment from here is that there's been a lot of de-risking. The most recent one was in mid-June where we had Batch 1 launch and successfully deploy. That's a big deal because those are the composite satellites. Now we have the go-forward technology in space working. Admittedly, they haven't started operations, but we have all of the critical components now largely behind us. And so it's a question of scale. It's a question of market size. It's a question of competition. These are the things that ultimately have to be answered from here, and we just don't know how much we're going to get paid. So it's always useful then to have a brief overview of what's the enterprise value. I didn't update this, although ironically it's pretty close. And I've always found it really useful to really clearly lay out what your investment thesis is. So why do I do this? This is so that if it deviates, in theory, you have a good mental catch on where to sell. What you don't want is thesis drift. Thesis drift is what kills. You wanna make sure you know what you own and why you own it. And if for some reason that changes, you wanna sell it. So my investment thesis was that it's a revolutionary technology. They've accomplished something that will do something that's important for the consumer. My investment thesis was that there's a strong commercial case for this, so that there was going to be a big market and one with good returns. My investment thesis was that the business was scalable. So doing it once in a Petri dish, so to speak, is not enough to justify an investment. It must be scalable. So wanting to see that they can make lots of satellites, wanting to see those satellites can meet the demands of many, many customers, that there are lots of customers. and that the company has the ability to scale and take the opportunity. And then lastly, my investment thesis is that it's a defensible business model. So here we have multiple prongs of the defensibility. It's multi-tenant, which means that naturally none of the individual customers should really be able to make a case to do it themselves because it's global. In a given region, the customers shouldn't be able to team up and do it by themselves. It should be hard enough to do so that people are going to give second thought to try to do it. It should have a natural network effect. These are the types of things that drive defensible businesses, and defensible businesses should have durable economics, and durable economics should give rise to durable valuation benefits. So here's a lot of words, and this was just another way for me to write my investment thesis in one page. Granted, this is a little bit of a cheat where it's like, whoa, hey, Kooch, put your investment thesis on one page. And I'm like, well, hold my beer. How small can the font go in PowerPoint? But my view is that it was positioned to be a winner-take-most player. In my line of work, if you find something that can be a winner-take-most in a big market, You don't see that very often and say you bet big. So I have bet big. You need to draw your own conclusions on whether you believe that to be true, and then you have to understand your own belief system on how to size positions. But I believe that ASTS benefits from several strong and reinforcing barriers to entry that are rare to find in an early-stage company. There's commercial barriers, intellectual property barriers, there's a lot of patents involved, and there's regulatory barriers. And I believed I had an edge because the investment industry typically had overlooked space until the recent IPO of SpaceX. Space was deemed too hard. No one really knew what the space economy meant. It was largely believed to be just engineering-based job work for governments and sleepy European companies with TV operations or bankrupt companies like like iridium. It just wasn't generally that understood. But what's exciting about it to me is what's changed since your father's satellite company. And so with the business model that was unique, or is unique to AST SpaceMobile, with the super wholesale model, it has the ability to overcome where the prior satellite businesses had failed. The prior satellite businesses had failed because of go-to-market inefficiency. They had to sell you a phone and then sell you a service. Not many people want to have 2 phones. So with the super wholesale model and being able to work to any device, you've solved that problem. So the go-to-market swing should be very low friction, which allows it to scale. So my belief, which has to be proven, is that this is going to be one of the businesses that is the fastest to scale to 100 million users, could potentially be one of the fastest ever to scale to a billion users. That's a pretty sexy stat. If it's right, I'm pretty sure the company will be worth a lot. And worth a lot is relative to the current stock price. And I don't know that to be true, but I think it could be true. And so if you find a business that by many measures could be among the fastest revenue and faster user growth companies ever, That certainly is something that's going to get my attention. And so here we are. So the background of the company is useful to understand. It was founded in 2017 by a serial entrepreneur who's known to be a little bit crazy named Abel Avalon. He had previously sold a satellite company. He's been in telecom his entire career, and he's adapted. He's seen where the opportunity is, and he's seen when it's adjusted. And this is something where I'm always looking for the arc of a founder. What have they done? Why is their founder market fit? Why are they among the 8 billion people on earth uniquely situated to see and execute upon an opportunity? And are there signs that the world sees them as most likely to seize and execute on an opportunity? And here you have a lot of proof points. The guy has been a successful entrepreneur. And then he successfully exited his company when he realized it was actually low-quality commodity business. Do I hold that against him? Absolutely not. It's really hard to start a business of any type, let alone a successful one that gets to hundreds of millions of dollars of value. And then to have the self-awareness to realize that it's actually not going to be able to survive over time because of changes in technology, to be able to get out of it is the sign of a good businessman. He made money, and then he recruited his team to go after the big one. The big one is AST SpaceMobile. AST SpaceMobile was able to get the support of the people who matter, the people who enable him, the tower companies, the spectrum owners, the handset owners. Without the support of these partners, this company would not be possible. And the fact that he got the support of these partners tells you that he was viewed as a node of talent and team building and execution capabilities that other companies felt like they could not replicate. And so the technology is very elegant. It's a phased array antenna that is using the benefit of low-cost launch to ship a very big phased array that can electronically steer wireless beams.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else falls Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: You know those tiny back-to-school emergencies that somehow become your problem? That's why I love Uber Eats. You can order school supplies, snacks, and lunchbox essentials for $5. So when your kid casually drops, I don't like peanut butter anymore, or I need 5 green highlighters for a project due tomorrow, Uber Eats has you covered. Get everything you need for back to school today from your favorite brands like Aldi and Staples on Uber Eats. Order now. Ends 9/7. $5 or less before taxes and fees. Select items only. Availability varies. See app for details.
[00:14:59] Speaker C: And those beams are big. And so below we have a timeline of some of the relevant events, and this is again tracking the de-risking of the company. So an important thing to think about with any investment is, will your investment work if things happen, or will your investment work unless things happen? So here, when I made my investment, a lot of things required ifs. If the technology works, if the regulators approve it, If financing is available, if the constellation gets built out, if the MNO deals happen, all of these things were highly uncertain. And you could have called any expert consultants and they would have said that these things will not happen. They would certainly not say these things might happen. They said they will not happen. So the entirety of the world believed that these if statements were going to resolve to no. Without the burden of legacy knowledge, but with the benefit of being a generalist and with the benefit of some really talented friends that I've made along the way, like Anpanman, Katzi, Steve Larison, and a whole host of other people, we developed views on how these if statements would resolve. And then you can see a formatting error here. The thing spilled over. But where we stand today, as these if statements have resolved to, yeah, technology does work. Now you have a stock that should continue to go up because the business should grow unless something changes. So if the technology fails, so basically it's going to keep working unless the technology fails. Unless the regulations change, unless financing disappears, these become very unlikely. And so now I believe that we're really left with one big if statement, which is just if there's a big market. And that's something that increasingly, I think, if you were to have Calci odds on this, Calci odds for is direct-to-device satellite going to be a big market? I think that the probabilities on Kalshi would be yes. Why do I feel that way? Because SpaceX stock is effectively a Kalshi market, and the stock market is saying, yeah, this is big. And just listen to the SpaceX call just a couple hours ago. They're talking about how they want to become an MNO. And so they view this as a huge market. They could be wrong, of course, but they're probably not wrong. And so that leaves it really is an opportunity for ASTS to lose. So this goes to what a consensus viewpoint is and what the variant view is that you have, or what I have. And so the consensus view, especially if we rewind a year or two ago, is that satellite ventures have historically been plagued by financial distress. And people usually just stop there and they move on and go, yeah, satellites are bad. And what I think they missed is the evolution of the business model the evolution of launch costs, and the propagation of demand by consumers. So those are things where you can see why people with 5 minutes of due diligence concluded one thing, but then why you could develop a view on another outcome. And then also, well, if you start to believe that, hey, maybe the consensus view on satellite businesses is wrong, look at SpaceX, then you could go, well, yeah, but they're going to lose To SpaceX. So you could say, well, yeah, okay, the world has changed. This is very exciting. However, ASTS is surely going to lose to Elon Musk. Well, I have a viewpoint on that, and we'll discuss that in a bit. So here's the timeline, useful when you're doing an analysis just to write it out, see what's happened, make sure you start to really feel the ebb and flow of events. A lot of events have happened. And so then what drives future events?
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Kalos.
