Latest / Giant Ideas / Robinhood & Aetherflux Co-Founder Baiju Bhatt: It's Time To Commercialise Space

Transcript

Robinhood & Aetherflux Co-Founder Baiju Bhatt: It's Time To Commercialise Space · Giant Ideas

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think if a civilization were to look at the Earth, say in 500 or 1,000 years, it looks a lot like Saturn.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of this data centers in space and energy and space application is specifically going to exist in these Dawn-Dusk, sun-synchronous low-earth orbits.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: And me, Tommy Stadlin.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: This podcast brings you behind the scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: Today we have a very special episode of the Giant Ideas Podcast, something a little bit different.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: We are in Menlo Park recording live from Aetherflux's offices with none other than Baiju Bat, co-founder and CEO.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Hi man.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, close.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: What we got here on the walls here with the murals.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yes.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So this the concept behind this mural was George Washington crossing the Delaware.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to make it a little bit weirder.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's George Washington crossing the Van Halen belts on a satellite.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the uh the creative direction that I gave was I wanted it to be like a who's who of American presidents.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: To avoid any politics, we we go back to the ones that, you know, that have that are no longer with us.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: The legends, uh not not the living legends.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the prompt was I wanted all the uh the leaders to be shirtless and ripped.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and I was like, I want it to be aggressively American, and um we kind of had to settle on like no no no guns, like actually let's make it aggressively American, like hamburgers and like weightlifting.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so we've got George Washington over there with Lincoln and Nikola Tesla.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: George Washington is holding a hairless cat.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is that Doctory a reference to Dr.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Evil?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, I think that was just a I really love cats.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about the hairless one.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: It strikes me as like a pantheon of the American gods with a psychedelic twist in space.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit, yeah, a little bit.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the robotic uh American American Eagle, and we've got Teddy Roosevelt over there riding a T-Rex in the arena.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And a robotic, shirtless Reagan just sort of looking down.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's inspiring.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, today there was some leaked news that you may be raising a large financing realm.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: Let's give our audience an overview of what your giant idea is.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, would love to.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, Aetherflux, the vision of the company is to build an energy grid in space.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll start out with kind of the the idea behind it and then what the exact thing is.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I started the company with the idea of exactly this that low earth orbit was an emerging platform for commercial activity, and the sort of scope of commercial activity on this platform I felt was pretty limited.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is, you know, kind of broad strokes, but prior to this wave of industrialization, it's been earth imaging, it's been defense stuff, and it's been telecommunications.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's kind of what's going on in space.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to live in a world where the the space environment is not dominated by sort of like governments and nation states, but it should be a commercial environment.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we want a lot of people to be a part of the space economy, we need to have great jobs for people to do.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we need young people that are coming out of school to be like, yeah, that's what I want to do.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: I want to be in space.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be in space, I want to get a job working at a space company.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And to do that, like we need to create opportunities that are purely commercial in space.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And my thought process was that energy is the next industry that's going to exist in space for and triangulated that from a variety of reasons.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: One, that the component technology is reaching the right level of maturity.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Two, um, some applications that I originally had, but this is kind of getting into where the vision of the company is going, new ones that are emerging.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And also for any economy, energy is like one of the core ingredients.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's the core input, right?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so the vision of the company started out at first with pursuing these DOD applications, uh delivering power from space where it's either a contested environment, there's no existing power grid, or you're trying to send power somewhere that there's no real alternative to getting power.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: So think things like poor deployed bases, military locations, but also things like power to things in the atmosphere, or power to other satellites.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how we started out.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: We're actually going to be doing space-based solar power, which, you know, this is not putting putting solar panels on satellites to generate energy in space.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then using lasers to transmit it.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, there's uh the very first one that's right over there.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: So you got these satellites, they got solar panels on them, and then you've got a laser that's gonna beam that energy back to parts of Earth and potentially to the atmosphere or assets in space.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we we did that, and about a year ago, I was thinking very critically about the the sort of the technoeconomics of energy in space, and the light bulb went off.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: That actually, two things.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, the primary driver of energy use was going to be artificial intelligence.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think when I first started the company, that was a thought.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: As time went on, it became clear that this was kind of the driver, yeah, like second to none.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the second one is that the energy economics of doing it in space, of harvesting power in space, were very, very interesting.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought they unlocked an opportunity there that would be purely commercial in nature.