#17 - Christian Keil, VP at Astranis

32:45So you apply in rounds. I got waitlisted. I found out about that probably in like January or something of the year before I left, like before the September that I would go to school. From January to September, I was continuously on the waitlist that entire time. And they whittled down the waitlist throughout the round. So it's like in the first round, I was on the waitlist. Second round, I still survived. They sent me an email that says, hey, good news, you're still on the waitlist. A third round goes by. Good news, you're still on the waitlist. But then there was like a secret special final round that was like literally weeks.

33:10So I was moving to California already because I knew that I was going to go to, I chose Berkeley over MIT. And I was like, I'm going to go to Berkeley. Or Stanford. Or Stanford, but I don't know yet. Still, I'm driving across the country with my dad. We're like, we have all my shit in the car and I still don't know which school I'm going to. So it's like, at this point, I figured it's got to be Berkeley, right? Like they would have told me by now if I was going to get into this thing. But then as we're driving, literally, like two days into the journey or whatever, from Michigan to California, driving across the country.

33:39I get an email and it says, hey, Christian, good news. You are one of the final 10 people on the Stanford waitlist. Like we will tell you tomorrow if you're in or out. I was like, what kind of email is that? It's so mean. There is no. So number one, if you get in, you know that you are the last person in the class to get in. You know that you are the least qualified person in the entire class. Or if you don't get in, then you've just got my hopes up for 24 hours and that was what ultimately happened i didn't get in i would there was like i was the last person rejected number two it's like oh my god it was exactly is that suck like isn't that a kind of like a dick move i've had i've had those situations before and it's it's painful especially the other thing too is like if you kind of know i mean if you know that there's only one person out of 10 getting in probability of you getting in is pretty fucking low yeah that's so that's true you can kind of just like preemptively you know grieve a little bit and then move on Yeah, crazy, crazy.

34:38So anyways, ultimately went to Berkeley. And I was very happy to go there. It's an amazing school. Berkeley and MIT are both incredible, incredible business schools. Top five or something. And they have amazing programs for entrepreneurship, which is what I was looking for. There are lots of schools you can go to. You can go to Wharton if you want to be in banking. You can go to Texas is a great school for consulting, for instance. There's lots of schools that are known for different things that they can help you get into. but there's not a lot of entrepreneurship education in business school and the best I could get the best I could find was one of these schools I'd like MIT is on it was like actually really good like somehow despite being on the on the east coast but then Stanford and Berkeley are obviously here and so it's like they're right by Silicon Valley they're by all the VCs and the startups and stuff and that's why I ultimately came out here yeah so did you have any other ideas before like direct for companies yeah oh yeah for sure I mean so when I was when I was a when I was a kid I had like a little baby company.

35:33This is like, but my web design, like I was like, but I just didn't, I was like, I don't see anything. So when I was, so the whole thing about being in the clan and doing the like, like logo design and stuff like that. I turned that into like a little mini business and it was so cute. Like when I was, I was probably like 15 years old and I had objectively like a really good idea. It was graphic designers. When they're building someone a logo, they come up with multiple concepts before the final logo is the one is accepted. that process, of course, is really expensive. Like you're paying for that person's time, no matter how much of it you end up using.

36:07Even if you use none of those logo concepts, you're still going to pay me because I did all that work. And so that process probably prices out a lot of people. It's like you can't, not everybody can afford $5 ,000,$10 ,000,$20 ,000 for a logo, of course. And so what happens for those people? Well, they just like either make it up themselves and it sucks. Or my idea was, what if they could buy one of the unused concepts from somebody else? I think that idea rules. I still think it should exist. I think it actually did exist. I think there was some company that did it later. But anyways, that was my idea back in whatever, 2006 or something.

36:41And I think to this day, I think it probably could have worked if I was actually like, I knew more about starting companies and was like in the right environment and surrounded by the right people or something. But anyways, so I started it. I started doing it for myself. And then I found a bunch of other artists that I was around, like other like graphic designer, artisty people. And I was like, hey, if you want to, you can like send me your logo concepts. I will put them on the site. If somebody buys them, I will pay you. That was the idea. And ultimately, like I didn't really make that many sales.

37:08I think I made like one sale for myself and one for this other guy. But like even trying to pay the guy was hilarious because he like lived in Pakistan. And I was like, how the hell do I pay somebody in Pakistan? I'm 15 years old. Like this is like before transfer wise and stuff. Yeah, I had to. So ultimately, I had to have my mom drive me because I didn't. I was I wasn't 16. I couldn't drive. I had to have my mom drive me to like Western Union or something to like pay a check. over internationally or 20 bucks it was no it was like hundreds of bucks oh yeah because it was like you know it wasn't the thousands of bucks they would take for a full look but they were no it's like hundreds of bucks i don't know so that was my first that was like my first foray into like what was the second one the second one was uh was designing just like straight up being a designer so i like uh strata designs was the name of my company and then i renamed it to ethereus designs and the none of those things mean anything but like the ethereus well ethereus has the ae symbol you know i'm talking about where the a and the e are combined lowercase and i was like that's pretty sick like how do i make a anything with ae in it and i was like a theory a theory is like let's go uh that was that was literally the entire point of that um but so i did that second first was like okay let's i'm making logos for my friends or whatever uh let's resell some things didn't really work second one was let's i'll just be like a designer basically for people um and i was never that good so it's like i made a little bit of money doing it in college, but not that much.

38:27How many customers did you have? Like sub 10? Yeah, yeah. Like not, but each one of them was like a big ticket size because it was like logo design or whatever. So I might make like, I might make like 10k for like doing a logo. I was like, damn, that's like pretty sick. That's enough to keep you going to college for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So what was direct? Yeah, it was, it was my first crazy idea coming to San Francisco. So the basic idea of it was, well, here's a context. I come to San Francisco. I don't know anything about startups at all. literally zero i like i my entire conception of what a startup was was snapchat before i came out here because i had it on my phone and i use snapchat all the time and i was like i had heard the story of like they're they're like in california and they're like living in a beach house and they're like working together to make snapchat i was like that sounds pretty cool and like you know billionaires or something yeah maybe i don't even i actually i legitimately don't think that like being really rich was ever part of the idea of what it was to me even at that time yeah i never i never knew that was part of it i was just like i just want to you know um build cool shit and like succeed in a way that I'm more happy with.

