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.
00:52:56 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:52:56] S0: Yeah. Okay. [00:52:57] S1: And I actually, like, did the the layout for this version of the gold card, worked with the design team on it. And so I was like, yeah, I'll put my deposit down with my gold card. It's a really goofy picture of me, like, holding this and... With the founders of, of Apex being like, yeah, I just bought a satellite, guys. [00:53:13] S0: Is that what you did? Yeah. [00:53:15] S1: I mean, was just a tiny little deposit on it. I mean Crazy. That is an expensive piece of hardware. I did not buy the whole thing with my credit card. [00:53:23] S0: So I know with with Elon, with XAI, he's able to just talk with Jensen. Like, there... He's gotten a a competitive advantage in in that he has the credibility and the track record and everything built up. Or you can literally just call Jensen and say, hey, we need this. Are you good to do it? And things happen. Whereas other companies literally can. Have you been able to kind of accelerate anything because you were able to do... Have that sort of relationship? [00:53:51] S1: So I have not called up Jensen. Yeah. If you're watching Jensen, we should chat. I've not called up Jensen. I I think that there is... Here's how I think about the question that you're asking, which is like, how does one go about building space companies or ones where there's a lot of contention for these resources? The dollar figures are all really big. Think it's quite challenging. Right? I think our ability to do this in this timeframe benefits from the fact that this is not my first startup. [00:54:22] S0: Right?
00:54:22 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:54:22] S0: Right? [00:54:22] S1: Like, there's a level of people that I've already met in the industry, the sort of know how of, like, how to actually build a company, like, so you don't just spin your wheels for a couple of years. [00:54:36] S0: A bunch of money, burn a bunch of time. [00:54:37] S1: Yeah. [00:54:37] S0: Not actually driving forward. [00:54:40] S1: No investors. Right? Like, have intuition for how to spend money on things and like, you know, intuitively ask the question, like, is it okay if we run a little rich on this? Should we really run cheap on these other things? There's not a book you can read or like, I guess if you watched a ton of podcasts, you can start to build some intuition for it, but like I've done it before and I kind of have the muscle memory of like those kinds of decisions, you know, maybe wouldn't do those again or these. I'm like, I would absolutely do that again.
00:55:13 · Ty Morse
[00:55:13] S0: Elon, in the early days of of SpaceX, he had this mental model that he kind of tried to impress on the team, which is basically he calculated that every day and, like, at some point in the future, they'd be generating something like $10,000,000 of revenue every single day. And that every day that they delayed basically getting that first launch to orbit and all these other things was a lost day of 10,000,000 of revenue. And because he had some resources from the Zip2 and and PayPal like, sales. You know, if he if he made some calculation where, yes, we can book, a private flight and spend a $100,000 today, but then that will move us one day forward, like, a little bit faster by shipping a little bit faster, it made sense to do that. Is there something in your head where you're seeing, you know, three, five, ten years in the future and you say, this is where we're gonna get to? Every single day that we don't get there just that little bit faster is like a lost, you know, revenue or lost progress, that sort of thing.