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: So about a year ago, started working on the concept of solar-powered data center satellites.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And now I can say that that's you know one of the major focuses of what we're doing.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's kind of the direction that we're taking the commercial side of the data.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot more activity, which frankly is awesome.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's much better that people coalesce around a set of ideas and pursue it.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we obviously think that we have a very good path towards being a major player here.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: We think there's going to be other people that are also going to be successful doing this.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's definitely not a winner-take to all.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh no, I mean, I really don't think so.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to get into the techno unique unique economics um, because that's a really interesting topic.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: But before we do that, like let's assume that things go as well as we could possibly imagine.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: What's the most outrageous vision of the space future you could see?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: Because this literally will sound like sci-fi to a lot of people.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the first articulation of this idea, solar panels, energy, and space, actually was is an I in an Isaac Asimov novel, right?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: In the 1940s, 50s.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's about like robots in space too.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of all converging on that idea.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's all converging.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, what's the most wild, wild um future we can imagine?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I think it's literally rings around the planet.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think if a civilization were to look at the Earth, say in 500 or 1,000 years, it looks a lot like Saturn.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and why do I think that is?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's because I think a lot of this data centers in space and energy and space application is specifically going to exist in these dawn-dusk, sun-synchronous low earth orbits.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's kind of a and one of my early thoughts on this is that that those particular orbits are kind of magical because they're still within low earth orbit.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're not in like the extremely harsh radiation environment, sort of in geostationary or beyond.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, still a relatively harsh radiation environment, but you can have nearly continuous illumination by the sun.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's kind of like the best of many worlds.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I think you're literally gonna see rings around the planet because I think these orbits are gonna be very densely populated.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think as humans, we'll look up and we'll be like, oh, that's where the computers are.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, amazing.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is that audacious enough?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: It is audacious, and I guess people going up there regularly to do whatever we can do in space potentially.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, okay, so the technical unique economics.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: There are a lot of people who are very bullish on this.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um Elon's obviously kind of very vocal about it.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, there's some people pretty skeptical who think uh it's hard to kind of square the math that it's very hard to service GPUs.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: This particular data center in space, I think.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's very hard to service GPUs in space.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Cooling is a huge issue in space.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, we are assuming that the cost of launch is gonna continue to come down, but nonetheless, it's gonna be very hard to just be the economics of data centers on Earth.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think about all of that?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, number one, I think there is a path to having competitive unit economics.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's gonna be a bunch of different approaches that take that we take that different people take to it.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: We have one approach that we're we'll be talking about in the not too distant future that kind of shows what our approach to this is gonna be.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think the fundamental thing that you should be that we're looking for at least there is the cost per GPU hour and benchmarking that against what people pay on Earth.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and can you get that cost competitive?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the real value proposition of this, I think, over the next five to seven years is gonna be the demand for AI compute is there there's no world in which I see this slowing down.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um I have a grace down that someone who works very closely with the CEO of DeepMind told me that if they could get 10x the data center capacity tomorrow, they would have demand for it immediately.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't like disbelieve that at all.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that was pretty amazing for Google.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's I again, there's a lot of different ways history can play out, and this is one viewpoint.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: But when you just look at how much stuff we could be doing with that, and kind of when you think about AI at scale serving the whole population of the planet, you're like, yeah, it you can see a world where every one of us has multiple agents or AIs that are running in the background, like nearly continuously, sure, and just soaking up GPUs and using more and more energy and higher, higher sort of like um performance GPUs to get more and more sophisticated with things that we're doing.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And right now you just can't do that, right?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like you just can't.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: And you have a very exciting announcement in the video, right?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's absolutely right.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: We are excited to be to be partnering with them on this.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about the announcement there, but I think taking a step back there, the cool thing about this kind of connects to the point that you made earlier that there is competition here, which is that people care about this, right?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's a world in which we, I guess, in a space in which we have to do this, where we are sort of like pioneering making these chipsets work in space, which is frankly a lot harder than having the sort of you know, the the company that makes them being like, yeah, no, we're committing to actually supporting this, we want to grow this as a business model.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so it actually fundamentally makes this more applicable to a broader set of potential buyers in the future.