🕶️ Disney star raised $375M for antennas

Good morning, mission control. 🕶️

Bridgit Mendler's company just raised $375 million, and it doesn't build a single rocket. Northwood makes the antennas on the ground that satellites need to send their data home. That's today's pattern: the money is in the plumbing, and so are the bills. Elon Musk just admitted that Grok Bot's serving costs ran "unsustainably high relative to revenue," so he capped his users. And Squarespace, which sells the plumbing for websites, is cutting 19% of its staff as AI builds sites from one prompt. So which layer under your market is still hard to build, and which one is about to be free?

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

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Bridgit Mendler's résumé reads like a Disney Channel plot twist (minus the laugh track). The former sitcom star now runs Northwood Space, which raised a $375 million Series C on Monday at a $2 billion valuation, co-led by a16z and DFJ Growth. Northwood doesn't build rockets. It builds the antennas on the ground that satellites use to send their data home.

Previously, on Good Luck Charlie: Mendler starred in the Disney sitcom, then studied at MIT and Harvard Law and worked in the satellite policy branch of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After that, the clock speeds up:

The traffic jam is on the ground: thousands of satellites launch every year, and each needs a ground station to talk to. Building your own is slow and expensive, so Northwood sells operators capacity on its network instead, including Prism, a nearly 8-foot dish that pulls data down.

Down to earth: every satellite that goes up is a potential Northwood customer, no matter whose rocket carried it. If your sector is crowded with people fighting over the shiny product, look one layer down for the thing all of them need and none of them want to build.

Looking ahead… Northwood has 140+ employees and plans to add 400 jobs in Torrance and Washington, D.C., over the next three years. The number to watch is how many antennas that factory actually ships.

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Nobody loves a buffet that runs out of shrimp. Over Halloween weekend, some Grok Bot users woke up to maxed-out weekly limits, even if they hadn't touched it overnight. It wasn't a glitch: on Sunday, Elon Musk confirmed on X that "the cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue."

What is Grok Bot? It's SpaceX's agentic AI, meaning software that carries out tasks for you, not just answers questions. In a filing last month, the newly public SpaceX said AI now makes up 52% of company income, and its AI division turned a $431 million profit. Musk has called Grok Bot "the fastest growth of a product that I've ever seen in my life."

Flat price, steep bill: a subscription charges everyone the same, but every task an agent runs burns compute (the processing power AI runs on). Heavy users cost the most and pay the same. So when a product grows that fast, the bill grows with it and the price doesn't, which is how a profitable AI division ends up rationing its hottest product.

Pool party: OpenAI is making a similar move, just more politely. Starting in December, ChatGPT and its coding agent, Codex, will draw from one shared pool of tokens (units of AI usage) for Plus, Pro and Business subscribers. OpenAI hasn't said how big the pool will be. One user on its developer forum did the math: "Doubling a resource allocation while simultaneously expanding the number of things consuming it doesn't inherently translate into more usable capacity."

Cap-acity planning: if your product or team runs on a flat-rate agent plan, treat today's limits as temporary. Track your weekly burn, budget for a cap you could hit by Wednesday and keep a backup model ready. If you sell AI at a flat fee, learn what your top users cost before your margins do.

Musk hasn't said what Grok Bot's limits will be, and OpenAI won't say exactly when in December its change lands. Until they do, assume the meter is running.

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