Space Datacenters | Baiju Bhatt, Aetherflux

0:00Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Baiju Bhatt, who is the co-founder of Robinhood and the founder of Aetherflux. You just were mentioning you basically did a rock climbing trip with Jared Leto. I did. Let's start with that.

0:10Baiju Bhatt:I was in the Mediterranean on this boat with Jared Leto and a couple of his rock climbing friends. Jared's a good friend of mine. He was a very early investor in Robinhood, and I would say maybe my hair idol. Do you have one of those? He's a handsome dude, man. Yeah. Okay. So he invites me on this trip with a handful of people to go in the Mediterranean for a couple of days. And it's with a bunch of rock climbing friends of his, like the dudes that pioneered deep sea free soloing. So I go to this and like I'm an entrepreneur, right? Like I work out, but I don't, it's not like the alpha and the omega of my life.

0:51Baiju Bhatt:And I go to this event or I go to this trip with these guys and I'm just like, you know what? I'm a fat piece of shit. Like, I was like, I got to do something. You're in this shape, right? Or were you in this shape? Plus or minus 10 pounds. I was a little softer in the midsection. But I'm like, I'm a fat piece of shit. And I was on full display because I'm around all these beautiful rock climbers. And not only am I not good at rock climbing, but I'm also not good to look at when I don't have my shirt on. I was like, I got to do something about this. So I come back and I'm like, I'm going to get a trainer.

1:23Baiju Bhatt:and I convinced Vlad also that we should start working out together so we had this trainer together um in 2019 working out together this guy was hardcore and he was French and he would yell at us and be like you guys are pieces of shit you work out harder so all the workouts were really hard a little bit Arnold Schwarzenegger voice a little bit yeah that's my French voice I guess so i so working out with this guy the covet happens right which was wild wild but our workouts we keep working out and we're like working out digitally right so we're like we're doing a video chat with this guy over zoom and the two of us are like in our respective houses working out and long story short i was doing a workout i was like basically doing bench press with free weights felt a little tickle in my nose i kind of tried to go for one of these numbers and the weight it was this arm starts falling backwards i stabilize it but shoulder was fucked after that um and mind you this is in covid and so what are you gonna do you're gonna go to the doctor like no so i just put my arm in a sling for a while all this to say like that was kind of bummer because i stopped being able to do push-ups yeah and all this started from the conversation around?

2:44Yeah. So basically, uh, Pavel Durov, uh, who's the founder of telegram has a training regimen where he does a hundred pushups and a hundred sit-ups every single day. Um, and so before I can interview him, I am going to do a hundred, you know, a hundred and a hundred every day for 30 days straight with no interruptions. Um, and right now we're on day five of that. Oh, I didn't realize this was day five. You made it sound like this was day 45. So it's day like 70 of getting up to the point where I can actually do 100 a day. And now I'm doing 100 a day and I have for five days. So, yeah. In a month, we'll be able to do this interview.

3:18That's something I can lock in. Yeah. Do you have any other crazy stories like that? You said Jared Leto was the first, like one of the first investors in Robinhood. Yeah.

3:26Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. He's a really, like, very intelligent human being. And also, in my experience, like a modern renaissance man. He has 30 seconds to Mars. He's an actor. He's a very active tech investor. He's like a very cerebral dude. A little bit similar to the Chainsmokers where they just like started in music and want to now invest in a bunch of startups. Is that right? Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, I guess kind of like that. But anyways, all this to say, like I ended up hurting my shoulder from that. And I was out of the game for a while. and after COVID got some got my shoulder checked out realized nothing was actually wrong with it just need to work out more and um I'm back in the same boat right now actually unfortunately I started doing boxing like maybe a year and a half two years ago and it has wrecked my shoulders man like I can barely do push-ups it's a it's a big problem because when you're boxing you're like you're like doing this kind of shit all the time and what you're actually doing is you're just just torquing that you're just yeah you're just like compressing your shoulder the whole time when i was doing uh rock climbing i started training a bunch of uh what is it like crimping and at one point i decided that it would be smart for me to train two finger crimps because you have to do like pockets yeah and of course if you do this you kind of can like basically put strain here so I go do that and immediately just tear both my both my hands like the muscles attaching those two things did you and uh yeah and it was like what was interesting is it takes so long for that to fully heal yeah I would wait you know I did this like three or four times where I waited a month I completely chilled for an entire month and then I tried something again got a little too overconfident after 30 minutes of nothing happening tore it again and I did this like four or five times and i finally healed it by just not rock climbing at all for like six months straight because you're you're young blood man you heal from that stuff quickly six months it feels like a long ass yeah i'm thinking about like what would happen if i rip my hand muscles like i don't know if they'd ever heal at this point yeah be out of commission for like two years yeah but i'm glad i'm glad they're healed that's like that's a big deal yeah that's one of those things where when it happens you're kind of questioning like will it heal properly yeah um yeah let's uh jump to like company culture and talk a little bit about that.

