About Above the Clouds: Stories from the Boardroom
This is Above the Clouds: Stories from the Boardroom. In every episode, we soar into a world of navigating the complex skies of B2B markets by talking to their leaders. We explore the flight paths they’ve charted, the obstacles they've dodged, and the trending winds lifting today’s businesses to new heights.
Whether you’re trying to grow revenue, swoop into a new market, generate higher margins, launch new products, or any other aspiring business goal, we promise you’ve landed in the right spot.
Wogbe Ofori is the Founder and Chief Strategist of WRX Companies, a Houston-based strategic advisory firm that bridges the commercial gap between science fiction and today. Most of his work sits in space technology commercialization, helping companies turn remarkable engineering into something a buyer will actually pay for.
His advice to space companies sounds backward at first: stop saying "space" when you sell.
Because cool doesn't close deals. Value does.
Wogbe and Richard dig into why the best mousetrap doesn't always win, where the real money in space is today, and whether orbital AI data centers could be the killer app the industry has been waiting for.
They also get into the overview effect, what it takes to tell a CEO they're part of the problem, and what the next five years could look like for the space economy.
If you've ever been told your product speaks for itself, this one's for you.
11 Sept 2026
Building for the Demand That Hasn't Arrived Yet
There are at least ten companies with real funding and a credible shot at putting thousands of satellites into orbit every year. Every one of those satellites needs a thruster. The entire electric propulsion industry has roughly twenty-seven producers, and as far as Orbital Arc can tell, only SpaceX has ever built more than two hundred in a single year.
Jonathan Huffman is the Founder & CEO of Orbital Arc, a Techstars-backed company building ion propulsion on a microchip. Smaller, lighter, more power dense, and produced through semiconductor fabrication, which means the scaling problem that constrains everyone else is already solved. He is a principal investigator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the first chips came back working on the first try.
He walks Richard through the technical bet, the market he is building toward, and why the reliability-at-any-cost philosophy that governed satellite design for thirty years no longer applies. Five years out, he wants to be shipping twelve thousand thrusters a year.
Also in this one: what a JPL propulsion expert told him about his first pitch, why venture firms keep saying the model looks great but they can't check the math, and the difference between building a great product and building a business.
26 Aug 2026
Google Said No. SpaceX Said No. He Built It Anyway.
Rama Afullo pitched in-orbit compute to two of the most ambitious companies on the planet. Google passed. SpaceX passed. So he left and built it himself.
Satlyt installs software on satellites already in orbit — no launch, no hardware, no waiting on Starship. Rama walks Richard through the trade study that killed his original plan for physical orbital data centers, why up to 90% of downlinked satellite data is lost or worthless, and what happens when you run a small language model in orbit to find and fix faults on its own.
He also makes the case most space founders won't: chase revenue from day one. The companies that wait for a defense contract to validate them tend not to make it.
Software-defined networking, an Android-style open ecosystem for space, and a domain name bought nine years before there was a company.
Who has been a guest on Above the Clouds: Stories from the Boardroom
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Chris Turner
Tom Millas
Dustin Williamson
Diana Smith
Ryan Chapman
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
6 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 20 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
26
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
32
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