[00:19:21] Speaker C: And so looking forward to the near future, things I'm looking forward are an announcement of J.Leo, which is a billion-dollar deal. Knowing how business gets done in Japan, while this is near-term in the context of a company, It might be a couple months in the context of an actual investment. Then we're looking for the continued pacing of launch. So it's amazing that here we are. For me, it's still August 4th. For many of you, it's August 5th. It's amazing that it's really just been a month and a half between launches. That's really exciting. That could start to compress yet further to basically once a month. Pretty cool. And then we're also waiting for some of these bigger bang contracts that are going to really shift the perception of the company's importance. And so Golden Dome, for one, is a big deal that I'm waiting for. How that will take place, I don't know. FirstNet is another one, but then these all really converge to an ultimate outcome, which is truly the important driver, which is as we cruise through time, how much revenue does this company generate? Is this company going to be able to support a $100 billion market cap, a $250 billion market cap, a trillion-dollar market cap? We don't know. Some of those are pretty big numbers. Previously, the idea of a trillion-dollar company was unheard of. So to stand here in the dugout and say that ASTS is going to be a trillion-dollar company is certainly not a conservative viewpoint. But the nature of business has changed in terms of how scalable infrastructure companies are able to have winner-take-most businesses. So that's new. That's the enabler of these massive outcomes. But also, you don't need that when we're at the present time. Company is worth whatever it is, $30 billion, a little under $30 billion. And a $100 billion market cap is pretty good from here. And then take stock of what happens after that. You don't have to think 20 steps ahead in life. You just have to figure out tomorrow, is it more likely than not to go up and down? And what's the general path dependency of the stock from there? So for me, what have been the big lessons? Well, SPACs are brutal. I knew this, yet I couldn't resist the temptation. because I was really excited about this project. But as we worked through what was a weak shareholder base, we had incredible volatility. We had no institutional ownership. So the highs were high, the lows were very low. And the company, the transition from an R&D experiment to an operating company took a long time, and it's really hard. And none of us really are in a position to judge because The survival rate of companies that try to do this is very low.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:28] Speaker C: It's a hard thing to do, which is why so few companies have ever done it. And we all got a preview of how hard this is by looking at things like Tesla with the production hell. So important lesson for me is not to whistle past the graveyard when we're in a transition from R&D experiment to operational execution. It's a lesson I don't feel like I really needed to learn at this point in my life firsthand, but I learned it again anyway. And valuable lesson for any of you guys looking at new stocks that you're enjoying or liking, or now you're in a community because it's down 80%. That transition from R&D experiment to operating company is really what drives a stock price. An R&D experiment being successful is a necessary but not sufficient condition necessarily for a successful investment outcome. And then also kind of part and parcel with that is the cascading effect of bad news. As you have delays, all of a sudden you have to start looking at your balance sheet and going, oh crap, what's my liquidity runway? And as people start looking at that, people bail on the stock, which then reprices the cost of capital, which then makes that liquidity runway even more acute. and you run the very real risk of having a death spiral. Well, ASTS gave me the pleasure of living through a death spiral when the number one thing I was worried about when I made the investment was a death spiral. And I would even tell the company, don't cut it too close, there will be a death spiral. And then I couldn't believe it when I was sitting there as the victim of a death spiral. It just goes to show you in life, How frustrating life can be, and then really the same expression of that is really understanding the investment risk you're taking. And so ASTS was compound risk of every risk possible—the riskiest risk a risk taker could take if a risk taker were to take risk—and I took it in size and seemingly survived. But it's a valuable lesson to remind, and it's something again I didn't need to learn again as. Like, I fancy myself a well-trained and astute risk observer and know how to be a good risk manager in a professional setting. And so here you have technology risk, execution risk, regulatory risk, and financing risk. Financing risk being the real killer because once people start to worry about your liquidity runway, you have enterprise value leakage. And this was the thing I was always so scared of, but As the investment sort of bore on for me, time passed, liquidity runway shrank without me really kind of internalizing the passage of time, which meant we got closer to this point where the risk that I feared the most, which is this liquidity runway risk, is actually really kind of what almost got me and got the company. This is useful again to put it in writing and make sure you, as a listener of this, Understand this, this risk. If you don't understand it and it's because you don't understand the concept, then you should pause and really reflect on it and get to know what you're doing. If you don't understand what I'm saying because I'm not speaking clearly, then that's a different issue altogether. But it is really important you understand this slide, especially this 4th point, so that you're able to underwrite an investment for yourself properly. So then you always want to look at the cap table. Who owns it? That's important. It's something that VCs always look at. Who are my co-owners? And sometimes people don't look at this as a public company, or they don't look at it like a cap table. They would look at a holders list and things like that, but they're not thinking of it as a private market investor where you really want to understand the cap table because the cap table tells you a lot about how the company was financed and who your co-owners are. Do I need to update this? But we now have a pretty good cap table. We have strategics and long-onlys that are going to be supportive holders now at the top of the table. Previously, we didn't have that. And that was the opportunity at the same time as it was the risk. Previously, when you didn't have that, it meant you had a lot of people that would buy if you were successful. But in the meantime, you had all this crazy volatility and you can see new de-SPACs, I won't name names, but when these things are sort of in the transition period, you don't have those holders yet. People are viewing the new de-SPACs as toxic waste. And so they can just drop to any price because the only buyer is retail and retail is thin. They don't have balance sheets. And also retail does dumb things like we saw last month. They get overly levered, they get blown out, and then when they get blown out, there's no one there to buy. And so the other parts of the cap table are the convertible notes and importantly, Abel, the founder shares. And so he still has a really big economic ownership of the company as well as voting ownership, which is good. It shows that he was actually able to raise capital very well. When you see a founder with a very low ownership, you want to ask a lot of questions. It means the business is very capital intensive, but in a bad way. It means that they were never able to get a low enough cost of capital for the capital intensive business. ASTS is a capital intensive business. You would generally not expect a founder to have an ownership stake this high because they would've been diluted because of the capital intensity. And so the fact that Abel still has this massive ownership means that despite people saying, oh, they don't tell the story, they don't PR enough, Well, they did something right because this is a somewhat rare outcome. And this is where I just thought about, well, who could the potential owners be? Will this company be relevant? Is this going to be this niche thing that no one will care about, or will this slot into an industry coverage group that has lots of money? And so will there be people who cover these sectors with huge amounts of capital in those sectors, Where then some of that capital is gonna leave the existing incumbents and flow to us. And my math, I didn't update this slide, but when I was looking at this, you know, you, you have over a trillion dollars of capital that could easily go into AST SpaceMobile. That number is now almost $3 trillion because we added SpaceX. So there's a lot of market cap, and this doesn't include things like Rocket Lab and Space— I don't know why I didn't add the space companies. I really was just focused on telecom proper, but there's a huge amount of money focused on this broader industry, which means that it's relevant. As ASTS gets market cap, gets traction, gets results, people are going to have to know about this thing. This is not going to be lost. This is not going to be a niche story stock no one cares about. This thing is going to be front and center, core coverage group of all of the pods, All the people running around Midtown Manhattan, they will know our name. If I do my job correctly, they will actually never know my name, but they will know our name, AST SpaceMobile. So I do, I'm a trader, bad one, but still one nonetheless. And it's useful to kind of understand how does a stock trade? It's useful to get a feel for what drives it. And this is where the private equity part of me got the better of myself because I could see forward. I see dead people, so to speak. I could see forward 5 years, 10 years what the ultimate terminal value of this company was going to be, and I didn't want to take the risk of not owning it. So I invested dramatically early through all of the operational teething moments and all this stuff. And you could see the stock just grinded lower For 1, 2, 3— oh God, painful— for 3, 4 years before the revaluation moment. And so this is the point of like, you can actually sometimes wait on stocks for years watching the development of the business until the unlock. Very few people have this skillset of targeting a name that's going to be very interesting and waiting a large fraction of a decade until such point the right cards flip. I don't know any of those people, but in theory, you could be one of those people and God bless. But more often than not, people buy the original dream, don't really know what they own, get frustrated, sell somewhere along the way, forget, and then years later look at it and go, oh my God. WTF, and see that if they had just literally shot themselves in the head, died, had their estate go into probate for years so that no one could have blown out of their portfolio, then they would, plus, you know, their heirs would be rich. But Very few people take the decision of killing themselves and going into a protracted probate. And so this is where the mental training comes in. You gotta know how to win and you have to have the confidence in yourself that you're right to withstand this type of brutality. So I've been doing this my entire life. My life is not short. I'm definitely not Leo Aschenbrenner age. And so I have the reps and the experience to know, A, when I've made a mistake, but B, how that mistake can resolve and how history can unfold. And in this instance, it looks like that experience paid off. The other thing, and I remember it, it was so counterintuitive to me. It was in front of the BW3 launch. I was so paranoid going, oh my God, launch, launch, launch. So binary. You know, here we are the day before launch. And Anpanman was like, no, Q, the market likes launch. And I was like, why the— why would the market like launch? Launch is risk. Why would you not want to get out of the way of launch? And so then we did this analysis of looking at all these stocks that had launch-type risk. Sure enough, stocks rip into launch every time. And I found it to be so peculiar because that meant stocks were ripping into risk. What I failed to appreciate is launch meant operational de-risking. And so the market was happy, was