Why Every Satellite Needs Earth | Northwood CEO on a16z

0:00Every satellite requires a connection point back to Earth. If you don't have it, you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a rock in space.

0:09Erik Torenberg:You just won a$50 million contract with Space Force to help modernize. At Northwood, you want to take space missions further faster. We're looking for a categorical outcome, not just an incremental outcome. Today we're talking about one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in the space economy, ground infrastructure. My guest is Bridget Mendler, co-founder and CEO of Northwood, a company building the systems that connect satellites back to Earth. If launch gets things into space, ground is what actually makes those missions useful. In this episode, we cover Bridget's unconventional path into space, why ground has lagged behind the rest of the industry, and how a more modern, vertically integrated approach could unlock the next wave of innovation in space.

0:58Erik Torenberg:Bridget, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. So we're here to talk about Northwood. We're here to talk about space. But first, I want to talk about how you got here. Unconventional career path, some may say. When you look at the arc of your career, what are the threads that tie it together? How do you make sense of your path? Following curiosity. I think curiosity becomes the most organic motivator for people. And that's definitely the case for me. I think my home environment growing up was really cultivating that curiosity. and my parents also really encouraged excellence, which I think is great.

1:30So if you're curious about something, it's not just something you dabble in, it's something you try to take to like the nth degree and really try to understand what excellence looks like in that domain. And so that kind of has led me to a lot of different places. I've said this some other places before, my mom is also an incredibly determined person. And so that's something that I think I was influenced by. And so follow what you're curious about, do it to the greatest capacity you can and don't take no for an answer. And then you kind of wind up like doing a bunch of different things in some really interesting experiences.

2:02So I feel very grateful for that.

2:03Erik Torenberg:It's fascinating because sometimes people frame it as either or either. Like you got to get just, especially for kids, like just straight A pluses or it's just do whatever you're curious about. But the combination. Yeah. Do what you're curious about, but also just absolutely crush it in it. Yeah. It's an interesting combination. Yeah. Sort of in your early career, did you think it would be forever? Or like at one point where you're like, I'm bored of this. I want to go into academia. Yeah. How did you make your decisions? It's interesting because like, I would analogize to how a lot of people that we bring into our company think about their career paths.

2:34Like a lot of the incredible people that we bring in, people who are like totally rock stars in their career, they're not thinking on like a 20 year time scale about their career. They're thinking like more incrementally than that about what am I interested in? What's that next thing that I'm going to tackle next in my life? And kind of, maybe there's not a definite timeline attached to it. It's like as far out as you can see on the horizon and just like worrying about that far because otherwise you'd constrain yourself too much. And so that has really been how I've approached my career. I would have definitely not expected I would be running a space company.

3:10Yeah. But like also why not? Because all I could see in the future as an actress back then was maybe like five years in the future.

3:16Erik Torenberg:Right. So you were like actress until it no longer became fun anymore or until academia or something became more interesting. and then you were just chasing your curiosity. When did the company idea come into play? Yeah, I think being in entertainment, I got to be a spokesperson for a lot of different things. And I tried to align what I felt to be impactful with what I was speaking up for. So as an actor, you wind up being able to have a platform to contribute to a lot of different causes. And that was something that I prioritized. But I think I wanted my impact to go deeper than that. And so I always kind of knew in the back of my mind, I wanted to create my own thing, although I didn't have a concrete idea of what that was.

3:58And as a child of millennial era, I got to see the internet coming to life and I got to see cellular networks coming to life and like what a profound shift that was on the world before versus the world after. And so I think when the problem set around space networking came up and And when that was something that I started digging into, it connected on that deeper level where it's like, wow, this is like an opportunity to make an impact on an industry that could be as fundamental at that kind of level of internet and cellular. That felt like such a unique opportunity to get in at an industry when it was at that early stages.

4:37Yeah. Just seemed kind of like the perfect thing.

