00:23:29 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:23:29] S1: Dude, you could have made him look a little better than this. We'll we'll know [00:23:33] S0: for next time. This [00:23:35] S1: is cool, though. This is really cool. Sorry. I'm getting fixated on how the guy looks. He is a handsome dude. [00:23:41] S0: Yeah. He is a handsome dude. He works out [00:23:43] S1: a lot. Yeah. Coming back to this theme of working out a lot. [00:23:47] S0: Do you think all great founders will work out in the future? [00:23:52] S1: No. Okay. Because I think it's possible to be a great founder and just spend like a decade in goblin mode. Fair. Just like subsisting on the sheer sort of power that comes from the chemical bonds that hold ramen together. Fair. Yeah. There's a meme that I saw which is like the hair patterns for founders at different stages. Right? It's like seed stage, you've got a full ahead of hair. Series a, you're starting to go a little bald. Series b, it's a big old donut hole. Series c, there's like nothing there. And then like pre IPO, all of a sudden there's a full head of hair. Post IPO, there's a full head of hair. [00:24:34] S0: Yeah. I haven't noticed this. I think that was the the Pavel Durov situation. [00:24:39] S1: Oh, was it? [00:24:39] S0: Uh-huh. Yeah. But with with him, he was like, I don't think Putin was super happy with him. So that that that may cause a little bit of hair loss. [00:24:49] S1: That would cause some hair loss for sure.
00:24:49 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:24:49] S1: That would cause some hair loss for sure. [00:24:51] S0: You know, there's been these different evolutions of SpaceX. First, it was Elon wanted to do the first greenhouse on Mars, and then he tried to buy rockets, and he couldn't buy the rockets. So he decided to build them himself. [00:25:02] S1: The ICBM to Mars? I plant in the ICBM. It's a cool idea.
00:25:02 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:25:02] S1: The ICBM to Mars? I plant in the ICBM. It's a cool idea. [00:25:07] S0: It's a it's a good idea. And what's crazy is you could do it for... I think they... The Russians were saying it was gonna be like $40,000,000 of rocket, and he was gonna buy two. And I think it was initially like 20,000,000, and then he was like 20,000,000, and they were like, fuck it. 40,000,000. But anyway, he didn't end buying them. But there's been these different evolutions of SpaceX. And I think at any given point in time, like, couldn't really know exactly how the business would develop. Like, even until very recently, I was watching this interview with Elon a couple days ago where someone brought up the the space data center thing. And they were like, how did you come up with this? And he's like, it went viral on Twitter or it went viral on X. And I was like, seriously? Is that... That's what he said. And I was like, okay. This is how you came up with the idea? And then, you know, there's maybe some massive business where it just so happens that because he's decreased the launch cost to orbit, it works. Right? Is this the sort of similar thing thing with you where right now you start out with this idea of you're basically collecting all this energy in in orbit and then you beam it down to Earth. Mhmm. And then suddenly because you have all this engineering know how on building satellites and and conducting this, you can suddenly expand into other areas
00:26:20 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:26:20] S1: as well. I think we're we're in the early stages of this because I... Look. I mean, we're... Like, you're you're you're here. Like, this is a a small but mighty operation. It's about 30, 35 people that are just hustling. [00:26:34] S0: It's kinda like being on a pirate ship. It's just a very small crew, but everyone's rowing in the same direction. [00:26:39] S1: Everyone's rowing the same direction. It's... And it... It's... It gets harder to do as organizations get better... Bigger. And I remember the the sort of points at which, like, we felt like we had a mastery. This is Robinhood, where we felt like we had a mastery the core thing, and it felt like doing adjacent things. We're like, ah, we know how to do this. Yeah. I wouldn't necessarily say we're quite there yet. I... We're getting closer, but there's a path to that, which is like... And maybe this is more from my point of view as the founder of the company. But, like, you know, I haven't been doing this for terribly long. Like, I've been doing this little less than two years full time. [00:27:19] S0: And
00:27:19 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:27:19] S0: And [00:27:21] S1: so all like my intuition for how these things work or like what matters, what doesn't matter, it's developing like it's in a state of development, which by the way is very fun because I know I I have experienced what it feels like to go from the searching and the striving to understand to demonstrating the understanding to then feeling like my understanding is at the forefront of what the thing is to kind of the high watermark, which is like my understanding and the things that I'm building will then define the forefront. Right? So that's kind of that we're definitely... I I wouldn't, you know, be so bold as to say that [00:28:05] S0: we're there right now. But you can see the trajectory.
00:28:07 · Baiju Bhatt
[00:28:07] S1: Yeah. But it's like the understanding the intuition is developing and developing and developing. So we have recently announced that we're pursuing a plan to build orbital data centers as well. And I think it's kind of interesting to play it through that lens. So my idea when I started Aetherflux was there's going to be an energy company that needs to be built in space. And more specifically, the thought was if you imagine low earth orbit as a platform for commerce, like a platform for global distribution, What are the verticals of the economy that exist on this global distribution platform? And as I saw it, I... You know, this is like, a caricature, but still a paraphrasing of its earth imaging, its defense stuff, it's telecommunications, and more recently, it's internet. That's not all that's going to exist in lower earth orbit. Like there will be other industries that natively exist. What are what is that next one where from a foundational perspective, I think the component technology is there and it's more you're building something that's the sum of parts that's more valuable than the sum of the parts as opposed to like inventing new things along the way. I'm like, well, this is my intuition says that the energy industry is both ready because photovoltaics are so cheap. And also there's going to be a market need for this because there's an energy crunch, from AI of the wave of which which is continuing to build as as I see it. Right? Like, what last year might have felt like, you know, it's sort of maybe crescendoing. In in hindsight, that's not think it's crescendoing. No. I don't... In hindsight, that's definitely not right. Now where we are right now, like, remains to be seen. Intuitively, to me, it feels like it's gaining momentum. I don't think that's a hot take, by the way. No. But the idea was we wanted to build a power company in space. And I asked the question, like, how would I do such a thing? Like, what's the pattern to pattern match there? Yeah. And the and the version I kinda settled on was space is very expensive in order to be able to compete with things commercially on the ground. Right?