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.
00:37:48 · Shubhanshu Shukla
Once you get convinced in your mind that we need to get into this sector, you will find a problem to solve. You will solve that problem and we will get there. You have to believe it in your mind first. That's all. Get us to the moon by twenty forty. That is all I have to say to you. So just believe that it is going to be really exciting. This sector is going to be very transformational for us as a country.
00:38:10 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:38:10] S1: You know, one thing I'll add about this is that this might be a little hard to, I think, perhaps appreciate, but the space ecosystem in The United States, at least in terms of, like, the engineers or, let's say, then is actually way smaller than you'd assume. It's actually not that large. It is a fraction of the size of, like, for instance, the software ecosystem. But the number of kind of, like, companies, the number of people who kind of, like, have deep expertise here, it's actually somewhat shallow. Right? Like, you don't... There are not that many places that have kind of the requisite, I would say, concentration of, like, aeronautical talent or rocket scientists or people that would... Like, it's actually just in a handful of places. And the reason I bring this up is because I don't think that even the leading, if you will, companies or the leading space programs around the world are that much further ahead than a place like India. I actually strongly believe that we have the talent in this country and the capabilities to to pull this off, like, in a very resounding way. The second thing I'll say is that if you go and read all of the accounts of how NASA first got kind of, you know, astronauts onto the moon, it was a bunch of 25 year olds, like, sitting in a room. These are not kinda like people who you think have like... Like, it was just... It was actually run like a startup. The Apollo program is probably like a like a perfect example of running a startup. They did end to end in, like, you know, twenty four to thirty six months run by a bunch of, like, you know, people who are actually less than 30 years old. A lot of them were doing it for the first time. But there was an unshakable belief that, like, we can and we must do this. This was somewhat surprising for me to find out. Like, as we started doing more investments into kind of this space area, my my take was that, oh, man, we are not hard tech investors. I've written a lot of software in my life. I should have actually started with this, which is... I'm actually quite proud of this, which is that when I... One of my...
00:40:08 · Aditya Agarwal, Shubhanshu Shukla, S2
When I was 19, I made some contributions to the Java kind of, like, you know, programming language, which then ended up being part of the first Mars rovers that actually went up there because it was useful for preventing essentially, like, some concurrency deadlock stuff. So I didn't know about this until a little bit later when one day I got an email from my adviser saying, hey, you know that work that you did while at Carnegie Mellon? It actually went to the moon. Oh, sorry. To Mars. So I was like, yeah, that's pretty cool. But no, I didn't go, you know, the software went. But anyway, so I've written a lot of software. So when we first started doing hard tech, deep tech stuff in space, my first reaction was like, oh, man, I don't know whether we have any right to be intelligent investors here. Right? Like, we... Like, there are people who surely must know a lot more than us, who surely must be a lot more immersed in the area, who can make better investing decisions. But now that we have been doing it for a couple of years, I say this with humility, I actually think that this is... It's not as complex as I thought it was going to be. There are lots of space cowboys out there. But I think that it's actually imminently doable if you kind of have the will and the desire to do so. Yeah. [00:41:21] S0: Yeah. I think what you said right now, it applies to life in general. There is This [00:41:25] S2: is true.