Data Centers in Orbit by 2028: Baiju Bhatt on His Plans After Robinhood

19:37Baiju Bhatt:tribe of young boys at home how long of robin hood did your partner see we met in college come on yeah so she like the whole ride she fell in love with me when i was a dj and a math grad student that's how you know she's a real one yeah she had like you know she didn't really give a crap about

19:55Joubin Mirzadegan:the finance stuff. Okay. But in some ways that that's actually helpful because the only version of you that she's really known is the entrepreneur. Yeah.

20:05Baiju Bhatt:I guess the mathematician and DJ version. Yeah.

20:07Joubin Mirzadegan:But that didn't last long before you guys, before you guys went for it. Yeah. So there wasn't much like a haggling or negotiating, like maybe the real question that I'm trying to get at is 15 years and all the money in the world later, did you not want to to look her in the kids in the eye and be like, let's go to, I don't know, France for a year. Or like, let's, why don't I just like chill for a little while? Like, I don't know, did that not?

20:35Baiju Bhatt:It definitely crossed my mind. I would be, I would be, I would not be, I would not be saying it straight if it wasn't the case. I kind of, I think about this sometimes, I'm like, why didn't I do that, you know? Like, why am I doing this again? And I think there's, at the end of the day, it's just like a feeling inside of me where I really, really, really wanted to prove that I could do this. Like I felt a very overwhelming drive to want to try to do this. and i think the other part of this also is the realization um that life is finite right and a byproduct of having been working on a company for 15 years is that i'm not the youngest founder in the world anymore right my my time of being able to devote my time and energy in a very sort of unencumbered way i think is is not infinite like i don't there's definitely people out there that are great founders that do it at a later stage in life.

21:40Baiju Bhatt:But I remember what Robinhood was like, and it was physically and mentally grueling. Like it, you know, it zaps. Being successful as an entrepreneur zaps every bit of energy you can give into it. It just does. And I wanted to take a real swing at this while I felt I was still young enough to be able to like grind really hard. So, you know, it's kind of all these competing forces. And a part of me is like, well, you know, I'll take a year off and live in France at the next stage of life. And, you know, good health permitting, I'll get a chance to do that. Or maybe I'll just jump back into another company or maybe I'll just be grinding on this until I'm, you know, too old to want to enjoy, you know, a year in France.

22:29Baiju Bhatt:I don't know. Who knows?

22:30Joubin Mirzadegan:Do you think, do you think you still have the same dog in you that you did? Is it even possible? to want it as bad as you wanted it back then yeah like you're just in a very different place in your

22:43Baiju Bhatt:life yeah i mean are you a basketball fan yeah okay so you've like watched last dance and stuff like that yeah you know michael jordan would just like look for shit to give him yeah like you'd

22:57Joubin Mirzadegan:make up people that were trash talking him yeah yeah like you saw those interviews like it's like

23:01Baiju Bhatt:yeah person saying this that the other thing and they cut to the interview of the guy like yo it's like i didn't do any of that yeah yeah yeah i'm a little bit like that in that you know i i look for things to motivate me to like push me along that little bit more right i think as an entrepreneur you have to exhort you have to you have to exert a natural force to bring an idea to life you can't clock in a nine to five and expect to be successful as an entrepreneur and it's not to say that you have to be, you know, grind maxing every night and every weekend. But I think my kind of view on it is you have to find the right points and the right times to really push hard and give it your all.

23:52Baiju Bhatt:So yeah, I mean, I was looking for reasons to like really motivate myself to bring out that dog in me. And I think a big part of this, and you can kind of hear in the things that I'm saying, right, is I've wanted to build a space company. I've wanted to get back to, like, my love of science and math, um, for a really long time. And I use that as fuel to be like, come on, you've got to, like, make something really successful here. Um, and for what it's worth, I'm very excited about the direction that we're taking the company. I think Cowboy is working on, has the potential to build something really, really impactful here.

24:30Baiju Bhatt:Can you talk about the thesis for your company?

24:33Joubin Mirzadegan:Because it's so interesting. Appreciate it, man. Of all the founders and companies that I have the joy of getting to know, this is one of the most go-for-it companies I've seen in a long time. Yes, I love it. I love that. Yeah. Yeah.

24:54Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, I know it is. You got to dream big if you want big stuff to happen. right? Oh, you're dreaming big. Yeah. And for what it's worth, I think the worst thing that could happen is you just won't succeed at it. That's true. You have to try. Yeah. So what are we doing? Cowboy Space Corporation on a mission to power humanity from the high frontier. So what does that mean? I'll tell you a little bit about kind of why I got to this thesis and what we're doing now and in the not too distant future. Like I said, I started the company about two years ago, maybe a little bit more now. Rather, I started working on it full-time about two years ago.