net happy with operational de-risking, even when it meant the concentration of acute binary launch risk. Say that 10 times, but it was very interesting. And so you can see the pattern. Once the company tightens the band of launch, stock explodes. The market wants this thing to be operationally viable. We see the same thing with Block 2. Boom. You can see what happens when it doesn't go well with Block 3 or with, what was it called? Bluebird 7. That sucked. I was there. Very disappointing to see the effort, disappointing as an investor, but disappointing to see the efforts of the team flushed. But you can just see again, the stock recovered. And this is another useful observation is in the very, very unlikely event that the launch that we're about to experience goes wrong, we've got more satellites coming, and increasingly so. And so at this point, I'm actually glad— I'm not really— I'm never glad for the failure of the company and for the wasted effort of all the employees who really work hard at doing this. But given that it was inevitable that we were going to have a failed satellite at some point, just based on math, I'm glad we ripped the Band-Aid off so that the market could have that experience and investors could have experience and go, If you panic on a failed launch, especially if the launch provider was at fault and you sell down emotionally, that's a big mistake. I knew it when it happened. I remember doing some Spaces on a treadmill at the Marriott in Orlando, and it will be a mistake in the future. And now people can go, well, what happened if we, God forbid, have another mishap like that? People can go back to April 19th and go, Oh, this thing recovered in days, and it will recover faster next time. And so now here we are, batch 1. That was the launch we just all went to. Once we got visibility, stock ripped. And, you know, here we are again. Stock is ripping into batch 2. It's coincided with a change in the market. But so then we think, well, rip, rip, rip. Ripping is fun, but what is the ultimate value of this company? I don't know. But what we can start to do is understand that it moves in these sorts of waves. And so we have these regimes. The stock can trade as a distressed option. It can trade for limited success going, well, yeah, this thing could be cool. And then it can really not pump, but it can start to really look out into the future. None of these are wrong. It just is depending on what mood the market is in. and what the most recent information you get that people can have a recency bias against. And so this is the world we lived in 2 years ago. We've now moved, and you can see how we progressed into this. And now we live in a new world where the market seems to understand what the downside value of this business is. You can see where we just tested it. What is our concept of NAV? It's the spectrum value, it's the good balance sheet, it's the technology value. It's some pace of deployment, but not a rapid pace. Then there's sort of the middle ground of like, yeah, things are going well, we're feeling good, we're not worried about competition, we're not worried about launch. That's where we're in this $100 to $150 range. And then what we're likely going to find, I hope, is what the next phase looks like when people go, This is winner take most. They've got the lot slots, they're executing. In fact, their opportunity is growing with government deals. This is the uncharted territory. That's the 150 plus. That's going to be exciting. You can see how we go in and out of these regimes, you know, again, depending on the mood of the market. Sometimes it's just driven by overall liquidity in the market, like Are South Koreans blowing their portfolios up? Well, we're going to go down as people need to raise funds, and so does everything else go down. And right now we're starting to be in recovery mode. It's exciting. So we can skip it. So is this part, but it's always useful to kind of understand what the sell side is thinking. They're usually just telling you what the current weather is, but they also can be a gut check on numbers. And so Deutsche Bank was always useful to really understand, hey, what happens? with success. They will help you understand what market share numbers look like when translated into revenue. They're a sanity check on what operational metrics we might expect. All of these are highly uncertain forecasts, and they're simply just that— forecasts. But they're good gut checks, and you could then start to ask yourself, what happens if they're right? Well, I own this company at XYZ turns of EBITDA. It just helps you frame the opportunity. And then you can track where estimates are moving. So you can see that they've gone down. So when the market was really ripping, when the constellation was viewed as more imminent, people were pulling forward what the real benefit of a scaled constellation was. We've already lived through the delays, and so now people have muted their near-term estimates of what revenue are, but still, these are big numbers. And then you have to realize, as we pass through time, a year from now, people are going to be looking further out, and those numbers start to get pretty big again. When evaluating an investment like this, it should really start with the team. You want to make sure you have a team that can execute, and we've already talked a lot about Abel, But this is a useful forcing function just to understand who's on the team, who have they attracted, why are they the people that can make it happen, and how are they paid? Do they have alignment with you or are they basically stripping value from the company, your money, your value into their pocket? It's a very important thing to understand the alignment. I follow it very carefully. So here's my analysis of that, trying to look at their careers. Are they people that have a pattern of success? Winners win. People can bloom late in life. That's great. But people who have a pattern of winning in their life just have a pattern of winning in their life. And then you say, is it random or is it because they're winners? Pretty simple concept. So let's blast through this and then we get into corporate governance. So this is also very important. ASTS is sort of a tale of two cities. On one hand, it has terrible corporate governance because you have a controlling shareholder. On the other hand, if you have my viewpoint, it has great corporate governance because it has a controlling shareholder. All of it comes down to, do you believe in that controlling shareholder as being able to make the difficult long-term decisions that drive long-term value for the company, Or are they gonna be subject to short-term tyranny of the minority that drive them to do what feels good in the short term but is bad in the long term? My viewpoint on this has come to recognizing and valuing the power of strong founders, people who can make very good long-term decisions, even if Wall Street doesn't like it at the time. So think about when Google bought YouTube. Everyone thought they were crazy for buying YouTube for $2 billion. You know, what are these nut jobs doing? They don't know finance. Everyone thought Zuckerberg was crazy for buying WhatsApp, for example. History goes on and on and on of where strong founders were short-term viewed as dumb by Wall Street. But then ask yourself, what in the hell did those Wall Street analysts ever accomplish in their own life? And so if you're humble and recognize your own shortcomings, sometimes it opens your mind to recognize just how talented some of these founders are. And then ask yourself, do I want them to have the power to do what they view as right, insulated from the pressure of people who don't have that same long-term perspective and don't have as much skin in the game? So that's where sometimes good and bad governance can be in the eye of the beholder. You wanna look at the board. In times of stress, in times of challenge, is the CEO gonna be supported by people who are there and can provide the right counsel and not just be shiny names? When you look at this board, it's people who can open doors, inspire the confidence of regulators and the confidence of customers, and attract talent. It's a great board from what I can tell. So then we go to compensation. We've already kind of talked about this. Abel Avalon is an owner-operator and is perfectly aligned with my outcome, which I care about, which is the stock price going up. AST SpaceMobile is his investment vehicle, and he cares about the accretion of value to common shareholders, of which he is the largest. And he's been able to attract people. So it's very important. You might not appreciate it, But ASTS is a story of building a team to do something very, very hard. Abel has to be able to attract people, inspire people, and lead people. You want to look for proof points that he can do that. So you— a startup company doing hard things is also not going to necessarily be a pleasant place to work. In fact, it could end up being a terrible place to work. If your priorities are 4-day work weeks, summers in the South of France, and cushy benefits, this is probably not the place for you. If you want to kill yourself on the factory floor solving impossible problems in a high-pressure environment with an owner-operator CEO who's breathing fire down your neck, then this is probably a pretty good place for you. So it somewhat self-selects. So you gotta be somewhat conscientious about the employee reviews and whether you get scared by them or not. So we talk about the business model. I'm really excited about the business model. How it ultimately evolves is TBD, but there's very clear paths for how this is gonna monetize. We don't have to go through each one and you can read it by yourself. So we know that there's lots of ways to monetize and it's gonna be through partners. And there are lots of partners and they already have secured those partners. That's great. We can start to see what partnership support looks like. Ads in primetime spots by our partners highlighting our service. That's cool. That's called CAC. When AT&T is paying Ben Stiller to advertise our service, we're very thankful for AT&T spending that money because we don't have to spend that money. Our CAC is reflected through our revenue share and it's very scalable. We don't necessarily get operating leverage on the CAC itself, but at the same time, we're not going to die from CAC. We have partners who are in the business and have massive user bases they can cross-market to, and that's the competitive advantage. What the pricing will be is TBD. I've taken my stab at the business model, and we'll get to that in a second, but I've modeled pretty conservative prices based on per gigabit units. But it's very, very likely that the pricing far exceeds what I've modeled because it's a premium service that's going to be scarce and people are probably not going to consume much of it, but value whatever they do consume very highly. And there's a massive consumer pool that you're going to be able to segment. So there's billions and billions of people, many of whom fall into different buckets that you're going to be able to sell different service levels to in different markets. And that allows you to extract value-based pricing. It's a global business, which is important. This is immediately scalable, and the economic model is simple enough. We have satellites that provide connectivity through many use cases, which have different values at use and different ways to package that data to different customers, and that's gonna spit off a lot of money. We can start to figure out that with estimates, but those are simply estimates. It's very difficult to know precisely how this service will monetize, and you don't have to be precisely right. You just have to be generally right at knowing that it's not going to be a bad business, that it will have customers, that it will be scalable, that it will be defensible. And then you begin to tighten the interval of confidence Later, hopefully at much higher prices. And so as we solve what the actual ARPU is going to be, I personally hope that that's whether the stock is trying to resolve whether it's worth $250 or $500 or $2,500. I hope that that question isn't being resolved to figure out if it's in fact worth $20. So you want to have a pretty good buffer for your estimates just to know that When we get to the point where the market is answering that question, hopefully it's a lot of upward bias to how it resolves. That's what we've seen thus far is people worry about, will they get financing? What