02:00:32 · Bridgit Mendler, Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:00:32] S5: Okay. This is this is Northwood HQ. Okay. First first Northwood HQ. Yeah. And yeah. We we're starting to call ourselves the United Nations of Northwood. So just more more flags representing really the the countries that we have a presence in. [02:00:47] S1: Yeah. I was gonna say it's if there were people if it was representing the people on the team, I imagine there maybe be a few more. But yeah, very very very cool. Yeah. [02:00:56] S0: Yeah. Has international expansion been like? Why is that important to the actual rollout of the the product, the technology, the business? Why do you have so many flags so quickly as a relatively young company? [02:01:12] S5: Right? No. We're we're doing startup on hard mode. Why Yeah. But so reminder, we do networking for space and Yep. You know, you can I I like to do the comparison to like a cell towers when you're going down the freeway? You need to hit different cell towers to stay in contact. Same deal with the satellite. It's just way further away. And so their equivalent of cell towers are literally on different countries or continents, and that's how you can provide the continuity of coverage. So we kind of have to stand up a bunch of sites around the world to support satellites orbiting. And, yeah, it's it's challenging. It's part of the game. But I think that's really gratifying. [02:01:48] S0: What is the state of yeah.
02:01:48 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Bridgit Mendler
[02:01:48] S0: What is the state of yeah. [02:01:50] S1: What what is the actual process of a search look like? I imagine in a bunch of areas of the world, you are looking at a region that encompasses multiple countries, and so are you basically doing like a road show and you know, you wanna get buy in, but then there's probably also incentives that you can get, but like, how does that actually work? If I'm not not planning to compete. To be clear. [02:02:14] S5: Give me the secret. Yeah. No. It I mean, the annoying answer is it depends. It really depends on what the satellite operator is maximizing for. So some will care about, you know, their contact time metrics. So wanting to make sure that they can have, you know, minimal windows of gaps between their contacts. Others will care about, can you drop data in this one very specific location? And so once we have that customer parameter, then the question is, know, you where's the infrastructure that makes things cheap and easy for Northwood? What country is is a good partner? And and then kind of kick off the the the lease hunt and the construction and all that from there, and then we get it up and running. So, yeah. We've we've been busy. We've been doing that in a lot of different countries, and was thinking it could be fun showing the factory floor. So it's been filling up a bit, and so we need to move to the new spot. So these are our portal and prism units. [02:03:10] S0: What's the serrated edges for? Do you have pigeons that land on the edges of the I've only seen those on like park benches in New York City.
02:03:10 · John Coogan, Bridgit Mendler, Jordi Hays
[02:03:10] S0: What's the serrated edges for? Do you have pigeons that land on the edges of the I've only seen those on like park benches in New York City. [02:03:19] S5: Yeah. No. You're not the first person to ask about that. Really for our antenna performance. So we we wanna make sure that we're really precisely hitting where we wanna go and Okay. And, you know, RF has this thing called side lobes Yeah. Which can means that the the signals will bounce off in kind of unintended ways. And so that's a way for us to kinda control where the signals go. [02:03:38] S0: Interesting. So if I How much space in in pigeon defense, things that might make my WiFi better or worse? [02:03:47] S5: Literally two birds with one stone. Avoid the pigeon, avoid the Oh. No. I I actually I I don't [02:03:53] S0: know that. You have to test it. [02:03:55] S1: So how much space do you actually need in a country? Is this like you can get by with like a quarter of an acre or how like the the the Yeah. Hardware doesn't look like massive. [02:04:06] S0: Yeah. You're not building like scratch [02:04:08] S1: power and it's secure Yeah. And it but No.
02:04:08 · Jordi Hays, Bridgit Mendler, John Coogan
[02:04:08] S1: power and it's secure Yeah. And it but No. [02:04:12] S5: That's the whole deal. We we compress it a lot. So our our portal system, which is right here Mhmm. It's designed to replace a 7.3 meter dish antenna, which is a hard number to visualize, but think of like a two story building. And so those portal antennas, you can combine, like, six or eight of them together and it replaces that. But the cool thing is you can actually do multiple satellite contacts at once. So what might take like multiple football fields to support that much contact, you can actually do in basically the size of like a strip mall parking lot. [02:04:46] S1: Mhmm. Very cool. [02:04:49] S0: I had something else. Now I'm blanking. Lost my train of thought. [02:04:54] S5: Yeah. [02:04:55] S0: I guess I guess my question was what is driving growth of demand for ground stations satellite connectivity generally? Yeah. We've seen Starlink's meteoric rise. Then more recently, I think earlier this year, there's sort of like the the like the other side, the other team that's emerging. There's some deals with ASTS, some other earlier stage. There was an acquisition. Yeah. There's a few other Internet providers. Feels like there's at least going to be an attempt at making that a duopoly or oligopoly. But then there's also we've talked to Planet Labs. There's so much else that's going up in space. There's government stuff. What what what do you see as, like, both the near term driver of demand for you and then also longer term?
02:05:44 · Bridgit Mendler
[02:05:44] S5: Yes. Great question. Overall, North with thesis was more things are going up into space and they need to be able to control the spacecraft. They need networking to control the spacecraft and to be able to sell more bits. That has definitely proven out. I think, you know, government and commercial demand for space, it's never been higher. Every operator needs those functions. And so for us, you know, moving to a new factory is about how can we ramp up the production on that hardware to support that. Mhmm. I think, you know, when when you think of the product lines on the portal side, which is the one I just showed you, think of missions that need to do complicated in space maneuvers, kinda like a Star Wars moving in space. So there's more customers trying to do that. And so that's driving expansion of that product line. The other one, the Prism product is really about how do you do, like, scalable highly scalable, highly reliable networking for Constellation. So kind of like the Mhmm. The folks that you're mentioning there. A lot of demand. I I you you guys mentioned a fair amount of it. I think it's been a crazy year for space. Right? I mean, we had the the SpaceX IPO. Huge amount of, like, enthusiasm and appetite. I like, one of the things I I was kinda curious to talk about with you guys because I imagine you're you're hearing it and seeing it too. It's like we're in this weird dichotomy where it's like appetite for space has never been higher. At the same time, there's like all of this concern around launch being constrained. Sure. It's a wild time. It's a wild time for the ecosystem I think. And, you know, I have my own soapbox on on like what that means and how the industry is gonna respond as a result. But
02:07:19 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:07:19] S1: Well, yeah view as a I I wish that we had more more alpha to share to you share with you on launch bottlenecks but you're the one buying launch capacity like No. How how much [02:07:30] S0: It doesn't need to. Well, so so Downstream of it. [02:07:32] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Down You're you're you're sort of limited limited by it Yeah. Potentially in the future where you a a good scenario is you get to the point where you're like, we are generating as much revenue as we can based on what is currently Going up. Space. And Yep. New revenue will be dependent on that. But how much of the how how you know, we had the the founder of what's his name? The space Philip from Star Cloud? Yeah. So Philip from Star Cloud was on. He said part of the reason to raise their they raised another 250,000,000 Oh, yeah. [02:08:03] S0: They're buying already. [02:08:06] S1: Yeah. And 2029. Yeah. But when you talk to different space, you know, teams, is that like really like super top of mind for them or do they have is that like problem number five after making sure that their satellites and spacecraft actually work and all those other things?