Venture with Grace
00:03:45 · Grace Gong, Austin Spiegel
[00:03:45] S0: I have so many questions. One is like, when you guys were... First of all, when you guys were DM ing Elon Musk, what would you say in the email to be like, Hey, do you want to join our dinner or something as students? [00:03:59] S1: Yeah, yeah. So this specific extracurricular program was a collection of students from engineering, business and design that would come together every semester, and it was typically, like, 20 to 30 students. And then you would build a, you know, a a prototype of a of a business or an application. It was kind of modeled on on Y Combinator, but it was entirely student run. So it was a bit, and it's still around, and they've done a month... They've, you know, really grown and they've done a great job. I'm actually going to speak tomorrow at the program. But the... Basically, we're just saying, like, hey. Look. We're, you know, we're a hand selected group of 30 students at USC that takes a semester to go and build a product, and we're really interested in hosting you for and dinner with learning about your business journey. And I think, you know, we sent out a number of these. I did actually send an email to Evan Spiegel as well. And and the tax... You know, I was like a a college student, so I was like, I'm your long lost brother. That that didn't go anywhere. But, we were... We managed to get Elon to come join us.
00:05:08 · Grace Gong
[00:05:08] S0: Oh, I love that. So I'm glad that Elon thing worked out. So when you were like, maybe this is such a niche question to ask, I guess when you were interacting with him, did you get the internship immediately? Was it default or was it, like, you know, did you kind of develop the interest in, like, space because of the conversation with him is, like, so interesting? Or did you kind of, like, feel like it's a... I guess, like, because of you guys are, like, such a selective group, and then they're like, oh, default. Like, everybody get, like, internship or something. How did you kind of like basically like created like an opportunity for yourself basically from that?
00:05:47 · Austin Spiegel, Grace Gong
[00:05:47] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, basically we have this dinner. He actually showed up like an hour late. I think he spent forty five minutes to an hour with us. It was a fireside chat and then a q and a. So there really wasn't a lot of time to, you know, interact with him. And honestly, like, looking back on it now that I've seen him up, obviously, at SpaceX and, he's he's such a public figure, like, lot of the stories he shared are the stories that he kind of always shares. Right? Mhmm. But I didn't even think... Like, I've I've always been a fan of space. I didn't really think to even apply for an internship at SpaceX at that point in time. It was actually, like, a month after that when I had been looking for an internship candidly, and I had heard some other people had submitted their resume through US chief of staff who was at dinner with us, that it kind of occurred to me that, you know, maybe I should take this shot. And then I applied, happened to get an interview, had a couple of interviews, then got an offer. But it wasn't like this, oh, have this conversation and get the job. It was just, I think probably the best part about it is my resume got to the top of the step. [00:06:57] S0: I love that. I feel like that definitely sets it apart because of what you're constantly taking actions that it really puts out the signal in the universe. I know it sounds like we're right now, but okay. So I wanna talk about, like... So you got, like, 50 something SpaceX people to invest in your company when you guys first started. Right?
00:06:57 · Grace Gong, Austin Spiegel
[00:06:57] S0: I love that. I feel like that definitely sets it apart because of what you're constantly taking actions that it really puts out the signal in the universe. I know it sounds like we're right now, but okay. So I wanna talk about, like... So you got, like, 50 something SpaceX people to invest in your company when you guys first started. Right? [00:07:16] S1: Yeah. Well, so we actually have a... One of our first investor, a guy named, Scott Norman at Earthrise Ventures. He's a former SpaceX engineer. He left in 2012, went to go work in Silicon Valley. He worked for, one of Peter Thiel's Venture funds. He struck out on his own, I think, around 2020 or 2021, and he founded a venture fund with another ex SpaceX here. And I actually met him at a happy hour, for another software for hardware business. I pitched him this idea. He was really excited. He was immediately ready to write a check. Ultimately, I told him, like, why don't we go do some research and really prove that there's an opportunity here? But most of his LPs are actually x SpaceX folks. So, kind of by proxy, we've got a lot of ex SpaceX folks on the cap table there. And then of course, he's invested in subsequent rounds and then we've had some angels as well.
00:08:14 · Grace Gong
[00:08:14] S0: I guess, when you were thinking about pivot into a company, so obviously you guys have built the software or the cloud product within SpaceX before. What was the original idea look like? Did it do a huge pivot later on? Do you feel like you guys are still building the original vision? And how do you really test out the market? Because I feel in anything space, it sounds like it's going to be an industry that's like have a really long sales cycle. And then there's only five company that does nowadays, there's like a trillion people that does something in space. But I feel like it is a market that's more of like a... It's not like the SaaS market, which is everyone's buying every tool all the time, but nowadays it's like AI. What does a market opportunity look like and how do you validate the idea at the very beginning?
00:09:10 · Austin Spiegel
[00:09:10] S1: Yeah, for sure. I mean, looks a lot different now than I think it did four years ago. So the idea that we had four years ago was based on the tools that we had seen at SpaceX. And I would say it was very much around the verification and validation process of software built for hardware and then hardware itself, and then hardware operations as well. That vision is, that's what we built. That's what we've, I'd say, continue to build. Although at this point, we've basically built everything that we had at SpaceX and beyond. So now we have to continue to figure out what is the next thing going to be and where are these companies going. I think when we started the business four years ago, we were kind of pretty early, right, to this kind of re industrialization narrative. We were early to, you know, people even realizing that there's a lot that's going to happen in aerospace. I think this this, SpaceX IPO this year has really kind of, like, opened people's eyes to what's happening in space. But certainly now, we're really starting to feel that there's a pull here and there's an opportunity here. A lot of these businesses that were founded, hardware businesses that were founded, say, four years ago are finally really getting their legs, right? I think you've seen a lot of big contracts signed and now they're actually transitioning into a production phase where they have to deliver on those contracts. And I think that's actually where Sift can really help benefit our customers. So, I think there's a multi part answer here, it's to say we built the vision that we had initially, we continue to improve upon it. There's some really exciting things that we're thinking about, especially now that generative AI has become such a big deal. And then the market is just continuing to evolve to a point where I think our existence is even more justified than it was four years ago.