25:34Baiju Bhatt:And the thesis behind this was looking at low-Earth orbit as a platform. So some of these things will have, they'll kind of rhyme with the thesis of Robinhood. And the thesis behind Robinhood was actually that mobile is this emerging platform, obviously. And like you rewind the clock to 2012, right? It was kind of the beginning of mobile. And my view on it was, was if you look at the industries that exist on mobile at the time, it was like internet technologies, all of maps and photo sharing and stuff like that, that I thought that there were going to be native finance companies, not just finance companies that were building apps for mobile.

26:17Baiju Bhatt:And in more sort of zoomed out terms, if you think of mobile as a platform, that there were going to be verticals of the economy that natively existed on this platform. And the thesis behind Robinhood was that investing services and more broadly financial services was going to be natively on the platform of mobile. And lo and behold, I think that thesis has borne out. um my thesis behind this was it was when i was first starting it that low earth orbit is a platform for commercial activity and that there will be distinct verticals of the economy that exist on this platform that is low earth orbit beyond the ones that exist today and the ones that exist you know rewind the clock a couple of years were and i'm paraphrasing here earth imaging defense and uh like military stuff government stuff and so my thesis was that energy is going to be one of the next industries that natively exist on this platform that's low earth orbit for a bunch of reasons one you can generate a lot of electrical power in low earth orbit because the you know if you put satellites in the right orbit they're not going to eclipse behind the earth but for a fraction of the time so you can take what is effectively one of the lowest costs if not the lowest cost way of generating power on earth which is you know let's call them home depot solar panels right cheapo solar panels you put those panels in low earth orbit and they're illuminated continuously they'll generate multiples the power output they would as if you bolt them on the ground so you get more power output from what is already one of the cheapest forms of energy.

28:04Baiju Bhatt:It's a natural environment for generating electrical power. Now, the main idea for space energy prior to the emergence of data centers in space as this concept was this old idea of space solar power. So that's kind of where I started the company. Original intent.

28:24Joubin Mirzadegan:Was space solar power. Space solar power. Different name to the company too. Yeah, Aetherflux. Yeah. Okay. That's what you seeded the company to go do.

28:34Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, yeah. Same company. Same company. Original intent. Original intent. And the thesis evolved from there. So from the very beginning, and this is, I said a few parts of this are going to rhyme with the thinking behind Robinhood because the same person that contemplated both these things was this focus on unit economics, right? And basically asking the question, how do you make something that is commercially competitive, its output service from space versus doing it on Earth? That's a little bit of a wordy way of saying it. If you build a service that does, let's pick another industry, for example, telecommunications, like provides internet service from space.

29:16Baiju Bhatt:How do you get that to be cost competitive with doing it on the ground versus fiber optics? In this case, you know, energy, how do you make the energy economics delivered from produced in space cost competitive with doing it on Earth? Like, how do you do that? Like, is there a path to doing this? And that kind of had been the central question as I was contemplating this idea of space solar power. And it was now probably a little bit over a year ago that I started sort of looking through all the different possibilities of how to do this and doing bottoms up economic analyses, or if you build a satellite that does these things, what are the parts cost?

29:58Baiju Bhatt:What are the manufacturing costs add up to? And in turn, what does that tell you about what the services output economics are going to be? i started looking much more closely at the idea of powering data centers because it was becoming clear that that was going to be the place where all the energy usage was going anyways right so if you're doing a space solar power company you probably should be thinking about its application to ai and the light bulb went off at some point that actually rather than contemplating beaming the power from space to earth, which, you know, the hindrance to the economics there are going to be that you lose a lot of energy and transmission and conversion from electrical to optical, back from optical to electrical.

30:47Baiju Bhatt:If you could just harness the power in space and use it in space, then you don't have all these transmission losses. And so you have more energy to work with. Therefore, again, from a first principle standpoint, you should be able to produce better economics there than by beaming it down to the ground. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And so that's one way of thinking about it. Another way of thinking about it is also realizing that if you take a truly commoditized service like energy and you layer stuff on top of it, meaning compute, for example, that inherently there's going to be more margin to work with there to kind of get to these break-even numbers.

31:27Baiju Bhatt:And so kind of asking the question, you know, what can you do? You can do space solar power plus something else to get more competitive economics. So the answer here was space solar power plus compute, i.e. data centers in space, minus the power beaming part of space solar power. So that's kind of where the idea evolved from this core idea of where the company started.