will the dilution be? Will that resolve to the upside? Look at us now. As they worried about execution, that looks like it resolved to the upside. Look at us now. So these are the uncertainties that you face and you just need to make sure that You've built in some buffers so they resolve to the upside. Some of the big drivers of that are the tech itself. And so what is the actual efficiency of the satellite in producing data? Is this gonna be so efficient that it becomes able to displace things like terrestrial towers? Is it so efficient that its use cases can be many to many different types of customers? A big driver of that is what's called the spectral efficiency. Initially, I was modeling in, and this is where the red highlight is, I was modeling in 2 bits per second, 2 bits per hertz. They've recently been blasting past that, I believe at 10 bits per hertz at peak data rates. And so at this point, I just go, well, I don't even know what the hell these guys are doing. They've clearly advanced this technology far beyond any comprehension I previously had, and that's pretty good. And so that allows me to know, as we answer some of these other questions, these are gonna be resolving probably to the upside. You know, we might find that the ultimate value of this company dramatically exceeds what I might have thought just months ago. But I take a stab at it regardless of knowing that I'm wrong. And that's why it's important not to cut me to pieces because you're like, I don't agree with your model. Well, no one actually really has an accurate model because a lot of the decisions by the company might not have yet been made. So no one knows. I would bet Scott has a pretty good model because Scott probably knows. AT&T probably has a pretty good idea, but we can generally get to the same place. At just knowing a basic thing of, is this a big opportunity or not? That's really the binary question. Yes or no? And so here's, again, multiple ways to skin the cat. No offense, cats. I'm not actually going to skin any cats. This is a safe place. Cats are safe. But you can start to look at how many subs do we have? Notice I just use AT&T and Verizon. I'm not looking at T-Mobile, which I'm very convinced we're going to win. And so then at a given ARPU, you could fight me all day on the $10 ARPU, that's fine. What attach rate do we get? 5% of customers? Maybe that's aggressive. I don't know. Do we get 25% of customers? Is that absurd? I don't know. Here's the sensitivity though. But then quickly you have a bridge of, you know, is this company doing $10 billion of revenue or $40 billion of revenue? Well, there is a very important distinction to make. We don't know. If ASTS were already being valued at a $1 trillion market cap, I would not own the stock because at that point, it looks to me it is pricing in more than I could squint and see in the future. And so do I believe this company is going to be doing at least $10 billion of revenue? I do. And so that means to own this at 3 times revenue, potentially 1 times revenue, strikes me as a very good risk-return when thinking about the path to get there. And that's where I go, well, look, I personally can see a path for this thing to be $250 to $500 pretty soon. It's not a statement to go buy stock, just me talking out loud on how I'm thinking about it. But you need to think about it too. And then that translates to a P&L. That's important. And so what type of EBITDA is there going to be? When is there going to be EBITDA? That's where you start to flow out your P&L. It's going to be wrong, but you should do the exercise because it helps you as a forcing function of knowing when you should own something. Again, I own this too early, but it's a good forcing function. And then it can get you to some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations on value. You know, why do you own a stock at a price and where do you think it's going to go and why? You should think through that. It can help in general understand the timing expectations you have. Again, I err on the side of I'd rather own it and eat dirt than miss it because I was too cute. That's my own personal preference. I have a very, very high pain tolerance. And so I have a healthy humility to the market of I don't know when the market is going to wake up and care and re-rate something. And it's really easy for something to re-rate, rip, and it gets away from you and you kick yourself. I don't want to make that mistake. Not saying that's the right strategy for everyone. So an important part of getting to that point is can the company finance itself? So this for a while was one of the most important questions in the market because You could be a thoughtful analyst and have legitimate concern that this company was going to be unable to finance itself. If you came to that conclusion, you should short the stock because it means it would basically go bankrupt and death spiral itself to zero. I took the view mostly out of desperation at the bottom is that good projects find money. Money wants good projects, and I believe that Abel was going to be able to attract strategic support. I was tragically wrong at the price at which he could attract support and when he would attract support, but they got it done and we lived to fight another day. The dilution sucked at the time, but in hindsight, here we are, and I'm pretty happy with the outcome considering that the company was able to survive an interest rate shock of Fed funds rate going from 0 to 5%. But we must be humble to the fact that this is a capital-intensive business and requires efficient access to capital to thrive. So then we want to go through the capital structure. Well, you can see a lot of convertible bonds. I am a convertible bond guy. I understand the products both to the upside and to the risks. And Scott obviously understands it as well. And has seen an ability to fund the company to minimize dilution, and then has a strategy of at the soonest opportunity to equitize those convertible bonds to make sure you don't have too much debt in the stack. But ultimately, they're taking actions that suggest they believe the stock is going higher. They want to minimize equity dilution for the benefit of a bell, and then indirectly for us, and they're looking to minimize their. fixed charges in the form of interest expense. So then we also want to just look historically at how they've been able to fund themselves. We have a nice pattern of our partners putting in increasingly large amounts of money, and lately with higher percentages of prepayments versus actual claims on the company. So a claim on the company would be equity that we issued to them, Or convertible bonds, that's a claim on the company, versus outright prepayments is the best form of capital because it's non-dilutive. So I was expecting more prepayments than we've had. So that's an open item as to why that hasn't happened. And there's lots of reasons why the company could have had the opportunity but chose to turn them down. I don't know what the truth is of Were they less available than we had planned, or did the company decide that they'd be able to get better long-term economics, therefore drive long-term value by not relying on the kindness of partners to fund their business, but in fact fund the business by themselves and then hold partners to better revenue shares? So here we can just go through all of the different financings. when you can do that in your own time. And they're interesting to see the evolution, and it's amazing to see what Scott and his team have accomplished in this respect. And then we see the JVs. So JVs on one hand sound cool, but they're complex and they have their own governance. But what we're finding is in the world of satellite constellations, sovereignty is an increasingly important concept. And so people do not want to rely on the United States of America. And they found out that sometimes the United States can change their mind and exert power. And they do not want to rely on Elon Musk because he can be capricious and he's also an American citizen. So it might not do what you want him to do. So the countries are a little bit in a tough place because they want sovereignty. Yet we go back to the fundamental barriers to entry of this industry. It does not make sense for each country to have their own constellation. It might in fact be impossible, but— well, it's impossible logistically because these companies don't have the industrial base or the launch capacity to do it. And then it's ridiculous economically because it just, it's an asset that will then be utilized at, you know, 10%. So it makes sense for there to be global infrastructure providers, but then we go back again to the sovereignty issue. Enter ASTS with flexible JVs that give sovereignty, basically the kill switch to the country, legal setups of control, domicile of the entities, and management on a local basis of the entities that satisfy a lot of the concerns countries have so that in times of crisis, more specifically in times of war, They can rely on being able to use their systems as they desire. And we've also just had a lot of deals and we can see the success of these JVs. We've had important definitive agreements signed like Verizon, for example. I'm anxiously awaiting the very real possibility that we have a DA signed with T-Mobile. which looks increasingly certain. We've had splashy deals like Saudi Telecom giving us our first legit revenue backlog with $1 billion of minimum contracted revenue. That goes a lot to thinking or helping us think about the business model. Saudi Arabia is not a particularly big country in this scheme of the world, yet to be able to backstop $100 million per year of revenue on a minimum basis with $175 million up front should give anyone pause when thinking or potentially dismissing this as a small opportunity. These are big numbers for a pre-operational service from one country that's not even a big one. So then we also look at how the company has financed itself away from its strategic partners. We've had a lot of convertible bonds, and these at times can hurt us, you know, drive the stock price down. But ultimately, we've recovered pretty quickly each time. Company's done a nice job of increasingly having good news after financing, so people know that they're not just going to get obliterated for months on end after dilutive events. Convertible bonds are dilutive in the sense of they issue the convertible bond, which has underlying conversion ratio of equity to convertible bond arbitrageurs who hedge it. And so when you deliver those bonds into the market, you have an increase in stock supply because convertible bond arbs borrow stock, sell it to hedge their bond. That's a net increase in effective supply. Therefore, there's your effective dilution on the issuance of the convertible bond, even though the convertible bond has not yet been converted into actual equity. That's why stocks go down when you issue convertible bonds, and we've done a lot of them. But now we're a seasoned issuer and we're known in the market. That's good. That's an asset of the company, and it's proven to date to have been a preferred way of financing the company. So why are they financing the company? Well, CapEx, duh. I haven't updated this slide, but you can just generally see that when you're launching A lot of satellites, they're not free, and you gotta raise money to fund it. And you have a team you're building that costs money. You have plants that are running and that costs money. So the company needs money, and we're getting that from, again, prepayments from our own balance sheet. And then things like JLEO are pretty interesting because we might start to get this money in non-dilutive ways by selling our satellites in a way to ourselves. but the JV that is buying it is funded by someone else, but yet we have ownership of it. And so JLEO's pretty interesting model, if we're able to sell our satellites to the JV, get $1 billion coming onto ASTS's balance sheet, but then really retain the economic use of those satellites on 99% of the world, ex-Japan. I'm not quite sure how they're gonna structure this, but conceptually, something like this is going to happen, but it's useful just to understand, you know, how much money is this company going to spend? What's my sources and uses? And so I have sources of capital and I have uses of capital, and I generally want to make sure these balance, and I want to know the inflection point where I'm no longer a capital issuer. And that is a moving target. No one ever really knows it for sure, and that's