Inevitable

Stu Landesberg is Co-founder and CEO of Seneca, a company developing autonomous aerial systems to detect and suppress wildfires before they grow out of control. Designed for rapid initial response, Seneca’s technology deploys robotic aircraft that launch within minutes, helping protect homes, infrastructure, and communities in fire-prone regions.
In this episode of Inevitable, Landesberg shares why he left Grove—his first company focused on sustainable consumer goods—to tackle what he sees as a civilization-level challenge: early wildfire intervention. The conversation explores how climate conditions, outdated fire cycles, and insurance market failures have converged to threaten life in the American West. Landesberg walks through Seneca’s approach to changing that trajectory: distributed strike teams of large autonomous suppression copters, built in the U.S., designed to reach fires faster than any existing response method. He also unpacks the product’s potential for mop-up operations, prescribed burns, and utility asset protection.
In this episode, we cover:
(2:40) Wildfire as a threat to housing and the economy
(10:07) The urgent need for faster fire response
(15:12) Why helicopters aren’t a scalable solution
(20:03) New use cases beyond initial attack
(28:25) What autonomy looks like in practice
(33:11) Why Seneca isn’t just another drone company
(38:21) Wildfire as a climate and national security risk
(46:18) Seneca’s first deployments and what’s next
Links:
Stuart Landesberg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartlandesberg
Seneca: https://seneca.com/

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant

Augustus Doricko is Founder and CEO at Rainmaker, a company using cloud seeding, drones, and radar to increase rain and snow as water scarcity and drought intensify across the West. In this episode of Inevitable, the conversation focuses on why cloud seeding—often misunderstood as science fiction or geoengineering—has existed for decades and why it has only recently become possible to prove it actually works.
The discussion centers on the industry’s core constraint: attribution. For years, operators couldn’t measure whether precipitation would have occurred anyway. Doricko explains how advances in dual-polarization radar and targeted flight paths now make it possible to identify human-caused snowfall, unlocking a path to scale.
Doricko also walks through Rainmaker’s vertically integrated approach, from weather-resistant drones and proprietary radar to software and validation systems, and why the company focuses on snowpack as a bankable water source. The episode also addresses public scrutiny, regulatory bans, and what it takes to build water infrastructure in a category that’s easy to misunderstand but increasingly necessary.
Episode recorded on Dec 16, 2025 (Published on Jan 20, 2026)
In this episode, we cover: 
[1:53] Cloud seeding vs geoengineering 
[3:27] How cloud seeding works and its history
[9:14] When and how it became commercially deployable 
[15:28] Advantages of using drones vs manned aircraft 
[18:34] The limits of today’s validation methods 
[24:54] Why Rainmaker focuses on snowpack first 
[27:34] Rainmaker’s go to market
[29:34] Acquiring legacy operators to scale faster
[32:40] Why Rainmaker sells services, not water
[38:25] State bans, politics, and public backlash
[40:39] Chemtrails and Texas flood controversies
[47:15] The future of cloud seeding in the US and abroad