31:55Baiju Bhatt:And does that make sense so far? Makes total sense. Okay. I'm sort of connecting a few thoughts here. And it was like the beginning, like towards the end of last year, beginning of this year, that the realization happened of exactly the way that we're planning on doing it, right? Which is that if we looked at, again, this idea of looking at the unit economics of compute from space, and you try to like figure out what it's going to cost to produce a GPU hour, from space and you boil it down to like how much do the solar panels cost and how many of them do you need right how much does you know the the radiator costs and how much of it do you need etc etc and kind of trying to ask the question how the heck do you get this to be competitive doing it on the ground and the realization that we had which is kind of the the core idea behind the architecture we're pursuing is if you look at the data center the satellite and the rocket program as one integrated thing how would you design it right so if you don't think about it just as a satellite constellation but you think about the rocket that takes it there as an integral part of the overall thing the realization kind of happened of twofold number one well a couple things here the the first one was if you think about um like two racks of gpus right um you have one rack in this room and you have another rack in the building across the street that's strictly worse from a utility perspective versus having them right next to each other by extension if you think about building a you know a gpu rack as a satellite if you have two racks you'd rather have one big satellite than two smaller ones right the first one the second one being if you think about what a data center in space satellite does and this is kind of very broad strokes it uses solar panels to generate power it has gpus on it for compute has a bunch of supporting electronics and it's got a big heat sink to absorb the heat and then radiate it away um and the thorniest part of this and in many ways is the the way in which it dissipates heat because you end up carting a bunch of mass and volume to space to to basically roll out as large sheets of radiator the second big breakthrough here was if you're on a rocket that's taking you to space rather than just disposing of that rocket or trying to reuse it what if you just used it what if you were able to use the rocket itself again i'm paraphrasing here but basically as the heat sink because you got a bunch of metal there and when you put these two ideas together you arrive at the architecture that we have which is that the upper stage of the rocket is in cell is itself the data center there's no satellite the rocket becomes the data center satellite once it's orbit and all of this in pursuit of realizing that by reusing the rocket itself the stage the upper stage of the rocket itself as a functional part of the architecture we can basically cut out a bunch of reuse components and in turn, you know, based on our findings at least, that this is what unlocks what we believe to be one of, if not the lowest cost ways of doing compute from orbit.

35:36Baiju Bhatt:Enter the Cowboy Space Corporation.

35:38Joubin Mirzadegan:All right, I'm going to ask like a bunch of dumb questions. All right. Hit me. So.

35:43Baiju Bhatt:Did that make sense, by the way?

35:44Joubin Mirzadegan:Makes sense. Let me clarify a few things. Yeah. And like, you know, I think the wavelength that you and I are operating on are very different. So like, let me just, just indulge me here. Please, please. With some pretty simplistic questions. Number one, I have seen the Martian, so I feel quite well educated on everything space related. Who's in the Martian? Matt Damon. Matt Damon, that's right. Anyway, there is a scene where he's stuck on whatever planet, Mars? I don't know what planet he's on. Stuck on a planet. It's the Martian. He's on Mars. He's on Mars. Great. Okay, good. Perfect. That makes sense.

36:17Joubin Mirzadegan:And to get out of Mars, they removed all the parts except for the plastic. on top of the rocket?

36:27Baiju Bhatt:Yes.

36:27Joubin Mirzadegan:So they just had a little sheet that was basically covering the top of the rocket. Yeah, yeah, I remember this.

36:34Baiju Bhatt:You know what I'm talking about? I actually don't know that I've watched the movie, but I've read the book. Oh my God. I thought the book was incredible, though.

36:43Joubin Mirzadegan:The movie's incredible.

36:44Baiju Bhatt:Okay.

36:44Joubin Mirzadegan:Anyway, is it not going to burn up everything when you're trying to exit the Earth's atmosphere into low Earth orbit? Like, why... why is it not a bad idea to have all of your most precious gear at the tip of the rocket?

37:01Baiju Bhatt:That's what I'm trying to figure out. Good question. Well, that's an interesting one. Well, first of all, once you're out of the Earth's atmosphere... Easy money. You know, there's not a lot of force that's being exerted on it. I mean, that's what the structure of the rocket does. That's what the fairing of the rocket does, is it protects what's inside of it. So it's tucked under the point of the rocket. Yeah, got it. And the interesting thing, if you go to our website and you look at the video that we have of it, the way that our system is designed is when it gets to space, like the top little pointy bit of the rocket pops off.

37:38Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. The solar panels come out of there. Okay. And then the actual like cylinder of the rocket folds out and becomes a big heat shield. Sorry, not a big heat shield, a big heat dissipating radiator. So we actually use the surface area from the fairing of the rocket to aid in dissipating of the heat. Okay.