why it's very difficult for the company to definitively say we're fully financed. They can say they're fully financed, yet raise more financing and not be inconsistent with the original statement because they might be fully financed for one thing, but then their ambitions might extend to do more. They might have an ambition to not just have 20 satellites. Of course, that might increase to 65 for full coverage. That can be fully financed, but then they will raise money to get to 100. Well, that doesn't mean they were lying about being fully financed for 65. It just means that they were not fully financed for 100, and then they might want to launch faster, blah blah blah. And so they raise more money, and then they might want to be fully financed for 243 satellites and then 500 satellites. And so to be overly pinned down by the prospect of dilution is, I think, to miss the forest for the trees. And you just got to trust that Abel and Scott are thinking about this every day. Maybe there'll be periods where there's some stock price. downside, such is life. You have to think about your own investment horizon, and mine is very long. It's not probably as long as Abel's, but it's long enough to survive the ups and downs. So this is my model. Then it gets a little bit more detailed in terms of the sources and uses, really tracking it. Again, it's going to be inaccurate in absolute terms, but it's directionally going to help me really think about the flow of cash in and out of this company. So then we get to, well, there's money going in and out of this company, but for what? What is the actual technology that is in fact being pursued? Well, really big waffles in the sky. So the company identified that really big satellites allow there to be superior beamforming characteristics. The problem statement, I like to say this phrase, problem statement sounds really smart. I stole it from one of my portfolio company CEOs that made the point to me once that even if companies wanted to compete with his company, they wouldn't be able to even hire the people that could identify the problem statements, let alone design the solution. Well, here the problem statement is, how do we create a really big phased array so that our beams are very powerful to overcome the fact that cell phones that you have in your pocket don't have a lot of power, certainly not enough power to connect to space? And so they had to figure out what they had to build and then how they had to build it, and what are the issues in overcoming those challenges. And the main issues are how do you make a really big antenna that is cost-effective to launch and that will actually survive because of the stresses of space? So here we go through lots of the complex technical things. Increasingly so, a new investor doesn't have to worry about these things because you can really just kind of accept that the thing works without having to really understand all the intricacies of why. If you were an earlier investor in this company like I was, you did have to understand the why because you needed to make a case to yourself, potentially to your wife, on why this company could do something that people thought were impossible and understand what were the approaches this company was taking that were different from those that were taken by companies before and why those new approaches were more likely than not to be successful and why people previously hadn't done it. And then what the benefit of that system was going to be. So there's lots of technical stuff here, which really just relate to the fact that these technologies combined form the ASTS satellite, have to unfurl, has to survive massive heat stresses. associated with power generation and going in and out of the sun, has to compensate for going 17,000 miles an hour so that the signal is usable. And then it has to create a beam without spamming all of the other operators using adjacent spectrum so that it is legally permissible while also giving the strength for a usable service. And here we go into some of the incredible technical feats the company has done, one being the unfurling of the satellite itself. And so it's packed very tightly into a tuna can, gets into space, and then like a jack-in-the-box pops and unfurls. Pretty cool. We learned a lot about heat dissipation. This is really interesting because this goes into then the future applications for AI data centers in space. Potentially also a really big driver of TAM, which is cool to think about because this is why you got to have a fluid view of a stock. Because if you have a static view of what something's worth, going back to those valuation regimes, you might— let's just say if you asked me 4 years ago, I could really get To a quick understanding of why I thought this thing was worth $20. But what if I'd sold at $20 and then I'd sit here today and go, well, oh my God, what did I miss? Well, the market moved massively. The general understanding of MNL uptake, the government applications, the scalability of the business, the performance of the satellites, the overall market opportunity, all of these things adjusted and you want to adjust with it. And I didn't, I wasn't thinking about AI data centers in space. Now, do I value that explicitly in my investment? No. Do I accept that that could spring into action to drive a lot of future value from some future starting point? Yes, I do. So you want to be on top of it. So as that develops as an actionable thing, you can adapt your own thesis with it if you so choose. But it's like Amazon, Do you own a bookseller? Do you own a general merchandiser? Well, then did you own the foundational disruptor of compute? These things all happened as a company evolved. And so it's very important to start to understand how could my company evolve if I have that type of founder. I believe Abel is the type of founder that is aggressive on product roadmap, who's ambitious, who wants to solve hard challenges and challenge his team and attract therefore increasingly talented team and pursue big ideas. Don't know that that's the case, but I believe it to be the case. So that's why you want to understand something in this technology to see what else could happen with this technology. And so we go through a lot of the tech. It gets very complicated very quickly. I'm not an engineer. I can sort of regurgitate a lot of these things that I've learned, but I'm certainly not a subject matter expert in this at all. And you don't have to be. That's why they have a talented team with lots of people with PhDs. But it is interesting to understand really the output of what they've achieved, one being the incredible beamforming capabilities of the company. And so what is my takeaway from this? The chart with the clean blue line just shows that The company can deliver an incredible amount of power. And so radio frequency gain exactly where they want it to be, but then it drops off. So it's not spamming the parts of the radio frequency that they do not want to be operating in. By contrast, if you look at the box on the lower right, you see the Starlink beam pattern juxtaposed over the ASTS beam pattern. And you can see that they don't have the same amount of peak gain, so they don't have the same amount of power. And even despite not having the same amount of power, there's a lot of power where you don't want it to be. And so they're shooting shotguns from space to Earth to connect hopefully with a phone, but not well, while we're shooting high-powered rifle bullets exactly where you want them to be. And this is something Katseye figured out very early and something that I'm glad that I ultimately figured out too. So we can kind of dumb this down. So what's the net result? When people say Starlink is really far ahead of AST SpaceMobile, you gotta really contextualize that and realize maybe they're not. We can do— we being AST SpaceMobile— can do true broadband for voice, video, data, and internet. That's native to the MNO. Starlink can do text and data and maybe some voice down the line. Our constellation only requires 50 satellites. It's kind of moved up a little bit for continuous coverage, but we're looking at a full constellation doing all sorts of crazy stuff at between 250 and 500. Starlink needs a satellite measured in the thousands. Our architecture has ground-based processing. So that's what allows the sovereignty of the operator. It's highly upgradable. It has a lot of military benefits because the bent pipe architecture— Starlink, by contrast, puts the processing in space. And so that means your data isn't staying in the country that it's meant to be. It's going wherever Starlink wants it to go. And that introduces a data sovereignty issue. It means that the satellite is operating as its own network. It's not integrating directly into the core. That's a big deal. It's not seamless with your phone. It's being viewed as a roaming network. So that has a lot of implications in terms of, does it drain the battery from your phone? Is the MNO happy with you? Is the user happy with you? And then comes down to the signal. Is it stable? Or is it unstable? Consumers are not very patient, even when it's something that arguably an imperfect solution that can save your life should be something people feel very excited about. The reality is if your phone is having a crappy signal and it's not connecting consistently, people are going to be very pissed off because consumers are used to seamless things that work. And so ASTS is trying to do that, seamless things that work. A lot of that has to do with the stability of the beam. Is it a fixed beam or is the satellite having to hand off to another satellite every couple seconds? There's lots of technical details that are discussed in this document that help you learn more about that. And then you can just look at the size. And so an ASTS satellite has 2,400 square feet of phased array. So roughly 40,000 elements versus a next-generation Starlink satellite, which is not yet being launched, has 10,000 to 12,000 elements, but in high frequencies, not low-band frequencies. And so the difference is one satellite can broadcast in bands that will work indoors and the other Cannot. And so ASTS has satellites that are massive that allow enough power for your device to work where you want it to work, and not that many satellites required to allow that service to work around the world. Whereas Starlink needs way more satellites to do something that is not yet complete, which is, and will never be complete, which is to work indoors. So indoor coverage is a big thing. Elon will tell you as much. And so you can look at the statements by the partners. We have all the data collected here. And ultimately, ASTS achieved the impossible. Funny thing to go through is back in time when Verizon was challenging the system before they announced they'd be a partner because they wanted to attack AT&T. And they were filing with the FCC saying this technology cannot work. They were saying it's impossible. They were calling into question how this was achievable, and they outlined the reasons why they thought it wasn't possible. Well, clearly they changed their mind because Verizon then signed a definitive agreement with AST SpaceMobile. So it's pretty crazy to see what they were trying to make sense of before they were brought in under the hood. Then they were brought in under the hood, and then allowed to become a partner and obviously changed their tune real fast. So it's pretty cool. And then you can also see what historically was the short thesis. This is always a classic, but there were short reports on this company which caused us a lot of grief, but also then outlined the next things that we were going to look at and analyze to figure out. Along the way of figuring all this out, we got to live through the ups and downs of ASTS prosecuting its technology roadmap. So it started with the proof of concept BW1, um, who just showed that you could close the link budget in space. This is before the company was public. Then you showed that you could do it, um, in a bigger way with BW3. Then we had our first Block 1 satellites go up, just showed that this company could actually make satellites. And now we are in the scaled execution phase of the composite mass production Bluebirds that are massive, that are gonna be the commercial operating satellites. And so we have a lot of information about the roadmap, including how the company's gonna serve the mid-band spectrum that it has access to through its MNO partners, and then the S-band spectrum it has via its Legato spectrum, which is exciting.
