00:18:37 · Nato Saichek
[00:18:37] S1: I've got my feet firmly on the ground. Yeah. No. So I've I've known Mike for something like fifteen years. I was, an early employee at, Planet. I was making, Earth observation satellites, And that was originally in a garage in a house in Cupertino, and Mike lived in the house. Classic. Right. And so I was eating him out of house and home. You know, I was eating his groceries from the fridge for lunch. And then eventually we became friends. And he has always had a lot of crazy ideas. He'd call me up and be like, hey, Nato, I wanna build a solar powered blimp that carries its own electrolysis machine, so it can it can, like, land in the ocean and then refuel, and then... And and I, you know, we we talk about... You know, we go back and forth like, oh, okay. I've got an idea. I wanna make a retrovirus that, like, turns my eyes green. Like, okay. You know, he's like, all kinds of... He'd have a variety of ideas, and, you know, I've I've done a little bit in biotech. I've, you know, I'm I'm a multidisciplinary engineer. And so we'd we'd go back and forth and and and sometimes we would play with stuff. We we got a giant Fresnel lens and we baked stuff in my backyard or in the garage or we built microwave susceptor materials for a microwave rocket thing that we were talking about. There's a whole bunch of... So we played around with a whole bunch of ideas. And when he came with the the space gun idea, I basically like, oh, you gotta align the barrel. That's gonna be impossible. You gotta do this. It's gonna be imp... This is this is hard. This is hard. This is hard. This is also you're not even... Like how are you gonna do this? Like, you can't prototype this. It's really hard to prototype this thing. Like, you know, it's it's... A lot of these things you can think of, how do you make the first small thing, and what can you do in the garage scale? And we could come up with things. But this one seemed really hard to do any of that. But but to his credit, he basically just kept coming back with, oh, talked to this professor so and so, and they said, they showed me this paper where they did this, that, the other, and like, oh, can solve that problem this way, and oh, you know, that's a good point. Know, okay. We went back and forth, and eventually, basically, the last objection that I had was that the system was gonna have to be too long.
00:20:31 · Nato Saichek, Jonathan Brebner
It was gonna have to be hundreds of kilometers long because of this, you know, this gas pressure drop off thing or something. I don't remember what my reasoning was. And and he said, I don't think it's gonna be that bad because we've got this, that, the other. And I was like, build a simulation, run it, and and you'll see it's gonna be too long. And he's like, I'm not a coder. I don't write simul... You make a simulation. And I was like, okay, I'll make a simulation. So I made a simulation, and at first it came back really bad, and then I found an, you know, oh, I flipped a sign there. Okay. Fix that. Fix that. Oh, extra zero. Get rid of that. And came back, okay, look. This thing only has to be, you know, four and a half kilometers long. And he was like, I think it needs to be longer than that. Four kilometers long? That's there's no way we're gonna do it in four kilometers. I'm like, look, I did the math. I've got the physics. Look at this. And he's like, I don't care about the physics. The main thing that just happened here is you believe the system more than I do now. So how come you're not on board already? And I was like, okay, good point. [00:21:27] S0: I mean what you've described is kind of a classic, having both sides of something, which is eye in the sky and feet on the ground, and sort of an iterative process of helping each other build conviction in the thing. Because I have to imagine that he was thinking like, I have to be able to convince Nato.
00:21:27 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:21:27] S0: I mean what you've described is kind of a classic, having both sides of something, which is eye in the sky and feet on the ground, and sort of an iterative process of helping each other build conviction in the thing. Because I have to imagine that he was thinking like, I have to be able to convince Nato. [00:21:46] S1: Yeah, he needed to be able to convince technically competent people that this thing is plausible or it's not gonna be, no one's gonna build it. Right? So, but once he had me on board, I feel like it makes it a lot easier if you can say like, oh, here's a guy who's been building satellites and rockets and robots for fifteen, twenty years. [00:22:07] S0: Yeah, because you were at a rocket company. [00:22:09] S1: Yeah, I was actually, I was at [00:22:10] S0: absolute You were building rockets.
