00:45:18 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:45:18] S1: It's it's all there. It's like it's it's it's not so much hiding as much as it is focusing. Right? Like, is what is the 80% use case? If that's the 80% use case, your form and function, right? The form should match that function, right? Now, if you take the 20% of use cases and you treat them like they're 80% use cases, you're not mapping to the way people actually will want to interact with it most of the time. Yeah. You still want the stuff there, and you still want it easily accessible. You wanna think through all that stuff, but, like, people are gonna have very specific usage patterns or in our case, like, they look at it and they put it down. Right? [00:45:58] S0: What have been the other big moments where you just decided to take action, try things out, take shots on goal, go down that maze, and then realized it was just dead end and you needed to walk back? [00:46:09] S1: I mean, this feels a lot like that right now. I don't know that we're walking down a dead end to the maze, but like [00:46:14] S0: You're walking down some path and it's unclear. [00:46:16] S1: Yeah. Like, how are we gonna build an an energy grid in orbit? Well, it's like, well, the first idea... And I think this is kind of relevant. It's like the first idea is like, well, we're going to pattern match the way that things in space have done before through this, like, DOD and then a commercialization approach. And, like, is this necessarily the be all end all of what we're going to be doing in ten years? We'll have to figure it out.
00:46:16 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[00:46:16] S1: Yeah. Like, how are we gonna build an an energy grid in orbit? Well, it's like, well, the first idea... And I think this is kind of relevant. It's like the first idea is like, well, we're going to pattern match the way that things in space have done before through this, like, DOD and then a commercialization approach. And, like, is this necessarily the be all end all of what we're going to be doing in ten years? We'll have to figure it out. [00:46:44] S0: Right? The great thing is, and I... I've I've thought about this a lot recently too, is you want to basically build a culture. So with with an app, it's super easy. You build a culture of shipping and basically trying things by just testing stuff. You make a thing, you test it, you get feedback, you run that iterative loop. For this sort of thing, it's it's a lot more difficult because your iteration loops are way longer and way less clear. Like, if your if your thing is a contract with the government, that might take multiple years just to have the first thing that you can even tell them about. [00:47:15] S1: And then [00:47:16] S0: by the time you've told them, okay, then it might be, like, two or three more years before you actually have something that's there. That's six years. Yeah. So how do you think about basically That? When you're going down this path, when you're going down through this maze, how do you kind of do that with this sort of stuff?
00:47:16 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:47:16] S0: by the time you've told them, okay, then it might be, like, two or three more years before you actually have something that's there. That's six years. Yeah. So how do you think about basically That? When you're going down this path, when you're going down through this maze, how do you kind of do that with this sort of stuff? [00:47:31] S1: I think it's actually interesting to look at this power beaming, like the hardware that's behind you right over there from this perspective. So space based solar power, collecting power in space, beaming it down for Earth for use. Right? This is like a seventies idea. This is not new at all. This is one of [00:47:50] S0: those things where they just, like, assume that this was the future. [00:47:53] S1: Yeah. People kind of assumed this was the future, and then nobody actually did it. And if you look at the history of why, and I took, like, real intellectual issue with this. Right? Where if you look at, why it's that original idea for space solar power, just like the way the idea was constructed, it didn't work unless you had a really big satellite, like the size of a kilometer or multiple kilometers. [00:48:19] S0: And why was that?
00:48:20 · Baiju Bhatt
[00:48:20] S1: It has to do with what's called diffraction limited optics. Like, basically, like, what is the aperture size that's projecting the light down? What is the aperture and the frequency of light that you're projecting down? And over a certain distance, like, if you have a receive aperture, how much of that are you going to capture? Right? And it turns out that over the distances of, for example, geostationary to low Earth orbit with microwave frequency light, you need an enormous aperture in space and an enormous aperture on the ground if you hope to collect 80, 90, 95% of the light that would be coming down assuming you're able to make it point down straight. Nobody's done that like that doesn't exist like that's an idea you know it's like, and it's frustrating because the idea has then since been intellectualized and people have written books on it. Not to say that there's anything wrong with people writing the books and kind of pushing the frontier of knowledge forward. But like when you put your pens down and pick your, you know, like your keyboards and your CAD up and your screwdrivers and when you actually start making it. And so as that applies to this, I kind of asked the question when starting the company, it's like, what is the straight line direct shortest time period path that I can imagine to realizing this idea? And so the approach that we took was, are we going to build something that's going to be a 100 kilowatts, you know, a megawatt of power? No. We're... We were like, could you do this with a small satellite? What's the smallest satellite you could do this with? What is the what is the sort of like cutoff threshold of power where you're actually beaming power as opposed to like using lasers for communications? Like that is a thing. So the number that we came up with there was about a kilowatt of power out of the satellite. That's that's what we declare as power beaming. Right? That's an energy application. That's not just a data beaming application. And so then you kind of ask the question, like, if you scope it down to that, how much much time does it really take to do this? Right? Like, could you do it in a year? Probably not. Like, you you might be able to, but your odds that it doesn't work are very high. You're really increasing them. Right? Yeah. Could you do it in two years? Yeah. I think you can. Really? It's alright.
00:50:59 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
Well, you can do it in two years and like, it may not be the future thing forever and ever, but let's do that. Let's just go and do that. And let's learn exactly how this works. And then from that understanding, start building up the more commercially relevant, the higher power system, the one that like is designed with a better understanding of the physics in real life. Right? And so that is actually what we're doing. That hardware behind you is scheduled to go up sometime this summer. And I left Robinhood full time like February, March '24. Like, it'll be two years and three months. One of the things [00:51:39] S0: that I've talked with a couple different, like, space founders about is specifically, like, on the Falcon launches. You have to basically... You're constrained by SpaceX's ability to ship, you know, launches to orbit. Yep. And the timeline for this is, like, if you wanna book a launch window, that's, like, I think, a year plus out at least right now. Yep. Which means that you have to say... Maybe maybe it only takes two years to actually put the thing in orbit, but you have to say in, like, six months in or a year in, we're doing this. Commit to SpaceX that you're doing it. Oh, yeah. And then make sure that you actually hit that timeline because the rocket's going up with or without your your payload.
00:51:39 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:51:39] S0: that I've talked with a couple different, like, space founders about is specifically, like, on the Falcon launches. You have to basically... You're constrained by SpaceX's ability to ship, you know, launches to orbit. Yep. And the timeline for this is, like, if you wanna book a launch window, that's, like, I think, a year plus out at least right now. Yep. Which means that you have to say... Maybe maybe it only takes two years to actually put the thing in orbit, but you have to say in, like, six months in or a year in, we're doing this. Commit to SpaceX that you're doing it. Oh, yeah. And then make sure that you actually hit that timeline because the rocket's going up with or without your your payload. [00:52:19] S1: Which is exactly what we did. When I started the company, I was like, I'm willing to spend a little bit of money to just put this on the accelerated timeline. So I seeded the company with 10,000,000 of my own and used that money to hire a small team, book a rideshare, buy a satellite. Actually, there's a funny picture. When when I... When we booked the satellite, when when we first put the purchase order for the satellite in was, like, literally right after I left Robinhood, and this was one of the last projects that I worked on. Was it gold card? Yeah. It's a gold card. [00:52:56] S0: Yeah. Okay.