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of shows that as the GPUs on Earth are getting better, there's gonna be work that's happening in the background to get a parallel path, ideally, of space-rated ones that are getting better too.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that's the end state kind of in 10, 20 years, or do you think that's a reality that we're gonna see in the next kind of two to three years as some of the most bullish?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think the two to five year time frame.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Two to five year time frame?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: And on the kind of pure them kind of more.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we have to wait 10 years just to do that.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, 10 years.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think so.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and what do you think of some of the competition in the industry?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: What's your what's your take on it?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: We've got StarCloud, I think they announced the round uh yesterday.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, SpaceX is doing this thing.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's awesome.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Really proud that they they were able to do that.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we've got um Google, we've got uh Eric Schmidt, I think, doing stuff, Jeff Bezos.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: What's your kind of take on the whole space?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's a there's a lot of very successful people that built huge companies that are working on the space.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: I was gonna say it seems to be the right of passage.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: If you if you're one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, you must build a space data center company.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess so.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's it's it's you know, specifically talking about Bezos and Elon and those folks.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's it's really awesome to see the sort of biggest space companies in the world committing to this.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: The thought that comes to my mind here is like kind of comes back to this commercialization thing, which is if you look at the total commercial envelope of space, it's not a ton of the the the total dollars being spent for commercial use is not that that big.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And and when you put that next to the dollars that are gonna be spent on AI and infrastructure build over the next decade, it's trillions and trillions of dollars.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: The the the reality in which some part of that then flows to developing the space economy, like let me let me be really emphatic about this.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this is a a once this is the first time this has happened at this scale.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like that there is a reason that everybody that's working on space is like, oh, that yeah, like that's a on an unseen scale.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because the the thing that has limited the space industry has been that it's really expensive and that it's super capital intensive, and it it's on a bit of an island of how capital and sort of like resource intensive it is to do it.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you can have even a small percentage of that, of the spend on AI and the build-out of AI drive the commercialization and build out of space, like having a vibrant space ecosystem is going to be a byproduct of this.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a really, really big deal.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and again, I can't stress this enough.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like the commercial opportunities in space before this have been few and far between.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's people looking for what are the commercial uses for heavy launch vehicles and stuff like that.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is like it doesn't get bigger than the the you know the projected dollars that are going to be spent on AI.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess one of the blockers here is just how hard it is actually to get data centers connected to the grid, yeah.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, just kind of getting permits to build.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's all kind of a huge blocker here to acceleration.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the time frame on that stuff is ballooning.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's yeah, exponentially.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is actually the sort of like real concrete problem that space data centers at scale will solve.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is you can go from like if you have two options, right?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: One is you got a truck full of GPUs, you can drive them to a construction site where you're building a data center, or you can drive them to our site where we integrate them into a space vehicle that's gonna then put them in orbit.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: On one path, it's gonna be, we know how long it takes.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's pushing, you know, five years in many cases domestically, less than other ones, more sometimes uh abroad.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Versus you take those same chips, you can integrate them into a vehicle, into satellites, get them to the launch pad, have them up in space ideally in a matter of weeks.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Incredible.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is because you're taking the process by which they're made, which is industrial manufacturing, and you're you're solving the congestion problem by having the process by which they come online not be a real estate and permitting problem or like a real estate construction energy grid problem.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Tech tech problem.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes a manufacturing problem.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Manufacturing problem.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: And what I guess the limiting factor here could be the rate of and cost of launch.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you think about that?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, there's kind of one game in town at the moment, correct?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: Which is you know, SpaceX and and Elon.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I know you've already, I think, booked your booked your initial launch.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a couple of things in there that are gonna be going up.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, how how do you think about that dynamic?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's gonna, I think it's gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's going to be a lot of new companies that are entering the launch capability game.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think the ones that have been doing this for a long time are building truly spectacular vehicles that if we can see those things sort of live up to their potential, there's gonna be a ton of mass going to orbit.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Every you know, week, month, et cetera, et cetera.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I think this is actually one of the really important limiting factors for the space reality becoming a thing.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, clearly, yeah.