00:22:11 · Nato Saichek
[00:22:11] S1: I was integration lead. I was literally building rockets. I delivered an upper stage and then I delivered two full rockets. And that was like... My degree is in aerospace engineering. Building rockets has been my dream since I was a child. This was a dream come true that I'm getting to build rockets. And then Mike's like, no, rockets are dumb. Know? He's like, oh, you know, yeah, that's a good point. That was the other sort of side of things. It's like, it it was a question of impact. And he basically said, you know, if the company you're at right now is absolutely as successful as it can be, and you have the maximum impact you're gonna have there, what's it gonna be? And I was like, know, company has, you know, 150, 200 people in it. If I have an outsized impact, maybe I have like a 2% impact on the on the future of the company, as just like a generic employee. And if that company's massively successful, I'm not gonna pretend that they were gonna eat SpaceX's lunch. They're gonna maybe have, you know, an extra one or 2% up mass. You know, one or 2% more stuff is gonna go up and costs are gonna come down for one or 2% customers, something like that. So I'll have like a single digit percent impact on a single digit percent impact. For a human in the world, that is a colossal, like, that is a colossal impact to have in general. But when you're given the opportunity to have a double digit percent impact on an order of magnitude impact, it's... It doesn't even... It doesn't... It's nothing. The opportunity to work on something like like a space gun that like could drop the cost by an order of magnitude, and that I might, know, as a co founder have... Hopefully hopefully, I have a double digit percentage chance on... Or double digit percentage impact on the success of the venture. Like, yeah. That that was... The only thing stopping me then was the American health care system. I needed health care. So Mike then got a phase two grant from the Air Force, got enough money in the bank that we could get health care, and and I quit my job and and joined up.
00:24:21 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:24:21] S0: So you were doing sort of just an internal expected value calculation. Yeah. I wanna kind of take that and go back a little bit to something you mentioned before, which is the way that you go about kind of getting stages of proof and sort of adjusting the way other people, yourselves, think about that expected value calculation. It's different for hard tech and for something like aerospace or space gun, whatever, kinetic aerospace than it is for traditional software. Very often, almost always, there's just gonna be a much longer product development cycle before you reach any kind of version that works at all, or that proves, or secures a contract, or you have customers for it's tough. [00:25:12] S1: Are counterexamples. The first nuclear, I think it was like the first nuclear submarine was built in like a year. Like there kind of crazy examples [00:25:23] S0: Counter examples involve the Cold War and like the most powerful nations on But
00:25:29 · Nato Saichek
[00:25:29] S1: the skunk works is 50 engineers. Team that designed the SR-71 was not, you know, that wasn't that wasn't an army, and it wasn't billions of dollars. It was, you know, tens of millions of dollars and less than a 100 engineers. And I can't say I can do that. I I like... I hope I can do that. I've read I've read books about, engineering management and stuff, but but you need you need deep engineering experience to do those things. Those people had already designed and built dozens of airplanes beforehand. They had already built all kinds of... Everybody involved in those systems had a deep technical background in those domains. They had done similar things before, but they'd never done that first thing, that amazing thing had not been done before. But they had a a broad enough, group of engineers with with, diverse talents and willingness to work really hard. They put them together, managed them well, gave them good goals, and, and and, you know, magic happened. You know, I I can't say that... Know, I'm sure there have been the picture of the airplane with all the little red dots on it, you know, the... Yeah, that's true. Looking at the project that succeeded, not the ones that that failed. But it's but it's but it's a sort of a... And this is maybe getting to the same thing you're talking about. It's an existence proof. The first thing you need for for technical, you know, to... For for conviction is the idea that it might not be impossible. It has to be not impossible, and if you can show that it's not impossible, like okay, oh you're never gonna raise money for it. Okay, well that's an argument, but if it's But it's not impossible. Right, right, but yeah, exactly. There was a project I was working on once where we were working on designing a a solar sailing cube set, that the goal was to solar sail to the moon. And we were... I was just with a group of friends and we were in a garage. Somebody was worried about like, how are we gonna get funding for this? And one of the people who was working on it basically said like, funding is negotiable, solar pressure is not. Like, the amount of sunlight that we're gonna get is not a negotiable thing. We can't argue that away. We have to solve this problem about the like, you know, the size of the solar sail.