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant

Philip Johnston is co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, a company building data centers in space to solve AI's power crisis. Starcloud has already launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit and is partnering with cloud providers like Crusoe to scale orbital computing infrastructure.
As AI demand accelerates, data centers are running into a new bottleneck: access to reliable, affordable power. Grid congestion, interconnection delays, and cooling requirements are slowing the deployment of new AI data centers, even as compute demand continues to surge. Traditional data centers face 5-10 year lead times for new power projects due to permitting, interconnection queues, and grid capacity constraints.
In this episode, Philip explains why Starcloud is building data centers in orbit, where continuous solar power is available and heat can be rejected directly into the vacuum of space. He walks through Starcloud’s first on-orbit GPU deployment, the realities of cooling and radiation in space, and how orbital data centers could relieve pressure on terrestrial power systems as AI infrastructure scales.
Episode recorded on Dec 11, 2025 (Published on Jan 13, 2026)
In this episode, we cover: 
[04:59] What Starcloud's orbital data centers look like (and how they differ from terrestrial facilities)
[06:37] How SpaceX Starship's reusable launch vehicles change space economics
[10:45] The $500/kg breakeven point for space-based solar vs. Earth 
[14:15] Why space solar panels produce 8x more energy than ground-based arrays 
[21:19] Thermal management: Cooling NVIDIA GPUs in a vacuum using radiators 
[25:57] Edge computing in orbit: Real-time inference on satellite imagery 
[29:22] The Crusoe partnership: Selling power-as-a-service in space 
[31:21] Starcloud's business model: Power, cooling, and connectivity 
[34:18] Addressing critics: What could prevent orbital data centers from working
Key Takeaways:
Starcloud launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit in November 2024 
Space solar produces 8x more energy per square meter than terrestrial solar 
Breakeven launch cost for orbital data centers: $500/kg 
Current customers: DOD and commercial Earth observation satellites needing real-time inference 
Target: 10 gigawatts of orbital computing capacity by early 2030s

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant

Kurt Terrani is CEO of Standard Nuclear, a company focused on a part of nuclear energy that gets far less attention than reactor designs but can become the true bottleneck: fuel.
In this episode, Kurt provides a nuclear fuels 101, walking through the front end of the fuel cycle from uranium processing and enrichment to fabrication. He explains in plain terms what makes TRISO fuel different, why it appears so frequently in next-generation reactor designs, and how fuel performance shapes reactor economics, safety, and scalability.
The conversation also unpacks Standard Nuclear’s origin story, which emerged from a Chapter 11 restructuring of UltraSafe Nuclear, and explores a future where reactor-agnostic fuel suppliers replace vertically integrated fuel strategies to unlock faster deployment across advanced nuclear technologies.
Episode recorded on Dec 4, 2025 (Published on Jan 6, 2026)
In this episode, we cover: 
[1:53] An overview of Standard Nuclear
[3:26] Nuclear’s history in Oak Ridge, TN
[6:07] The nuclear fuel cycle 
[8:35] US involvement and ownership in this cycle
[10:17] TRISO fuel or coated particle fuel
[17:56] Why enrichment access constrains deployment 
[21:43] Government’s role bridging fuel supply gaps
[24:03] Why reactor companies try vertical integration
[26:26] Standard Nuclear’s origin story 
[28:51] Why fuel must become a commodity
[33:42] The case for standardizing TRISO specs
[39:20] Challenges of building a fuels company

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant

Aleks Gampel is COO and Co-founder at Cuby, a company rethinking how homes are built in the middle of a nationwide housing crisis. The cost of housing has soared while construction productivity has barely budged in decades, and today’s homes are still built through slow, wasteful, and carbon-intensive processes that aren’t designed for escalating climate risks. Instead of shipping prefab boxes across the country, Cuby asks what it would look like if housing finally had its assembly line moment—and the factory moved to where homes are needed. Their mobile microfactories are inflatable, rapidly deployable facilities that manufacture standardized home components on or near the job site using mostly unskilled labor, then assemble houses in a predictable, repeatable way. In this conversation, Aleks unpacks the roots of the housing shortage, why past modular attempts fell short, and how Cuby’s model could change what’s possible for housing affordability, waste reduction, and resilience.
Episode recorded on Nov 20, 2025 (Published on Dec 16, 2025)
In this episode, we cover: 
[4:40] Causes for the housing crisis today  
[8:17] Emissions associated with housing and how Cuby differs
[12:54] An overview of  industrialized construction 
[16:43] Main challenges with industrialized construction
[19:25] Cuby’s antithesis to centralized gigafactories in construction
[27:08] How Cuby’s inflatable mobile microfactory works
[30:17] Cuby’s European headquarters and China facility 
[31:57] Cuby’s single-family home design 
[33:30] The company’s business model
[37:52] Why Cuby isn’t displacing jobs 
[38:55] The company’s funding to date 
[40:15] What’s next for Cuby

Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at [email protected].
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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant