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.
01:01:18 · Ty Morse
[01:01:18] S0: This is the fascinating thing that I... That I've noticed about Elon as well is if you look at his companies, they may be firing... You know, SpaceX is firing on all cylinders now. Tesla is firing on all cylinders now. But if you look at like year eight of SpaceX, it's going bankrupt. Year eight of Tesla, it's going bankrupt. Like, they're a couple days away for not being able to make payroll eight years in. If you look at Boring Company and Neuralink now, it's like, okay, Neuralink is doing human trials today, but they took ten years. I think they were starting like 2015, 2016 to get there. And it took them a very long time. I think if you start a company and it's super successful, it's a little bit like you start out just planting one seed and you water it and you take care of it and maybe it dies and then you learn something and then you plant another seed. And, you know, eventually if it works, you have this big farm. And then if you decide to go start a new company in an entire entirely different industry, you've been this big farmer for the past five or ten years or eight years. And you've got this massive field, like a thousand acres of these crops that are growing like crazy. And then you go back and you're like, oh shit, now I've got go back to planting just one seed and then kind of like watering it all nicely and giving it the miracle grow and like hoping to God that it, you know, grows a little bit. But you can't just yell at the... You can't yell at the plant. Can't like play Beethoven music to make it grow faster.
01:02:37 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[01:02:37] S1: Turn into a field, goddamn it. Exactly. [01:02:39] S0: Was there anything when you started this company where it was a little bit like yelling at the seed to to to try to make it or like Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. [01:02:48] S1: Yeah. What was that? I mean, it's like on and off all the time. Right? But but, look, I mean, that if you do something that's very big, you strive to do big things again. And at the same time, you kind of have to be... I have to be honest with myself about the path there is like a long and arduous one. Right? Moreover, the path as I look back to my past experience was the fun. Know, one might think that like it's like, well, you become successful and you're like, this feels great. This is what I was aiming for for the whole time. That wasn't really my experience. My experience was like, you get to some point of like, you know, third party validated success and you're like, man, I had so much fun getting here. And like the real [01:03:43] S0: the pursuit of it is
01:03:43 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[01:03:43] S0: the pursuit of it is [01:03:44] S1: the joy. Real yeah, the real high about all of this was when I went from not knowing and being unsure of my ideas to knowing that my ideas were right and being like, yes, like that's the intellectual sort of like journey that that like in hindsight is the thing that I've glamorized, the thing that I've like, you know, drooled over reliving. You know, it's not the IPO day. It's the day seven years earlier when we made a breakthrough in the product and like like, Didn't know how to solve that. Didn't even know if that was the right problem to solve or if it was solvable. We did it. That's the fun stuff. And that's kind of how I think about this. Right? It's like... And we're kind of getting to some of those points now where I'm really excited for the summer where hopefully this thing is up in space doing its thing, and we're like, Crack the nut on this one. [01:04:49] S0: You know? If you had to think like for, let's say, twelve or twenty four months and everything in your mind today for what can go right does go right. What kind of information and feedback would you like to see from these first tests and stuff? [01:05:04] S1: Oh, think that's very dangerous thinking. [01:05:07] S0: Why is it dangerous?