Why the Co-Founder of Robinhood is working on Space Datacenters | Baiju Bhatt, Aetherflux

Today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Baiju Bhat, 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.

0:00

I did.

0:09

Let's start with that.

0:09

I was in the Mediterranean on this boat with Jared Leto and a couple of his like rock climbing friends. Jared's a good friend of mine, was a very early investor in Robinhood and I would say maybe my hair idol.

0:10

Do you have one of those?

0:24

He's a handsome dude, man. Okay, so he, he invites me on this trip with a handful of people to go in the Mediterranean for a couple 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, it's not like the alpha and the omega of my life. And I go to this event or I go to this, this trip with these guys and I'm just like, you know what? I'm a fat piece of like, I was like, I gotta do something.

0:25

You're in this shape, right?

1:00

Huh?

1:01

Or were you in this shape?

1:02

Or were you close to 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 gotta do something about this. So I come back and I'm like, I'm going to get a trainer. And I convinced Vlad also that we should start working out together. So we had this trainer together 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 how to. So all the workouts were really hard.

1:02

A little bit Arnold Schwarzenegger voice.

1:46

A little bit, yeah, that's my French voice, I guess. So I. So working out with this guy and Covid 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. And mind you, this is in Covid. And so what are you going to do? Are you going to 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. And all this started from the conversation around.

1:47

Yeah. So basically Pavel Durov, who's the founder of Telegram, has a training regimen where he does 100 push ups and 100 sit ups every single day. And so before I can interview him, I am going to do 100, you know, 100 and 100 every day for 30 days straight with no interruptions. And right now we're on day five of that.

2:44

You know, I didn't realize this was day five. You made it sound like this was day 45.

3:03

So it's, it's day like 70 of getting up to the point where I can actually do 100 a day. Okay. 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. Assuming I can lock in. Yeah. Do you have any other crazy stories like that? You said Jared Leto was one of the first investors in Robinhood?

3:07

Yeah, yeah. He's a really 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.

3:26

A little bit similar to the chain smokers where they just like started in music and want to now invest in a bunch of startups.

3:44

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. I just needed to work out more. And 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 pushups. 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,

3:49

just torquing that you're just.

4:32

Yeah, you're just like compressing your shoulder the whole time.

4:33

When I was doing rock climbing, I started training a bunch of, 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.

4:36

Yeah.

4:47

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.

4:47

Did you?

4:58

And yeah. And it was like. What was interesting is it takes so long for that to fully heal.

4:59

Yeah.

5:03

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 toward 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.

5:04

Cuz you're, you're young blood, man. You heal some of that stuff quickly.

5:22

Six months just feels like a long ass time.

5:26

Yeah. I'm thinking about like what would happen if I rip my hand muscles. I don't know if they'd ever heal at this point.

5:28

Yeah.

5:33

Be out of commission for like two years.

5:33

Yeah.

5:35

But I'm glad, I'm glad they're healed. That's like, that's a big deal.

5:36

Yeah, that's one of those things where when it happens you're kind of questioning like, will it heal properly?

5:38

Yeah, yeah.

5:44

But yeah, let's jump to like company culture and talk a little bit about that. Most 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?

5:45

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, is that there's a lot more distinct disciplines here. Right. Because in building a software company, Robinhood, like the core kinds of people that you'd have there, that we had, there were front end engineers to like mobile engineers. Right. So Android engineers, web engineers, iOS engineers, then backend software engineers, so database engineers, like people building the APIs, 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 A small but mighty design team, which was 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 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? When you talk to customers? I think so this is kind of like the culture there and obviously a lot of other functions, like tons of customer support people, operations people, finance people. Right. 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. There's a thermal engineer sitting right behind you. 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,

6:05

you know, backgrounds.

7:56

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, 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. 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.

7:58

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, you. 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.

8:53

It does. It's also like one of the things I've kind of found related to that is when people are. They're having a good time, 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.

9:11

They're taking risk by sharing it and it's like basically lowering the barrier for them to feel like they can.

9:42

Yeah, exactly.

9:47

Yeah.

9:48

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.

9:48

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?

9:55

Exactly.

10:04

And I think it takes a little while for people, like every, every person that I've 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.

10:05

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.

10:20

Amazing. Steve Jobs had this line and I think Brian Chesky has really adopted this as well, where the design is not only how something looks, but also how it like functions. 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?

10:29

Yeah. 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. I absolutely idolized that guy. And I tried to embody as much of his sort of approach to design as I could and really took it to heart. The answer to the question is something I've actually thought about quite a bit. And I'm 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 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 is like the function of a laptop, right? Is it on or off? 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 they were always like. My understanding was there was like a real allergy to, like, indicators. Right?

