I’ve never understood why it’s easier to ship something across the planet than it is to ship it across the street.
Miles Mufuka Martin didn’t understand either (though he did have a better sense of supply chain than I). So, he founded Relai to help solve the unexpectedly complex problems of local logistics and trade.
In so doing, he also happened upon a distributed compute network hiding in plain sight. He calls it “invisible infrastructure,” and it’s the subject of today’s all-new Thought Liters.
Personal note: it’s been a while since you’ve seen me in your inbox. There’s a reason: I had a kid and have slept 39 minutes since the beginning of March. So please read, watch, subscribe, like, forward, do all that fun stuff because daddy literally needs a new pair of shoes now.
300 No’s. 1 Yes.
Miles and his co-founder TJ first developed the concept of a battery-powered “asynchronous Exchange Zone” a few years ago. The solution seemed elegant enough — person A drops a good off, then person B picks it up some time later, all from a sleek-looking box wrapped in obsidian and lime. (Think, a safer Facebook Marketplace exchange combined with an Amazon locker.) The pair teamed up to take the concept from paper and cardboard to real life, starting their development and entrepreneurial journey in the Steel City.
Seriously, it started on cardboard.
But the journey from 0 to 1 took more than getting burned by partners (thrice, according to Miles) and learning how to code from scratch. Notably, it took a ridiculous amount of door-to-door knocking to get a “yes” to place his first Zone.
How many, Adam? 10? 50? Please don’t say 100.
Try THREE HUNDRED NO’s IN A ROW before Relai got to pass their box baton. (If you round down.)
Eventually, a pizza shop gave Relai its first shot at a true neighborhood network.
and that made Miles very happy.
What’s In The Box???
On the outside, a Relai Exchange Zone looks simple enough: a locker with a few QR codes and a series of doors waiting to be opened, closed, and opened again. On the inside, you’ll find a labyrinth of processing power waiting to be unlocked for the benefit of the surrounding area.
All of the compute that we use to open the doors… I don't even use, like, a percent of the potential compute powers that are in all my microcontrollers and computer chips, etc., etc., etc…. That is free bandwidth that we can give to the immediate communities around there.
How much bandwidth is there to go around? Well, in Relai’s densest market (Atlanta, where ten EZs are already operational), Miles estimates that his Relai network could serve and host half of its software-based startups…with creatively-placed, multi-purpose, battery-powered entities boasting far more usefulness to a small business than the newest million-dollar data center down the street. Now, while Miles does note that some data should still sit in the blue-chip cloud (payment data, for instance), there’s a massive opportunity to be a solution for vast amounts of non-critical data, hosted at a fraction of the cost (up to 70% savings, Miles estimates).
By the way, it should be noted that Miles is expanding here in Pittsburgh, too. Just recently, Bakery Square became the newest Exchange Zone location.
With an updated colorway to boot!
So…What Comes Next?
For the last few years, we’ve been told the "cloud" is a mythical, multi-billion-dollar warehouse sitting somewhere in northern Virginia. The internet is ablaze with concerned citizens fearing the day their town is drowned out in a dystopian hum of generators and GPUs. Relai is proving the cloud can literally be a battery-powered box sitting outside your local pizza shop.
If Miles pulls this off, he’ll be laying down a localized, decentralized internet, which puts real, invisible infrastructure back onto the street corner.
(And yes, you’ll have a safer way to buy that secondhand home decor you’ve been eyeing.)
In this episode, we crack open a flight of Pittsburgh’s finest and explore exactly what happens when that infrastructure reaches critical mass. We dive into:
How to bounce back when you get burned (three times).
The profound, deeply unsexy reality of hardware supply chains.
What it actually means to build "invisible infrastructure" from scratch.
If you are building something hard, or if you just want a creative glimmer of hope for how the physical world can more elegantly meet the digital one, you need to watch this
So please, watch the full episode here. If you enjoy it: like or comment on YouTube. That drives visibility more than anything. Consider subscribing as well.
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Cheers!
Adam
