Today's Space Tech Boom with Apex's Ian Cinnamon and Mark Suster | E1946

26:12um yes but yep i will say that's only a very recent trend so if you rewind five or ten years there were most satellites were in geo not totally get it totally because of the cost of launch leo has been the booming market and and is anticipated to be so i don't need history lesson we're focusing on the future future and the future of apex so part of what you need to do as you described it is you have the earth and you have a satellite in Leo and the gravitational force is pulling you back to earth constantly. So, you have to have propulsion. You have to have fuel that keeps you from... And I assume you provide...

26:52Do you provide that as that part of the bus, like the propulsion? Absolutely. So, the whole mentality that we have is you can't have one bus that works for everybody. So, you have to pick different configuration packages. It's like your car analogy, right? If you're going to buy a car, do you want the seat warmers? Do you want Sirius XM radio. So different customers, depending on what they're doing, need different types of propulsion. You could either get away with no propulsion, which means you're going to deorbit much faster so the satellite doesn't last as long. You can use something called electric propulsion, which is what my co-founder Max scaled production up when he was at Astra.

27:24That basically keeps you at one point and pushes you up slowly. Or you can use chemical propulsion, which is much stronger and pushes you much faster up. And that's if you need to move around in LEO. So it really depends on what you need. And so basically the satellite orbits the earth, it takes what, 90-ish minutes? 90 minutes. And depending on where you launch, you could basically cross over earth multiple times a day, every point on earth twice a day. So the most common launch is called sun synchronous, and it basically means you're orbiting the earth, but slightly rotating as you do it. So you go over everywhere, which is pretty useful if you think about the applications.

28:02As I go over the earth, I'm either transmitting down or I'm pulling stuff up or I'm observing what's happening on earth. I actually might be observing what's happening in space, but let's focus on earth for now. So I need a way to power the camera or power my radar power. I presume it has to be solar, right? Because you couldn't have a long-term solution other than solar power. Is that right? Yes. Yes. So think of it like you have solar panels, they charge a battery, and then the battery provides power. Because when you're orbiting Earth, you spend 45 minutes in the sun, right? And then you spend 45 minutes where the Earth is blocking the sun.

28:43So you still need to provide power even when you're in the shadow, but you also need power when you're in the sun. So the battery helps fill that gap. And you provide that as well. That's part of what you do? Absolutely. So what the hell is the payload company doing? The payload company is making all the money, right? So they're providing data for everything from financial firms to monitor how many cars are in the Walmart parking lot, all the way to climate change, all the way to manufacturing, you know, drugs in space, all the way to defense applications. Okay, everybody, I got an amazing announcement.

29:18I'm doing a jam session with J-Cal on this very podcast. You're going to get to join me on air on this week in startups. you can apply. And there's only a couple of rules here. You got to have less than$2 million in funding. So we want early stage startups. And you've got to have an awesome dot tech domain name. If you've got those two things, you can apply to come on air here and do a jam session with Jake. What's a jam session? You tell me about your business. I ask you questions. You tell me about what you're struggling with. I give you answers. I give you ideas of how to solve your problems or how to grow your business.

29:53This is going to be an amazing episode coming out this summer. Go to get.tech slash Jason, get G-E-T dot T-E-C-H slash Jason. And remember, only two rules. You got to have a.tech domain name, which is an awesome domain name to have. A lot of great companies like Rabbit are using it. We're using it for Founder Fridays. And you just have to have under$2 million in funding. We're looking for early stage startups to jam out. Where did the jam session come from? The jam session was something Travis and Chris Saka and I and other people used to do. We would just hang out and talk about our businesses 20 years ago when we're trying to make our way in the world.

30:29And now it's your chance. What is it? A jam session. Why should you care? Great advice. And you get showcased on This Week in Startups. What do you do right now? You go to get.tech slash Jason. I have to ask it. So first of all, do you have any satellites already in space? Like, is this real? Or you guys just have a pipe dream to manufacture this stuff? We do. About 60 days ago, we launched our very first satellite bus platform to orbit. This is probably the proudest moment for the company where my baby, the satellite, separating on a one-way trip to space. That's a real video? That's a real video provided by SpaceX.

31:07So there it goes. It floats away. It's moving really fast, right? Several kilometers per second, but obviously you can't really see anything that's relative. So it springs off and it begins transmitting. And then a few days later, we actually trimmed on the payloads. So on this first mission, we had a few different customer payloads. The payload I was most excited about was our own payload, which is a selfie camera. And you could see the tweet that we pulled up where we downloaded the selfie taken from the satellite. You could see earth in the background. And that's actually, can you describe what I'm looking at?