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[01:16:08] Speaker C: And ultimately, the net result of the company's technology is that its satellites, because of their power, can fly high. Which allows its beams to be broad coverage, yet highly directed while closing the link budget, which means fewer satellites are required to achieve full coverage versus flying low. And flying high also gives you the benefit of your satellites are not subject to as much orbital drag, which means that you don't have to replace them as much. And so here's just kind of going through memory lane. Of all of the progress they've done, which is really fun to look at. I mean, especially for a lot of us that lived it, going to these launches really pains me that I'm not there tonight to experience launch with everyone. I'll be at the next one. And we can just go through the tech. It's useful to just learn what we can learn. And there's a lot of technical validation that we were glomming onto early on. Now this is less important. You don't need to be combing through every FCC letter to figure out, is it gonna work? We now have a lot of data that allows us to know you can kind of rest easy on this. And so the thesis has in fact progressed, and we can really then blast through a lot of these slides. Looks like the AST SpaceMobile webcast is gonna start in about 5 minutes. Obviously when it starts, I kind of know my relative importance in this world, so we'll end my webcast.
[01:17:42] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:17:44] Speaker C: And let's see where we go from here. So we have a lot of patents. I'm going to skip through this. This gets very dense, very fast, but something a lot of us have gone through to look for clues on how AI data centers in space will progress, which is certainly uncertain, but very, very interesting in terms of how the TAM for this opportunity could multiply manyfold, which is a path that could ultimately drive the stock much higher than people like me who are admittedly very bullish could prove to be pretty conservative. And it doesn't mean you're gonna hold the stock for the whole thing, but it's again useful to know what you own. So interference concepts are important. This section goes through a lot of the technical things that Cathie was really early on I'm not going to speak to all these issues. We've kind of breezed through a lot of it in terms of what the beam pattern looks like and what interference looks like. A lot of really interesting analysis. I learned a lot in putting this together, which is really just trying to follow in Katzie's footsteps and memorializing it. And there's lots of incredible takeaways from this, which you can explore in your own time in terms of how things like spectrum reuse happen. So what does that mean? That means that an MNO, if you have incredibly efficient satellite system with precise beamforming, it means that you can reuse the same spectrum by having lots of different beams, which effectively the net increase in your spectrum capacity, as opposed to a system which is inefficient, which does not allow you to reuse your spectrum. We had a lot of debate as the SCS, Supplemental Coverage from Space rules, were actually being, uh, litigated, which now they're done, of, you know, what the, uh, interference rules were going to permit. And that's all been resolved, but here's some of the remnants of that journey. And what we learned from SpaceX was just how bad their system was. And so some of the same documents that we looked at for ASTS, we would get the same ones from Starlink and realize that their system doesn't scale because they don't have the beamforming technology. Their system actually degrades as it gets bigger, which is why they were fighting for these waivers, which they got to operate at a higher power at the risk of interfering with incumbent MNOs. But it's a critical observation because it means the system might actually brick itself At a future point. And so this goes to the basic question of, do you have a scalable system? If you're an investor in SpaceX, you implicitly assume that the king of scalability, Elon Musk, would think about scalability. But here in the very own FCC documents, we have an admission that the system isn't scalable. With size, it spams itself and breaks down. It's a fundamental problem and it's a critical observation Katzi had. And so we can zoom ahead more of a lot of the interference concepts, and then we ultimately get to the lifeblood of this industry, which is spectrum. We can skip a lot of this because this is just an overview of spectrum and the details behind it, but what's critical is ASTS has a very robust and diverse spectrum strategy. They aggregate it from their MNO partners who effectively give it to them in return for a revenue share. So it's really found value for us. And then ASTS is able to get its own spectrum through creative corporate maneuvers like the Legato acquisition, which I think was truly astounding corporate strategy. Hopefully it closes. But then also by just getting spectrum from government grants. All countries are different. Some you have to pay for in auction rounds like the US, some you get just by applying for it if you're able to put it to use in a good way. And so it's important to understand just how efficient ASTS can be at aggregating spectrum. And here's some more background on the Legato deal. And it's important to compare this deal, which we'll get to in a second, compare it to the deal that SpaceX did. And SpaceX paid over $20 billion for their spectrum, and we paid a price which you can put some numbers around, which I will here. It's certainly more than what the headline value was because there's revenue shares and things like that. So you'd want to try to really figure out what the actual totally fully loaded value is. But the inescapable takeaway is that ASTS was able to strike a very good deal because they were the only ones that could turn lead, the existing Legato spectrum, into gold because of their system, which is unique and no one else has it. So the value use of Legato spectrum is higher than for anyone else, which is why they could extract a very good deal. So one interesting thing is then just figure out what the value of the Legato spectrum is in an abstract hypothetical. So I did some backbends to try to understand what it could be if you were isolating it and then just comparing it to, are my values sane when compared to the implied valuation of spectrum in the MNOs? And you can see on this slide, you know, it actually ties out that even when I say, hey, look, ASTS spectrum could be worth $30 billion. It's not totally crazy in terms of a dollar per megahertz versus what the implied market caps of AT&T and Verizon are. This is when those stocks were higher, admittedly. But given that this is a very, very small fraction of the total spectrum that those MNOs have, and this is going to be the highest value-at-use spectrum of any spectrum anywhere, you can start to contextualize my estimates versus those composite averages. So here we get into the SpaceX deal and you can see a comparison of what they got, what they paid, and what the differences are. The key thing is just the coverage and quality of the spectrum in terms of is it going to have high data rates, Interference, work well inside, and things like that. SpaceX got some, some good spectrum, but it's at a higher frequency, so there's more attenuation, which means it doesn't work as well in weather and inside. So let's skip forward a little bit. Here we get into the market. We can cruise through this. The market, in my view, is very big. This is the original section I did on it. And key thing is just to realize that there's a consumer market, a military market, a government market, commercial market. And in these markets, there's submarkets that are gonna be bifurcated based on the types of users and the type of application, whether that's IoT and things like that. It's a very exciting thing to think about. But if you were going to leave with one takeaway, it's that it's dynamic. And the ways in which this technology is likely to be monetized is going to evolve and change with time in ways that we can't possibly predict now. And then you just have to take a bet. Is it going to evolve and change in your favor? Therefore, you're going to be conservative, or is it going to change out of your favor? And so when thinking about, is the world desire, have an increasing or decreasing demand for low friction, low cost connectivity? My bet is that it's going to have more demand for it. So exciting market, exciting use cases. And I did a lot of sanity checks to help, but a key enabler of why this can all happen now is because of launch availability, And then the demand for it. We all have mobile phones. They're increasingly important to how we run our lives. And the tolerance to have no connectivity or low connectivity is an increasing pain point with the consumer for which they're willing to pay to solve. And we can just go, what does this market look like for the incumbents? And so high friction, high cost systems still sell. So if you want to go to Iridium, you can be paying over $1,000 a month for a system that requires an immense amount of installation. We can look at IoT products that are on the market and they're really expensive. So even when looking at the current market with the ancient technologies that exist, we can see that we should crush all of those people. And that immediate near-term market opportunity is quite attractive and should turbocharge your ability to get to billions of dollars of revenue very quickly. And so I'm skipping a lot of slides here. It's just backup, that sanity check a lot of my estimates. And I believe my estimates are erring on the side of being very conservative, which might sound crazy. I know a lot of FUDsters accuse me of being very aggressive and very pumpy, but I think I'm just forward-looking. And there's a real difference to that of an entrepreneurial, creative, forward-looking person can seem crazy as a contemporary, but can end up being very conservative if they're directionally right. And then reality far outpaces what their dreams were. So lots of exciting new use cases, but the key here is just look at the existing market. Look at how high the pricing floor is for us. And so I started to standardize these things in terms of just the fee per month or the fee per gigabit, gigabyte. And you can see that these can cost like thousands of dollars per month. And if you want to have just one message per day, from Globalstar, just a simple text message, that's basically no data, it's $9 a month. For unlimited messages to an IoT device, which is just really sort of pinging a device with some basic telemetry data, that's $35 per month. So that's why I don't think I'm crazy to think ASTS with an IoT solution, which is going to be very scalable, because again, it doesn't use very much data at all, if they're charging $10 a month, so that's the ARPU, Do you see how quickly, and that won't use any data, so to speak, do you see how quickly my models can end up being very conservative? So then of course we want to compare it to Starlink. So is Starlink a perfect substitute with their fixed broadband? No, it's extremely high throughput. It's a great service. And so looking at it in terms of per gigabyte is the wrong comparison, but you can just start to figure out people's pressure point. So a lot of people are paying for Starlink just as a backup system for themselves and paying $50 to $100 a month just for the periodic and episodic availability of the system in case their power goes out. So that's how my friends use it, for example. And so that's showing you a lot about the propensity to pay. So will those same people pay $10 a month so that their phone will work episodically when their terrestrial network isn't working? We're all going to find out, but you can start to get a lot of that market information by looking at adjacencies and by looking at comparables, which is what I did. So here we then talk about the government opportunity, which is very exciting. We'll just blast through this. We've talked about Golden Dome on my Spaces quite a lot. Lots of positive proof points here. This is no longer a hypothetical. This is no longer hopium of maybe ASTS will have government applications. We now know they do and they're getting traction. And what we don't know are the ultimate contracts that we're gonna have, how big those are gonna be. But in general, it's a very exciting part. It should be a high multiple business. It's gonna be very validating. And so if you get a big military contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the market will get it. That this means that the government is not letting you go away. You are a made man, so to speak. That's what's gonna drive valuation multiple and certainly drive a lot of eyeballs to then understand why did this system get this endorsement from the US government? It's gonna start to drive a lot of capital flows into it. So we've done a lot of research on what