39:27And I was like, maybe if I can align like hard work and like being smart and like being good at a job or whatever with success, if I go to startups, that was like the, that was the hypothesis. But I didn't know what they were. I just knew that maybe Snapchat was one. And so I move here and I just try to like absorb as much as humanly possible about that world as possible. Like I, so I was in business school. So I like would participate in all the like pitch competitions and stuff like that. I would do the like I volunteered to work at VC firms and stuff and try to get internships at VC firms. Did anyone get, you know, offer you anything?

40:02Yeah, I ultimately did. I was a I was like an associate or like a part time associate for two different firms. Just like random. Just random. Just yeah, like one of them was like Berkeley guys. And then another one of them was based in New York City. And they just wanted somebody who is in California. OK. And so I was like an associate for two of them. Just like sort of like very part time. Like, I don't think I ever had like a legitimate lead or anything because I didn't know what I was doing. I literally know what I was doing. I was just like figuring out this world and trying to like do it any way possible.

40:32So it was just rooting around in the dark to begin. Thank you for those people for believing me. I knew nothing. I told them, but I was able to tell them a good story about crypto at the time because so when I joined. What year was this? 2017. Okay. Okay. So 2015 or something, I found out that crypto existed. I got curious about it. I like bought a fraction of a Bitcoin for$184. I should have bought 10 or 100 of those. And then I would be long gone. I would have disappeared out of the map by now. But I, so I like, I got curious very early. And I was like, this is, I just thought it sounded fun.

41:07This was the period where you could just go to websites and they would like just give you crypto, basically like the faucets or whatever, just to play around with it. Like real Bitcoin was being given out for free. Yeah, I remember like, I think the first signup thing for Coinbase was like, we'll just give you a Bitcoin. It's unbelievable. I mean, I think it was like a dollar or something. That was, so Coinbase was actually the, I was like a very early, like an early customer of Coinbase because it was the least sketchy way to like interact with all these places. I was like, I was very interested in it, but I was very skeptical of it because I just didn't, I don't know.

41:35I didn't, the more, you know, the less like centralized it felt, the more sketchy it felt to me at the time. And so I was like, okay, Coinbase, I can do that though. And so I like, yeah, you can go back to my Coinbase history or whatever. And it's like a dollar, like$184 for a Bitcoin. It's like, let's go. So I could tell a story about that, though. And that was like sort of my in or whatever to like both startups and to VCs. It was like I had this I had this like belief early about this technology that ended up working. In the early days of trying to get like learn about the place, it was really that I was just trying to get my foot in the door any way possible.

42:08And so I realized pretty early that the strategy of please give me your time. Like, let me, you know, just please, can I like can I like throw some ideas off of you? Like nobody wants to do like no one wants to say yes to that. Like you have to give them something to work with. There has to be some structure, some like some reason to talk to them. And so that was what that was what I did by starting my first company. It was really a way to like try out entrepreneurship, see what it was like, see what it's like to go raise money, see and then have a reason to talk to all these other really awesome entrepreneurs that came from Berkeley or came from, you know, the broader Bay Area.

42:43Yeah. And so I would you know, I started the company. The basic thesis was actually actually pretty cool. Well, it ended up happening in the industry, which is kind of sweet. It was, what if instead of using centralized record processors for telecom, basically. So if you're whatever, Deutsch Telekom, and I'm AT &T, and my person goes to Germany, there's got to be some way that they can roam on your network. And for that to happen, there's like a bunch of records that get processed or whatever, like generated in your place that you need to send to me that says, they spent this much time on my network.

43:16They called this sort of number, whatever. Like, here's the rate that you should bill AT &T. And then you can pay me back. Like AT &T can pay Deutsche Telekom for that time that was spent. And so because I'm the only person that can build the customer, obviously. And so right now that all flows through a central centralized clearinghouse. Like, can't we decentralize that? Like, that was basically the thesis to begin. But it legitimately, it's like a good idea because that person's like this, this entity, the clearinghouses are like, they extract a lot of rent. Like, it's why would they exist? Like they should just be a standard like thing that you can talk back and forth.

43:50Maybe it doesn't have to be crypto, but like maybe it doesn't have to be blockchain. But like there should be a way for those for me and you to talk directly instead of working through a third party. That was the basic idea. And so with that, I like was like trying to figure out how to actually do a prototype for it. So I was like talking to undergrads at Berkeley to help me build it. And we've like built little tiny things like little in retrospect, like very rudimentary products. But they were products nonetheless. There was some code a little bit. But and then we went to the industry groups and we started trying to like try to sell it basically of like trying to get a telco to develop it along with us or something.

44:23Went to the partnership. Yeah. No, wouldn't it be great to partner with me like some random 25 year old or whatever I was at the time. You give me money and business. You give me money. So here's the deal. I give you a small amount of code. You become my customer and give me money. Sound good? Yeah, exactly. but it was but I did some cool stuff you know like I ended up going to Mobile World Congress which is like the big conference for all the telcos and like pitching as part of that so that was a really good experience got to pitch to customers a lot got to pitch to VCs a lot ultimately like raised money for it so I like I don't know I never know how to say it but like I got to the point where a VC said here is a check here's a term sheet like let's do this and then I that was when I was like okay I've done the thing.

45:11Like I have, I could do this if I want to now. So now is the first time that I'll decide if I actually want to do it or not. Like it was like, so did you get a check or an offer and then you turned it down? I turned it down. Why did you turn it down? That was the, well, so for the, for the longest time I was like chasing, that was the dog chasing the fire truck or whatever. You know, like I was like, I know that I want the, in order to be a entrepreneur, you must go raise money. That's what entrepreneurs do. And so I was like, okay, let's go do that. Let's like figure out how to do it. And so I was like massaging the idea every which way and like trying to like basically just like change the idea that I originally had to try to make it work.