5:49Most of the people that I've interviewed have only been working on like a hard tech company. You've actually had like this full transition from starting in software, starting in fintech, building up that culture to like many thousands of people. And suddenly now you're jumping to a hardware startup. What's the difference? What have you learned?

6:05Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. I think the biggest thing is, is that there's a lot more distinct disciplines here, right? Cause in building a software company, Robin hood, like the the core kinds of people that you'd have there that we had there were you know front-end engineers so like mobile engineers right so android engineers web engineers ios engineers then back-end software engineers so database engineers like people building the apis you know devops all that stuff then you have a whole bunch of compliance and regulatory people legal people and for us a big focus was on design and product design and so we had like a small but mighty like design team which was um people doing visual design brand design but also research right so people that are professional behavioral researchers because we spent a ton of time going out and interviewing customers to me that was always kind of the north star of like how you differentiate a good idea versus a bad idea because the north star there is like is it something that's useful for customers right so how do you know if something's useful for customers you when you talk to customers i think so this is kind of like the the culture there and obviously a lot of other functions like tons of customer support people operations people finance people right um but on the engineering side it's different here because there's more specialization right because there's embedded software engineering there's like optomechanical engineering um there's a thermal engineer sitting right behind you um there's like a lot of there's a lot of like much more unrelated fields right so you have like people that come from mechanical um you know sort of backgrounds yeah mechanical backgrounds people from electrical backgrounds people from computer science backgrounds and then you have laser people you have optics people which are sometimes also mechanical people so the the kind of engineering there's a lot more different kinds of engineering um but that's kind of like some of the functional stuff in terms of culture of how do you like how does the company what's the operating system for the company one of the things that I found is kind of universally true is when people are having fun, when people are like legitimately enjoying themselves, they will go above and beyond.

8:36Baiju Bhatt:Right. And so that not only that though, but when people are having a good time and they're actually enjoying what they're doing, there's like, there's another really interesting benefit that comes from it, which is that people tend to be more creative in my, in my experience. Yeah, I think I think there's been kind of some studies on this where if you have if you if you're in like a even like a fear state, your creativity shrinks way down. And if you're very calm and like comfortable and happy, you're much like your mind flows in a whole bunch of different ways. It does. It's also like one of the things I've kind of found related to that is when people are they're they're having a good time.

9:20Baiju Bhatt:They're enjoying what they're doing. You tend to get more ideas out of people. Like if people feel comfortable, like actually that they enjoy what they're doing and they're working hard, you get the quiet people to speak up a little bit more. Right. And you get the people to like actually vocalize the halfway formed ideas. you know what I mean and like those are ideas where it's like I don't know if this is a good idea or not taking risk by sharing it and it's like basically lowering the barrier for them to feel like they can yeah exactly yeah and if you hear a good idea you're like no that's a great idea or that's the kernel of something that like could be a really interesting idea I don't think this is something that people typically come into especially when they're like joining a new company you kind of got to feel out what is the right you know how do we operate in this environment and I think it takes a little while for people like every every person that I brought on like they have the ability to have ideas that are really great for improving things you kind of got to draw it out at least a couple times prior to them naturally just offering them up totally that's so much more comfortable I've kind of been like almost at feet level and like kind of pushing off from this table much better amazing Steve Jobs had this line and I think Brian Chesky has really adopted this as well where the design is not only uh how something looks but also how it like functions um and you want something that's great super usable but also beautiful and like delightful how do you kind of take that same philosophy to a fucking satellite yeah um i i read the walter isaacson book on steve jobs years and years ago of super inspirational and steve jobs undeniably through coming up was my idol.