31:42That's not the earth, but obviously part of your satellite. Absolutely. So the way the satellite works is you have solar panels that deploy. So what you're looking at is the back of a solar panel that's deployed, the strut that's sticking up keeps it steady. And then on the back of the solar panel, you could see the American flag, our logo. And then what's actually pretty cool, most people don't realize this, the bottom left, it's a photo of our team on the day that we finished building the satellite. And back then the team was less than 20 people. Look, your company was only created two years ago.

32:17How hard was it to go from just starting a company to actually having a thing in space? Because you said it was$3-ish million price. So I don't know what the cost, but let's assume it's 50-60 % of that. Plus, you have the payload. That's a lot of money and a relatively short period of time. Give us some perspective on having accomplished this. So, the saying in the industry is space is hard. And let me just say that saying is correct. Space is incredibly hard. There were a lot of sleepless nights and literally blood, sweat, and tears to pull it off, but we did. Fundamentally, I love space. Max loves space.

32:53Everyone in the company loves space, but we're not starting a company because we love space. We're starting a company because we see a phenomenal opportunity to open up and democratize access to space and have a phenomenal business of the magnitude of how difficult it was to launch. What was it from when you said, okay, I mean, forget like company formation and what is our strategy and raising money, but you're like, okay, we have some money. Start the clock to actually getting something launched in space. And how impressive is that relative to what other people take? So the number one thing that we focused on was how quickly could we get the satellite into orbit?

33:32So that was our North star. Historically, we talked to a lot of experts and they said, you should estimate about three years and about$50 million to get your first satellite to orbit. We did it in 12 months and we ended up spending well under$10 million to get that first satellite to orbit. That was hard. Yeah. So I imagine, I imagine it's not something I could have done. So hats off to you. But so under$10 million implies that you raised money. So let's talk a little bit about venture capital. Who did you raise from? When did you raise it? What's publicly available? Yes. So I was fortunate after Palantir, I spent about a year and a half exploring this idea at a venture capital firm called Village Global, who invested in my last company.

34:18So they were the very first check-in. They kind of believed in it from the beginning as our pre-seed. We immediately then raised our seed round in September of 22. And that's really when the company started. And that was led by Andreessen Horowitz. So we'd been talking to them for a while about this concept. Everything, Mark, you said about how space had this Cambrian explosion and everything is changing, they believe wholeheartedly. And they wanted to put their money where their mouth was and invest in us. So we're very fortunate. We made great progress. And then about nine months later in June, we raised our Series A, and that was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Shield Capital.

34:59And we've been off to the races ever since. And I will say, fundraising is never easy, but we don't like to celebrate fundraising, right? We like to celebrate our core milestones of what we've done with the company. And I think that mindset has been something that everyone in the company has really embodied. So the question I get the most about space, because we've been investing in space companies, we're very interested in the category. The question I get the most asked by my investors is about CapEx. They're like, can you really back space-related companies? Surely that's going to take a lot of capital expenditure.

35:35Give us some sense of that and why should anyone give you money? So it's a great question. The nice thing about satellites and satellite buses are we are able to make money on every satellite that we sell. So there's actually positive unit economics tied into all of them. And what we're able to do is we work with our customers and we try to be very, very transparent. And we say, look, here's what we're charging you for the satellite bus. We need to go pay for this percentage of that dollar amount. You've already said it's three and a half million dollars okay so somewhere somewhere between one to two million dollars must be the material and labor precisely you know so i don't need to pinpoint that exact number but let's say somewhere between one to two and let's say you want to produce 10 in a year you know you're talking about 10 to 20 million dollars just in low volume in materials so that's what I mean by CapEx, right?

36:31Like a traditional software company raises money, but then it launches its software at 80, 90 % gross margin. How do people get comfortable with the CapEx requirement? Because surely you're going to need$500 million if you continue to scale. It comes down to really having our customers early, right? So we're not just building this and hoping they come like we have met the customers, we know they're going to pay us. and then working with our customers to get paid by them early. So prepayments, milestone-based payments, and then of course, final delivery payments as well. But what that means is from our perspective on the cashflow side, before we spend money with the supplier, we're making sure we bring money in from our customers.

