971 - Enabling Worldwide 7G Connectivity Via Space Lasers w/ Gulmohar Ahluwalia (Nyxara)

All right, how's it going everyone?

Welcome to another episode of Forward Thinking Founders, where we talk to founders about
their companies, their visions for the future of the world and how the two collide.

Today, I'm very excited to be talking to G, who's the founder, CEO of NextEra.

Welcome to the show.

How's it going?

Yeah, great.

Thanks for having me, man.

Yeah, excited to have you on.

um You know, we were talking before we started recording.

know, right now you're based at Founders Inc.

How are you enjoying Founders Inc?

What's it like over there?

It's really awesome.

think it's a great community and I cannot believe that there are two other laser companies
that are here.

It's highly unusual.

They definitely have a way to attract the most insane talent from all across the world.

Other socials do a good job of getting the Word app, but once you get there, it's a little
bit of a different world for sure.

So let's go into it.

So tell us a little about what you're working on at NextEra, and we'll go from there.

Yeah, so at Nixera we are building a new type of a communication system that uses space
lasers to transfer data between space and ground at terabits per second.

And if you're wondering what that kind of connectivity feels like, it is the fervor of you
being able to download everything on Netflix in five seconds.

So that's what 6G should feel like and that's what we're bringing to the world.

Okay, so my next question is, how did you, you a lot of questions about that, but how do
you even decide you wanna work on that?

Like, walk me through your journey of what got you the conviction to solve this problem
and build this for the world.

Yeah.

You know, like many other founders, it has been personal interests in space and then
having the work experience and proximity to the problem that got us to this point.

I started out by wanting to go into the astronaut space selection program and really just
train for that, study for that, go to study electrical engineering and do a hardware

startup, luckily, very

early on, so had a bit of a business inclined mind as well.

And when we finished engineering, there was nothing in Australia that was set up for the
new space economy back in the day or have even a space election program.

So the typical parts would have been to do a couple years and then come to the US, do the
whole NASA route.

And I

ended up doing the closest thing to space in Australia, was uh satellite-based
communications and the rollout of 5G networks, which was very interesting.

And as a freshly minted telecoms and electrical engineer, that was the spot to do it.

And they really gave me an education into what does it take to build networks that are
going to scale.

And they showed me, the 5G networks and how the

It's antiquated system.

Even the most innovative parts of the company are unable to take on this huge challenge
because everything's steeped in legacy systems.

And our internet speeds are getting slower and slower, and we are getting more more
congested bandwidth.

So that's where the idea came from.

During my time, I'd started looking into free space optics in my own free time, not as a
part of the company.

flagging these things to my superiors and you at the time we were so focused on 5G we
didn't explore that and now space lasers and you know using free space optics became the

it thing.

I came over to the US to essentially build this company out.

I didn't have a specific goal of how we would do that.

It was more about um I know this is an idea like I need to talk to these customers that
are all in the US so that's

where we got started.

uh What a crazy background like this and what a vision for the world, right?

We will get into like your larger vision later, but I'm curious this to me as like a
podcaster and like a startup person uh Feels like almost like out of this world vision,

right?

Like what you want to build but for you based on your skill set and background This is in
your wheelhouse.

You wouldn't be with building it if it wasn't so I'm kind of curious like like as you move
out here to San Francisco out to San Francisco out to the states

How do you even think about building this?

What is the order of operations?

Do you know you need a hire?

Are you able to build a prototype yourself?

How do you even get started with a vision like this?

Yeah, well the bigger vision is that we need to get out of this planet and that we're
going to need four things to do that.

So we're going to need some kind of a vessel to carry people out of this planet.

We're going to need fuel to do that and we're going to need networks that connects back to
the home planet.

And we're also going to need some food and water and some type of nutrition.

The problem that I know how to solve is the communications problem.

That's the one I'm closest to.

And in our lifetimes, I want to see people solve all four so we can get out.

um that's the bigger vision.

And you asked, you know, how do we start building it out and what is the order of
operations?

The first one is, can you build something really small that can perhaps show that this big
goal is achievable?