45:47Fundable. Fundable, basically. And I still had no idea how this world worked. I had no idea like what was fundable and what was not or like how did people think about it. And so eventually after pitching it enough times and like hearing enough reasons that people passed on me, I was like, I apparently figured it out. And somebody said, like, I'll give you a check to go do this thing. But only then did I think, do I actually want to do this? And so I went and I talked to all the people that I like all the mentors and stuff that I had acquired or like accrued over the years or whatever. You know, people from Berkeley that were formerly successful or like had exited their own startups, that sort of thing.

46:17Like awesome people. Like to this day, I stay in touch with a lot of them. They're really awesome. But I went to them and I was like, hey, I have this thing. Yeah. I'm like, absolutely not that excited about it. Like, do I think this thing will work? Maybe. Like, maybe not. Like, I just didn't have a ton of conviction about it. and the best piece of advice that I got was from this guy, Albert, actually. He was the co-founder of MyFitnessPal, which sold to Under Armour. So like, awesome dude. Shout out, love you, dude. You're awesome. He advised me, like the best piece of advice I got by far, which was don't do it if you think the money is there.

46:51Do it if you want to spend 10 years of your life on it. And with that context, I was like, okay, hell no. Am I going to spend 10 years on this idea? I do not care about the connection between telcos in a data center and the, you know, like that part of it is like, it's not that interesting to me. Do I think it's definitely going to happen? Yes. Do I think it's like a venture scale business? Maybe not. And ultimately that's what happened. It ended up happening. Like that sort of thing is in works in the industry, but it's definitely, it's not a business. It's not like a multi-billion dollar company.

47:19But it's not even a company. It's like an industry group or whatever that built it as like an international standard as opposed to like a company. And that's the right way for that idea to come into the world. But yeah, that was a funny, it was a funny saga. It was like I only realized that I didn't want to do the startup by achieving the thing of getting an offer, like getting a funding offer. How many interviews or conversations did you have with people before you decided to say no to the check? Well, so here's the thing. Like when you're pitching VCs, you learn what they – you have an idea in your head to start.

47:51And then everyone else has an idea in their head. And I was immature enough or like not – like didn't have enough conviction or whatever that my idea would just change. like people give me feedback. And so I just changed the idea. And like, they would say like, oh, what if you did this thing? I'd be like, I'm doing that thing. Like, you know, it was actually that's a much better idea than what I had. And I'm going to go spend the next 10 years. But did I actually think it was a really good idea? Like, not really. I was just like, I just know that this is something that people want. And so ultimately there were a couple of offers that I got that were around that vein.

48:21Like the funding offer was sort of tied to this idea that they had an old portfolio company and I would like sort of acquire the old portfolio company. that was just dead and defunct and like for the IP or something. And so like that was like sketchy. Wait, so how much how much were they offering you? And then did they like want you to turn around and buy this asset? Well, not with money. They wanted me to buy with equity, not with money. So I was actually getting funded. It was weird, dude. It was really like that was that was weird. There was another one that was like a big company that I won't name that like wanted me to come work for them as like, oh, we'll make this a division of our company.

48:54And I was like, why? Like, this has nothing to do with what you guys are doing. this is like raising every sketchy alarm. Like, I don't know. So there were some red flags. There were red flags with like all of the offers that I was getting, which like in hindsight makes sense because I don't know, it wasn't that venture backable, wasn't that great of an idea. But like, it's really, I think it's actually pretty dangerous for like people who are new in this world and don't have very firm conviction about what they actually want to do. You're just going to get swayed by the winds of this place. Like everybody has their own things they want to do.

49:23They have that, like that company inevitably, like undoubtedly wanted to have some blockchain something. and that was why they wanted to work with me. That investor really wanted to have an exit for that company. So that's what he wanted. But when you're naive and young or whatever, you don't know that. I had no context to realize that's what was happening until later when I had like, you know, now I'm much more experienced in this world and I know what was going on. You didn't know what the incentives were and so you were making decisions under the wrong information probably. Right, right. Right.

49:53And it's that is that is true. But more, I think that it's just I was pursuing the wrong thing. Like I was like, again, this is a this is a common thread in my life, honestly, is like, I am very competitive. I want to win. I want to succeed. And so like when you pursue those things very directly, if you were saying I want success, that's all I want, or like I want funding, that's all I want, then you just like you throw out too much to get there. And like, thank God I made the right decision and didn't do that. Like I didn't like to say I will be a backed founder or like whatever um i decided not to do that instead to go about it the right way or like a better way which is like more aligned with what i actually want to be doing yeah how did you decide to go from like turning down that check uh how much was it by the way like 100k or something okay so it wasn't a whole lot wasn't um how did you go from turning down the check to like joining astronauts so the the whole experiment of that startup happened over basically a calendar year in business school so it was like uh the first four months of business this business school is two years long the first four months like the first semester i was just like learning and figuring out what I wanted to do.

50:52That whole next calendar year, so the second semester, first year to the first semester, second year, all of that was spent doing the startup January to December. It was actually pretty cleanly exactly that year. So January rolls around of 2019, which is like the year I was going to graduate from business school. And I just decided to turn down the offer and not pursue the startup full time. And so from there, I had to go off and recruit. Basically, I was like, I got to go find a job. Like, let's figure out what it's going to be. and so my original idea was okay i know that i still know that i like telecom like i really enjoy those projects at deloitte um i think it's really interesting i think it's important like it's good to like connectivity universal like human rights like people should be connected um so i okay connectivity would be cool i definitely want to work at a startup i probably want to work at an early stage startup when that's like not too many people because i like the i love the vibes of just being me and being like a renegade out there by myself like trying to start the company.

