00:10:50 · Baiju Bhatt
[00:10:50] S1: Yeah. I I I read the Walter Isaacson book on Steve Jobs years and years ago. Super inspirational. And Steve Jobs undeniably through coming up was my idol. Like, I absolutely idolize that guy. And I tried to embody as much of his sort of approach to design as I could and really took it to heart. The the answer to the question is something I've actually thought about quite a bit, and I'm, you know, still kind of figuring out what that exactly means. But in the world of software and kind of how it extends to hardware, it's about form and function. Does the form of the thing natively represent the function? And like is the function of what it's trying to do fundamentally simple? And does the form communicate that simplicity? So the example that kind of comes to my mind right is like the function of like a laptop right? Is it on or off? Like how do you communicate that it's on or off? Is there a button? Is there a light that's on? Like, that's kind of the function. Right? Do you have, like, a persistent little green dot that tells you it's on? Or do you natively assume that it's on and are sort of like given a signal that it's off. Right? Like, how do you communicate the function of on versus off for a computer? I bring this up because I think Apple thought about this a lot. And I... They were always like... My my understanding was there was like a real allergy to, like, indicators. Right? Yep. Like, there's a there's a little light that always says it's on. Like, no. You should actually have the form of the thing represent the function, which is that it's natively on unless you actively turn it off. Interesting. That's like one. I'm not sure if I did a great job of articulating exactly that point, but this idea of the way it looks is integrally tied to the way it works and that the way it looks is not window dressing on top of the way it works.
00:12:52 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:12:52] S0: I think they're kind of doing that now, aren't they? Yeah. They're trying to have it always on. [00:12:56] S1: Always on. Right? Interesting. There isn't an on off button. So what does that mean for satellite hardware? It's actually kind of interesting because you've got a job that the thing needs to do and you want the form of the thing to natively represent the function of it. Right? Not because you're looking at it, but because you don't wanna overcomplicate the thing. And so it's kind of in the early stages. We'll get into this more, but we're... You know, we've kind of been for the last year and a half designing payloads that that go on other people's satellite buses that, you know, we partner with a third party for our satellite buses and kind of thinking of the form and the function of what does a laser system look like, what does a compute payload look like. But as we get to designing entire satellites and designing constellations, the thing that the jobs that the thing has to do will very natively define the way it looks and feels. So for example, in the context of things like laser power beaming, which we're actively working on here, right, you have the biggest things in the satellite are gonna be the power generation and the heat dissipation. Right? So how can you natively combine those things? So ideas that we've played around with are, you know, can you localize the power generation and the heat dissipation? [00:14:18] S0: So, basically, the, solar panel is gonna both dissipate heat while also collecting? Exactly.
00:14:18 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:14:18] S0: So, basically, the, solar panel is gonna both dissipate heat while also collecting? Exactly. [00:14:24] S1: Or can you get the actual, you know, diodes that go from electrical to optical to reject the heat and leverage the surface area of the thing that you've already got to reject the heat? So there... There's a video playing right here, which is a very early rendering of how we thought the system's gonna work. Obviously, a lot of evolution in the idea since then. But even in this, you can see on the backside of the satellite, there are these big sheets, which are effectively the radiators that dissipate the heat. Right? So, like, to answer your question, like, what does marriaging form and function look like in the context of a thing that has a very extreme job to do as opposed to something that, like, fundamentally just needs to represent simplicity to a person that wants to press a button, have it do the thing that it's supposed to do. [00:15:09] S0: Do you have a specific feeling? Like, whenever I see something beautiful that just looks right, I get this feeling of it just looks right. It feels right. Do you have that same feeling when you are designing something?
00:15:09 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:15:09] S0: Do you have a specific feeling? Like, whenever I see something beautiful that just looks right, I get this feeling of it just looks right. It feels right. Do you have that same feeling when you are designing something? [00:15:23] S1: Yeah. There's definitely the thing that you strive for. Right? It's like when you look at something and you ask the question, like, how could it possibly look any other way? Like, this just looks final. It looks like the last and final version of the thing. Yeah. That's something I thought about a bunch over the years and was something that, you know, in the context of my my old gig, very much front and center. Like, how do you keep the the form and the function kind of as simple as possible but still doing the job that it needs to do? [00:15:54] S0: Yeah. It's like as simple as possible, but no simpler. Yeah. Has that evolved? Has your, like, taste and ability to kind of rep or, like, understand what good looks like evolved over time?
00:15:54 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:15:54] S0: Yeah. It's like as simple as possible, but no simpler. Yeah. Has that evolved? Has your, like, taste and ability to kind of rep or, like, understand what good looks like evolved over time? [00:16:05] S1: I have been drawn towards expressing that in other things. In the context of like building software and, you know, like a lot of the the first ten years of the design language of Robinhood was something that I was like leading in at the absolute forefront of. Right? Which is really fun to express those ideas in the context of building digital products. But the part of my brain that kind of was getting activated as I started thinking about other things was like, okay, feel like I know how to do it when I'm building digital products. But like, can I apply this same lens that I look at that world to building hardware? [00:16:43] S0: Yeah. [00:16:43] S1: And my original version of this was actually... I built a car in my spare time. [00:16:47] S0: Can you talk about that? [00:16:48] S1: Yeah. I built, sorry. I built a Shelby Daytona, like a factory five racing. Do you know this company? [00:16:55] S0: Isn't it like a like a racing car? Heard of [00:16:57] S1: it? Yeah. It's basically a race car. Okay. So I built one of those from scratch. Had had a lot of help along the way, and I had some, had some pro mechanics look over and, like, actually go through and make sure everything worked correctly [00:17:11] S0: before I took
00:17:11 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:17:11] S0: before I took [00:17:12] S1: it on the road. So I actually did this over COVID. I was feeling the itch to do exactly this, which I was like, I really wanna express this creativity, this, like, way of thinking about things onto something that's not software or just not just software. Right? I kinda wanna expand my horizons because I... Just a little bit of a step back here. I've always found that in order to be creative at the main thing that I'm doing, I need to have, like, a hobby or a creative outlet or sort of a creative muse that's not related to the thing that I'm doing, which stems from the idea of, like, what is creativity? Creativity is about taking unrelated ideas and seeing the commonality of them. [00:18:00] S0: Right? Like marrying them together and Yeah. Yeah.