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.
00:56:06 · Baiju Bhatt
[00:56:06] S1: How do you feel about that? I very much feel that way because I guess to me intuitively, this broader concept of like a power grid in orbit, I I believe that this is gonna happen. And I believe that, like, the sooner it happens, the sooner we can start putting bricks into that building, sooner we get to, like, realizing the benefits of it. So to take a step back and kind of reflecting on not necessarily, like, my view of this, but kind of how it must have felt like an early SpaceX. The part that comes to my mind is like, there's an incredible level of individual conviction. Right? There's an incredible level of individual conviction where it's like, I've thought about it. I've turned over this idea enough in my head. And I now very, very deeply believe this to be the case. Right? And it's like, what is the is the mental math that you did to get there? And like, what are the experiences that you've had? We're like, no, this is actually not a bottleneck. This could just happen if we just worked a little bit harder. And if we actually got it to work, thing we're trying to do is very doable. We don't know how to do it just now, but like the more we work on it, the closer we get to being able to do it. Basically, if we can make this happen, this is a good idea. I'm kind of paraphrasing the way I think about it. And if that's the case, and it's a good idea, and it's really effort limited, just like, let's work our butts off to get there sooner. I do feel like I'm getting there with this, you know, where I wouldn't necessarily, I mean, I wouldn't, you know, like, I I don't know that I was necessarily there on day one of starting this. No. Because I kind of mentally budgeted a little bit of time of exploring and kind of building intuition for how to build hardware. Because, again, I was a finance bro, like, two and a half years ago. Like like, by and large, finance bro. Is there anything
00:58:08 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:58:08] S0: that you had to unlearn to basically get good at building this type of company? [00:58:13] S1: Yeah. Yeah, actually. It's the the willingness to be scrappy again Mhmm. And, like, kind of marriaging the willingness to be scrappy again with the areas that I don't wanna be scrappy. [00:58:28] S0: Talk about both those. [00:58:29] S1: Yeah. I mean, because think about my... The last ten to fifteen years of my life, I go from like seeing Robinhood as this like little twinkle in our eyes to a rapidly growing thing to a thing that was very big and was managing a hugely important amount of, you know, resources and money for the Americans. [00:58:55] S0: Millions of people using the product.