11:03Baiju Bhatt:Like I absolutely idolize that guy. And I tried to embody as much of his sort of approach to design as I could. It really took it to heart. The answer to the question is something I've actually thought about quite a bit. And I'm, you know, still kind of figuring out what that exactly means. But in the world of software and kind of how it extends to hardware, it's about form and function, right? Does the form of the thing natively represent the function? and like is the function of what it's trying to do fundamentally simple and does the form communicate that simplicity so the example that kind of comes to my mind right is like the function of um like i'm like a laptop right is it on or off like how do you communicate that it's on or off is there a button is there a light that's on like that's kind of the function right do you have like a persistent little green dot that tells you it's on or do you natively assume that it's on and are sort of like given a signal that it's off right like how do you communicate the function of on versus off for a computer i bring this up because i think apple thought about this a lot and i they were always like my my understanding was there was like a real allergy to like indicators, right?

12:25Baiju Bhatt:Like there's a little light that always says it's on. Like, no, you should actually have the form of the thing represent the function, which is that it's natively on unless you actively turn it off. Interesting. That's like one, I'm not sure if I did a great job of articulating exactly that point, but this idea of the way it looks is integrally tied to the way it works and that the way it looks is not window dressing on top of the way it works. I think they're kind of doing that now, aren't they? Yeah. They're trying to have it always on. Always on, right? Yeah, interesting. There isn't an on-off button.

13:00Baiju Bhatt:So what does that mean for satellite hardware? It's actually kind of interesting because you've got a job that the thing needs to do, and you want the form of the thing to natively represent the function of it, right? Not because you're looking at it, but because you don't want to overcomplicate the thing. And so it's kind of in the early stages. we'll get into this more but we're you know we've kind of been for the last year and a half designing payloads that that go on other people's satellite buses that you know we partner with a third party for our satellite buses and kind of thinking of the form and the function of what does a laser system look like what does a compute payload look like but as we get to designing entire satellites and designing constellations the thing that the jobs that the thing has to do will very natively define the way it looks and feels.

13:53Baiju Bhatt:So for example, in the context of things like laser power beaming, which we're actively working on here, right, you have the biggest things in the satellite are going to be the power generation and the heat dissipation, right? So how can you natively combine those things? So ideas that we've played around with are, you know, can you localize the power generation and the heat dissipation so basically the solar panel is going to both dissipate heat while also collecting exactly or can you get the actual you know diodes that go from electrical to optical to reject the heat and leverage the surface area of the thing that you've already got to reject the heat so there's a video playing right here which is a very early rendering of how we thought the system's going to work obviously a lot of evolution in the idea since then but even in this you can see on the back side of the satellite there are these big sheets which are effectively the radiators that dissipate the heat right so like to answer your question like what does marriaging form and function look like in the context of a thing that has a very extreme job to do as opposed to something that like fundamentally just needs to represent simplicity to a person that wants to press a button have it do the thing that it's supposed to do do you have a specific feeling like whenever i see something beautiful that just looks right i get this feeling of it just looks right it feels right um do you have that same feeling when you are designing something yeah there's definitely the thing that you strive for right it's like when you look at something and you ask the question like how could it possibly look any other way like this just looks final it looks like the last and final version of the thing yeah it's something i've thought about a bunch over the years and was something that you know in the context of my my old gig very much front and center like how do you keep the the form and the function kind of as simple as possible but still doing the job that it needs to do yeah it's like as simple as possible but no simpler yeah has that evolved has your like taste and ability to kind of represent or like understand what good looks like evolved over time?

16:05Baiju Bhatt:I have been drawn towards expressing that in other things. In the context of like building software and you know like a lot of the the first 10 years of the design language of Robin Hood was something that I was like leading in at the absolute forefront of right which was really fun to express those ideas in the context of building digital products but the part of my brain that kind of was getting activated as I started thinking about other things was like okay I feel like I know how to do it when I'm building digital products but like can I apply this same lens that I look at that world to building hardware yeah and my original version of this was actually I built a car in my spare time can you talk about that yeah I built um sorry I built a Shelby Daytona like a factory five racing do you know this company isn't it like a like a race car heard of it yeah it's basically a race car okay um so i built one of those from scratch had a lot of help along the way and i had some um had some pro mechanics look over and like actually go through and make sure everything worked correctly um before i took on the road so i actually did this over covid i um was feeling the itch to do exactly this which i was like i really want to express this creativity this like way of thinking about things onto something that's not software or just not just software, right?

