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.
00:58:56 · Baiju Bhatt
[00:58:56] S1: I mean, the way you operate when you have tens of millions of people that use your product, right, is decidedly more mature. And the sort of like risk aversion, risk tolerance matches like what the... It's like, you know, it matches like what the actual thing is that's doing. Right? That's not to say we were like flipping in the past, but there was a gravity and a seriousness that like it was exactly the right way to operate the company as as it got bigger and bigger. This is Robinhood. Now, like, that's not necessarily the mental model you wanna apply to this on day one because this is not mature. It's an idea that's, like, sprouting out of the ground that will hopefully, you know, like produce a flower and then, you know, continue on from there. So like, what are the things that you want to do right? What are the things that you want to... Or you want to get really, really, really right? Like I saw it in the beginning or like towards the ends of doing Robinhood versus what are the things where we're okay with like, like basically figuring it out. Right? And I think it's evidenced in some of my actions so far. So we announced like a week or two ago that, where is he? Yeah, a guy sitting two seats behind you, Joe Yaffe joined as both our chief legal officer and our chief operating officer. Like, we're entering a space where we're gonna be beaming power down from space, like doing this in a regulatory forward way, working closely with the regulators, taking sort of all the compliance aspects of the business and being very sort of like disciplined and determined and systematic about that from day one was the right thing to do. And even before that, think one of our first two, three, four hires was our laser safety officer. So importing the knowledge of having seen something that got really big and knowing that if you could do something brand new from scratch, these are the things that you'd want to shore up pretty early on. Whereas other parts like the exact engineering system design, right? You don't want to apply that same level of like... Do wanna be rigorous, but you don't wanna be, like, rigorous in that way when you're getting it started for the first time.