37:14And we're very upfront about this, right? Because we want our customers to trust that we're going to be around for a very long time and be their supplier long-term. So it ends up being very mutually beneficial to make sure that cash flow does not become burdensome. It seems like having launched and proven that you could launch a satellite was an important way to then go to customers who would then do prepayments. Because if you're going to do a prepayment or milestone-based payment, but you aren't sure it's actually going to work versus being able to demonstrate, is that why you did it? Is that partially why you did it?

37:47I like to joke, the biggest hobby of everybody in the aerospace industry is to over-promise and under-deliver. People love doing that. So what we wanted to do was instead of just saying good things, we actually wanted to do the work and actually launch it and prove that it worked. Now, we were very fortunate to have some customers pay us to be on that first satellite that you saw. We also were very fortunate to have other customers buy full satellites from us before we ever launched. That being said, everyone really wanted to see that it worked. And that proof point has then led into a lot of excitement.

38:22The other questions that I tend to get a lot from investors is they imagine space means two things. Number one, they imagine it's mostly government and military. And can you really back companies that are mostly serving government and military? Is it is the satellite industry or is the space industry mostly government and military? There's a lot of government and military, but there's a lot more commercial. So I think what everybody forgets is how critical everyday life is dependent on satellite infrastructure and a lot of commercial satellite infrastructure that's up there. So everything from understanding how the climate is changing all the way to mapping out if you're going to go on a hike and where you're going and different trails and roads, etc., all enabled by a lot of these commercial satellite operators.

39:14Now, of course, the government is going to be a major customer as well, but I think everybody forgets the day-to-day life is really enabled by a lot of these commercial operators. The stats that I have, they might be different than what you have, is that it's about 77 % commercial, 23 % military. Dual use has been the history of the venture capital industry. It drove the chip industry. It drove the PC industry. It drove a lot of the software industry. So I think a lot of people forget how important dual use is. And government can be an important source of innovation and capital at the same time you're developing commercial use cases.

39:53But aren't you just competing against SpaceX? So SpaceX, we see as a major enabler of us, right? They obviously launch and they're putting satellites up. They also run their own constellation, which is something like Starlink. But that is fundamentally different than being a bus vendor. Now, we might have customers who buy a satellite bus and want to provide internet connectivity, and they've carved out a niche use case that's different than Starlink, and that's great for them. But we're all playing in the same ballgame of let's put something in space, but we're playing at different positions, right?

40:26And it's very collaborative. In a way, I would just say I think Starlink is probably driving your market. And the reason I say that is, like, the minute costs get reduced, new use cases always come about. This is true in any technology market, right? So the things that you can't imagine until things are cheaper. So the fact that Starlink exists created a market for communications on boats or in remote locations where they were cost prohibitive before. And the minute that you do that, suddenly you put pressure on everyone else in the industry to be able to provide cheaper satellites, cheaper communication.

41:04So they're going to need low-cost bus manufacturers. They're going to need low-cost satellite if they're going to compete with SpaceX. In many ways, I think it should drive the market. That's exactly how we see it. And it's happening, right? It's not just an idea, it's reality. How big is the satellite market today? Like, I don't have that data. Yeah, so right now, if you look at just what people are spending on just buses, so not overall satellite markets in the trillions, because you're looking at all of the applications, but just what we do on buying satellite buses. So excluding people who build them themselves, you're looking at well over$30 billion per year in annual spend.

41:40Pretty big market.

41:49Yes. So what I would say is we can't talk about most of our customers, but we could talk about some. The most recent one we just announced is a company called Booz Allen Hamilton. So they're a very large defense prime. Another company that we've been able to announce is a smaller company called Ubotica. They make edge compute systems for space. And that's a great example of one defense, one commercial. And they're working very synergistically together. They're both on the very first satellite that's currently on orbit. And it's amazing. It's what you said. It's the dual use side where government might push something forward.

42:25And then the commercial takes that and finds all these great business models on top of it. they keep building off each other. To give people some scale, historically, there was about 30 satellites launched into geospatial orbit per year, 30 per year. Geospatial orbit is about 10 to 15 per year right now. So like these really big expensive systems built by the Northrop Grumman and Boeing and other big primes, it was really a small market, incredibly expensive, hugely valuable. I think the entire industry is being disrupted and kind of a Moore's Law sort of way, driving down costs, increasing performance, increasing the type of stuff that's going to space.

