Cowboy Space Corporation

A Great Example of The Great Differentiation

Trying something new for not boring world subscribers. A little case study as a follow up to an essay I wrote last year called The Great Differentiation.

I saw a great case study on the Great Differentiation this week, so put together some quick thoughts off the dome, as I continue to study how companies tell their stories in new and interesting ways. Let me know what you think.

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Cowboy Space Corp Differentiation Case Study

Earlier this week, I saw a headline that a company called Cowboy Space Corporation had raised over $200 million to build rockets whose upper stages are just foldable data centers. My first thought was who would be dumb enough to compete with Elon in launch at this point and my second was that this had to be the peak.

Then, I saw that it was Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt’s company, Aetherflux, rebranded and expanded, and I got a little more interested, because at least they’d been planning to do energy in space since before data centers were cool, and because turning Robinhood money into sci-fi energy and compute moonshots is exactly how you should billionaire. This is Choose Good Quests.

I wrote about it in the Dose yesterday, because if nothing else, it’s bold.

But in that process, I watched the videos. There’s the one I included in the Dose, which was pretty cool because it had a tumbleweed, and some cowboy-adjacent music, and because the product itself - the upper stage that unfurls into a data center powered by a bunch of solar panels - is arresting, and because calling space “The High Frontier” is both cool and relevant for a company now called Cowboy Space Corporation.

If it were just for that video, though, I wouldn’t be writing this note. This is the one that made my fingers do the keyboard two-step:

It’s so fucking weird when you watch it, right? Baiju, who I’ve never met and I’m not sure watching this if he’s really like this or if this is a bit, is just talking into the camera while he slaps cowboy hats on his team’s head.