51:45And so I don't want to go back into like the big corporate world, definitely like thousands or tens of thousands of employees. And so those are my criteria, like maybe telecom, definitely startup, probably small, got to be in a role that I can do, obviously. And so with that criteria, immediately, Astronus jumped out, like just from the very outset, like I was, I wasn't, I wasn't searching for that long. It was like four years old at this point, right? It was winter 2016 right so that but that means like january 2016 and so i was this is around 2019 that i was yes three years in um so but astronomers was like perfect it was like it was a telecom company um telecom and space that's freaking cool like they were um the right size they had a small business team even though they were 50 they were 50 people which felt like a million people um 50 person company but not that big of a business team like the business team was a very very small subset of that that maybe had like, I joke and I exaggerate and I say it was like 48 or 49 engineers or whatever.

52:38In reality, when I ultimately joined, I was, I think the first person that did not have an undergraduate engineering degree. So like there were other business people, but they were like technical. So anyways, so, but it was a perfect, it was the perfect thing. And so I applied and I got rejected. I didn't get in the first time I applied. I like, I applied for some supply chain role. I got interviewed for it. And the, my, well, who became my boss, Mickey, she was like, so like, do you have experience doing supply chain? I was like, yeah, definitely. I definitely have tons of experience doing supply chain.

53:09Like tried to basically BS my way, like as you would do in any job interview. Um, and she was like, no, you don't. And I was like, yeah, you're right. So I didn't get the job. Um, they thought that they wanted someone with tons of experience. They thought they wanted like the supply chain vet who was like 20 years had been acquired, like, you know, uh, procuring stuff for the longest time. Were they trying to hire people with like way more experience than the actual team had? um at the start or yeah definitely i mean for sure like uh they so their advice that they got i learned this all later like after i joined ultimately but it was like they the advice that they got was that they should find super experienced people that are like the person who's going to be able to do supply chain for them now and then at scale which like is actually not that good of advice it's like you want to find the person that's right for the job as you have it now not as the job as you're going to have it like three or four startup epicycles from now.

53:58And so the so I wasn't the right person for that job. And so I got I got rejected. I was like, damn, it's like that was the perfect thing. Now I got to go back to the drawing board. And basically, all of those criteria that I talked about, I just started throwing them out the window in various ways. I was like, OK, telecom strictly optional now. Like, let's go do let's go apply to fucking Coinbase. Like all the you know, let's just apply to all the stars that I can find. So I had this whole soul search thing going on. But then finally, somebody said, yes, it was like a like a like a cybersecurity startup thing but as soon as I got that offer I was like okay I have security I can go pursue the stuff that I actually want to do now and so I went back to Astronus at that point they had posted a new role it was not supply chain it was like finance which like again like kind of sort of I can sort of do that like you might have experience if you like twist it a little bit let's like let's like pretend that I have more finance experience I went to business school everyone at business school knows finance and you worked in Deloitte yeah exactly Deloitte finance they have tons of finance.

54:56Sounds like finance. Yeah, that's sure it does. So the basically, so I went back to to Astronus and I was like, I really want to work here. Like, this is the perfect place. Like I, and when I, they gave you an onsite project, we still do this to the day, to this day. Like it's, they say, it's been like three to five hours on it. You better believe I spent like 20 hours on that project. Like I just like crushed it. And I also, I did, I did this thing where you're supposed to do a personal presentation and a, um, uh, like a project for what they do. So the first one, you can choose any project that you've ever done.

55:27And then they, and then you can talk about it and explain why it was important and why it would be useful for the skills that you had. And then there was the project that I spent way too many hours on. But for the first one, I did this thing where I had actually, I prepared 12 different stories, 12 different presentations that were ready at a, whichever one they chose. So I gave them the choice. I walked into my interview and I said, here's a page with 12 logos on it, basically like 12 little icons. I can talk about any one of these for 30 minutes. Which one would you like me to talk about? And then they actually chose the book.

55:56They asked me to explain this. But they could have chosen any one of the 12, and I was actually ready for all 12. Does Astronis have a special, because you're clearly really good, and Jason's really good, and I know that you kind of brought on Jason, but have they got some great system for finding super-cracked high-agency people? Yes, definitely, yes. That's like it's it's Astronis's best strength, I think, is recruiting. So in the early days, they recruited extremely, extremely, extremely well for the first 10 employees. I think that is like pretty determinant of a lot of Astronis's early success that the first 10 people were just unbelievable.

56:33They were very intense about interviewing those people. They made the process really hard, really long, really arduous to like get through in the first place. One of our first hires, the guy like he started off designing GNC stuff for us, like guidance, navigation and control. Um, he then went on to become the program manager for our first satellite. He's now like, he's the, you know, head of program management and stuff. Now it's like, he's, he's like really, really awesome. His project was design us an entire, like basically navigation system for our CubeSat. Like that was the project. It was just do the work, like prove to us that you can actually do this work.

57:06That project takes like multiple days, definitely more than 40, like more than 40 hours, probably. Like, I think it was scoped at 40 hours. That's intense. Like, um, and is this just one of the interview parts? I think this is like the, you know how I do the project of like the thing that I spent 20 hours on? He's probably spent like 40 plus hours on his project designing something in hardware. Unbelievable. And like scoping it all out. And it was like this huge document. Like I've seen the thing that he put together for it. And so they were super intense in choosing those first 10 people. And they were all amazing.

57:34Like if you look back at the first 10 employees of Astronus, unbelievable. You have like, there's this one guy, he was like Elon Musk's favorite structural engineer. And how would you know that? Like there's so many that work at us, that you know at SpaceX well he was the first one to ever get approved to work remotely ever in SpaceX's history really because he was he was gonna leave his wife got residency or whatever like got a job up as a doctor up in San Francisco he's gonna move away from LA and he said sorry I'm moving I quit and he said no you don't like you're gonna keep working for us and so he actually he ended up working on some of the first huge gigantic structures for Starship like back when it was still called uh whatever it was like the bfr yeah the big falcon rocket uh back when it was still that um he was like one of the first people working on it and so like he became our first structural engineer unbelievable um you have like this guy that worked at um you have this guy that worked at qualcomm he liked to help design some of the like 3g 4g radios for qualcomm and then he came to astronauts to design our radios like just these absolutely unbelievable people and um they scaled.