government applications can look like with ASTS. It's alphabet soup. M-U-O-S-O-I-S-L-I-O-T-E-M-C-O-N-A-L-T-P-N-T. If you like acronyms, the government applications for ASTS is a great place for you. And I'm not going to go through them all right now. Then there's loopback, polar, bent pipe, ICD, atomic clocks, direct sequence spread spectrum. I'm trying to add these things as I learn about them so that we've categorized it and you can find it on the DD if you so wish. We've had some dead giveaways of ASTS's ambitions because we have seen their orbital slots. So Katzi, uh, who has an incredible attention to detail, has observed that we have SSO slots that really have a core use for the government because of military applications. And so seeing these different shells that are filed with the ITU, shells being slots of satellites, tells us some of the future intended uses that the company's planning for. So this is where you can really get some insight in terms of developments that might not have been as explicitly announced by the company. but are implicitly announced by the company because of some of the regulatory filings. Pretty cool stuff. And let's skip a little bit through Golden Dome. There's been some awards. Scott has always helped us get to this conclusion because then he'll just retweet some announcements and go, Golden Dome, you know, in case you didn't get, get the takeaway from the The original press release of Scott will sort of clarify it and be like, yeah, that's exactly what we meant. And then there's exciting things about the position navigation and tracking market. These opportunities alone, I think, could be billions of dollars. These are things people hadn't thought about as applicable to ASTS on the outside, you know, just a year or two ago. And all of these opportunities stack. They're not mutually exclusive. They're revenue accretive. They stack on top of each other. And they help drive utilization of the system over areas that are not necessarily large population zones, which drives the utilization of the overall system and absorption of all the data that this system is capable of handling. Pretty interesting stuff. And again, we have sovereign attempts to try to catch up. A lot of them are flawed. If you're interested in learning about the European initiative with IRIS², this is the slide for you. And there's government support. And so just like we're seeing the JLEO deal come together, which looks like it's $1 billion of money for ASTS, there's things waiting in the wings like the 5G Fund for Rural America, military grants, FirstNet in some capacity will come with money. And this is the non-dilutive financing that we're always waiting for, but is increasingly Irrelevant toward driving the stock price because of the balance sheet that we have right now. So here's where I just started to do some basic work. This is basically my scratchpad because it's so tentative, but starting to think a lot more about AI data centers. I want to know if my telecom bet on ASTS evolves where I start to believe that this is the advantage platform for AI data centers in space, And if I believe that this is a viable opportunity, if I believe this is gonna be the winner, I want to know. I want to know if the equivalent of AWS is starting to find a home within AST SpaceMobile. If I already own the winner of a burgeoning opportunity, I wanna know. Sometimes the most efficient and highest return investment is the one you already have if it's a platform. Winners win. Pattern of winning begets future pattern of winning. Winning teams, great entrepreneurs find ways to evolve. All you had to do in life is realize Elon was a winner 25 years ago, and then just keep going with him. All you had to do is realize Jeff Bezos was a winner and just go with him. So investment returns don't necessarily correlate with activity of the investor. Sometimes it correlates with the patience of the investor. So I want to know, and I'm constantly evaluating, is Abel Avalon going to be a persistent winner and evolve the company into a dynamic market that is ever-changing, which might find him as situated to win in new and evolving markets because of the platform he's built? But there's a lot of uncertainties with AI data centers. I'm not going to purport to be an expert on this at all. I'm just trying to gather facts. And you can see it's a rapidly evolving market and some people trying to get involved with it. Good luck. So some more data on AI data centers from space. So key to all this is, can they build it? Well, now we're seeing launches happening in increasing scale. So I think we can conclude, yes, they can build it. This was a lot of work to figure out the operating capabilities, how these things were built. It's pretty fascinating stuff, but now you can really take comfort in the fact that clearly they can build it because they're building it. You're seeing right now them about to launch another 3 satellites after having just launched 3 satellites. So this section starts to just become general interest because they're already proving that they can do it. And here it goes back into why prior delays happened. So Operations really can mean many things to many people, but right now it's not the operations of the satellites I'm worried about, although maybe I should. It's the launch cadence. And so producing satellites was the first thing the market worried about, and now it's the launching of the satellites and launch capacity. We're getting a better scale of production, which is exciting. And this hasn't been updated, but I've posted this on Twitter. Starting to really get these things out the door, which is exciting. And then soon we're gonna have beta operations and launch will come. So launch capacity, this is the new thing we all got to worry about in May after Blue Origin showed that their quality controls were lacking. And so then the market refocused on, oh my God, is their launch Well, as we are finding out tonight, well, at this moment right now tonight, there is launch Falcon 9. What we don't know is how many more Falcon 9s we have booked. We believe it's five. We might have gotten more, but there's a lot of other vehicles, and Blue Origin will get back on the pad. I'm very confident. But importantly, ASTS was always a launch agnostic satellite. They can launch with everyone. So. Japan launch vehicle, Europe's launch vehicle, the other US launch vehicles, ULA, SpaceX, obviously, Blue Origin, obviously, and ISRO in India. So, and there's probably some that I've forgotten about. There's a lot of other launch platforms coming to market, like Relativity and Stoke. And so right now, some of those aren't ready. So there is this bridge period of uncertainty of how is the company going to bridge the gap in the near term? We're all gonna find out. That becomes much less of an acute issue when thinking about how are they going to bridge that gap in the long term, because the visibility of future launch capacity certainly is bright. It's a very exciting time for space. It's a very exciting time for cargo owners because there are a lot of launch systems coming to market, which is going to give cargo owners a lot more choice. At seemingly better prices. So here's a review of all the different launch systems that we've profiled. Pretty cool. I mean, rockets are neat. What can you say? Brings out the inner 10-year-old in all of us. I know I'm really excited to keep growing my rocket collection. It's a conversation piece. I'm sure my wife is just like, keep it in your office. No one wants these in our family room. Um, but this is all the stuff you might want to know about launch vehicles. Thank God we can all now skip over the regulatory process. If you want to talk about brain damage, let's talk about the FCC. This was some brutal stuff that I had to chew through over the years before this was a certainty. Now ASTS is approved. I think it is Easy to conclude regulatory risk has now gone basically to zero. But until this was approved, this was pain because you had the FUDsters FUDing like FUDsters would FUD. They were saying we weren't going to get approval. They were poking holes in all of the different types of rules that were being written that were still evolving and. There were lots of things to be scared at along, along the way. And scared I was. And so I had to learn a lot about things as various FUDsters would literally just make stuff up. And then I would panic and have to study things like orbital debris assessments for my entire vacation. And this is pretty Byzantine things. But now, if you're listening to this as a new investor, You are welcome. You can skip this section because it really is no longer very relevant. But if you're interested in the history of it, here you go and knock yourself out. This will put you to bed. But the reality is, as we're about to launch, the FCC is just going to give us approval because now we're a known quantity and we've addressed their issues. Done. So competitive analysis. Well, this is ever-changing and fluid. I haven't updated this in a bit, but we had the known guys, Globalstar and Marsat Iridium, that offered the products that were in market. These are device-specific and high friction, but they worked. You know, if you were an explorer going into the Arctic, it was probably worthwhile to have your $1,000 sat phone that would save your life. But this is not a mass market product. So ASTS was the first to offer this idea of mobile broadband to your existing device. Pretty cool innovation. And so here we go through really the bifurcation of first principles. Some operators wanted to base their system on satellite spectrum. It's not that they were dumb. This is smart. Satellite spectrum was available. It's global. And it works for what it was designed to work for, but the limitations are that it wouldn't necessarily work with existing devices. It is high frequency, which limits its ability to work indoors. There's some thin tranches, so it limits the ability to do high throughput broadband. Terrestrial spectrum, by contrast, is not global. You gotta go market by market. You gotta deal with the MNOs, but it's extremely useful because It has good propagation characteristics. And so ASTS has done a hybrid approach of using both existing satellite spectrum and pairing it with terrestrial spectrum. It's the only one to have done this, which is pretty creative. And so here we have an overview of the different guys. The relevant competitor is really SpaceX. And so ultimately we have a difference in technology, And the relevance of those differences are from the eyes of the user. So whether your phone is trying to roam versus having something that's native to the network, and then if you're roaming, it stresses out your phone. It's not seamless. And the ability to do things beyond text messaging are in question. And then also, the MNOs are not born yesterday, and they're very fearful of partnering with SpaceX. So that's a business model challenge of, are you partnering with a vendor who's in turn gonna turn around and compete with you? The mask is off on that. I think every MNO knows that SpaceX is not a carrier-neutral partner. They are carrier-adversarial. So this is now going to settle itself real fast in my view, where Starlink is a competitor for sure, but in a totally different arena of a fully integrated direct-to-consumer MNO competing against not ASTS, but competing against AT&T. And so ASTS is going to end up being the arms dealer to the world's MNOs who have all of the spectrum, all of the customers, all of the regulatory support against the newcomer SpaceX. It'll be interesting to see how this goes. But there's a lot of competitive stuff here, a lot of breakdown in terms of how the technology works, and it gets really complex really quickly. And so we're not gonna go through every slide. Because I'm getting exhausted and hopefully we're at the go/no-go point for the launch pretty soon, which will absolve me of my duty to keep talking. But ultimately we have a tech difference, a tech capability difference, a spectrum availability difference, a go-to-market difference, a difference in the perception of whether a solution is adversarial to the market gatekeepers or whether the technology is going to bypass those gatekeepers all directly and become directly competitive. ASTS, again, is designed to be carrier-neutral, hybrid spectrum strategy, and very efficient. Because it was designed for purpose versus SpaceX's system was a repurposed failed IoT system that was done effectively as one click more real than vaporware to try to steal the oxygen from ASTS and Apple, which usually would be enough to kill a competitor is just simply Elon Musk saying, I'm going to compete with them. And then any rational financing party on Wall Street would say, well, I am going to steer clear of that mess. Why would I put myself in front of that chainsaw? That would work 99 times out of 100, except for when you have wild people like Space Mob who are gluttons for pain and are willing to step in front of And confront, challenge, and fight to the death Elon Musk.
