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.
00:27:44 · Nato Saichek, Jonathan Brebner
If we have to make it twice as big and we have to ask for twice as much money, okay, then that's what we'll have to do. But first we have to solve the physics and then we can worry about the money. [00:27:56] S0: So you just did a ton of very compelling storytelling. This is something I spend a lot of time on with the members and founders here at SPC. And in particular a lot of the people who are doing kind of more deeply technical things. Because you just have to get people to believe, to suspend their disbelief for a longer period of time and often to a greater degree because of the capital costs. The physics are non negotiable, but then you can tell a story once it's like, it's not impossible. [00:28:24] S1: How [00:28:25] S0: did you and your co founder approach that process early on as you were going out and convincing your first investors to join? Or as you were trying to expand the circle of people, obviously Mike had already gone and gotten a grant for the project from the government, but then you needed more capital and you had to start convincing more and more people to kind of join the vision. Was that an iterative process, or was it mostly just like Space Gun, and like whoever vibed with that?
00:28:53 · Nato Saichek
[00:28:53] S1: So I think we initially, I think we actually overestimated the amount that early investors would care about technical diligence. Once we had a physical thing that we had built, we demonstrated we have a team here, we can build stuff. We had a Air Force grant, so we were able to convince somebody that this thing was not completely useless. Mike is... Can tell this part of the story way better than I can, because he he was the one making the phone calls, and if somebody had technical questions, then he would drag me in. But that was almost never. He would call and get kicked in the teeth for hours, for weeks, hundreds of calls to potential investors. Either they didn't care about space launch, they only cared about short term weapon applications for blah blah blah, Or they didn't care about weapon applications, they only cared about space launch. And then we're a tiny little company in a garage. We don't have, you know, how long is it gonna take us to build a space launch? Well it's gonna be more than four years, and that's the horizon over their investment horizon, so forget about it. So he got kicked in the teeth repeatedly by tons of investors for a whole bunch of reasons. Almost never, I think there's maybe one investor who, like, we couldn't... They they were gonna invest, but they we didn't give them the the technical, enough technical credibility. I think mainly when... If an investor would come over, and they would see, we have the team here, they're working hard, there's people out there, they're cutting metal, they're grinding, we're doing a test shot. You you know, the... It's that when you... If we have an investor visiting
00:30:29 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:30:29] S0: Yeah. [00:30:29] S1: We tried to line that up with test shots. Because if they get to push that button and feel that That's pretty good demo. Yeah. It's a oh man, there's nothing like it. So it's great to be able to show people the things you're working If you're doing a, yeah, b to b SaaS company or something, and you're like, oh, look at this cool dashboard that we have or some... It's like... It's different than if you say, look, here is a giant concrete tunnel, 20 feet by 20 feet, 300 feet long, and inside it is the world's largest gun. And over here is the control system for it, and like, you know, like, you can crawl down the barrel if you want. Your hands will get dirty. Like, it's a very different thing to walk next to it and hear the echo of the space around you. And and, you know, you can see the the weld beads and the slag and the, you know, all the, like, the... It's a it's a visceral physical thing. And there's so if you're considering doing hardware, there are rewards. Even if I don't have as many Git commits as as I used to, my GitHub history is is has a lot of blank spots now. I used to do a lot more software. But there's other rewards.
00:31:43 · Jonathan Brebner
[00:31:43] S0: It definitely is, yeah, I mean the flip side of you have to get people to believe is that once you get them over that first initial hump of incredulity. Once you get someone to be like, but maybe... And then you can be like, and we're building a space gun. The thing itself has so much more intrinsic, don't know, energy to it, in this case literally, but that it is a little bit easier to get someone excited about it. But that first step is often very different. Well it's interesting actually, this does fit with other examples I can think of, but it is counterintuitive that at least early on, are not as interested in the technical diligence. But then at a certain point, it's like, that kind of makes sense really early on. Right.
00:32:29 · Nato Saichek
[00:32:29] S1: Right. So some of the early investors are basically like, okay, and when you get to space, what are you gonna be doing? And we'd say things like, well, look, the the there are some cool weird things that this system enables that, like, first thing is, it's weird in that, like, traditional rocket, you get to pick the orbit that you're going into, if you're a customer. You wanna go into an orbit? You buy the rocket. It'll put you into that orbit. Our system is gonna be 10 or 15 kilometers long. We can't change the angle. It's it's pointed where it's pointed. It's gonna go into that orbit, which is in some ways a big restriction. But one of the ways we can sort of get over that, what that means is that like any customer who wants to put something up in a different orbit, are they are they shit out of luck? Well, one of the first things we could put up is like a whole fleet of space tugs. And we can refuel them for nothing because we have the cheapest access to space there is. So yeah, we'll shoot your satellite up and then we'll put you on a first class ticket to whatever orbit you want on a space tug that's not running some dinky ion thruster that's gonna take you six months to get there. We'll put you chemical all the way, buddy. We'll put you in your orbit in, you know, in fifteen minutes. No problem. And then we'll burn chemical back to that same orbit, and, and then we'll refuel it because it's because fuel costs nothing to put up for us compared to anybody else.