58:39That's the best part about them. They were not only really awesome individual contributors, cracked engineers, but every single one of them, without exception, became an awesome manager and a manager of managers. Like all those people now are directors and VPs that are just crushing it. And so that was extremely, extremely important. So the DNA was there from the beginning of how do you recruit a cracked team? But of course, as you scale, it gets harder because not only is it like the people, so there's the first 10, there's the first two, which are the founders. Then those two became 10, which is that first group of 10 people.

59:10Then those 10 recruited maybe the first 30 or 50 people. But once you get to 30 or 50, all of a sudden I joined and I don't have all that context that everyone else had in the early days. I'm not one of those cracked engineers that was there at the very earliest days. I'm employee 50. So it's like, how do we make sure that I am good enough at interviewing that I'm going to find people like Jason and not just like Scrubs? And Astronus is really good at that too. There's this whole system for like, how do you recruit people. What are you looking for? Well, we're looking for evidence of exceptional ability.

59:38We're looking for the fact that you've worked on hardware, like with your own hands before, or at least like in the abstract to the business world, you've built something for real before. Do they want kind of like everyone in the company having done that at some point? Yeah, for sure. So we definitely want, well, we want everybody at the company to do that, but we also need everybody to be able to assess it. And so everybody at the company is a recruiter. everybody like everybody participates in recruiting not only in like vetting people to come to the door but getting people into the door top of funnel like we have insane top of funnel as I mean part of that is we are like blessed to have like an amazing mission trying to connect the world people are really pumped about that connecting the world from space it's super cool too so it's like it's we get a ridiculous amount of applications just like naturally by doing nothing and sitting there but still we have a very very very deliberate and like you know good way of going out and getting more people to apply.

1:00:30And so whenever I'm hiring for a new role, I spend a lot of hours on LinkedIn recruiter to just pull in as many people as I possibly can into the process. And then from that, you can whittle it down really well, but you have to have a super big top funnel to start. How did you end up hiring Jason? So he applied. He just applied on the website. But that's like sort of selling it short. He had offers from a lot of places and he could have worked at some really, really, really crazy companies not just like other awesome startups but also like the top ad agencies in the entire world like the dudes obviously like everywhere he applies he should get in like he's amazing um and that was very evident even from the early he made like a custom video for us as part of his application not as part of like even an interview he just like made a video that was like hi i'm jason i'm applying for this role i really love astronis here's the story of like why i love connectivity like that whole thing he like he did that before he even joined the company um just So he's just just to get.

1:01:23Yeah, just to get an interview, basically. Like dudes, he was always destined for success. But like, I think that he's a great example of what I'm looking for, though, when I'm hiring people, because generally speaking, you interview 100 people for a job and they fall into a bell curve. Right. There's like the middest of the mid candidate. There's people. Fifty percent of them are worse than that. And then 50 percent of them are better than that. And there's the normal distribution thing. What you normally I think where people go wrong is they hire people that are at the top end of distributions.

1:01:49So they look at that, they see the distribution, and they're like, oh, damn, this person's like two or three standard deviations above. They're like a 95th percentile candidate. They're better than almost everybody I've ever talked to for this thing. Or like maybe they're better than everybody I've ever talked to for this thing. But they're still very much in the distribution. They hire them. That's a mistake. You should not do that. Instead, what you should do is you wait for Jason. Jason is 10 standard deviations above the average. Like it's not even close. For what he does. You wait for the people that break the distribution, not the people that are the best within a normal distribution.

1:02:20That's my rule. So it's like, and I find that with like a bunch of these people that have hired. I've just, I've grown my team a little bit. Like my personal team is part of Astronus more recently. And we've recruited, you know, I think it's like 12 people now. And all of them are just so good. Like there's this one guy that I just hired. I posted about it on Twitter. I said, I'm looking for like a badass generalist or something, which led to the most applications I've ever had for a role. People were so pumped to call themselves a badass generalist, which like note to self, like cool titles. Well, well, it's, it's, you're of course looking for like something that is a job title that, you know, I'm a supply chain manager, I'm a finance manager, I'm a graphic designer, whatever.

1:02:57But really what you should be advertising is like, if you come do this role with me, I'll make you a founder in two years. Like that's a much better sales pitch. Like that was the sales pitch that I had on Twitter and whatever thousands of applications for that role. Maybe a thousand is too many. Maybe it was more like a few hundred hundreds or something. It was, it was, it was too many to go through. It was too many to go through, way too many to go through. So anyways, when I was hiring for that role, I described it, I think well enough. I like excited people to want to apply for it, but then I had to go through all these people.

1:03:24Like, how do I interview all of these people? And you go through resumes and a lot of them just kind of make themselves, make themselves known they're not going to be great. But then you try to find like where like the nuggets of like really cool stuff. And so something we value very highly is like the application questions. So we have them do like a pretty intense like thing. So like I was talking around with different wordings to this question. But what I'm really getting at is like, what's the best you've ever been in something? Like, what's the top most you've ever been in any distribution?

1:03:51What is that? Tell me about it. Like what? Like, how did you do it? And the person that I ultimately hired for that role was like a world champion e-sports athlete. Like he was not he had no business background, literally. Like he had never worked at a corporate job before. He first was like an actual, like he played the games himself, but then he became a coach and he like coached multiple teams to be awesome. Like awesome champions. And he just started on this Tuesday. It was the last Tuesday. He's already amazing. Like he's crushing it. Like I'm so pumped I'm on the team. So it's cool. It's like, it's very fun to, and that's a good example of somebody that like not, like, you know, we weren't sure if you can onsite it.

1:04:25Like he doesn't have any business experience. Like what should you do? But I really fought to like, I want to bring this guy onsite. And as soon as we gave him the chance, he like blew us out of the water. His project was so good. It was so good. So I don't know, it's fun. Do you think that Astronus is kind of like the last company that you're going to be working for? Wow. Honestly, no. I mean, I've been pretty upfront with them for the whole time that I want to found a company someday. I told them that like week one of joining Astronus. And so I think someday I will do something else. I mean, will Astronus be around in 100 years?

