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HOME/PEOPLE/PHILIP JOHNSTON
// PERSON

Philip Johnston

ROLE CEOMENTIONS 9LAST SEEN AUGUST 5, 2026
// BIO

Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, a company building orbital data centers to provide AI compute infrastructure in space. He previously co-founded Opontia, a digital brand aggregator, and worked as an associate at McKinsey & Company on satellite projects for national space agencies. He holds an MPA from Harvard University, an MBA from Wharton, and an MA in Applied Mathematics from Columbia University.

Discussed in
// RECENT MENTIONS
// SIGNALS
9 SIGNALS
01
funding·Lightcone·AUGUST 5, 2026

After YC, we'd raised like 11 million at 40... And even then it took us six months to make our first hire

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02
mention·Lightcone·AUGUST 5, 2026

We came to a much closer to reality number of $500 a kilo. And that's what we think currently that the breakeven launch cost is.

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03
mention·Lightcone·AUGUST 5, 2026

They're building these two Starship gigafactories. They're designed to produce something like three Starships per day. And because Starship is reusable, you know, on a sort of three or four year time frame, that could lead to us having thousands of times the capacity to get things to space.

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04
product·Sourcery·JULY 19, 2026

We're building a kind of campus to set up a huge manufacturing line for what we're calling StarCloud 3, which is like the vehicle which will fit on Starship. So we can potentially fit up to 10 megawatts of compute capacity per Starship launch.

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05
mention·Sourcery Newsletter·JULY 19, 2026

"My hottest take right now is that the SpaceX IPO is gonna be viewed historically as the most undervalued IPO of all time. I think they will tear through 10 trillion within the next couple of years."

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06
mention·Sourcery·JULY 19, 2026

We flew an ARM chip on our first spacecraft. We threw three ARM GPUs on our first spacecraft. Nobody knows about that, but we did.

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07
m_and_a·Sourcery·JULY 19, 2026

StarCloud is in active conversations with SambaNova and Cerebras about flying their chips.

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08
product·Sourcery Newsletter·JULY 19, 2026

Starcloud | Orbital data center company | Building AI compute infrastructure in space

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09
mention·Sourcery·JULY 19, 2026

My hottest take right now is that the SpaceX IPO is going to be viewed historically as the most undervalued IPO of all time. I think they will tear through 10 trillion within, you know, certainly within the next couple of years.

Source

AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.