When you held Startup class in NYC. You brought up a few founders who were invested in... and what struck me was that each of them had previous relationships to their investors.
For example I heard at least twice from an investor: "I've known john for years prior to him coming to me with [insert company name here]."
So my question is, do you think there exists a "good ol boy's club" in SV that increases the chances by a great deal of getting funded? Or do you believe the playing field is even for those who don't have those kind of connections?
For sure it helps to get to know investors over long periods of time.
However, the investors that invested in my company knew me for 45 minutes (YC), a few weeks (Sequoia), and a few months (NEA).
It's important as a founder not to make excuses for yourself. Sure, it's easier to get money if you've known investors for a long time, but it's certainly possible to get it without knowing them for awhile.
In YC's specific case, we don't know the great majority of the people we fund at all.
Mbps is capacity. Think of a water system of pipes...how many gallons of water can be put through per second. Latency is how long it takes to turn on the water.
So, high latency and high mbps = wait a second for image to start to load, once it does, image loads really fast.
Low latency and low mbps = image begins to load immediately but takes forever for the whole thing to appear.
One problem with existing satellite internet (or phone) is that the signal has to travel to and from a satellite thousands of miles above the equator causing a ~500ms (half second) delay or lag which is noticeable in voice or video calls, ssh sessions, games and even browsing the web. You'll press a key and it will take half a second for it to register, or say something and not be heard right away.
Getting this down to ~100ms puts it in the range of terrestrial communication and will make things much less noticeable.
Well, simply put, there's more to a good user experience than having some high Mbps. For example, if your latency is high then loading a web page with fifty small pictures will take longer than one really big picture.
On your phone, when chatting with someone, the connection will be really choppy.
Think of it as having a car that can go really fast in a straight line, but it takes a really long time to make any left or right turns.
Getting a sub-orbital rocket traveling at multiple Mach to decelerate and land (vertically, nose up) on a point in the ocean that's about 200 square feet in size?
At the relative ranges we are talking about here, those numbers are probably more comparable than many would realize. Consider, Mars at its closest, is over 6700km away. The space station at its furthest is 418km. (Assuming I looked up the correct numbers, of course.)
Considering it came down from 60 miles up and 5x the speed of sound, yes, this is pretty damned close. Especially given the probable cause, needing just a little more hydraulic fluid, and the fact that it's literally the first try for real landing.