And how do you break these big Goliath

goals into tiny steps.

um we're starting out with a new communication system, massive undertaking, lot of CAPEX,
what do need to do now and what is the problem we need to solve now?

And we started with, there's these optical communication systems already exist.

You already have Starlink and Kepler, Kuiper, they all communicate with lasers in space in
the low Earth orbit, but they can't get these lasers to the ground and they need to go

through fog and cloud cover to be able to do that.

So we started looking at let's solve the cloud piercing problem, let's pierce through the
clouds and get communications through these cloud systems at a 50 meter distance and then

at a 100 meter distance or a kilometer distance.

So that's how I started thinking about breaking down the problem and then it came down to
what kind of team is able to do it.

That's the most important part.

So being able to assemble that

in a new country is, well I knew it was going to be hard and I also knew that my strength
is in finding these people and bringing them on board.

So I spent a ton of time in finding the best people in optics, the best people in
engineering who are able to achieve this and also what is the academic background that is

needed to use some of the free space that is available in labs and how do we reduce our
NRE as we do this.

It kind of snowballed from breaking down those big milestones first.

I have a couple of questions about, about like maybe the tech or the science as someone
that knows very little about this coming into it, right?

Except for like a little bit of research.

Tell me about the significance of like, of the cloud.

So you said Starlink isn't able to like go into the clouds or maybe like communicate
within clouds.

I guess two questions.

Why not?

And then two, why is that important as someone that isn't in this industry?

Like why should, why do clouds matter in the equation here?

Yeah, God I wish they didn't.

It would really help right now.

So how Starlink works is from space to ground, they are using something known as radio
waves.

And this is pretty much the thing that you know of when you hear the word spectrum and
that there are a bunch of companies that have to buy spectrum, sell spectrum so you can

access your cellular phone devices, your bandwidth on your internet.

That's all RF spectrum.

uh

But the technology that they utilize in space when they have satellites that is a
space-based laser so that's free space optics and Those lasers are very very compact.

So think of them as being as as as skinny as these these wires here so super skinny lasers
compact data Transferring terabytes at a time.

There is the radio waves go off as a giant wave

towards the ground from space.

uh And that's why you can only get a max of 200 megabits per second.

I believe the top speeds are Starlink.

So you can't boost the speeds up because of physical constraints.

It's just not possible.

And spectrum is a limited resource that everyone shares.

And we're full because we have too many people now and too many devices.

So the optical comms works at a terahertz frequency, which is oh

orders of magnitude higher than our radio wave frequencies.

And it's totally empty.

It's like being back in the days when anyone could go build a radio, plug into any
spectrum, everyone was starting a telco company because it was empty.

And we're at that point again where optical spectrum frequencies are empty and
uncongested.

So we need to move to them so we can meet our data needs and to access those frequencies.

we need new hardware.

The problem with this new hardware is that these lasers that are extremely compact, when
they try to get through the Earth's atmosphere, they um have issues with the water

droplets in our cloud and fog cover, and then they just diffract in strange ways and the
signal never makes it to the ground.

So they're great for communicating when it's a clear day, it's sunshine all the time, but
you can't do that on Earth where you have a ton of cloud cover and

fog all the time.

if you want to move to 6G, we have to solve that cloud cover problem first or figure out
another way to carry our zettabytes of information that are coming up within the next

year, in fact.

is awesome.

I'm learning a lot here.

So you're building, you know, a product or solution that's able to avoid cloud cover.

So without giving away any secret sauce, obviously, I'm just curious, is what is the
nature of how you're thinking about it?

Is it avoiding the clouds?

Is it making it where it can detect where the clouds are?

And it just, just, yeah, I guess I just said it avoids it.

Or how do you kind of get past this problem, the historical, you know, these lasers have
been not being able to get through.

Yeah, we blast through them, so we're not avoiding them at all.

I know some other companies looked at avoiding them.

We're tackling it head on.

So we have two lasers on our system.

The first laser, and it always starts from the ground.

Imagine this is a satellite.

That's the ground.

We are at the ground.

And we blast up a ultra-high-frequency laser, like up from ground towards the uh
satellite.

And what this does is

this is cylindrical channel that's a big tube.

Think of it as a large empty tube.

