00:28:19 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:28:19] S1: You know, we could... You know, we could probably talk all evening about, obviously, your experiences on the ISS and given how unique an experience it is. But perhaps now to switch gears about the future of kind of space, not just space travel, but kind of the space industry. We are going towards what is looking like it's going to be one of the... Say, not the largest IPO of all time. SpaceX is likely going to IPO before the end of the year. You don't have to believe Elon's projections of the TAM. It doesn't have to be $26,500,000,000,000, but it would... It is still going to be a a remarkable, I think, IPO. Right? But what I find more interesting than the IPO of, obviously, that iconic company in and of itself is actually how much ambition it has unlocked in the entire ecosystem of people wanting to build for space. So we were actually joking about this at South Park, you know, at SPC. Our his... You know, historically, we have done mostly kind of software investments. We have a we have a very heavy portfolio in AI and software. And when I say software, you know, kind of the classic categories, consumer, b to b, infrastructure, and so on. But a lot of our focus for the last, call it, eighteen to twenty four months has been on much more hard tech. So at this stage, we have actually got a company. We have a space gun company. We have a space kind of like docking company. We also have a space laser company. But a lot of the reason for this is I think that people now are starting to believe that the ecosystem of space can be developed successfully. And, obviously, the combination of having... Well, this is actually a symbiotic relationship. Being in space, but then also, like, orbital data centers, kind of the crazy power requirements of AI and so on. It's kind of an interesting symbiotic moment. But I'm curious, like, how are you thinking about what is likely going to be hopefully a Cambrian explosion of startups and activity in space over the next decade? Do you see it coming as well?
00:30:31 · Shubhanshu Shukla, Aditya Agarwal
[00:30:31] S0: Yeah. Absolutely. I think in some ways, I would say that the Cambrian explosion has already kind [00:30:36] S1: of I tend to agree. [00:30:37] S0: Yeah. Because five years back, you know, this was very limited, a handful of startups who were doing this and today you have almost 400 startups in India which are doing... [00:30:46] S1: Just in India, so yeah, exactly.
00:30:47 · Shubhanshu Shukla
[00:30:47] S0: So they're doing a really, really good job. And I agree, this is a change from what traditionally we have been doing. This is a tech based revolution that is happening right now, which is what I'm extremely excited about. I feel that space inherently is exciting. Whether it is a child or it is an adult, it doesn't matter. Just reading about space, just talking about space, it is that it just evokes those explorational tendencies of human race, which have always been there. So, is exciting. For the first time, people have started seeing the viability of using space for creating opportunities and creating businesses and creating tech, and I think that is what is happening very rapidly. I I met a few of those companies that you were talking about just before coming here, and, you know, young kids, you know, and they are doing this fantastic job, and they are making stuff which is actually going to be used. It is useful. Yeah. We just have to connect the use cases to the things that are being made right now. I am extremely excited about this sector, especially for globally also, it is already happening on a huge scale. But for India, am very excited because this is a shift from what we have been doing traditionally as a country, you know, where like a service based economy we have been talking about and most of the innovative startups which we always found, the big ones were always either Swiggy, Zomato or UberOla or India's, you know, versions of the equivalence of these things. But this is what excites me that we are actually making things and we are going to create tech and create this, not just the property that we are making, but also create this intellectual property in the bargain of doing this. So, am definitely very, very excited and I think the next ten years are going to be amazing for this country. Not just for this, because we have a necessity also. We have already said that we want to do a human space mission, which is Mission Gaganyaan, and then we have said that we want to make our own space station, which is the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and then eventually landing somebody to the moon by 2040. To just make these things happen, the kind of innovation and the kind of technology development that we need to do is phenomenal. So I think that this is... There is a lot of space here for space in the next few years in India. Yeah.