37:59Joubin Mirzadegan:Crazy. Yeah. Okay. So that's question one. That was a deep cut. I like that question. Question two. um like the thing that elon seemingly showed everybody um is that to get the unit economics to the place that made sense for spacex he needed to vertically vertically integrate every single component but that's probably because he was the first um and now there's like you know a rocket that launches what every two or three days that goes up to earth that goes from earth to space um you know can you not borrow any of the existing work that's already being done from point a land on earth to point b hovering around orbit like do you have to really redo the entire stack for it to make economic sense for you.

38:59Baiju Bhatt:I think we do. Not all of it, but a large chunk of it. And I'll tell you why. And this is kind of one of the learnings from having built Robinhood, is if you want to control the unit economics of your output service, it necessarily leads you to vertically integrating, right? To controlling the sort of components that drive it. and we did a lot of that over the history of Robin Hood in this case while the space industry is maturing and growing like a lot of it well at a base case there is nowhere near enough launch capacity that's available for what everybody in the world wants to do like at least at this point in time there is not enough mass to orbit there aren't enough ride shares there's not enough ways of getting stuff to space right and spacex is i think um like i mean like look at what they've done right their accomplishments have been monumental but they're going to end up using as they've said and i don't want to speak for them a lot of their payload for what they're building right for us to be able to control our ability to build this data settings based company we fundamentally realize that there's not enough launch capacity that's available and if we want to control how we do it the scale the actual unit economics of it like we need to actually look at the whole thing as vertically integrated granted that's very difficult to do yeah um but i think it gives us the best chance of building something that's going to be really useful here yeah um and yeah there are like a lot of the underlying component technology there are places that you can buy that stuff from and each one of those then it becomes like a build versus buy decision right does it make sense to do that does it make sense to integrate and the answer is not dogma right you kind of look at it based on again the one true North Star here is the unit economics.

41:12Baiju Bhatt:Like, is the output cost of what we're building, is it competitive relative to the terrestrial option or is it more expensive? And the goal is to get it to be competitive with the terrestrial option because that's fundamentally what the business is about. It's kind of what it's entirely gold on.

41:29Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah.

41:30Baiju Bhatt:Not entirely, it's a big part of

41:31Joubin Mirzadegan:what the company's gold on. Within a reasonable amount of time. Yes. Because if the thesis backs into data centers, first solar, get the power of the sun, beam it down to earth, figure out what to do with that energy. Okay, great. Most of the energy is going to AI and data centers. Okay, great. Let's just put the data center in space. Right now there's the world's greatest race to go build as many data centers as humanly possible on earth. As humanly possible. And we're, maybe this music will never stop and we'll be devouring energy forever. but certainly right now we are. And so right now there's ditches and shovels being put into the earth nonstop to figure this problem out.

42:19Joubin Mirzadegan:And so maybe the other confounding variable for you besides the unit economics is time. Yeah, it certainly is, yeah. You got to do this in a reasonable amount of time to make sure that you can take advantage of the market demand.

42:32Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, I don't think this opportunity is going to exist forever. I agree with you wholeheartedly. That's why we've said this before, and I'll say it again. We've set a really ambitious goal of launching our first in-house built system at the end of 2028. That's still within the amount of time it takes to build a big data center project on Earth. It's arguably shorter than a lot of the timelines that are out there. You look around at a bunch of thoughts there. One, that's a very ambitious time frame. and like we're working our butts off to try to make that happen so we've got kind of the algorithm going through my head is like what are the things that are going to prevent that timeline from happening if we don't take specific action to like get some ball rolling now versus three six months from now prioritizing accordingly that's why a lot of my effort over the last handful of months has been in standing up our rocket engineering team which is based in seattle which uh which i'm very excited about i think we've got some really strong people on that team and then trying to figure out along the way what do we actually need to do to build this integrated data center launch program and i think that's one where we have the advantage of focus like we're not building a rocket program that's going to do data centers in space and is also going to do human spaceflight like we're just not doing that we're not building a data we're not building a rocket program that's going to do data centers in space and take up other people's payload to space like we're building a rocket program in service of building our data center in space architecture and that's kind of it like we are hyper hyper focused on integrating the rocket program for the single use case and look just to be very clear like we may do some of these things in the future um but that's not a part of how we're thinking about it right now we're trying to be ultra ultra focused on one use case one application um and using that as the guiding light across a lot of technical decisions, right?