And then we pass the communication signal that these satellites can already communicate
with and point them towards the ground through this tube and also from the ground through

this tube upwards.

So from space to ground and ground to space.

So we're essentially creating a pipe, this empty hollow pipe, that we can transfer the
signal through.

uh

That makes sense.

Yeah, definitely.

So once you accomplish this or once you pull this off, uh walk us through what can be
done.

Like, know, we have this kind of high speed connection faster than we've ever had before.

What's now possible that isn't now today?

Yeah, so.

Basically, the hardware, the science, that's a part of it.

The most interesting part to me is a distributed network that can change dynamically.

know how AWS completely changed how we do cloud storage and computing in general, because
you could get these slots of data that can be expanded and then shrunk as needed.

But we can't do that with networks right now.

However, in a world

where you have AI-grade inference loads, you need networks that, for 5 % of the time, are
performing at 100 % capacity.

That's when there is a ton of data, you're training something, and then all that data load
just goes away and it's normal comms.

uh Meanwhile, the infrastructure that we lay down right now, the fiber cables, you have to
plan for the max load it's going to take.

That's very, very expensive.

And within the next five to ten years, all that work we put into cabling and data centers
is obsolete again.

And you have to do it again.

That's why telcos have traditionally had really low margins because it's so capex
intensive.

What if I told you, you never had to lay all that cable again?

You could put a device on your rooftop that's portable and it could adapt to what kind of
uh data loads you needed at that given time.

And that's only possible through space because these satellites are moving.

They can carry all this data and they can beam it down to different locations as and when
needed.

This has just never been possible before.

And we're going through a total platform change in compute.

And this is something that some of the Cisco and Google Cloud execs recently highlighted
at one of the A16Z runtime conferences actually a couple of days ago.

And they were talking about the same thing.

So to build a data center, you need networks.

you need the space and you need the compute power.

We hear lot about compute and energy.

So we hear a lot about the energy and the geography of selection, but we forget about that
networking piece because it doesn't even cross our mind right now that there's a second

way to do things.

It's not just fiber optic cables.

So if you're able to remove reliance on these cables, we can put these data centers in
really, really cool locations, like put them in Iceland.

and put them where the energy costs are lower.

And you can still serve the hyperscalers that are sitting here in the US.

And that's the game changer.

Now that makes sense.

So in your end vision of how you want to impact kind of this, like this four prong
solution you mentioned earlier, you need to, you primarily manufacture this device that

goes on top of buildings.

You also manufacture the satellites up there.

Like what is necessary in order for you to pull this off there, like the things you need
to build.

You don't manufacture all of that.

That's a mistake.

I believe it's a mistake to do the whole stack when you're a small startup.

We're a telco player, right?

Like we're space telco.

And how we are doing it is by partnerships.

So we're partnered up with these ground stations.

We're partnered up with satellite stations.

We have access to some of the big satellite players and we're in contract with them and
the ground station piece.

And we're talking to the telco.

So we just charge by terabytes of data that is delivered.

We're pretty much like think of us as AT &T or Verizon.

So when you get your Verizon internet, Verizon is not the company that is also digging
cable to your house.

That's someone else.

They are also not the company that's manufacturing your modem.

That's outsourced.

That's someone else.

And over time, maybe you can bring a couple of these things in-house.

Maybe you can start manufacturing the modem.

too many things to do for a telco player.

So we want to focus on our core tech, which is that cloud piercing part, and partner with
all existing ground stations, all existing uh partner satellites, and do it that way.

That's what enables us to move faster.

is great.

I feel like I just learned a ton.

I'm changing the tune a little bit.

You were in Australia.

Now you're an SF.

What are some observations that you've made since you've since you've moved?

And I guess how long have you been in SF?

And yeah, what have you learned so far about about this city?

oh that I should have come here two years ago.

Honestly, I wanted to come here for years.

My parents said, look, you're not gonna go to your undergrad at a West Coast university or
you drop out and never go back to school again.

Boy, they were right, because I also dropped out in Australia for a bit and tried to do
another startup.

So they knew me, which is fair enough.

um

The spirit here is crazy.

eh I get more things done within a week here than you do in Australia.