4:39Erik Torenberg:And you started it with your husband? Yeah. Was he always on board from the beginning or how did that emerge? I should say my parents also started a company together and ran it for 15 years. Yeah. I'm definitely inspired by the mom. That's super cool. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny how people are now like, oh, you start a company with your husband, but people have been doing family businesses like since the dawn of time. And I think for both of us, we're just both ambitious and kind of curious about how the world works. And we were both passionate about building businesses. And so it's like, all right, let's align our efforts towards something.

5:12Like there's a certain utilitarian aspect to it where it's like we have a certain amount of energy and time and we want the most net outcome from this. So that was definitely like a part of my thought process too. But it's been awesome. Yeah, I think it's been a really great experience.

5:25Erik Torenberg:Let's get into Northwood, what you're trying to achieve and what's the why now for it. Yeah. So what we do, we're ground infrastructure, kind of end to end for space companies. So all the way from the time when they're first coming up with satellite mission, what the space operators want to do, all the way to when they're actually streaming data, delivering that data to the end customers. The problem that we're solving is for every satellite, it requires a connection point back to Earth so that they can control the spacecraft. It is kind of like a remote control car where it needs some mechanism to make sure that it's going where it's supposed to go and a way to actually bring that data back to the users on Earth because that's where the users are.

6:07So that point of contact on Earth is called the ground infrastructure. And super basically, if you don't have it, you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a rock in space you're doing nothing with. So ground infrastructure, it's completely fundamental. And for us, we were observing the space industry how launch cadence was increasing. You could put a satellite up into space way faster and you could build satellites way faster because there was this whole boom around spacecraft manufacturing. And interestingly, what started becoming the longest pole in the tent was just getting the point of contact on the ground to connect with.

6:44So, you know, you could build a satellite and launch it faster than you could actually connect with it from the ground, which just seemed absurd. And so we're like, why is that? this kind of critical third component was not modernizing because you'd seen all this modernization happening elsewhere. And when we started pulling it back, it was kind of like a classic value chain problem where there was just not like the incentives aligned with each stakeholder in the value chain to modernize and innovate. So you had antenna manufacturers that were responding to a call from a customer and delivering them a point solution.

7:19They weren't thinking holistically about how you build better ground infrastructure. You were having like a software integrator layer where they were basically just dependent on whatever infrastructure was being laid by somebody else. And so we realized like this is really holding back innovation and like a complete thought on what this should look like on the ground side. And so really the only way to address fixing the ground segment was to do the whole thing. And when we say the whole thing, like it includes a lot of disparate disciplines and activities. So it includes things like R &D of antenna hardware.

7:54So the antenna on Earth that is physically receiving RF signals from space, interpreting them into ones and zeros, sending them back to the users, popping them back up to the spacecraft. That includes actually procuring land and doing development at a site to be able to put that antenna hardware somewhere in the world because satellites orbit the Earth. You need to connect with them as they orbit the Earth. That includes the networking layer. That includes the actual software API that you have to connect with to give commands at that ground site. And so it was kind of a daunting task. It's like realizing you have to do this really massive undertaking, this big risk in order to experience the big reward on the other side, which is unlocking this critical third pillar of infrastructure for the space economy and really enabling it to go to new heights.

8:44And so that was kind of like our venture scale problem where like this is going to require a lot of money, a killer team across many different disciplines. And it's going to require a ton of orchestration of all of those different pieces converging together to deliver something that is really better end to end as well as something you can turn around quickly. And so that's kind of the undertaking that we've been on.

9:11Erik Torenberg:When did you realize and how did you realize that space infrastructure was broken? Like, what was the idea maze? Was this your first idea that you guys decided to pursue? Or how did they come to be? Yeah, and we've been doing antennas ever since that Home Depot run during the pandemic. That made us ground nerds. Yeah, so we started working on the antenna designs during the pandemic. That was our summer project. And yeah, we just described ourselves as ground nerds. It was just cool. At first, it was just really cool to be able to receive signals from hundreds of miles away. Like I said, that's the RF waves.