45:00Baiju Bhatt:So I think one of the things that this also, a byproduct of this also is, we need a rocket program that works. We don't need to build the world's greatest rocket program. Like we, if you kind of think about the continuum of rocket engines, right, we're much more interested in building a Honda Civic rocket engine. Totally. Than, you know, a Bugatti Veyron rocket engine. We might end up building a Bugatti Veyron rocket engine someday but again like we are trying to do this in a relatively short amount of time that means cutting out all the arts and crafts projects and being ultra ultra ultra judicious with picking the things that drive our ability to do this and frankly saying no to a lot of other things i'll add one other point on this which is the power of focus i think focus is you know like we don't have the advantage of having been a rocket company for the last 25 years right like we're not gonna that's not how we win we win by being very surgical in the things that we do trying to pick the things that matter and do those things and say no to a lot of other things

46:14Joubin Mirzadegan:just just remind me i wrote down a quote um from daniel leck yeah what did he say basically something along the lines of great entrepreneur that one the stud yeah i've never met him i'd love to meet him he's a stud handsome dude as well handsome he's a stud he's a stud he's a stud he's a stud in every way when you're that when you do that when you build that kind of company just automatically become ultra stud yeah the way we're building a real lasting business and products by really focusing and narrowing on one specific thing and making a very concentrated bet with a handful of customers at a time.

46:52Joubin Mirzadegan:And then in quotes, I can give you all of the other reasons, but the truth is we're just going to care way more about music than anybody else's. And, um, yeah, I love that. Isn't that good? That's really good. Like, yeah, he's like, I could give you all of these reasons why we think that YouTube and Apple and these others should have a right to exist and we won't. But the reality is we're just going to care about music more than them. Oh my God, what a simple, profound thing to say. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it shows, right? Like I use Spotify all the time. Like you're just going to care about space data centers more.

47:29Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. There's a more general version of this, right? And I think this is like one of the lessons I am reminded of time and time again. The people who get it in life are the people who want it more. Because they just don't give up.

47:45Joubin Mirzadegan:pretty pretty freaking simple right so how much have you raised now you just announced around

47:50Baiju Bhatt:not that long ago yeah we announced uh 275 series b before that we'd raised about 90 so total

47:59Joubin Mirzadegan:you know capital raised is around 365 do you have a i'm sure you have a projection by 2028 how much money and people it's going to take to get this thing into orbit we think it's going to take low single digit billions okay yeah so you're gonna be fundraising yeah a lot a lot a lot

48:20Baiju Bhatt:kind of yep yep it's gonna be a big part of my life big part of the job i joke around about this at the company sometimes where i'm like i don't know how this happened but i got stuck with the emails and spreadsheets job at this company and i'm like looking around at our engineers and they're like you know in the clean room like building stuff and like getting the software work and i'm like i'm on a bunch of freaking zoom calls um careful what you wish for i guess yeah it's kind of what the job calls for it's it's not just fundraising i think fundraising is an important input to doing this but there's a ton of business development that goes into this as well as um and again you kind of like what about this is exciting beyond doing the space company part of it um i'm learning a ton of new stuff totally and i really like that a lot how many people are there now at the company 50 60 somewhere not that many yeah it's growing pretty quickly

49:22Joubin Mirzadegan:uh would you go to space yeah i would i'm surprised that wasn't like a i'm surprised i don't like heights very much

49:34Baiju Bhatt:i mean i know myself right like i've been to the space needle in seattle before and been like oh get me out of here so would you then that's why there was a pause i mean like i think the

49:45Joubin Mirzadegan:politically correct thing to say given that you're starting a company that is uh you know

49:50Baiju Bhatt:going to pretty high heights is yes but would you i i would yeah i would i'm not jumping up and down to do that's not definitely not the reason i'm doing this company but yeah given the opportunity assuming i wasn't too old yeah probably can you steal man for me

50:09Joubin Mirzadegan:what a pundit would say why this is insane it won't work um

50:16Baiju Bhatt:oh my god let me tell you all the criticisms we got it's like well why is this not going to work uh how are you ever going to compete against the established incumbents right what do you know about space aren't you just a finance guy um isn't this going to be solved on earth uh what else isn't this going to take too long how are you ever going to be able to assemble the capital to do this how are you ever going to assemble the team to do this um yeah i think those are some of the things that come to mind i'm sure you can come up with some more too i think that's a pretty good list i mean i think the

51:04Joubin Mirzadegan:just premise of data center and space sounds is this even a worthwhile opportunity right although i don't know if i i mean look you think the world's coming around to that pretty fast

51:14Baiju Bhatt:i do i mean i think it's a really useful technology and i think it's going to be more and more useful as it gets better and i i think about the world in the future where people have the base case right even if you don't want to believe in the possibility of like humanoid robots taking over the world or whatever like a much more um pedestrian view is like what about the world in which you know billions of people around the world have ai agents that are working in the background for them like doing their menial shit for them like that's gonna require a tremendous amount of compute and i i think that i don't think you have to believe too much stuff to realize it's like yeah it's like if every single person could have an an agent helper person helper thing that was helping them definitely not people helping them do their day-to-day tasks like wouldn't they use it absolutely but like at the same time when i'm using cloud code i'm timing out all the time because they're running out of compute for example right or same thing with open AI or Gemini.