17:29I kind of want to expand my horizons because like just a little bit of a step back here.

17:37Baiju Bhatt:I've always found that in order to be creative at the main thing that I'm doing, I need to have like a hobby or a creative outlet or sort of a creative muse that's not related to the thing that I'm doing, which stems from the idea of like what is creativity. creativity is about taking unrelated ideas and seeing the commonality of them right like marrying them together and yeah yeah and so that sort of drew me towards like i want to build physical things i know how to build digital things what are what's like a physical thing that i've always wanted to build i've always loved cars and i've i this was back when i was building my very first car over covid i was like i really want to get into classic cars like i'd like to own some classic car someday.

18:24Baiju Bhatt:So how am I going to do this? And my little, you know, sort of creator brain was like, oh, I know what the way to do this is. I'll build a car from scratch. And then I'll understand how all the different pieces of it work. So that then if I want to, you know, get into classic cars, I'll really understand what's going on. And so I did. And so it took, um, probably took like six to nine months to go from like box of parts to something that I could like drives kind of squeaks yeah squeaks and creaks like a rolling chassis that you can turn on and you can like drive it down the driveway and drive it back um that was freaking cool man do you want to see it I do want to see it can I show you all right check it out here's how it started literally as a box okay in a truck yeah in a truck um and that's the full car but just in a box form yeah like this and um got the first version of it kind of put all the pieces together on the frame and how long did that take uh that didn't take more than like a couple of weeks i think and i'll just i'll show you the i'll send you some pictures later on but here's the finished version of it beautiful yeah is it driving um yeah it is back it up there we go so i didn't paint the thing i didn't do any of the upholstery there's like there's a whole um there's like there's the artistry of it right which is like how do you paint a car like this well you don't want to fuck around and find out and painting a car because you'll just do a terrible job like you want to have somebody that's done a bunch of time that has like um that has like kind of the the tactile feel for it there's a there's an old design word for it let me see if i can remember right now i think it's called like finger spitzengefühl which is the finger feel right it's like if you put your hands on it does it feel right to the human touch yeah you want that with dudes that are like doing paint or upholstery or any of the sort of like you can't mess it up things yeah um which is why it looks good what kind of held you back from starting this maybe five or ten years earlier and deciding to just go for it like was it just covid and you have lots of time to think to yourself when nothing's happening and you think fuck it i'm gonna build a car well the five to ten years leading up to it i had been very busy yes and i had a love of cars during that time I think like the impetus for doing it was I was cramped up in my house and I mean I was like working over COVID I was like working I mean the days and weeks blurred together they were like 12 hour days like week after week it's like I'm on a call on like a Saturday afternoon I'm like what day of the week is it like is it the weekend or is it the weekday there was a i need an outlet like i need something that's not just work yeah that's not that problem space where i can still let that sort of like creative you know almost frenetic energy from like my monkey brain like i need to project it's a creation energy creation energy exactly like i need to project it somewhere else um and so i think that's kind of what what was the inspiration for i mean also like let's be real like 10 years before i was dead broke like i had money like the idea of like you know it's like well why don't i build a car for fun it's like well i have this car that i drive that's kind of broken and i can't really afford to fix it yeah so i'm always interested in like what made people start like what made people fundamentally shift what they were doing you know years in advance to one day they just decide to take some other direction.

22:21It's always, I think, for a long time, you're kind of building something up in your mind. And then there's some domino that just kind of like knocks over and you suddenly go like for this, like, why did I not start a podcast six months earlier or another company? Yeah, that's a good question. The answer was, I actually did start a podcast six months earlier, and no one said yes to an interview. So I just did it myself. Like I just researched founders. And there was like another version of Relentless prior to Relentless where I, you know, spent two weeks researching someone and then basically do like a Founders podcast episode on them.

22:55I only ended up doing two episodes. And on my third, I decided to create a like Airbnb themed product instead of actually doing an episode on Brian Chesky. Can I tell you I love that hustle? Yeah. Like I just freaking love that. Do you want to see my product from Airbnb? I would love to. Yeah, show me. So I tried to record the interview, like, I think it was like 14 different times. And I just it just felt like the wrong way to tell the story. And so instead of doing that, I created.