9:46They're like fainter than the power on a flashlight that you're getting from space. And you get to interpret that into, for us, it was an image. But for other folks that use satellite data, that's our missile warning system. That's how we find out like about any missile going off around the world. That is our GPS infrastructure. You know, for a lot of people, that's their one source of internet. and it all comes through a ground infrastructure that is able to interpret those faint signals and make it work. So it was just kind of like, you know, one of those magic moments where you just become really fascinated with the technology.

10:18And then we started peeling it back further and we did this market study where we looked at all the commercial operators. We looked at, you know, U.S. government use cases as well for how that they were resolving their ground. And it was at that point, really from the point of first just being curious about the space that we realized that a big bottleneck was coming.

10:39Erik Torenberg:Yeah. And is this an idea that couldn't have existed five years ago because there was just not enough of an economy around? Or, like, yeah, talk about the timing of it. Yeah, I think it really does influence the timing because previously, if you're not as concerned about a three-year timeline between, you know, concept of a spacecraft and launching it, then it's not a big deal if the ground segment can't keep pace. I also think the ideas for how to use space have changed a lot, both pace as well as the ideas around it. So the mission sets that we're talking to folks about now are a greater level of proliferation.

11:22They're talking about way more spacecraft being in communication at the same time than they used to. They're also talking about mission sets where satellites are moving in new ways. They're moving really dynamically in and out of different orbits. Previously, you could think about space missions. It was a pretty static world. Think about old school space where it's kind of like science missions, one satellite parked over a certain location, not moving anywhere, sending very small amounts of data. to now it's this whole circus of a bunch of different missions needing to coexist, transmitting way more data and having like constantly changing parameters.

12:05So I think that has really, you know, flipped the switch for some of the, you know, government customers that we talk about. Like their missions just would not be able to be resolved without a new ground architecture. And same on the commercial side, frankly.

12:17Erik Torenberg:Yeah. Your system is able to deploy in three months, whereas a traditional ground station deploys in three years. What enables you guys to have that level of suite up? It really comes down to the vertical integration. And what we mean by that is kind of like what I mentioned of being able to stitch together all of the different pieces in the end-to-end system so that they inform each other. So, for example, when we say three years before, what did that timeline look like? It looked like an antenna vendor who, you know, gets a phone call. After they get the phone call, they press the order on the supply chain.

12:54They got to wait X number of months to actually get the parts to arrive. Then they assemble them all. It's a bespoke manufacturing line because it's, you know, it's a bespoke system. They're just, you know, they're doing it one-off. And then they ship it, and they're shipping a giant piece of equipment. So it probably has to go over, you know, ocean shipping methods. And then it arrives at site and you have to put together a giant construction project because the size of many of these antennas, they're like multi-story buildings. So you have to do permitting, you have to lay a concrete foundation, you have to have whole construction teams in order to put them together.

13:31That adds up into a three-year timeline. Whereas for us, because we're thinking of all of those things at the same time as we're doing that development, we get to say, we need our antennas to fit in a standard shipping container that can go on a commercial United Airlines flight. and so it gets there the same day. We need our system to be able to fork off of that shipping container and land on a patch of dirt with no concrete and just plug into a standard 240 power bolt. We need to be able to have that telemetry run across our entire system so that we know how to fire it up in a matter of minutes.

14:13So being able to coordinate all of those things is really what's translated to that outcome of shaving off the time.

14:20Erik Torenberg:And when did you realize that vertical integration was just where you're at to go? Do you know from the beginning or is it something you learned over time? And what have you learned about hard tech in the process of doing that? Yeah, I think it was a bit of a peeling back the problem space where initially you think, okay, great. We want to put more capacity. We want to make more capacity available. How can we optimize the ground system to do that? But then there's so many dependencies in what the site actually looks like, in what the software integration looks like. And we just realized that the way to deliver the best solution that actually aligns our incentives with the customer was to do the whole thing.