1:04:56Like probably, like in some form. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that it's built as a company that will be around for the long term just by the nature of you put up, like we have an asset on orbit right now that's going to be there for like 10 years. So like it'll be around 10 years. We are going to launch four more later this year. Those four are going to be up there for another 10 years or whatever after this year. So it's like we will be a long-term business by our very nature, but it's also like super set up for success in that way too. So I think Astronos will be around. Like, will I be there for the entire journey?

1:05:26Like, probably not, honestly. Like, I mean, whatever, 100 years from now, I'm not going to be alive. Do you think that there's like a certain stage of company that you enjoy working with? I love the chaos stage. It's so fun. It's so fun. It's like the stage where like there are. So I came up with this analogy. I don't know if it's a good one yet. You tell me. It's like an Easter egg hunt. So when you do when you have like my little kid went out to the Easter egg hunt for his first ever. Like, you know, we went and we watched all the little kids running around or whatever. And it's hilarious. The Easter egg hunt.

1:05:58There's just eggs strewn on the open ground. You don't even have to search. You just go there and you're like, you're picking up things and putting it in your basket. Like that's what it's like at the early stage of a company is nothing's hidden. There's all these problems. All these problems are obvious. Go tackle. So obvious. But then like after however much time of going and picking up the obvious things and putting them in your basket and like figuring them out or whatever, like it starts to get harder to find those problems. And so it becomes less of like, are you a good Easter egg picker upper and like taking on tasks and crushing them.

1:06:28And it becomes more like, Like, how do you find things you got to go work on? And so that's been the fun thing. I mean, I like both of them. Like, both of them are fun. We're definitely fully into, like, all the obvious eggs are picked up stage of Astronus right now. And so it's like, how do we scale? Like, it's not how do we build a first satellite? It's how do we build 100 satellites? It's like, it's not how do we recruit one great video person? It's how do we recruit a video team? Like, we're now in the scale phase fully, which is fun and interesting and different. but it's not the like chaos of like, ah, there's like all this shit like to do and how do we possibly prioritize?

1:07:01Like that stage is very fun too. Yeah, I noticed you said something about like there's a clear playbook for how to build a software company. There's a less clear playbook on how to build a hardware company and what to start with and what problems to tackle at the beginning. And you're trying to kind of solve that with first principles. Yeah. What is kind of the goal with first principles? Okay, so there was an era of startups in which like nobody knew how to do anything, right? Like we were just all sort of rooting around in the dark together. There were no success stories. Nobody did anything.

1:07:31Like this is like the OG days of when startups were first coming about. We're far beyond those days now. Like if you just flash forward, like let's abstract through the whole middle section and just get to like the context today, we know how to do software startups. Like we figured that shit out. Like it's not only, it's not like software is easy. It's not like software is solved. Like that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is there have been decades of success stories in software. We know what it's like to grow from literally zero people or like zero dollars revenue and two people in a garage to being the most valuable company in the entire world.

1:08:02We have done that. Silicon Valley has done that. It's like documented. It's documented. People know what the strategies were that they use. Some of the people that are, you know, they're like alive and working still that were working on those companies at those times. It's like we have examples of what it looks like to succeed in software and like all the stuff that goes along with it. We have Andrew Chen in software, like Andreessen Horowitz partner, has written some of the most impactful blog posts of all time, like has, you know, taken concepts that previously were just sort of like floating and no one really knew how to make sense of them and made them concrete and distilled them into like knowledge you can use very easily in the world and apply them.

1:08:38Like I could read this blog post and then all of a sudden I know that there's this thing where if I can get more lifetime value from a customer than it takes me to acquire that customer, then I'm good. And there's like ratios, like we have enough data on these companies that You can know the different numbers. Like literally, if you go to one of these awesome consumer partners at a top VC firm like Andreessen Horowitz, they have all the numbers in their head. They know like your retention should be this much month to month. You should have this much value to like lifetime value to CAC or whatever.

1:09:05Like they have all these metrics. And because of all these examples of all these companies that have come before. And so that's where we are. Like we have that for software companies. We sort of lost our way a little bit in the middle of that when software companies stopped innovating though. So we had, we had figured it out enough. We had figured out enough of the playbook that it became possible to just apply those lessons and sort of like not novel ways, but to novel areas. And so that was the whole, like when people like satirize SAS and like make fun of SAS, that's really what they're making fun of is like, we take, it's like a, it's like, um, software engineer talent arbitrage.

1:09:42It's like trying to find a problem just because you have such a good playbook. Sort of. It's basically what, but I think it's more like, um, We have all these people that are graduating with degrees in software engineering. So they have this skill set. That skill set is not everywhere yet. Like the future is here. It's not evenly distributed whole thing. Like we're that that phase was like evenly distributing software across every industry across the entire world. That was what that phase was. And that phase was like, fine. It was a good idea. Like people, there's a lot of money to be made by doing that.

1:10:11But it wasn't tech. Like there's a difference between tech and business startups. A tech startup is one that's like building new things and like figuring out new stuff. like the early stage of stop software 100 was tech 100 like they had to figure out that like uh all these resources didn't exist like servers i'm putting uh i think it was like a website builder onto a what was a floppy disk i believe the first version of via was on a floppy disk yeah like that kind of thing like something like that so much harder to do all this stuff back like and now i just like i could literally make a website with my phone in like five minutes if i had to like it's so so um is that a good thing that happened absolutely 100 yes like we we figured out how to do this stuff.

1:10:49We abstracted away a lot of the complexity. We made people be able to focus on the business and just like solving a business problem or solving a need for a customer. Amazing. But is that tech? Like, I'm not so sure. Like, I think that we sort of had the phase of tech in the early days. We had to build everything. We had to figure it all out. And then we've had this weird like interim phase of basically just like business startups that are taking existing technology, applying it to new places. And so now we're coming to end of that cycle. We have learned that those business startups or whatever, like that whole business, that whole like let's take existing stuff and apply it elsewhere is sort of done, is sort of like, you know, we've done it.