52:27Baiju Bhatt:There's not enough compute to even be able to ask it you know come up with a recipe for a Magic the Gathering deck for me. Which I like playing Magic the Gathering. Have you

52:41Joubin Mirzadegan:met Elon? No. Is he like on your Mount Rushmore?

52:46Baiju Bhatt:I mean somebody I tremendously admire. Yeah.

52:49Joubin Mirzadegan:Yeah.

52:50Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. Somebody I tremendously admire. Me too. Yeah.

52:55Joubin Mirzadegan:Super interesting. Can I go to, I have some Robin Hood related things. Yeah, hit me. Really, really, I, actually I'm not done yet. Can I, where is the, where is the, like, is everybody in Seattle?

53:07Baiju Bhatt:No, we have the rocket team and the satellite engineering team that's being built in Seattle. We've got like the, the core of the company is still in Silicon Valley right now. so we have um pretty much everybody building our first first two satellites and first two satellite missions excuse me that are going to space in the bay area um long term i think we're going to have all the computer science and computer engineering people here probably have a lot of the executive functions here as well probably a lot of like the compute sale side of the business will be here um but again kind of the one of the new things about building a space company is there's a lot of like facilities that you have to build right you have to build a lot of factories to do this um the the factory building was not as big a part of robin hood i don't think we had factories for anything really um it's a digital product in this case we have a rocket engine factory that we're going to be building in Seattle, right?

54:13Baiju Bhatt:We're going to be building a vehicle, like a rocket vehicle manufacturing site, and that's still TBD. And we've got a launch pad and a ton of infrastructure that has to be built at the launch pad site. And eventually we'll have multiple launch pads, ideally a really large number of production facilities. Do you know the places that you do stuff because if you're building rocket engines for example you need to hire people that know how to build rocket engines and you have to kind of go where the talent is and same thing with you know building a launch tower at a launch pad like there's a lot of people that

54:56Joubin Mirzadegan:know how to do that in florida for example when you're recruiting these people right now how um like it's funny like you're i feel like you're at the intersection of two of the hype things in the world like ai and space you know space was not hype at all when i started doing this i got two years ago yeah i got a lot of like really pays you like that's what you're doing like

55:21Baiju Bhatt:you know there's a lot of like why don't you go build an enterprise finance sass company i'm like Come on. Like, I am not, not no interest in that. Sorry. Thank you. Yeah, but it has become very hypey recently for sure. Has it helped or hurt your ability to recruit? Oh, I think it's inevitably helped because people, it's kind of interesting. Space is going commercial. and even like you know a couple of years ago there were inklings of it i think it's becoming more and more consensus that it is um and you rewind the clock like 10 to 15 years ago right there were like the launch program the launch industry across the board was kind of the sun was setting on in the united states right crazy right people like oh this is old technology how on earth is that the case we're in space so all that to say there was a long period of time

56:27Joubin Mirzadegan:where it was not very hypey during the 15 years of robin hood 14 i think is what we agreed upon 14 years um is it all a blur or do you remember the highs and the lows like uh as you look back on i don't know that's the question is it all a blur or can you like point to jubin on this day like i thought we were gonna be the biggest company on earth or we were dead yeah i can

56:59Baiju Bhatt:point to a lot of those days for sure i think the interesting thing was i mean i before robin hood i was a nobody entrepreneur you know i was just one dude in a sea of people trying to build companies and you know a ton of people building fintech companies and then as robin hood was picking up steam and becoming you know a more and more significant company the pace of my life really picked up i guess had a lot of stuff going on right days that were wall-to-wall meetings right hundreds and then thousands of employees that we had to like you know show them what we were doing get them up to speed like grow the workforce you know manage the workforce like there were a ton of people in my life that were competing for my time and so that definitely created the sense of blur right where just like when you're an entrepreneur trying to figure out an idea you know it's it's exhausting work but it's not that fast-paced right and then when you get into building and scaling a business it's like like post-product market fit it's like everything all the time.

58:09Baiju Bhatt:And so those periods definitely feel more blur-like. But it was very exciting.

58:15Joubin Mirzadegan:Does life slow down when, like if something bad happens, and there are several bad things that happened, I don't know, you can name them off the top of your head, I'm sure. All of a sudden, that becomes the priority and the only priority. Yeah. No other, there is no other competition for your time. Yeah. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah. Do you think that's why maybe it stands out so viscerally?