Australia is great.

It's very relaxed.

It's an amazing place to go back and retire.

And if you want to build things, um you want to build things well, you want to take your
time.

It's great for that.

I don't want to take my time.

I just want to things well.

I want to do it quick.

I want to deploy it.

And there's access to capital here that you don't

have in Australia yet.

Those markets are maturing, but it's nowhere close.

So it's just not possible to do that here.

uh So I do that there.

And that's why we moved.

really been noticing a major shift since moving here.

And I've only been here full time for the past two weeks before that I was going back and
forth.

And I was on the East Coast before as well, which is also a different ballgame.

different location it doesn't have the same flavor so I would highly recommend if somebody
is building in this space and once the community wants it to be easier to do a startup,

people should move here.

I want to double click on something that you mentioned.

you feel like you get a lot more, you do get a lot more done there than you did back home.

uh I've heard this a lot, right?

Like I heard a lot of companies like in YC too, like they just, you know, they get so much
done.

There's like the pressure, the pure is X, Y, Z.

How would you, like, why do you think that is?

Like I agree.

I've been to SF 30 times.

Like I've spent a lot of time up there.

I completely agree.

But I haven't quite put my finger on what it is about just being there makes you work
faster.

m How would you define that?

It's the talent concentration.

How many meetings you can do if you can just walk down the road and talk to a fellow
founder who is also doing CNC tooling, for example, which somebody will be.

They'll tell you, hey, this is the cheapest place to do it.

Why don't you speak to this person?

Let's get it done.

Instead of taking that process to go through a week of you looking over the internet,
finding spots, you just go and talk to

people and I've been able to problem solve so many things and meet more people.

Everyone's very much open to making an intro or you want to go see an investor, just walk
down the street as opposed to set a call, like do the whole works.

It's wild the amount of people I've just been able to get on the phone with and just grab
a coffee with because I was in the city.

I think a lot of people that aren't in the city don't realize the shared context that
comes from being there.

like, it's like, you're kind of, you kind of nailed it.

It's not even that you code faster or you think that it's like, you just give access to
everyone you need right within a seven square mile radius, which is just kind of crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's wild.

And I initially thought that we wouldn't have as many hardware companies and boy, was
wrong.

There's so many companies here doing that work and the talent concentration is insane.

So that was my other goal to find more people for us who would be a good fit.

And it's been crazy to find all that talent here, more meetings here, more useful meetings
here than I've had uh

in a while on the East Coast.

You also mentioned, you know, like Australia, but it's a nice place to live, know,
quality, you know, quality life.

And I actually, I feel similarly in Phoenix, right?

You know, most people here, you don't come to Phoenix to like grind.

You come to Phoenix to like, you know, go on your honeymoon, screen break, you know, And
as I'm born and raised, I'm here, I family here, I'm probably not leaving.

just like, I'm kind of rooted.

But it's been interesting as I, you know, I like to think I'm, you know, virtually in the,
in the SF world, you know, online on Twitter and whatnot.

ah And through this podcast, I have a large taste of what that's like, but just looking
around here, the pace is quite, it's just quite different.

It's kind of crazy.

I can't imagine.

I can attest to how everyone in Australia could sit at 5pm, it's time to grab a beer.

That's not happening in an SF.

That's not the thing.

I just did a podcast with a founder a week ago, maybe who's an SF.

And I asked him what his day to day is like, and I'll actually ask you that too in a
second.

he's like, well, you know, working until five o'clock, then I get a workout in, I grab
some dinner, then we head back to the office at seven and we work until 12.

And then we do it all over again.

And I think that some people would hear that and they're like, Oh my gosh, you're a
workaholic.

You don't have a life outside of work.

What's wrong?

I don't think people realize that people in SF love what they do.

They love the work that they do and it's not even work to them.

Would you agree with that or what would you say about that?

That's so cliche.

mean, you could love what you do, but it's about consistently being able to repeat and do
that.

And the reason why it doesn't feel like a mental load is A, everyone else around you is
doing it.

You're not unique.

And if you're building a company, which a lot of people want to, that's worth something,
then you have to put in the work.