23:28Baiju Bhatt:Dude, you could have made him look a little better than this. We'll know for next time. This is cool, though. This is really cool. Sorry, I'm getting fixated on how the guy looks. he is a handsome dude yeah he is a handsome he works out a lot yeah coming back to this theme of working out a lot do you think all great founders will work out in the future um no okay because i think it's possible to be a great founder and just spend like a decade in goblin mode fair just like subsisting on the sheer sort of power that comes from the chemical bonds that hold ramen together fair yeah there's a meme that i saw which is like um the hair patterns for founders at different stages right it's like seed stage you've got a full head of hair series a you're starting to go a little bald series b it's a big old donut hole series c there's like nothing there and then like pre-ipo all of a sudden there's a full head of hair Post IPO, there's a full head of hair.

24:34Yeah, I have noticed this. I think that was the Pavlodurov situation. Oh, was it? Uh-huh. Yeah, but with him, he was like, I don't think Putin was super happy with him. So that may cause a little bit of hair loss. That would cause some hair loss for sure. You know, there's been these different evolutions of SpaceX. First, it was Elon wanted to do the first greenhouse on Mars, and then he tried to buy rockets, and he couldn't buy the rockets. So he decided to build them himself. um the icbm to mars with a plant in the icbm it's a cool idea it's a it's a good idea and what's crazy is you could do it for i think the russians were saying it was going to be like 40 million dollars a rocket and he was going to buy two um and i think it was initially like 20 million and then he was like 20 million and they were like fuck it 40 million um but anyway he didn't end up buying them but there's been these different evolutions of spacex um and i think at any given point in time, like you couldn't really know exactly how the business would develop.

25:32Like even until very recently, I was watching this interview with Elon a couple of days ago where someone brought up the space data center thing and they were like, how did you come up with this? And he's like, it went viral on Twitter or it went viral on X. And I was like, seriously, like, that's what he said. And I was like, okay, this is how you came up with the idea. And then, you know, there's maybe some massive business where it just so happens that because he's decreased the launch cost to orbit, it works. Yeah. Is this the sort of similar thing with you where right now you start out with this idea of you're basically collecting all this energy in orbit and then you beam it down to Earth.

26:12And then suddenly because you have all this engineering know-how on building satellites and conducting this, you can suddenly expand into other areas as well.

26:22Baiju Bhatt:i think we're we're in the early stages of this because i look i mean we're like you're you're you're here like this is a a small but mighty operation it's about 30 35 people that are just hustling it's kind of like being on a pirate ship it's just a very small crew everyone's rowing in the same direction everyone's in the same direction it's and it it's it gets harder to do as organizations get better bigger um and i remember the the sort of points at which like we felt like we had a mastery this is Robin Hood where we felt like we had a mastery of the core thing and it felt like doing adjacent things we're like ah we know how to do this yeah um I wouldn't necessarily say we're quite there yet we're getting closer but there's a path to that which is like and maybe this is more from my point of view as the founder of the company but like you know I haven't been doing this for terribly long like I've been doing this a little less than two years full-time yeah and so all like my intuition for how these things work or like what matters what doesn't matter it's developing like it's in a state of development which by the way is very fun because i know i i've experienced what it feels like to go from the searching and the striving to understand to demonstrating the understanding to then feeling like my understanding is at the forefront of what the thing is to kind of the high water mark, which is like my understanding and the things that I'm building will then define the forefront, right?

27:59Baiju Bhatt:So that's kind of, we're definitely, I wouldn't, you know, be so bold as to say that we're there right now. But you can see the trajectory. Yeah, but it's like the understanding, the intuition is developing and developing and developing. So we have recently announced that we're pursuing a plan to build orbital data centers as well. And I think it's kind of interesting to play it through that lens. So my idea when I started Aetherflux was there's going to be an energy company that needs to be built in space. And more specifically, the thought was, if you imagine low earth orbit as a platform for commerce, like a platform for global distribution.