1:11:26We've applied it to all the places that make sense. And there's also sort of - Or like a lot, like you've applied it to 85%. Yeah, sure. And we've applied it to all the valuable places or something. And it's now time to go like do new stuff again. And we're suddenly like there without as many tools as we had before. like there's there's this whole huge wave of all of these hardware startups like all the the crazies in the gundo like love you dudes like there's all the people in san francisco that are building like you know uh um everything from satellites to like hypersonic engines whatever like guns that fire things into space like uh like well like there's so there's all of these amazing things that are happening like these crazy ass ideas but we don't know we don't know the same amount of like stuff the the same we don't have the same frameworks we don't have the same um like shared understanding of how to make these companies succeed and we're ridiculously overfitting on the elon companies like those are the only ones so we have we have basically we have tesla we have spacex like what are the other huge success like you know there i you could say that um you know andrew's getting up there maybe you could say that we have um you know maybe we can look back to the chip companies like are those examples of hardware success like sort of say that there's quite a few hardware successes in china like there's a lot of there's a lot of automakers in China that have kind of, you know, taken Tesla and applied it.

1:12:48Sure. But that's like, that's exactly doing what I said is like, you take an existing model and you apply it somewhere else. Anyways. So we have, and I think we're super overfitting on that right now. Like people are taking, okay, SpaceX and Tesla. I, if I want to do a great startup company, I got to do that. What does that mean? I got to start with a premium product and like sell it like for like the Tesla model. I have to start with a premium product. I have to sell it to rich people. Once I do, I can democratize and make the cheaper version. Like that's one, that's definitely one way to do it, but it's not the only way.

1:13:16Um, the SpaceX example, people are like, Oh, I have to vertically integrate. I have to build everything myself. If I don't build, if I rely on outside suppliers, they're going to be slow. Um, they're going to be, uh, I'm, they're not gonna be as good as me because I'm really smart. They're not gonna be as smart as me. Um, and so it's not going to work. So I have to vertically integrate. Like those lessons are fine. They can work. Um, they definitely work at a certain scale. It's like, you know, a vertically integrated company is a better idea when you're bigger than when you're smaller. If you're a small company, you're trying to fully vertically integrate when you're building your first prototype, you're definitely moving too slow.

1:13:46Like there's no, you're not going to invent a new camera when you're building a drone, like just by the off the shelf camera. Well, it's just way faster to like rapidly prototype using a 3D printer and stuff. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so we're in this weird place where there's a ton of energy, there's a ton of momentum, there's this huge wave, there's like, there's all this power that is behind this wave, both in terms of like excited people that want to work on these problems instead of like excited money that wants to be put behind it um there's a lot of new money that's that's not a bad thing it's a good thing yeah it is actively a good thing um and but it's like we're sort of directionless and so we have we have this big wide thing that we think we want to go to which is like let's build more tech let's build new things but we don't know which stuff to build and we don't know how to decide between how do we spend our time or our money on different places so that's that is the inspiration for first principles.

1:14:34That is where it came from. The idea of how do we replicate all of the like learnings, the frameworks, the like rules of thumb, the like the evaluation of the different companies. How do we do that? But for hardware and new stuff, as opposed to software and old stuff. Are there any like specific things that you want to cover with that podcast? Like I imagine there's certain people that you'd like to interview. Sort of, but sort of not like I care less about, and this has always been maybe the, the, like, uh, the weakness of this podcast is like, I care a little bit less about the, like the company or the person or whatever.

1:15:11And I don't really want to tell a lot of the, like, when I was a child, I always loved cars. And so I decided to build cars. Like, I think those stories are like fine, but it's like, um, they're not directly applicable to the problem I'm trying to solve. If what you care about is doing that, if what you care about is helping people evaluate how to make sense of these companies, well, you should have an opinion about like, what are the best ways to be allocating your money and time and stuff like that. And I certainly do. I mean, my opinion is that, or like my framework for evaluating that is engineering first principles.

1:15:40It's like, if we know for a fact that a market exists, like there's already a market for energy, there's already a market for spaceflight. What that means then is that what you're trying to do is you're trying to evaluate, is this thing technically possible or not? Is it conceivable that this thing could exist in the world? Does it violate any laws of physics or does it not? And of course, obviously, We should not be directing our time or money towards things that violate the laws of physics that are impossible or that are so difficult because of laws of physics that they're going to be way too expensive or they're going to take way too long or they're going to, you know, crash and burn in some predictable way.

1:16:16You have to be careful with that, of course, like things that don't seem possible happen all the time. But it's like you have to. But then that's where that's where the magic is. You have to decide what are the things that just sound crazy and it's sound impossible versus the things that are actually impossible. And I think that like Reflect is a great example. That's Reflect Orbital. So that has been, so I did an episode on them. I like have been around the company for, or like been talking to them for a while, like watch them through all their like little viral stunts and stuff that have gotten them both incredible praise, but then horrific criticism.

1:16:48And it's like, shout out to them for having, for coming up with the concept that is so polarizing. It's actually good. It's actually a great thing. They're a good example of a startup that sounds impossible. Sounds like it should not, like, What are you talking about? You're going to put mirrors into space that are going to reflect sunlight down wherever I want, like over my solar farm or over like my enemy's house or something. They don't do the second one. Use a laser. It's very soft light. But it sounds crazy. It sounds like it should not be possible, but it is. Like they actually recently, like just like a week ago or two weeks ago or something, I think it was literally last week, they had like some guy like do a takedown.

1:17:22There was like a takedown, like an engineering takedown of their idea. And it's just wrong. I mean, I'll probably do a reply to it. at some point here because it's like it was like a 30 minute video and the guy made like two claims it was like uh and they're very easily addressable claims so it's like okay we should just we can get past that but that's the that's the kind of thing you see that's the kind you see the like um a reflexive thought that i'm not familiar with this i don't get it so therefore it's impossible and that's the wrong that's the wrong framework it's not rigorous it doesn't make anything the confusing thing too is it's like it's one thing to spend billions of dollars on something like reflect it's a whole nother thing to spend like a few million dollars.