43:06Our imagination today is really things like comms. So it's like cell phone communication. You're used to satellite phones, data transfer, internet. It's things like earth observation. Earth observation, it's critical. It's like knowing where the Houthis are attacking boats coming around the Red Sea. Turns out it actually matters or monitoring the straits of malacca um near singapore or the the width of the panama canal like we know all of this stuff matters it matters to hedge funds it matters to oil companies it matters to government also if you look at the recent war where iran for the first time in history directly tried to attack israel um you know they had these uh exo magnetic uh defense systems that were able to shoot down the missiles before they entered earth atmosphere.

43:59And so you think about military capabilities will increasingly require sophistication in space. So I imagine governments are going to increase this. So given all of this, people then can't imagine what's coming next. Now, I know some of the other use cases, I was hoping you might be able to talk about some of them. If you're knowledgeable, if not, we won't spend any time on it. But I know there's companies like Varda, which are looking at doing pharmaceutical manufacturing in space and a zero gravity environment. I know that there are companies like Astroforge, which is looking to mine asteroids and bring materials back to the US.

44:38Talk a little bit about what does this market become? I think it really all stems from what you said earlier, which is as cost goes down and frequency goes up, more and more business models begin to make sense. So you have companies like the two that you just mentioned are perfect examples. If you're manufacturing drugs in space, what it really comes down to for those pharmaceuticals is, well, what's the cost versus what's somebody willing to pay and what are the benefits? And they've realized that in zero gravity, you have different crystallization of certain pharmaceuticals that make them much more effective.

45:08And if they're more effective, Well, insurance companies will pay a lot more for that because it'll help a lot more people and save a lot of lives. So that is something that, frankly, five years ago, that business model didn't make any sense. Today, because the costs have come way down, that business model makes a whole lot of sense. And we're only going to see more and more go in that direction. Another great example is for every electronic device in the world, rare earth metals, things like platinum are key to enabling them. There's a finite supply on earth. there's pretty much an unlimited supply out in the galaxy.

45:42And the idea of asteroid mining, I mean, that's been from the dawn of science fiction, I would argue, has been a dream of everybody. But the business model, frankly, never made sense until now. All of a sudden, you could get a launch to space, a lower cost satellite bus, you could actually build the mining tool, send it back to Earth, all for something that is less than the price of mining platinum here on earth. So fundamentally, like these are just two examples of what I think are some of the coolest business models that I have seen. We are at the brink of so many more of these ideas beginning to emerge.

46:16And what I think a lot of people don't know is that a lot of these rare earth metals are not easily available to Western countries. Like a lot of them happen to be in China and happen to be in Russia. And so I know that there's a big initiative from the United States from Western Europe to see whether or not you can start to mine some of this from space. One of the areas that I know is kind of a little futuristic, but maybe we could give a taste to people, is this area of cislunar orbits and the idea that increasingly you might have satellites around the moon. You might have things orbiting the moon.

46:53Why would this exist? Why does it matter? Because I imagine it could be a future market for you. Well, I'll turn it back, Mark, with a question for you. if you could go live on Mars or at least take a vacation to Mars, would you? No. Really? Okay. I know I'm supposed to say, yes, I'm on team Earth. I was trying to tee you up for a yes, but we'll take it. We'll take it. Sorry, I'm on team Earth. Hypothetically, let's say you wanted to go take just a short vacation to Mars. To get there, right, you can either try to go entirely from Earth and go all the way there to Venus or wherever you might want to go.

47:25Realistically, what makes a lot more sense is to have a layover, right? And you have a layover at somewhere nearby where you get out of Earth's gravitational pull and you're able to refuel and go somewhere else. Turns out the moon is a really good spot for a lot of those things. The moon also has some amazing resources like helium-3, which some startups are thinking about mining. It also might be a place where humans one day might want to set up shop and do certain things there, etc. To enable all of that, though, we need infrastructure not just on the moon but around the moon. That means think of every satellite we have over Earth who's monitoring the Earth, monitoring what's coming near the Earth, providing communications to the Earth, all of those things.

48:07You effectively need to replicate them out near the moon as well, and that's considered cislunar. So down the line, we're seeing increased – right now, it's a lot of people talking about it and starting to take action there. And that's something where I would love to see our satellite buses and SpaceX's rockets and this entire market evolving beyond just Earth, but to the moon, to Mars and beyond that to enable all of those things. As someone who lives in Los Angeles, because, you know, they always say that the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. Right. I always say this to like my family who doesn't work in the tech sector, like the stuff that's coming in just three to five years is really mind boggling.

