space
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Michael Gorton’s long way to Mars
At 12, Michael Gorton planned to be the first person on Mars. The Teladoc co-founder took a detour through power systems, internet startups, mountain summits, and novels - without quite abandoning the destination.
James Crean
James Crean is the co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer (also serving as President/CTO) of CREAN Inc, an Austin, Texas aerospace engineering and smart factory firm he started in 2002 with his wife Jennifer. A former satellite systems engineer and program manager at Hughes Space & Communications and Boeing - where he worked on DirecTV, NASA's TDRSS and other communications and weather satellites, and built the Lean Six Sigma group for Boeing Satellites - Crean now leads a team of 600-plus aerospace and defense engineers and champions CREAN's AI-enabled Smart Factory Operating System (SFOS), which aims to make American high-mix manufacturing fast, flexible and competitive enough to bring production home from overseas.
Pierre-Damien Vaujour
Pierre-Damien Vaujour is the co-founder and CEO of Loft Orbital, the San Francisco-based company that turned satellite deployment from a multi-year aerospace engineering odyssey into something closer to provisioning a cloud server. A French aerospace engineer by training — ISAE-SUPAERO class of 2008, master's from University of Michigan — he cut his teeth at ESA, NASA, the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and was among the first hires at Spire Global before co-founding Loft Orbital in 2017 with Alex Greenberg and Antoine de Chassy. Under his leadership, the company reached unicorn status in January 2025 with a $170M Series C, surpassed $500M in cumulative bookings, and is now building the default AI execution layer for orbital infrastructure.
Aymerik Renard
Aymerik Renard is a General Partner at HCVC (formerly Hardware Club), a community-driven venture firm investing in hardtech startups out of San Francisco and Paris. With more than two decades in venture capital - including stints at Innovacom, Orange, PCH International, SanDisk and Western Digital Capital - he backs founders working on robotics, space, biotech, defense and climate technology in Europe and North America.
Vishnu Sridhar
Vishnu Sridhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Matter Intelligence, a deep-tech startup building ultraspectral satellite sensors and geospatial AI to map the planet at molecular resolution. A Queens-raised Indian American engineer, Sridhar spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Cognizant Engineer for the SuperCam instrument aboard the Mars Perseverance rover and as Flight Director for the Opportunity rover before pivoting to commercialize the same sensor physics for Earth. Matter Intelligence emerged from stealth in October 2024 with $12M in seed funding backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, and Mark Cuban, building toward EARTH-1, a satellite that will deliver more than 500x the information density of existing sensors.
Christian Keil
Christian Keil is an Investing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz on the American Dynamism team, backing startups that build for the national interest - from aerospace to defense to infrastructure. Before turning investor, he spent seven years as a top executive at Astranis, the satellite company he helped scale from a 50-person R&D shop to a 500-person aerospace-grade factory with over $1 billion in sales. He may be the only venture capitalist who has personally bought a dedicated Falcon 9 rocket. A proud Midwesterner who moved to Silicon Valley in 2017, Keil writes, podcasts, and thinks deeply about what it means to build things that matter for America.
Trae Stephens
Trae Stephens is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, the defense-tech startup that hit $1 billion in revenue in 2024 and reached a $30.5 billion valuation in its 2025 Series G. A partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund since 2014, Stephens has spent his career at the intersection of national security and Silicon Valley - from Arabic computational linguistics in the US intelligence community, to early days at Palantir, to co-founding Anduril with Palmer Luckey in 2017. A devout Christian from Lebanon, Ohio, he frames building autonomous weapons as a moral imperative and became a billionaire in June 2025.
Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson is a Swiss-American technology investor, author, and former journalist whose career has spanned five decades and multiple reinventions - from fact-checker at Forbes to the founding chair of ICANN, from running the most influential tech conference of the 1990s to training as a backup cosmonaut in Star City, Russia. The daughter of physicist Freeman Dyson, she built EDventure Holdings and its newsletter Release 1.0 into required reading for Silicon Valley's elite before pivoting to angel investing in health tech, AI, and aerospace. Now working on her book 'Term Limits: Time and Scale in the Age of AI' (MIT Press, 2027), she remains one of tech's most original and independent thinkers, guided by her personal motto: 'Always make new mistakes.'
Daniel Museles
Daniel Museles is a Principal at NFX, the San Francisco-based venture firm behind a $450M fund and the NFX Signal network. He leads NFX's crypto practice and invests across AI, space, and Web3 at the pre-seed through Series A stage. A Cornell ILR grad and former BCG consultant who answered what colleagues called a 'wacky job listing,' he backed Starcloud (space data centers, now valued at $1.1B) and Known (voice-AI dating app) before being promoted to Principal in September 2024. He finds founders before they find him.
Gigi Levy-Weiss
Gigi Levy-Weiss is a General Partner and co-founder at NFX, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed venture capital firm managing $875M+ across 577+ portfolio companies with 25 unicorns. A former Israeli Air Force attack helicopter pilot turned serial entrepreneur, he co-founded Playtika (sold to Caesars for ~$180M; later valued at $4.4B), served as CEO of 888 Holdings (a London-listed online gaming company), and made 150+ angel investments before co-founding NFX in 2015. Known for combining military-grade rigor with a warm, self-deprecating sense of humor, he leads NFX's Israel office and focuses on gaming, bio, space, and generative AI.
Steve Jurvetson
Steve Jurvetson is a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Future Ventures, best known for coining the term 'viral marketing,' backing Hotmail, SpaceX, and Tesla from their earliest days, and bringing a scientist's obsession to everything from model rockets to nanotechnology. After two decades at Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing over $6 billion, he launched Future Ventures in 2018 with a patient, 15-year fund structure focused on deep tech, AI, space, and synthetic biology. A triple Stanford alumnus who finished his EE degree in 2.5 years at the top of his class, Jurvetson is as likely to be found photographing rocket launches on his Flickr account as sitting on SpaceX's board.
Ashlee Vance
Ashlee Vance is a South Africa-born, Texas-raised journalist, author, and documentary producer who spent 14 years at Bloomberg Businessweek before launching Core Memory in January 2025 - an independent sci-tech media company. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books including the definitive pre-Isaacson biography of Elon Musk, producer of HBO's Wild Wild Space and Netflix's Don't Die, and creator of Bloomberg's most-watched video series Hello World. In 2025 he is writing a forthcoming book on OpenAI and Sam Altman with exclusive access, and already sold the film rights.
Peter Diamandis
Peter H. Diamandis is a Greek-American entrepreneur, physician, and futurist who has founded or co-founded 25+ companies and is best known as the creator of the XPRIZE Foundation - which has launched over $600 million in incentive competitions catalyzing $10+ billion in R&D. A data-driven optimist, he co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil, runs the Metatrends newsletter (157,000+ subscribers), and is a 4x New York Times bestselling author. His current mission centers on longevity - he launched the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan in 2024 and published the Longevity Guidebook in January 2025.