58:43Baiju Bhatt:I mean, I think that if I would actually take it in a slightly different direction. I think as an entrepreneur, there's people, you know, the human meat computer has different algorithms that it's running at any point in time. And one of those algorithms is like figure out what the thorniest problem is that like if you don't get it right is going to really, really adversely affect what you're trying to do. but that there's kind of like other algorithms that are running in the background which is as the entrepreneur you're you're kind of usually being served up a shit sandwich with regularity right which is like you have all these people that you've hired and they can't the organization it either isn't mature enough in this little pocket or this problem's arisen and like nobody knows how to solve it and guess whose problem it is now it's the founders right like the worst the thorniest problems end up on your desk as the founder of the company and so you're kind of doing that the whole time and sometimes it's really big existential stuff other times it's more mundane stuff like i remember for a while um we had some turnover in hr and all of a sudden there was like i remember a summer where there was like nobody in hr at the company and i was pulling my hair out and i'm like these engineers that are pissed at us you know for for for like i can't remember what the reason was but like there was a lot of like and at that point in time you know it wasn't this like giant existential crisis but like i had to basically become the hr person at the company for a while until we hired the next person to do it um so i think that's kind of how company building goes right it's like and during that point in time all the other problems were like beijia you gotta like get this problem solved um because otherwise you're gonna you know not gonna be able to operate the business properly so all that to say i think that there are um that's kind of always happening in the background right it's like whatever the thorniest problem is kind of ends up on your plate as the entrepreneur actually i think elon has a a good way of saying it what does he say he says um being an entrepreneur is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss or something like that and i remember when i heard him say that in some interview i was like yep that's right that's exactly right uh because if other people can solve the problem in the organization it's not going to end up on your

1:01:26Joubin Mirzadegan:plate it's solved yeah somebody else will solve it what's the big existential one or two that you think back on that you're like all right this is probably this might kill us i mean those have been pretty well documented publicly think about the gamestop era um the gamestop one was

1:01:47Baiju Bhatt:it was very challenging gamestop one was bad it was very challenging yeah you didn't have to go do much media during that that time did you i had actually just stepped back as um ceo co-ceo of the company a few months prior yeah trying to think of other ones um that were super duper thorny during the years i mean i think the one that was perpetually very thorny was like actually getting enough engineers in the door and that sounds kind of mundane but we were through the majority of of scaling the company we were just like understaffed and under resourced and it was very stressful. We just didn't quite have enough people at every step along the way to do what we were trying to do.

1:02:36Joubin Mirzadegan:But isn't that like the gift of product market fit? Like if the market is moving ahead of you so fast, like isn't that kind of the thing that you want that always feels terrible, but that you'd really actually want because then you're just chasing the market. Yeah, yeah, it is. Like that's why you couldn't hire engineers fast enough because you needed to build more product faster to keep up with demand.

1:03:02Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of like the really tough things are in some way, shape or form born of a thing that went well as well, right? Totally. Like big problems come from being big.

1:03:15Joubin Mirzadegan:I incubated a company here that I'm leading at KP. Nice. And actually one of my co-founders is a Robin Hood alum, fun fact. Who? You probably don't know him. He's younger. Who? His name's AJ, not Arajan. he's like uh he's what year was he there i don't think i know him he was like there he after robin he did he bootstrapped a company that he sold to private equity he's a stud he went to like caltech at 16 years old while he was at nasa working on the um mars rover god damn stud so you guys found some pretty good people it turns out and anyway uh uh so thank you for him thanks for thanks for whatever whatever y 'all did there thanks uh by the way how wild is

1:03:56Baiju Bhatt:that yeah i don't know insane yeah it's kind of surreal for me because like it's kind of like um no this is a random thought it's kind of like as a parent you kind of always see your kids as like little kids yeah right for me like robin hood is in my mind perennially like also i kind of just think of it as a startup it's like the fact that we had alumni even that is like going and doing things in the world there's something about that that just feels surreal i mean that's kind of the

1:04:26Joubin Mirzadegan:hopefully you take it as a man i couldn't it's almost like in the the kids thing it's like you want your kids to grow up and be good people and successful and you know like that's happy kind of like the highest compliment that you could give a parent yeah you know um anyway uh he is uh the the the point of the story that i was going to say was um and i was recruiting a head of design candidate. And it was dicey. And I was like, all right, I got to go talk to her husband. I have to talk to her husband. I'm quite convinced that this is an extremely personal decision. She's got a cushy job right now.

1:05:06Joubin Mirzadegan:And she's going to go back into the deep end in a startup. And her husband's probably asking like, what is wrong? What are you doing? We do not need to do this. And so I was talking to him and I'll bring this full circle. And, you know, I said, Hey, we have a supply problem, not a demand problem. Like we cannot keep up with the demand. And so we need to like hire a bunch of engineers, people like your wife to like help us start satisfying the demand. And he was like, um, Juben, when does, when does that stop? Like, by the end of the year, are you going to have fixed the supply problem? And I said, ideally, we've made it worse.