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think that maybe the the negative view could be that he, you know, they could keep the cost of launch at a place where it makes sense for them to do their activities, but not for others, right?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that would be that's certainly possible.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Possible.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, listen, one of the things that initially um attracted us uh so much to your idea was this idea of abundant clean energy, right?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't the mustache.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the mustache was part of it.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: The the music history was also part of it.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: There were there were a couple things.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: The hair was a big play.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, good.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: But um, but uh always always a fan of someone trying to bring clean clean abundant energy to the world as well.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: So um, so how do you think about uh that part of your business?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh which I guess is the initial um wedge in some ways.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, renewables and storage are becoming pretty cost effective here on Earth, which is awesome.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um do you think it how do you think about the cost of energy that you'll be delivering through your platform?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's it's two things.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the cost of energy when it's used in space should be fundamentally much, much, much lower.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think using the energy in space unlocks a much broader spectrum of like commercially competitive opportunities.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: When we think about delivering power from space to Earth or somewhere else, what we're effectively doing is we're collecting the power with solar panels, either storing it in batteries or directly sending it to little little, you know, like a series of lasers in space that then combine all the laser power and then point it somewhere.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Where once you send it somewhere, you again have solar panels that are in this case tuned specifically for that laser light that reconvert it back into electricity.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: So that's how you reduce the loss on the way.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's how you re-harvest the energy when you deliver it somewhere.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're projecting the power, our view, our approach to this is actually to use um higher efficiency receivers for when you're converting the laser light down and using you know more general purpose solar panels when you're just trying to collect a bulk of power.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think it unlocks the ability to get power in places that there's really not a lot of great alternatives.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that in the case of renewable energy and such, like one of the initial thoughts behind this was actually understanding the way in which fuel from the US government is set to different battlefield locations or places where the Department of Defense, previously now Department of War, need energy.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the bread and butter of this is diesel fuel.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's kind of how we power our forward operating bases and such today.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that might be an initial customer for Yeah.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think augmenting those capabilities where we can use the sort of hydrocarbon-based fuel for the things where you kind of have to use hydrocarbon-based fuel, I think is an interesting way to augment the energy use.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think the fact that it's solar power is frankly a very pleasant extra to the fact that it should ideally be useful in places you just can't do it otherwise.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna nerd out for a bit.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: What is what are some design choices you've made for the current product that you think enable uh what what you're doing?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is on the the power beaming side.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Good question.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing that's going up is actually a relatively subscale demonstration.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of the trade space that's gone into it is how do we maximize the performance of the power transmission system, given the limitations of the total volume and mass of the satellite?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're the first mission on this is going to be a ride-sharing mission.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a lot of it has to do with sort of the pointing and tracking.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: How do you transmit power?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: How does the receiver know that it's got power?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: How does it communicate back to the satellite that it's receiving power?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: What is the cutoff mechanism?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're doing some pretty novel things with things like unpowered receivers using reflective optics to signal back to the satellite that you know this is how it's like this is how it knows it's on the target.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so some pretty interesting stuff, ways of harvesting the light on the ground where you're able to concentrate the light potentially and use higher efficiency receiver cells potentially operating at higher temperatures.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure people will love an insight.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: How do you come up with that stuff as a team?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: Is it like iterative process?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: Is it top-down, kind of first principles, physics?
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how you how about.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: I gotta say, like, one of the parts of this that's been really fun for me is, and we haven't talked about this yet, but my like, what is my background coming to this?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm a physicist and a mathematician by training and a finance bro by trade.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: And your father was a NASA too, right?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: My father was a scientist working at NASA Langley.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so like how do these different skills translate to this?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's a there's a big hole in the middle there, as I've kind of discovered, which is industrial manufacturing, applied physics, sort of frontier technology, all of these things.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just give you an example.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: How do lasers work?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like how do you generate, you know, kilowatt class laser power output?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've studied lasers in the context of Stanford Physics Lab.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit different in.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, that doesn't necessarily tell you how these industrial applications work.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been fun to kind of learn where the frontier of technology is, being like, how much of this stuff is in the lab versus do people actually make this stuff?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Can we buy it?