00:33:01 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:33:01] S1: You know, it's interesting. Your your point about space being inherently exciting is actually something that is very resonant. I think human beings, all of us, have this intrinsic desire to explore, to kind of, like, go towards the unknown, right, to basically go and figure out, like, to go and invent, to explore. And I think when you manage to tap into that, I mean, like, guys, why would you wanna work in b to b SaaS for, like, marketing optimization when you could actually, like, build space lasers? You know? And some of the... You know, one of the companies that I'm fortunate to be working with, they're basically building a modern docking station. Now on the face of it, a docking station is a somewhat... You know, it's easy to describe. You have, like, two things that you wanna basically attach to each other using some kind of, like, attraction mechanism. Yeah. It's hard though when it's, like, you know, at, you know, whatever, 40,000 kilometers power floating, like, 200 kilometers above the earth and to do so with, like, millimeter level precision where, you know, any kind of, like, misalignment results in catastrophic loss of kind of equipment. So that makes it a lot harder. But when you describe, like, we are building docking systems in space, that's super cool. Right? It kinda gets your heart racing. And in a way that... I think that the hardest thing to do in a startup often is it's very hard to manufacture excitement. Right? Sometimes at the ultimately... Listen. If you're building b to b SaaS software for marketing or whatever, it is what it is. Right? Like, you can't... There's only so much you can dress it up and make it look cool. So I think that if you are choosing to do something today, you might as well, like, kinda choose something exciting and fun. Right? So I'm personally very excited to kinda see the new crop of startups working on deep tech, hard tech, obviously, in San Francisco and the Bay Area, but more... Moreover, like, even in India. So I guess here... Here's a question in here for you, Shukla, which is for the entrepreneurs in this room or the budding entrepreneurs who want to build something in space... In the space kind of ecosystem, what are two or three kind of like high level tips you would give them?
00:35:03 · Shubhanshu Shukla, Aditya Agarwal
[00:35:03] S0: My first tip is that start believing that this is possible in India, this is going to be viable, it is going to be possible for you to conceive of some concept, and we would need it as a nation. So, it is going to get connected. You know, it is not going to be something hypothetical that you think that we don't have a need for this. We have a need, we need to make all these things happen. And I know, I don't know, a lot of you who are there and working in ward. I... I'll take example of Shubhanshu sitting in the second row. I know him from before, you know, from ISRO. And he is he [00:35:36] S1: is Raise your hand, man. Come on. There we go. [00:35:38] S0: So he's a kid. He's a... He's space lasers when you referred... You referred to him. [00:35:43] S1: Laser guy. I see all three of them. Exactly.
00:35:45 · Shubhanshu Shukla
[00:35:45] S0: Yes. So imagine this. Right? And I'll tell you the practical problem. When I was on station for about twenty days, we we manually clicked a lot of pictures. You know, a lot of videos we shot and a lot of pictures we clicked, and we wanted to send it back, downloading the data. The day we landed, July 15, it took almost a month for NASA to download all the data. There was a restriction on the bandwidth that was there. So this is a real problem that we are on. This is... We are doing it manually. Imagine the sensors which are doing it 24 by seven going around the Earth. Like, it is a phenomenal thing. So these things solve those problems. And also quick things which I am saying that the ecosystem is evolving very rapidly right now. The government is also understanding that the pace at which it's going IPO you're talking about. So everybody is taking notice of this. You know, what is happening in the world when we are talking about these things. So they want to catch up and they are looking for possible opportunities of how can we make this happen. And if you forget everything, whatever else is happening, even if you remove all that, just the fact that I said, even we pursue the human space missions, that in itself is such a huge opportunity for this country in the next fifteen, twenty years till the time we get to the moon, that we need to do so much of work and there are going to be so many opportunities for the private sector to pitch in to help us do it. It is not going to be easy. It is going to be extremely difficult and extremely challenging to get back, you know, get to the moon for the first time, you know, get back is for US, but we are going to go there for the first time. So I think this is a very exciting field. This is a very exciting sector. I am very excited to see the tech being manufactured here. So, don't participate in this, make it happen. Make us get to the moon by being a part of this actively. You know, it is not somebody else's responsibility to do this. It is ours, it is mine and yours responsibility to ensure that India reaches back to the moon. And I am only saying moon because everything preceding has to happen for us to get there. But we can make it happen, right? So all of us who are sitting here have to believe that first. And that is the only thing. I know you will figure it out.