48:47So living in LA, I'm seeing a lot more companies developing vehicles for driving on the moon, lunar vehicles. I'm seeing companies that are trying to do robotics that can both work on the space station, but also work on the moon. And so they're having to design on Earth a simulated environment of what does it look like and feel like on the moon to drive around to prove whether or not your equipment works. I think we are gearing up for a lot more to be happening in and around the moon, both extracting materials and eventually like so what is explained to me is that because the moon has less gravitational force, it actually becomes a great refueling area.

49:32So you can take a rocket to the moon. You can then refuel and then launch from the moon to go somewhere else further out into space for mining purposes or for your vacation to Mars while I'm in the south of France. And I think it's it's nearer than people think. And I think it's a really exciting opportunity. I think a lot of great startups are going to be created to take advantage of these kind of opportunities. um you you today um you're you've launched one satellite you have a satellite you've launched the full satellite but you produce your bus so i presume you've now got a standard process for how you build the bus um maybe you could talk about what the throughput could be like how many of these could you build and i understand maybe you have a little video that could show us what your current facility looks like look we started in los angeles in a small facility in culver city which is, I would argue, the heart of LA.

50:32And that facility is phenomenal. And it lets us build basically one satellite bus at a time. So we kind of peak out there at about 10 satellites per year. The facility that you're seeing right now is in Playa Vista, about 10 minutes away from our current facility. And that will let us scale to building well over 150 vehicles per year at its peak. So we're just beginning to move in there now. But part of the reason for, look, we've only been around 18 months, we're already moving into our new facility is the demand that we're seeing because of the reduction in launch costs, the new business models that are coming together for more and more satellites going to orbit is enormous.

51:11And now we need to go produce those products to actually deliver to those customers. That's a pretty massive improvement in terms of the cadence of ability to manufacture buses from what you said in the past. So I really hope for your sake, I hope for the industry's sake, that your thesis is correct, that by standardizing the bus, lowering the cost, increasing the cadence, we as an industry, we as a country, we as the technology ecosystem can start doing a lot more launches, getting a lot more into space at a lower cost, because I think it will then spur software companies. Because once you have the hardware out there, now you can design and develop more software.

51:52And as I understand, I've spoken with Booz Allen in the past, I know part of what they want to do is develop software in space. And so once the hardware exists, then you see application layer stuff. And I think that's really going to be part of our future. And I hope to see more of that in the years ahead. You today, you do about 250 kilograms is what you can support. So the satellite bus platform itself is about 100 kilograms and can support another 150 kilograms of payload cameras, sensors, whatever you may want. And then we go up in size from there. So that's like, I don't know, I can't do the math.

52:29Is that like 220 pounds or something like that? For the satellite bus itself, yes. And then for once you attach everything to it, and you think four or 500 pounds. I understand that your future is to develop bigger buses. And maybe you could talk about that. Why would you produce them? How big would they be? When are those available? So the way that people monitor the cost of launch, it's dollars per kilogram to orbit. And when we talk about the cost to get to orbit going down, it's really, you know, the cost per kilogram going far down. The result of that is that trend's continuing, which means that people are now able to launch better and better payloads.

53:08And a better payload usually means it's heavier, it's physically bigger, etc. So we're now working on our new platforms called Nova and Comet, which you could see here, that are double the size of Aries and then quadruple for Comet the size of Aries. So we're seeing the market demand where people say, well, costs have gone down, let me launch something bigger. And we're meeting that market demand. And I guess what we're seeing here on the screen, you are able to be launched into Leo, Geo, Cislunar, if asked to, you're able to launch not only on we can see Falcon 9 here, but any of these other platforms.

53:44So you're kind of agnostic to how you get up, but it seems like most launches are on Falcon 9. Is that right? That's right. So commercial launches are almost all Falcon 9. Government launches, they try to diversify a little bit. So we're seeing a few more providers and it's important to be... We don't like vendor lock-in. We want everything to be as standardized as possible. Let's talk about your company. How big is it today? How many people? Are you growing staff? Are you hiring? What kind of people are you hiring? Who should reach out to you? How should they reach out to you? We're approaching 50 people right now.