1:18:01Yeah, exactly. It's like a rounding error to zero on world GDP, and maybe it makes a big impact if it works. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't know why. I definitely think that's true. If the investors understand and the founder understands, there's no problem. Well, that's true. But it's also, it's this double-edged sword that people play with early stage PR. It's like, you know, you're exposing your baby to the world when they're like not ready for it yet. Like, you know, my son who was here earlier is not ready to give a polished interview. you know like he doesn't he can't represent himself well he's like he can't even uh talk yet so it's like um that happens with early stage ideas too like the the gestational phase where you're sort of figuring everything out the ideas are very like vulnerable and fragile at that stage and um you have to decide like do i keep it hidden or whatever and keep it vulnerable and keep and like let it um stay precious or whatever not like sullied by the outside like not like under the scrutiny of the outside public or do I reveal it to the world in this kind of like larval state and like hopefully people don't like think it's horrible like the reason you would go that route of course is because you have to get funding like if you're if you're a billionaire you don't have to go through that terrible phase of like it's a very very early idea and it's not ready for you can do the blue origin situation where you just spend like a billion dollars a year two billion dollars a year of Amazon stock forever, like every year.

1:19:19Like that's a not, not a bad way to do a hard tech startup, but it's not, uh, but it's also not a way that is available to me, for instance. Um, so I don't know. I have all these opinions about how do you decide between sounds crazy or is impossible. I have all these ideas about, um, like the right way to get press or not for these various companies and like how to tell your story to the world in a way that is, um, people can get excited about it without having the whole like Theranos red flags go off and that kind of thing. That's what that's what I'm trying. My best indicator is that you like talk with someone and they have a whole slew of things that they've done in the past that are really interesting, unique.

1:19:53Maybe they created a bunch of businesses as a kid. And you if you hear about someone who's just done a bunch of stuff and like successfully. Yeah. And then they go do the hard thing and like the crazy thing that sounds impossible. I feel like I want to just suspend disbelief and just say, right, OK, you know, someone gave you a million dollars like show us. Well, I mean, I don't want to be too combative, but that is deliberately not first principle. That is the exact opposite of first principles. That is matching on a pattern from the past, not about evaluating the actual idea. So it's like, I think that the normal thing of pattern matching of where you could take a person who'd done another software startup and just say, okay, I could trust them with a million dollars to do this next software startup.

1:20:33That was a pretty good bet because in software, literally everything is possible. like this is proven truth of computing that anything that is computable can be done by a computer and so it's like there are no laws of physics that you ever hit up against when you're doing software you hit up against like laws of speed or something of like processing but you don't hit up against laws of like is can i represent this in software you can always represent it in software and so i think that's actually um that's like second principle thinking

1:21:02great no but it's fine but this is but this is i think this is interesting because it's because it is the like normal way. It is the normal way of doing things is pattern matching, but you can't do that here. Yeah, but what's interesting to me is I've talked with a lot of founders and especially for when they're like first raising money, they may talk to, you know, like most of the guys in the gundo got rejected a hundred plus times. And you go ask them like, did any of the VCs ask you about what you'd done prior to this company? And almost invariably, the answer is really no. Really? Interesting.

1:21:30Yeah, it's really weird. I don't know what questions those people are asking. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, a lot of those guys are quite young and early in their careers. And there are things that can distinguish you early in your career that make you... Like Ben from Reflect is a good example. He had this YouTube channel and he was building fusers in his backyard when he was 18 years old. So that's pretty cool. But it's like, does the ability to build fusers in your backyard mean that you can build a network of orbital reflecting satellites? I don't know. Yeah. Okay, final question. What's the hardest thing you've overcome?

1:22:02When I was a sophomore in college, I was like severely anxious and depressed. It was like bad, bad. Like it was never like clinical, put this guy in a sanitary. I don't know. Like it was never like it was never like clinically bad, but it was and I never got like diagnosed or anything like that. But looking back on it, once I emerged from it, I was like, holy shit, that was actually really scary. multiple months where I barely ever got out of bed. I would like wake up in the morning and have a split second where I was like normal or whatever, like I had normal mental process for like literally maybe two or three seconds in the morning.

1:22:41But then as soon as I would have a moment of like remembering how anxious I was or whatever, it felt like remembering, I would just be zonked for the rest of the day. Like it was like, I would be so in my head about everything and so afraid of everything that I like couldn't really process the world around me. Like it was very bad. how did you get out of that sadly like the worst way possible like it wasn't because i was i went and got help it wasn't because i like um told anybody about it i just like fucking gritted my teeth and bored and like bared it or whatever and um thank god i emerged like i it was it was exercise that like saved me um i started working out at that time um and that just like moving every day like definitely helped um i did ultimately tell my parents about it so they they helped to the extent that I think they I think my parents recommended that I try to work out as like part of getting out of it um but for the most part it was just a crazy phase that I went through that I had to find my way out of um and the thing that got me the thing that ultimately got me out for real like exercise helps a ton you should if you're if you feel like that you should absolutely like focus on the very basics like feed yourself well exercise yourself get outside see some light like get uh yeah get good sleep that kind of thing so like just the basics are, will get you, like, standing.

1:23:56They will get you standing. But to, like, run or walk again. My strategy was to, like, lean in fully to that, like, competitive fire that I had inside of me and to apply it to, like, succeeding in life. I know that sounds weird, but, like, basically what it meant was I made a list of, like, what does it mean to have a productive and successful life? Make a list of all those things. What are the places I want to see? What are the things I want to do? What are the things I want to achieve? And then I just like maniacally focused myself on that. Like super unhealthy way to do it. Like super unhealthy way to like live your life to just like literally try to check things like check things off of a checklist.

1:24:36But it worked. I mean, it was what made me write the book. This was born out of like that crazy time. I mean, some of these things took like years for me to get to or whatever. But like as part of it, I wrote a book. I like ran a marathon. I got married that was on the list. Like I had a baby that was on the list. These are all things that like seemed impossible. Like when I was in the depths of that thing, absolutely seemed impossible. It was very hard for me to even like get up and go eat food. But ultimately like step by step by step by step I pulled myself out of it and here we are.