28:45Baiju Bhatt:What are the verticals of the economy that exist on this global distribution platform? And as I saw it, I, you know, this is like, um, a caricature, but still a paraphrasing of it's earth imaging, it's defense stuff. Um, it's telecommunications and more recently it's internet. That's not all that's going to exist in low earth orbit like there will be other industries that natively exist what are what is that next one where from a foundational perspective i think the component technology is there and it's more you're building something that's the sum of parts that's more valuable than the sum of the parts as opposed to like inventing new things along the way i'm like well this is my intuition says that the energy industry is both ready because photovoltaics are so cheap and also there's going to be a market need for this because there's an energy crunch from ai of the wave of which which is continuing to build as i see it right like what last year might have felt like you know it's sort of maybe crescendoing in in hindsight that's not right i don't think it's crescendoing no i don't in hindsight that's definitely not right now where we are right now like remains to be seen intuitively to me it feels like it's gaining momentum i don't think that's a hot take by the way no but the idea was we wanted to build a power company in space and i asked the question like how would i do such a thing like what's the pattern to pattern match there yeah and the and the version i kind of settled on was space is very expensive in order to be able to compete with things commercially on the ground right you'd have to get to some pretty substantial scale where if you get to substantial enough scale, then you can start down costing the cost of your service because you're not buying one-offs, you're making them and you're making them in larger quantities, you're getting economies of scale.

30:45Baiju Bhatt:How do you do that? My thesis was for energy and power distribution from space, find something that's useful, that is oriented towards government applications, because that's the place where a lot of space technologies have like sort of incubated for a couple of years matured and then become more useful for commercial applications so gps is an example of this and so that's kind of the path that we're on and speaking to like the building of the intuition the light bulb went off for me um you know sometime in the sort of summer maybe a little earlier than that of this past year because we were talking about like what can you do if you collect a lot of power in orbit and you beam it down well it's you know the initial applications for this i think are going to be in places where there's not a power grid so contested environments remote environments where you get the benefit of being able to plug into a power grid with a small little receiver on the ground cool and that that's something that will be useful for the dod applications excuse me department of war scale from that and then eventually as the satellites get bigger and the amount of power that you produce gets much bigger then you can start applying this for industrial applications like ai ai like doesn't don't people want energy for data centers like why don't you beam power down to data centers as a conversation i kept having i was like well you know it could be useful for that application however by the nature of power transmission you You end up dissipating a decent bit of the power, going electrical to optical out of the satellites and then reconverting optical to electrical on the ground.

32:33Baiju Bhatt:And so maybe in the future it'll be useful for those applications. But I wouldn't say that I necessarily was like, yeah, that's going to be the place where it works immediately. than the intuition of going through and like, you know, doing design reviews for like this power beaming stuff and like really thinking through how this works. It was in a conversation with a friend that the light bulb kind of went off where like, actually, what if you just took the chips rather than collecting the power in space? So you have like photons that hit the solar panels, turn it into electricity. The electricity goes into a, you know, a laser system that turns it back into light.

33:12Baiju Bhatt:Then you point that light down to the ground, use, you know, effectively solar panels to reconvert that into electricity. And then you plug that into the data center. It's like a bunch of process steps that you can just eliminate entirely. Yeah. Well, what if you just deleted all of it? Yeah. And you took the chips and you moved them right next to the receiver. It's like, well, no, no, no. Why don't you move them right next to the satellite, next to the laser? Like, eh, just get rid of the laser. What if you put the solar panels? This was the original kind of like intuitive concept. what if you put the solar panels and you put the gpus on the backs of the solar panels like why that's not actually the the architecture that i think you would go with for this because because of other constraints but as a thought experiment like isn't that the most direct marriaging of the application um and the sort of like energy provider for that application and then as I started doing more and more thinking about for example the thermodynamics of this the radiation shielding etc etc it became clear that it was going to be hard but there weren't any obvious showstoppers moreover by actually putting the thing that's consuming the power right next to the power generation it's actually kind of a magical architecture right because the real benefit of this is going to be as we look out over the next handful of years the time it takes to bring a new data center online it's like five to eight years like there's a real crunch here right this has the potential to be a massive accelerant in that um in that you can take the chips of which there's going to be an overabundance of at some point i think i tend to agree with you on that imagine a factory where you know like a truck full of chips comes in on one side takes a week couple of weeks month let's say a couple of months to turn those chips integrate them with solar panels build satellites out of them build stacks of these things rent a falcon and ship them up exactly yeah and then as soon as they're in orbit effectively they're online right and you a little bit more to it but together with lasers yeah yeah so that's where the laser technology is gonna i think be um a very important reused sort of core component that ties these two different applications together yeah i think one of the biggest like critiques was just having like a massive megastructure in space and you know slight like uh i don't know like variations or anything could just destroy the entire thing and if you just have like small satellites they're network together with lasers there's not really any issue yeah yeah i think um i would love to live in a world where these like massive megastructures exist in space there's there's probably a way of engineering them um it's just not terribly economically feasible in 26 at least right now not right now i want to come back to something okay and i want to share a little wisdom with you young padawan okay um this is coming back to that rendering of brian chesky we're gonna asterisk this that was like three years ago we've gotten a little bit better thank you now go on the way if you if you really want to show reverence and respect for somebody right right take the example of what i've done with this mural here no for our founding fathers right totally agree look at look at the the pec muscle definition that george washington has next time you should just make you know whoever said founder is so make him jacked as fuck unbelievably ripped all right brian chesky if i ever interview you we will edit that in post to make you even more we can start the interview with like i don't know squats or something yeah just make him look like a fucking superhero like really really ripped yeah these are the why i'm fixating on these are the things well because you notice something that should have been done differently and you care you know yeah also if you ever make any renderings of me i would you know just go make sure to get you apply that to me as well yeah yeah no problem you know you talked about intuition you also talked about how like you have this start of intuition you have this new idea and you're thinking maybe this might work and you start out with that intuition but you know that your intuition is going to evolve over time and you basically don't want to be like overconfident at any point in the time yep and make decisions like hypothetically you could say this is the path i'm going to hire 500 people and just go after this but that's probably not like the optimal where you aren't going to actually do the thing that you want to do if you do that nope um and so how do you think about when you're just coming up to speed on something and deciding you know where is the confidence interval that you should be at any given point in time and then how do you most rapidly learn and like reflect on your intuition ideas and update them yeah to basically have that cycle fast?