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and can we iterate on it?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of what goes on behind the scenes here is us buying components and breaking them.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And buying more components and breaking them.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: And breaking them and breaking them and breaking them and seeing which ones survive, which ones can survive, TVAC, radiation environments, um, vibration tests, kind of the full gamut of like you know, torture therapy for for electronics.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: So this is really like your dream come true in many ways.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's really fun.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, very cool.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: I I also read that you built a car during COVID.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: I did, yeah.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: So this so this is like that 10x, I guess.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: 100x.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean You love cars.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: I do love cars.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: You love building things.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: I love building things.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um the uh it's kind of interesting.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: The process of building that car, I don't know that this would have happened had it not been for that.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: Well just getting your hands like kind of like metaphorically dirty again, or yeah.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: I spent like a decade building digital products.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I love building digital products, very proud of the things that I built.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can build products for people, right?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's fundamentally as much about the people and and how they use it, how it fits into their life, like what aspects of it are useful.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Way more about that than it is um really anything else.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think that's kind of the main thing.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, the design, the form and the function, but like the aha moment is when somebody uses a product that you've built and they're like, this is really useful.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, I can, you know, like cool feeling.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then, yeah, absolutely.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll add one more thing to that.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's like when you when when I've seen in the past, as a product creator, you create something, you have a certain language in which you communicate it to the world, like, here's what it does, here are the features, and like here's why I think it's going to be useful for you.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: But when you hear people that you've never met before describe what you've built to somebody else you've never met before, and they describe it in a way that sort of captures the essence of it, sort of like the signal to noise ratio it cuts through.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's when you're like grass, fine.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: We did it.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like we we the way that people think about it, the way people explain it to other people, it it like is very, you know, it's very close to the way that we describe it.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like the transitive property uh of like building products, yeah.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a bit of a tangent on building digital products.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: You I mean, you had a lot, you had a lot of success, right?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: With Robin Hood, you could have chosen to build probably anything next.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, why why why did you choose this?
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: And at least a car project, right?
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: And how how are you, yeah?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: You could have could have, I guess, gone and built high-end cars.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nah, I don't know about that.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: I like doing it, but like it's kind of like keep your fun stuff, your fun stuff.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Keep your work stuff, your work stuff.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, what do you do for fun now?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I love cars.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Still building cars.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love cars, yeah.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: But okay, so family, family is a lot of fun too.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Family's a lot of fun.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you could have done yeah, you could have done anything.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: Why, why, why'd you choose Aethaflux?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess how are you doing it different this time from last time?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I do want to talk about the car that I built a little bit.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: You kind of bridge in the Daytona?
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a it's a Shelby Daytona recreation, the type 65.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Factory 5 racing.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I got to this point where I I needed a creative outlet, you know?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like I needed to try my hand at something where I was a student again.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is kind of like a thing I think about a lot is the relationship as a creator or entrepreneur of being a student versus a teacher.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is that one way you kind of keep the beginner's mind?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: Stay curious.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because if you don't get to be a successful entrepreneur by being a professional teacher, like you have to figure stuff out, you have to be a student of the thing that you're building.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Love that.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: But as you get to certain levels of success and company size, you're you're actually forced into a role where you're teaching people how to do the thing, um, much more so than the time that you spend as a student.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of have always liked to keep those things in balance.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, over COVID, I was like, well, first of all, I'm stuck at home.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not hanging out with my friends.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: And like I need to get that creative outlet somewhere.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd always loved cars, and I'd always wanted to collect some classic cars at some point in the future.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, you know what?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: The way to do this is gonna be?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna build one.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: So then I'll understand how it all works.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because I like the the fun part of driving is like, what am I hearing?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what is like like what is that noise that's happening?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like what part of the car is making that noise, and how do it's like spider web of cables and electronics and hoses and things make this thing go down the road.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: That was first principles.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna build one.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I did, and I friggin' loved it.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: It was it like it brought this level of joy to me that I just have this visual of you just like beaming like a kid driving this thing down the driveway.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, more like, you know, up at like midnight, you know, like covered in like grease all over my hands and having gasoline spit out of the car and sort of like knocking out my face.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um incredible.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that kind of made me realize I loved thinking about how physical things come together.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm like, yeah, I want to, if I ever get a chance, I want to try to build something big and physical with in the physical world.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: But the the motivation behind doing this, I think I've talked about this before, but I grew up around the aerospace world.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like I grew up around NASA Langley Research Center, where my dad was a research scientist.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um I, you know, I kind of like, I was like, if I ever get a chance to work on the space industry, and if this is happening in my lifetime, well, first of all, if it's happening in my lifetime and I don't participate in it, like that's one thing that I'm probably gonna be like a grumpy old man about.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's something I'm gonna look back on and I think feel a fairly profound sense of personal regret.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: And um Yeah, I love the idea of thinking about the mastery of the atom instead of just the bit.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's something so powerful about that lesson or takeaway that yeah, particularly if you're doing very intellectual work, that can be very cerebral or very kind of abstract, even if we're digital products, just getting your hands stuck into something or creating something that's like tangible.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: For me, it's like I go play piano and I feel like I tap into a whole different set of creative impulses, you know.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I think that's for all entrepreneurs, I think that's uh to have that creative outlet to generate new ideas is is powerful.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: I have one final question for you that we'll wrap on.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: I've read that Steve Jobs is your kind of top entrepreneur that you look up to.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: Why what is it about him?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, man.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, things that he did just if it was not for Steve Jobs, I don't think I would have had much interest in being an entrepreneur.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: That is a big statement.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was a math and physics kid when I went to Stanford.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like I did not take classes outside of those two schools beyond the bare, bare minimum.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: People who don't know that's like as that's as like nerdy as it gets in a way, right?