1:05:51Joubin Mirzadegan:I hope never. Exactly. I hope never. Like in some bizarro world, I am more afraid of having solved the problem because that means that probably we're not chasing the market anymore than I am having to deal with this like annoyance all the time, which by the way right now it's like you know full hand-to-hand combat competing for anybody good in the market it's like the worst you know uh and it's got real real competitive i mean it's gotten competitive would be putting it lightly it's gotten fictitious in what's happening when you're competing with you know the labs and these and overly well-funded startups let's call it what it is uh so anyway uh it reminded me of what you're saying because i was like man i hope never i hope never i hope we have this problem forever which is funny because you're like yeah it was one of the most annoying terrible problems that we had was just getting engineers through the door and that's like the dream problem it is yeah i don't i don't disagree with that at all because

1:06:56Baiju Bhatt:i mean i have a maybe a slightly more grim view on this yeah which is that product market fit this kind of comes back to what i was saying a minute ago earlier in this conversation product market fit is very elusive like it is very very difficult to come by in my opinion um uh yeah and so a lot of the times when you're operating a startup you're kind of dead and you don't know it you know you're kind of the company's dead and you haven't come to grips with it yet having you know created a few startups that were not very successful before Robin Hood that was kind of the thing is like I want to be in that situation where those problems like where we're doing something interesting right where we're you know where we're chasing the market like you said the point I'm trying to make is like a lot of the times or most of the times like those situations are so elusive to come by and a lot of startups are actually kind of when you're operating a startup right you want to believe that it's going to be a thing and like you convinced yourself it's going to be a thing but it might actually be dead and you just convince yourself that it's not yeah you're like those are i agree with you is what i'm trying to say is those are as as challenging as those circumstances are where you're like god we're just under we're just understaffed and like we are really struggling to keep up with this man i way rather take that than being a zombie startup do you have a definition of product market fit that you like yes i do actually um if whatever you're doing does better than what you project like that's usually a good sign that you have product market fit there's a that's like the most general version of it um in the case of a consumer product i think product market fit is part and parcel with like long-term retention do people continue to use your product time and time again or does it just dwindle off to zero but in always i think the hallmark is always or at least in all the times that i've seen product market fit is whatever you whatever your projections are how you how well you think something is going to do right we have like you know you have mediocre expectations good expectations and great expectations if you're doing better than great expectations like you generally have product market fit like something is going on that is more resonant with the people that are using your product than what you thought even coming in that's a good definition yeah i really like that one because all these things are generally you know if something is working it's just gonna people will use it um to to help them do stuff for themselves right and it'll always be or a lot of times that's more than what you project people use your product for yeah thank you for doing this yeah this was really fun yeah this was really fun um yeah thanks for having me i will say the one thing it's a little bit chilly in here that's by design is that right is it really cold i'm a little bit cold okay all right good to know hopefully i'm not i'm not too and i'm like

1:10:23Joubin Mirzadegan:all right all right we that's a good note thank you i hate you know my because you know what i'm trying to prevent the opposite which is when people sweat i actually think that's more uncomfortable yeah anyway um are you hiring yeah absolutely we are rocket scientists in seattle

1:10:42Baiju Bhatt:we're hiring rocket engineers we're hiring vehicle engineers we're hiring people that know about spacecraft engineering computer architecture people computer software people lasers optics mechanisms solar panel engineering well we're hiring yes last question ask every guest

1:11:05Joubin Mirzadegan:when you hear the word grit, what do you think of?

1:11:08Baiju Bhatt:When I think of the word grit, what do I think of?

1:11:16Perseverance, tenacity, having that dog in you.

1:11:20Baiju Bhatt:I think that's probably what it comes back to is having that dog in you.

1:11:25Joubin Mirzadegan:Well, I can't wait to see the dog in you manifest into this orbit and others.

1:11:33Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, one of these days, there's going to be an x-ray of me like that that meme on the internet it's like what is that it's

1:11:39Joubin Mirzadegan:like that's that dog man i hope in 10 years we're um we're laughing about you someone convincing

1:11:47Baiju Bhatt:you to go to space yeah i hope so too and i hope i do it too because it would be really fun i would if i did it i would get over my fear of heights yeah feels like a rite of passage for a space company yeah it does doesn't it ceo but bezos and elon haven't done it yet have they not yet

1:12:04Joubin Mirzadegan:yeah well bezos did the like

1:12:08Baiju Bhatt:he sent up other people didn't he did he oh he did he was on the ground he said like his brother-in-law I think he sent his wife up. And Katy Perry, right?

1:12:26Joubin Mirzadegan:Oh, man. Thanks for doing this. Yeah, man. Good times. Really fun. I appreciate it. Thank you. Really fun. That's it for now. If you liked the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production, and I'm Juven. Thanks for listening.