38:13Baiju Bhatt:My philosophy is get your failures out of the way quickly. Okay. What's an example? Oh my gosh. So get your failures out of the way quickly. The example of this that's the most obvious one to me is the story that led up to Robinhood. So a lot of people don't know that Robinhood as you see it today was not the first app that we built. We built an app before that. so rewind the story there's a point in time where you know my co-founder and i were starting robin hood we were not consumer tech people we were like math and physics nerds that were doing like computerized trading stuff right and we were reminded by a lot of vcs early on that we had no idea what the fuck we were doing and that we were probably not going to be terribly successful at building consumer products and they were wrong but uh and so there was this there was this like question of like how do you go from not knowing how to make a consumer product to being good at it ideally like how do you learn the thing and one really sage piece of advice that i got early on was like get your failures out of the way quickly and so what does that mean it means like don't be too precious with the idea just try it even if the idea is not perfect you're gonna learn way more by going from like by completing the loop so from like idea to like finished version of it to did the finished version when released to the market work or not work right it's like the the brian armstrong thing where he says action produces information action produces information yeah that's a smart thing to say yeah yeah that's a that's a very succinct way of putting it my version of it is get your failures out of the way quickly so in the example of robin hood we were like in the process of trying to get our broker dealer license so that we could release the thing that people use today there was a period of time where we didn't have it and we're like but we still want to make a mobile app um so we can start to kind of build some of the functionality that's not the brokerage stuff but like you know maybe just news and content like adjacent things So we built this app called analyst which we then renamed to Robin Hood.

40:29Baiju Bhatt:Why'd you name it analyst? No, just a reason just random wasn't yeah, you think in financial Analysts yeah again like get your failures out of the way quickly we picked a name and Then ended up realizing that there was a better name called Robin Hood um but that app we released it on the app store and this is out there it was like 2013 it's publicly out there and i remember we're like it was like you know i think we called it your stock market companion if i'm remembering correctly that was the tagline for it we announce it and we get some people to use it and i remember seeing the usage of how many people are like continuing to use it after that first announcement just sort of slowly zero asymptotes to zero So asymptotes to a non, to not to a non-zero number.

41:21And we're like, that was wrong.

41:24Baiju Bhatt:What did we learn from that? We tried to build something that did everything, right? It's like, well, you can read your news here and you can also like share your opinion on stocks. You can rate stocks. You can think how they're going to do. There's like a social component. Da, da, da, da, da. This is the old, this is the old analyst slash Robin Hood app. and the learning from that was that's not really how people used mobile products back then right and the mental model i kind of gleaned from that through trial and error was like actually the way people think about apps on their phones as they think about them as like functional buttons right like this is the map button this is the calculator button yeah this is the weather button right this I get some distinct, concrete, understandable value by taking this action, opening this app.