54:16We are actively hiring. We We have a bunch of job wrecks on the website. Mark, you're very knowledgeable about the space. If you want a job, we're in LA, so come on by. We'd love to hire you. So yeah, we're actively hiring for all roles, everything from engineering to BD to finance, et cetera. Venture capitalists, exactly. Help us raise more money, Mark. So you're hiring, you'll grow to how many people did you say? So at the end of this year, we're looking at approaching 100. Okay, so you're going to double. Yes. Yes. It's all sorts of people, business people, marketing people, finance people, but I assume a lot of engineers and people designing, manufacturing, and a lot.

54:57The majority is on the engineering and the production side. So engineers will design the vehicles and then the production team says, how do we build them at scale? And then of course, we get some people on the BD and the GNA side to help sell more of the vehicles and keep the company running. You have a website or how would people apply for jobs? Yes. So go on our website. It's apex, A-P-E-X space, S-P-A-C-E dot com. You could see all the open job recs that we have there, learn a little bit more about the company. And one plug that I'll put in as part of that is if you go on our website, you could actually configure your satellite bus online, which is very new for this industry.

55:35So you could pick the one that you want. You could reserve it with a credit card. So Mark, if you're ready to buy your satellite today, go, let's do it. But it really democratizes access, which again, is one of the core tenets of what we're trying to do here. I guess one of the things you'll do at some point is raise more venture capital. How much capital does a company like this ultimately require? So one of the things that I'm proudest about our company is we do have sometimes a maniacal focus on unit economics. And we say, we're not just building something as a science project, we're building something because there's a real fundamental business.

56:07So we're in a very healthy financial position where we're able to make money on satellites that we sell, reinvest that into the company and to keep growing. Down the line, as we see demand to go beyond 100 satellites a year into much larger quantities, we'll want to bring on more capital to just move faster and scale. But at the time right now, we're very fortunate to be in a position where we don't need to be looking for investors, but we are looking to hire people. The easy math for me that I can do in my head, you said it was$3.5 million per the price tag. So you sell 10 of them, there's$35 million, you send 100 of them, let me assume some price reduction to$300 million market.

56:47So if there's a market for 100 plus of these, and it sounds like there is, like you could be doing hundreds of millions of revenue, you've got to make sure you have the margins. Let's talk about competition before we wrap. Who else is out here gunning for you? So what's so interesting is the traditional satellite bus manufacturers out there, right? You mentioned them, the Northrop, the Lockheed, et cetera. They all make satellite buses. They're competing on a lot of the same contracts that we compete on. However, many of the people that are buying the satellite buses from them are frustrated by the speed, the lack of cost transparency, et cetera.

57:23So often what we're seeing is the people who would traditionally be our competitors are now becoming our collaborators. We are a pure play satellite bus platform vendor, meaning we are happy to supply to any of the companies who are serving those end customers. And we end up becoming an enabler for them. So it's a little interesting where you have a market where you're both competing, but then also collaborating with the same entities. And that's really who we see ourselves coming up against. There's some other amazing companies out there who have laid a great foundation in this industry and are doing well, but we see it as a massive market with room for more than one.

57:58From what I understand right now, standardized bus manufacturing for Leo, you're the main player that's gearing up to do that. And if you're right about the market, it should capture, I think, good market share. There's other people focused on Mio right now. And whether that becomes a more important market or the same importance, I think history will tell us in the future. But that's the real difference I've seen as other people focus on Mio while you're focused on Leo. Ian, I'm thrilled that Apex Space is based in Los Angeles. I'm excited for all the opportunity that we all have in this great city.

58:35I have said to people a lot publicly and privately, Los Angeles had such a big moment from 2015 to maybe 2020. And it felt like in COVID, we kind of went into a cocoon as a city. And I think the reason is that the energy in COVID seemed to go to crypto. And crypto seemed to gravitate towards New York, maybe San Francisco, but a lot of New York and Miami. And the energy I see right now in hard tech and in space in Los Angeles is something I haven't seen in this city for 10 years. The amount of people moving here, creating new companies, capital going into the system. I think it's a really exciting time.

59:18I'm thrilled that you're a part of it. Your Twitter handle, so we can plug you if people want to follow your journey is? My name, Ian Cinnamon. So it's easy to remember. Ian Cinnamon, such a unique, memorable name. My handle is msuster, at M-S-U-S-T-E-R. And I am a partner at Upfront Ventures, a LA-based venture capital firm. So So anyway, thank you so much, Ian, for telling us more about Apex Space and about the space market overall. Thank you, Mark. Great to be here.