00:13:14 · Brian Taylor
[00:13:14] S0: Yeah. Totally. So usually, but not always in space, it is a good idea to start out with as a defense focus of some kind. When we initially talked to customers, commercial customers, they said, yeah, that'd be great. I'll sign an LOI that says if you hit your demonstration launch and you hit these prices and these performance levels, I will buy X number of missions and flights from you. And LOIs only go so far, Right? And so non dilutive funding from the US government ends up being actually a big, big signal of traction, and that allows you to go raise. And it's less about dollars. It's more so if you get a $1,000,000 contract from one group, does that lead to a program of record, a $100,000,000 contract somewhere down the road with another group? And so that's a very different kind of path than it is for commercial that says, I'll sign an LOI, go be successful, and then I'll buy these missions from you. And that honestly doesn't last long enough for us to get to that demonstration in space. And so we really need that non dilutive funding and the willingness of the US government to kind of fund the research and development that we have. So we focused a lot of our business development and revenue goals around Department of War and NASA and other agencies and things like that. But we also have commercial customers. Like, on our first mission that is sold out, we have this great cross section of civil, defense, and commercial customers that really kind of show the possibilities of the markets that we will hit in the future without kind of having to have those companies pay for a whole constellation or or whatever, something like that.
00:14:55 · S2, S1
[00:14:55] S2: This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet, and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. [00:15:16] S1: What have you learned so far about just navigating that world of government and defense and and procurement?
00:15:16 · S1, Brian Taylor
[00:15:16] S1: What have you learned so far about just navigating that world of government and defense and and procurement? [00:15:22] S0: There's no handbook. There is actually a class. I think it's called DOD 5,000 that is about the acquisition process. It's not actually that helpful. This is a thing that people spend twenty years of their career learning and knowing how to do and then building the networks to do that of all the different contract types, all the different colors of money, how the money gets to the place where you can kind of catch it. That is just an entire world that I didn't understand. And for sure, there's a learning curve there that I can kind of hop in and learn about it and learn by doing. But that learning curve is massively too steep or too slow for how fast our company needs to grow. Like, is just not tolerable for the founder, if you don't have experience in that, to kind of learn as you go. And some people have a natural knack for it, but usually you need to hire for that talent, for somebody that knows that world specific to this application, specific to space, to this color of money, and really has experience convincing those government customers how to kind of go from zero to one. It's a very different person that's even gonna do that in the government that goes from one to 10 or from 10 to a 100. And so knowing that person for us was really, really important to get me off of the learning curve and and just kind of hire that expertise in.
00:15:22 · Brian Taylor, S1
[00:15:22] S0: There's no handbook. There is actually a class. I think it's called DOD 5,000 that is about the acquisition process. It's not actually that helpful. This is a thing that people spend twenty years of their career learning and knowing how to do and then building the networks to do that of all the different contract types, all the different colors of money, how the money gets to the place where you can kind of catch it. That is just an entire world that I didn't understand. And for sure, there's a learning curve there that I can kind of hop in and learn about it and learn by doing. But that learning curve is massively too steep or too slow for how fast our company needs to grow. Like, is just not tolerable for the founder, if you don't have experience in that, to kind of learn as you go. And some people have a natural knack for it, but usually you need to hire for that talent, for somebody that knows that world specific to this application, specific to space, to this color of money, and really has experience convincing those government customers how to kind of go from zero to one. It's a very different person that's even gonna do that in the government that goes from one to 10 or from 10 to a 100. And so knowing that person for us was really, really important to get me off of the learning curve and and just kind of hire that expertise in. [00:16:43] S1: What advice would you have to the founders listening in just trying to learn how to do that and trying to learn that playbook themselves? Maybe they're a bit earlier on in the journey, they can't hire someone.
00:16:43 · S1, Brian Taylor
[00:16:43] S1: What advice would you have to the founders listening in just trying to learn how to do that and trying to learn that playbook themselves? Maybe they're a bit earlier on in the journey, they can't hire someone. [00:16:53] S0: It depends on the amount of dollars you're going after. Right? And what speed you wanna hit. So as soon as you decide to take VC money, you're on a different path and a different trajectory and a different speed. And you kind of can't tolerate learning as you go really on any front. Right? All the engineers that we've hired are senior principal level because they've done it before, and we're not kind of teaching people right out of college how to design a satellite. And so same thing with business development and government sales and things like that. And so you can do a little bit of learning, but really the maximum you need to do is enough learning so you can hire the right person. But if you're going after 50 k or a 100 k SBIRS or a couple of NASA things and you can go a lot slower, it's much closer to kind of the university grant writing. And that can be learned and have a lot higher success rate, I would say. But if you need in your first year or two years to hit, you know, $15.10, or $20,000,000, like, you just cannot learn that fast enough. [00:17:56] S1: And final question. Let's talk about the big picture vision. So zoom out for us when we go out. However far you wanna go. Three years, five years, ten years. What's the big picture vision look like?
00:17:56 · S1, Brian Taylor
[00:17:56] S1: And final question. Let's talk about the big picture vision. So zoom out for us when we go out. However far you wanna go. Three years, five years, ten years. What's the big picture vision look like? [00:18:04] S0: Yes. I think about five to fifteen years from now. In my mind, it will seem silly to send a satellite up and let it burn up in the atmosphere. And just like it now seems silly to do that with rockets or with aircraft or with cars. And I think that's because of where the launch services infrastructure is going. And I think back to the contrarian idea, at some point, suddenly everyone will say, I knew you were right all along. And they go, don't worry about when I thought you were crazy. And I think that reusable satellites will be very, very common, and missions in space will look very different. They will be shorter duration. The specific mission will be more targeted to what you're trying to do in space, but the platforms and the infrastructure that you use will be broader. We're in a form right now where we're getting to productization of satellites. And, you know, we are a continuation of that where you can use not only the same design, but the same physical hardware for two different missions. We will have satellites going up and down on a regular basis in a fifteen year timeline in the thousands or hundreds of thousands of satellites. So, yeah, that's the future I see for us at least. [00:19:16] S1: An actual last question. I realized I'd never ask you. Your favorite SpaceX story from your time there?