There's no way around

And I think people should remember that regardless of what you do, you are putting in the
hours, doing something else, right?

Like you could be in consulting, investment banking type roles, you're working crazy
hours, you're just doing it for someone else.

And you think that this is insane?

Well, it's not.

I actually think it's more work-life.

balancing you have control over your time most founders I know they are very very diligent
about where they spend their time and how they take care of themselves like it's it's

really important to be able to do that to actually function this way so I don't think it's
it's imbalanced I think it's pretty spot-on that's what you need yeah

thing about SF is like I think that's understood in SF.

It's like a shared understanding And then outside of it people are looking at y'all crazy
But it's like I think they're the ones that are missing out on like, you know Like

building something great for the world and like, you know getting the most out of
themselves, right?

Maybe there's some jealousy like who knows I don't know Hey Yeah, anyways, how do you
spend your day?

So like your founders ink right now?

Um, you know, are you there all the time?

It sounds like you do some meetings, like walk us through maybe your, you know, one
average day for you in SF.

And then we'll round it out with a couple more and then we'll call it a day.

Every day is extremely different.

First of all, there is a lot of chaos.

So I like to control my mornings because I have control over that.

And for the rest of the day, probably not.

I might get pulled into a million directions.

So I need to spend some time focusing on things in the morning.

I try to wake up pretty early.

I'm a bit of a early to wake up, early to sleep type of person.

I do run ultra marathons so I want to have the sleep time and I do want to have the
workout time in the morning and also have a dedicated an hour or two to tackle something

that's been really hard for me to do the prior day or plan the rest of the day if I
haven't done that the night before so it's my quiet time a couple hours in the morning and

then there's going to be typically a few meetings and I try to not have

as many meetings, we're in the middle of a fundraise round right now.

there's a ton of meetings for that right now.

But usually it would be more just focus time, do the product work, because I do a ton of
that and I still do a lot of the technical work.

It seems like a one man shop, which is one woman shop.

Yeah, that's what it is.

And I try to have at least

four or five customer checkpoints.

If I haven't spoken to a customer on average every single day, then I'm not doing it
right.

It's about the customers and uh we're very much in the process of figuring out our product
market fit.

there is, like all the talking is typically reserved for customers.

uh Right now it's going towards the fundraising piece, but usually it's just customers and
doing the product.

and selling it.

Sounds like you're pretty busy, which makes a lot of sense.

How do you maybe think maybe two to five years from now, what's the big vision here?

You already kind of outlined it a little bit, but where do see the world going once you
accomplish what you want to do?

yeah, we'll kind of, yeah, I'm curious.

Well, I think I want people to just walk down the street one day and see a plaque they're
saying here lays fiber optic cable from 1990 to 2025.

That's what I want people to see.

And then I want people to go see, oh, remember, like we used to have this.

Like I want it to be a floppy disk.

Like people vaguely remember what it is, but it's like, what was that?

Nobody.

use it.

But we know kind of what it is.

So we want people to be like, like, you know, there's all these cables under the ground.

They're like, oh, granddad as if, like, that's insane.

Like, what do you mean?

And like, yeah, back in my day, we had cables.

That's that's the goal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And if someone wanted to kind of follow along with the journey, you know, do you have a
website?

Are you on social media?

Is there a newsletter?

Like, how can someone follow along your epic vision here?

Well, pretty much how you found me.

We can connect on X.

I only recently got on X.

And that's, by the way, that's your SF question.

I had no idea that it was a big deal to be on X.

I've only been there from a week, and it's been pretty insane.

So do that.

It's so wild.

I wouldn't do anything that I do from Phoenix.

would need to be in SF.

X gives anyone that wants it a little bit of a flavor of SF without being there.

Not full flavor, but like a little bit, just enough, you know?

That's a good way to put in the next best thing you can do is be on X if you can't be in
SF now I know that and then the other pieces I post on Substack and LinkedIn about all of

our work and you can sign up to our newsletter on the company website so you can link it
back, but it's just NickSaraSpace.com um and You can sign up there and we'll send you some

updates

Cool.

Well, thanks for coming on the podcast.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you for having