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[01:47:41] Speaker C: So the FCC docket was pretty interesting as we learned about Starlink's limitations. So buried in these FCC filings, were all of the technical details and limitations and requests for waivers by SpaceX to get their hacked-together system to work. This is where a lot of the untold truths were revealed to us, and they're all in this document. One critical observation I want to point out is that when you do not have good beamforming characteristics, it dramatically limits where your system can work. And so Europe, for example, carved up through thousands of years of battles among princes that gave rise to split and broken empires, languages, and cultures, resulted also in lots of crazy borders. Well, if your system has interference patterns, which the princes of yore, Charlemagne, could not have possibly contemplated, the importance of his border with respect to spectrum interference patterns of a satellite system, then you have a problem of that satellite system actually can't cover some countries. Because if you have to have a 100-kilometer border, otherwise you're going to start to pollute the spectrum of an adjacent country over which you don't have authority to do, because you're starting to blow up another MNO that's not the same MNO as in a given country. So take, for example, Hungary. If you were to draw a 100-kilometer buffer zone around Hungary, you've started to delete the ability to actually operate in Hungary. Otherwise, you're starting to spam Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Australia. Big problem. So these big red boxes are areas where if you start to put these 100-kilometer buffers, these are the places where Starlink really can't operate in Europe. It really starts to mean They can't serve Europe unless they start to get these waivers across multiple MNOs and things like that. It's pretty cool. Well, it's not cool for Starlink, but it's pretty cool for ASTS. And it starts to show a big competitive advantage of why we're able to operate in markets where others really are going to have some challenges. And if they can't operate in markets, that means they're not able to absorb the fixed costs of their systems the same way, because they're not able to spread users over the system the same way. A lot of these things have very important economic knock-on effects, and economic knock-on effects have competitive moat knock-on effects. So here we go, the technical moats. Beamforming. So to be able to have the precise beamforming means you have a better product for the user, And you're able to operate more seamlessly within the various regulatory regimes of countries. The unfurling is a critical observation. To be able to fit a big array in the now current rockets we have without relying on a new future launch system to launch a bigger array is what allows ASTS to deploy its constellation given the rockets we have today, whereas SpaceX literally is limited To launching its new system until Starlink work— Starship works. And we don't know when Starship will work, but, you know, potentially ever. I'm sure they'll figure it out. ASTS got an early jump on their ASIC. So what's an ASIC? It's an application-specific integrated chip. These take quite a long time to do. You've gotta figure out what you're doing, then you have to tape it out, test it, then you design it and you can't change it. And this could take 2 to 3 years to get done. We already have it. The ASIC allows you to operate with incredible power efficiency, which allows your system to be very competitive, to use the limited power generation you have onboard your satellite for beamforming. And so if you've already paid the price of time and money on your ASIC and someone hasn't done it yet, You have a very big time benefit. They've also had the benefit of integrating the software stack with the MNOs. Again, the MNOs are not just going to let anyone go work into their network with all of the resources that are required to facilitate that. And so having been early to get integrated into all the network cores is a competitive advantage enjoyed By ASTS. And again, that core integration seems like a big deal. We can skip ahead a little bit and more on the competitors. And then this just is a section that goes through what has been tried before. It's useful if you're gonna be an investor in an industry to have a good sense of how we got here at this point. No man exists on an island. No industry exists on an island. No company exists on an island. What came before? What can we learn? So we have a lot of companies people have probably never heard of in the '90s that were trying to do this. We've got Teledisc, that's a famous one. And yeah, even things like Iridium and Globalstar, both of which filed for bankruptcy but are still around in their reorganized state. So there are a couple key takeaways at addressing why things failed in the past and why we're not going to suffer the same fate. Because I have a real aversion toward losing all of my money. And so I really do want to understand why other things failed and why this time it's different, realizing that those are famous last words. The early systems, as we talked about, required specific dedicated devices. That makes sense. I'm not going to go out and buy a $1,000 handset in the event I don't have service. I have 2 iPhones. I literally never use my other iPhone because I have it for compliance purposes only. It sits on my desk. I don't think it's been charged. I have it because I'm required to have it, but I don't use it because I'm not going to carry 2 iPhones in my pocket. And so I'm definitely— and that's a small iPhone. I'm definitely not going to be carrying a big satellite phone with me. And if I did, the probability of me having it charged and ready to go when I actually need it is hovering above zero. So not very useful and it costs a lot of money. The other systems were not integrated. They were not vertically integrated. They relied on prime contractors. Guess what? Boeing is not your friend. If you are relying on a prime contractor to build something for you, you're gonna get murdered by change orders. You have no ability to adapt your technology as you learn things. You are going to get crucified on the change order bill sheet and the unresponsiveness of engineers who actually don't give a shit about you. That's where these things would generally go to die, and they were not vertically integrated. And you can see a commonality between ASD Space Mobile and SpaceX: both are vertically integrated. They took incredible pains. To do this, this is the production hell. You're building the machine to build the machines. This is where a lot of investors can give up. They can go, oh, these guys will never get it. Oh, they've blown timelines. Oh, they're liars, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is hard. You're building a scaled aerospace production facility at the same time you're trying to figure out your own technology. But if you don't do it, you're almost guaranteed to die. So this is why all these other guys died, and they were targeting small markets again because of the high friction points to it. So here's everything you could possibly want to know about Teledesic, ICO, Skybridge. Those were paper constellations. Very few of them got off the ground in any semblance whatsoever, if at all, and lost investors huge amounts of money. So lastly, we just have the satellites we have in order, in orbit. This is what we call birdwatching. Pretty cool. Now much less important because they're deploying these things pretty easily and consistently. Initially, we were going through incredible pains to figure out if BlueWalker 3 had been successfully deployed. It had been. Now you don't really have to worry about that as much. So we can skip through this. And really it ends with perfect timing, 'cause I just saw that AST SpaceMobile just flipped to their webcast right when I get to my favorite slide, which is we're not a bunch of cowboys launching satellites. This is a serious, well-funded project. So given that AST just flipped on their own webcast at the exact moment I got to the end of my presentation, If you believe in conspiracies, I believe that perhaps Scott is listening to my presentation and is now relieving me of my duties. So thank you, Scott, and godspeed to the AST SpaceMobile team on this launch. I pray for a successful mission, and I am very excited. Wish I could be there, and I'll be there next time. So I'm going to end it here. And thank you everyone for your time and attention, and let's enjoy a successful launch tonight. Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mirror. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
[01:57:53] Speaker A: Listen. Mmm, waffles.
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