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that is.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was curious about the way the universe worked.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was interested in things like the grand unified theory of physics, quantum, you know, quantum gravity, like the sort of like esoteric things in in math at the frontier of it.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do you understand the geometry of complex manifolds and stuff like that?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: Intersection of philosophy and physics almost at the at the frontier.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, philosophy, math, and physics are they start to overlap.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: They really, really do.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I was not the kid that went to Stanford and like ever, I don't think I ever went to the business school.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I really even know where it is, to be totally honest with you.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, economics was not something that the dean of GSB is listening to this.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very sad.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, fuck, what did we do wrong?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the economics, like, I frankly didn't really care.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I was I went to Stanford to study physics and math because in the pre-AI days, I was like, I don't think I'll ever be able to learn this unless it's from the professors at like a school like this.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I was a junior, remember, I think it was a junior, yeah, it was junior year, I got my first MacBook.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, wow.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: This thing.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: The way it works.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: I remember the first time I got it, I did like, and I've since watched interview, or I since watched those documentaries that um that they did on design where they interviewed uh Johnny Ive.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's called there's three of them.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's Helvetica, Industrialized, and I want to say urbanized are the three awesome documentaries.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: I watched them.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you absolutely should.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I remember my experience with the first time I used a Mac product was eerily similar to the way that Johnny Ive described his first experience with it.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is I remember just going through and poking around all of like the menus and the buttons and stuff and being like, wow, it's really good.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, also, this thing is dead silent.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember, and I now kind of putting the pieces of the puzzle together with hearing how the great Johnny Ive, who I absolutely admire and idolize.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think he's one of the greatest visual and sort of product thinkers, full stop of the industrial era.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about it where he's like, and I'm paraphrasing here, but the high watermark of product design is when you get by using the product, you get a sense of the people who created it.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like the personality of the individual shines through the product.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is a big deal because one, a lot of products are made by committee and they look and feel like they're made by committee, which, as an end user of any technology product, we're like little monkey brains, you know?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: We like to project humanity onto inanimate objects.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the reason why we get angry at our phones sometimes, like, ah, why doesn't this thing work?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, what's a block of metal?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what do you expect it to do if there's like electricity in the thing?
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: But we're like, it doesn't behave like a human.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's the high watermark of a digital product is that you get the sense of the people that created it, and it kind of shines through.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in turn, it like gives the thing a sense of humanity, which we're so pre-programmed to project onto it, anyways.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, ah, I want to do stuff like this.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I I I just it captured my intellectual curiosity.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then as I learned more about him, I was like, man, I want to wanna do that.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: Probably no greater testament to an entrepreneur than the product they created, like literally made some want to go be an entrepreneur.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's like when I that reminds me when people say they heard a Bob Dylan song and it made them want to be a songwriter or an artist, you know.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's that's pretty awesome.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: I love Bob Dylan too.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: He's uh and so does Steve Jobs.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, on that note, thank you so much for joining us on Giant Ideas.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: By Jew's been a real pleasure, man.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: My pleasure.