I only hold a couple stocks. But two of them I won’t be selling anytime because of the people running them and what they do. $ASTS and $NBIS. Two CEOs. Two completely different stories. Same result. Relentless builders who refused to quit. Abel Avellan built his first satellite company from scratch in 1999. Grew it into one of the largest private satellite operators in the world. Ranked as the fastest growing satellite service provider on earth for years running. Sold it in 2016 for $550 million. Most people retire after that. He took one year off. Then in 2017 he started $ASTS with an idea every expert said was physically impossible. Put satellites in orbit large enough to connect directly to the phones already in billions of people’s pockets. No new hardware. No new apps. Just coverage everywhere on earth. He has not taken a single paycheck since the company went public. No salary. No bonus. His only compensation is the stock. He wins when shareholders win and not a day before. 24 US patents co-invented. $3.9 billion raised. AT&T, Verizon, Google, Vodafone all signed. The world’s first space-based two-way phone call made. BlueBird 6 in orbit. The largest commercial communications array ever deployed in low earth orbit unfolded successfully. Launches every one to two months through end of year. The man is building the internet for the next 4 billion people who do not have it yet. Then there is Arkady Volozh. Born in Soviet Kazakhstan. Applied mathematician. Started importing computers from Austria in the late 1980s. Co-founded Yandex in 1997, a year before Google launched. Built it into a $30 billion empire over 25 years. Search. Ride-hailing. E-commerce. Autonomous vehicles. Payments. The most dominant technology company in the largest country on earth. Then Putin invaded Ukraine. The EU sanctioned him overnight. He resigned from everything. Watched the company he gave his life to get carved up and sold to Russian buyers for a fraction of what it was worth. He lost it all. Most people never come back from that. He publicly condemned the war. Renounced his Russian citizenship. Relisted on Nasdaq under a new name with a small team, a data center in Finland, and $2.5 billion from the wreckage. Then Microsoft called. $20 billion deal. Meta followed with $27 billion. Nvidia became a shareholder. The company he rebuilt from rubble is now worth more than the one Putin took from him. 547% revenue growth. $7-9 billion ARR guided for 2026. 16 data center sites globally. Two builders. Zero excuses. Both still in the arena.

SpaceX tops the list of the most valuable private companies in the US.

The US has Stanford, MIT, CMU… and they all know each other. Europe? Not so much. Until now: Students move between labs, compete in the same challenges, start companies together. There’s a shared culture. Europe’s biggest problem in robotics isn’t talent. It’s that nobody connects the dots. ETH has a phenomenal robotics scene. So does TU Munich. EPFL. TU Delft. But a student in Lausanne has zero visibility into what’s being built in Eindhoven. There’s no equivalent of the American pipeline where university robotics feeds directly into a startup ecosystem. Until now, apparently. ESRA a network of 11 student robotics clubs across 8 European countries. ETH, EPFL, TUM, TU Delft, TU Wien, KTH, Polimi, the list goes on. They’re organizing joint hackathons, sharing access to compute and hardware, and basically building the connective tissue that European student robotics has been missing. The part I like most: this wasn’t some EU initiative or university admin project. The clubs built it themselves because they got tired of waiting. 2,500+ students, zero bureaucracy. That’s how good things start. studentrobotics.eu Thank you, Florian Schroeders for let being part of this! Saying Hi to Declan Shine 👋 #Robotics #Europe #DeepTech #ESRA