42:15Baiju Bhatt:Like what does the button do? Right. And so the button was like, this is the stock market button. That's kind of the idea that we had, or this is the button that I press when I want to buy stocks. This is the button I press when I want to see my stocks. And so if that's what you're trying to do, just do that. And so we ended up the, then you can look, you can look up the earliest versions of Robin was this incredibly reductive take on what it was. It was your account value at the top, a spark line, and a list of the stocks that you owned or that you were following. And that was kind of the main thing, right?

42:51Baiju Bhatt:We put a lot of the other functionality behind the sort of like hamburger button that, you know, the old design language of the hamburger button that leads to the basement. So that's where like the majority of the functionality was. but we kind of realized that if people were going to use this they were going to use it as a stock market button very different than where we started and the first thing didn't work so that was like a good mental model of like if you if you're doing something for the this is what I say to myself like beiju if you're doing something for the first time don't be too precious with the idea just like see the idea through to completion and by doing so you're so much more likely to figure out what the actual thing that has a really really important impact is that you would have never gotten to if you didn't just like knucklehead your way through the first thing I kind of like this so you're basically saying as soon as you have an idea you're just automatically saying this is probably wrong but I'm going to run with it and I'm going to go down like I the way that I think about I think I've kind of explained this this is like this is not wrong yeah yeah the way that I have the way I think about it is I try to walk like three steps down the path and then see how I'm feeling if I like the thing of great if I don't I just turn around come back walk another three steps in another direction and keep on doing that until you basically find the right thing it's honestly a little bit like a maze kind of where you're basically running down one side you're like shit hit a dead end walk back to where I came run down the next path yeah yeah it's it's actually pretty pretty spot on like you have this like big thorny problem that you have to unravel and like make sense of how are you gonna do that are you gonna do it by like just thinking about it and like looking at it and being like well it'd be like it'd be like you're at the start of a maze and you're just trying to think through all the different paths but you haven't actually had any contact with the enemy like you haven't seen which are which places are the dead end start doing the maze yeah what paths are the most like distinct so that's the that's the first one you basically come in with this idea of we're gonna build the everything app for finance kind of you know you're gonna get your finance news you're gonna get your stocks you're gonna get your information here you're gonna be able to trade and then you basically dial it back and i like the whole simplicity you figure out like what is the specific thing that my customers are gonna click on my app for and we're just gonna do that really well and then we'll hide everything that isn't that thing behind you know basically a bunch of buttons that you have to click and it's not it's kind of invisible at that point it's it's all there it's like it's it's it's not so much hiding as much as it is focusing right like what is what what is the 80 % use case?

45:27Baiju Bhatt:If that's the 80 % use case, your form and function, right? The form should like match that function, right? Now, if you take the 20 % of use cases and you treat them like they're 80 % use cases, you know, you're like, you're not mapping to the way people actually will want to interact with it most of the time. You still want the stuff there and you still want it easily accessible. You want to think through all that stuff, but like people are going to have very specific usage patterns or in our case like they look at it and they put it down right what have been the other big moments where you just decided to take action try things out take shots on goal go down that maze and then realized it was just dead end and you needed to walk back i mean this feels a lot like that right now really i don't know that we're walking down a dead end to the maze but like you're walking down some path and it's unclear Yeah, like how are we going to build an energy grid in orbit?

46:20Baiju Bhatt:Well, it's like, well, the first idea, and I think this is kind of relevant, it's like the first idea is like, well, we're going to pattern match the way that things in space have done before through this like DoD and then a commercialization approach. And like, is this necessarily the be all end all of what we're going to be doing in 10 years?

46:43We'll have to figure it out, right? The great thing is, and I've thought about this a lot recently, too, is you want to basically build a culture. So with an app, it's super easy. You build a culture of shipping and basically trying things by just testing stuff. You make a thing, you test it, you get feedback, you run that iterative loop. For this sort of thing, it's a lot more difficult because your iteration loops are way longer and way less clear. like if you're if your thing is a contract with the government that might take multiple years just to have the first thing that you can even tell them about and then by the time you've told them okay then it might be like two or three more years before you actually have something that's there that's six years yeah so how do you think about basically that when you're going down this path when you're going down through this maze how do you kind of do that with this sort of stuff