15:10So our incentives are aligned when our measure of success is their mission success. And you don't have that if you're just solving part of the equation.

15:22Erik Torenberg:Yeah, yeah. SpaceX was able to bring launch costs down by an order of magnitude from what came before. Why hasn't the same thing happened in ground? Yeah, I think it does come down. Like, I hate to be a broken record on the vertical integration, But the reason why that matters is that what SpaceX has done is they've really streamlined their product, right? Like they're not trying to build a ton of different bespoke products. They build one thing and they make it super efficient and effective. They get the economies of scale and everything. And so for us, if we were, you know, just being an antenna vendor, then we would probably need to build a bunch of different types of products.

16:00But because we get to see across so many different solutions, we can think and we invest our R &D in building a solution that works commonly across the industry. So that means that, you know, we're accounting for commercial missions, government missions, allied missions, all within the same system. And that makes our costs lower and more efficient. And when we're able to do it as a shared service, that's really the difference for us. Like we view ourselves more so as a platform, right? So it's not like a one-to-one sale where you're trying, you know, get all of your value off of that single sale.

16:44Our platform is such that many missions can benefit from the same infrastructure. infrastructure. So we make our investment and then many customers get to benefit off of that single investment that we make. And then what's great for customers on their end with that is that they're able to take advantage of all the learnings and all the investment that we've made across a bunch of different concepts. And so, you know, it winds up being more beneficial for them. They don't have to do like a big one-off capital expenditure on the system. They get to, you know, smooth out their costs and everybody's happy.

17:19Erik Torenberg:Starlink is working on direct optical intersatellite links. How much of that is a threat to the ground station business model? I view it as like a zero percent threat. And the reason why is if you are banking on, you know, any of the space infrastructure, it is about the direction of data volume. And so for us, anything that supports growing the trend of data volume through space is great. Like we're all on board with the same objective there. And so for intersatellite links, what's great about that solution is that it's reducing the latency. It reduces the friction of how you can actually transmit data through space.

18:02And so think about like all the use cases that that opens up. I mean, I think Starlink is a great example of this. you know, talking about matching or in and at certain times beating internet latency speeds, like that would be unheard of in space before and look at the value of that business. And so I think technologies that align with that trend are really positive.

18:24Erik Torenberg:Yeah, that makes sense. In a potential Taiwan scenario, there's a version where, you know, ground stations can become targets. How do you think about resilience? I think that's a great question. And it actually is both a commercial question and a government question. Like both commercial and government care about resilience. And I think like you can look at a lot of different companies that have tried to address this. We take the similar path of proliferation. so making things like cheaper faster to deploy more uh volume manufacturing is kind of the solution to that so that when a single site location goes down that's you know it's not a catastrophe um it's actually interesting for some of our teammates that did come from starlink that was their similar model so they they consider resiliency in the same way where they have multiple ground sites in a region so that if one goes down it doesn't totally take their service offline.

19:20So I think a similar concept applies here.

19:23Erik Torenberg:A lot of people analogize the space economy to the early internet. They say a lot of infrastructure being built, lots of companies will fail, and lots of applications, very successful applications will be built on top. Does this analogy hold for you? Yeah, for sure. I get really inspired by the analogy, especially thinking about for folks that were early with the internet, Like, there's no way they would have foreseen what the internet is today. But they were betting on a direction. And they were setting up a model that would basically, like, unlock a lot of innovation. And they were developing principles and building aligned with certain principles that would support that innovation.

20:09And look what we have today. yeah I mean I think like things as simple as like TCP IP protocols for example like trying to make different layers as easy and supporting for innovation as possible so I think we're in a similar moment with the space industry where we don't know what is going to be built like a year ago today would we think that everybody would be talking about orbital data centers no way but it's captivated the public imagination and who knows what's going to come next and so for us we're directionally aligned with that movement and we are building to principles that will support innovation.