10:50

Yeah.

12:25

Like, there's a. 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.

12:25

Interesting.

12:37

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.

12:38

I think they're kind of doing that now, aren't they? Yeah, they're trying to have it always on.

12:52

Always on. Right?

12:56

Yeah. Interesting.

12:57

There isn't an on off button. 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 over complicate 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 jobs that the thing has to do will very natively define the way it looks and feels. So, for example, in the context of things like laser power beaming, which we're actively working on here, 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?

12:58

So basically the solar panel is going to both dissipate heat while also collecting.

14:18

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 backside of the satellite, there are these big sheets, which are effectively the radiators that dissipate the heat. Right. So 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?

14:23

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. Do you have that same feeling when you are designing something?

15:09

Yeah. There's definitely the thing that you strive for. Right. Is 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, in the context of my old gig, very much front and center. Like, how do you keep the form and the function kind of as simple as possible, but still doing the job that it needs to do?

15:23

Yeah, it's like, as simple as possible, but no simpler.

15:54

Yeah.

15:57

Has that evolved? Has your taste and ability to kind of understand what good looks like evolved?

15:57

Over time, I have been drawn towards expressing that in other things in the context of building software. And a lot of the. The first 10 years of the design language of Robinhood was something that I was, like, leading in at the absolute forefront of, 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 can I apply this same lens that I look at that world to building hardware? And my original version of this was actually I built a car in my spare time.

16:04

Can you talk about that?

16:47

That, Yeah, I built. Sorry. I built a Shelby daytona like a factory 5 racing. Do you know this company?

16:48

Isn't it like a. Like a race car? Heard of it?

16:55

Yeah. It's basically a race car.

16:57

Okay.

16:59

So I Built one of those from scratch. Had had a lot of help along the way, and I had some. Had some pro mechanics look over and, like, actually go through and make sure everything worked correctly before I took on the road. So I actually did this over Covid. I 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.

17:00

Right.

17:29

I kind of want to expand my horizons because, like, just a little bit of a step back here. I've always found that in order to be creative at the main thing that I'm doing, I need to have 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 what is creativity. Creativity is about taking unrelated ideas and seeing the commonality in them. Right.

17:29

Like, marrying them together.

18:00

And so that sort of drew me towards, like, I want to build physical things and know how to build digital things, but 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 cars someday, 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 get into classic cars, I'll really understand what's going on. And so I did. And so it took probably took like, six to nine months to go from like, box of parts to something that I could drive. Kind of squeaks.

18:03

Creaks.

18:59

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. That was freaking cool, man. Do you want to see it?

18:59

I do want to see it.

19:10

Can I show you? All right, Check it out. Here's how it started. Literally as a box.

19:11

Okay. In a truck.

19:18

Yeah, Nice. In a truck.

19:19

And that's the full car, but just in a box form.

19:21

Yeah. Like this. And got the first version of it. Kind of put all the pieces together on the frame.

19:23

And how long did that take?

19:34

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.

19:36

Beautiful.

19:44

Yeah.

19:44

Is it driving?

19:45

Yeah, it is backing up.

19:46

There we go.

19:48

So I didn't paint the thing. I didn't do any of the upholstery. There's like, there's a whole. 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 in painting a car because you'll just do a terrible job. You want to have somebody that's done it a bunch of time that has like, that has kind of the tactile feel for it. There's an old design word for it. I'm going to see if I can remember it right now. I think it's called fingerspitzengefel, 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.

19:49

Yeah.

20:36

Which is why it looks good.

20:38

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 it's, I'm going to build a car.

20:42

Well, the five to 10 years leading up to it, I had been very busy. Yes. And I had a love of cars during that time. I think 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. There 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.

20:55

Yep.

21:34

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.

21:35

Creation energy.

21:46

Creation energy, Exactly. Like I need to project it somewhere else. And so I think that's kind of what. What was the inspiration for? I mean, also, like, to be real. Like 10 years before, I was dead broke. Like, I have 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.

21:48

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. Because it'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?

22:09

Why did you? Yeah, that's a good question.

22:35

Well, the answer was I actually did start a podcast six months earlier, and no one said yes to an interview, so. 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. Two weeks researching someone and then basically do, like, a founder's podcast episode on them. 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.

22:37

Can I tell you, I love that Hustle?

23:04

Yeah.

23:06

Like, I just frigging love that.

23:07

Do you want to see my product from Airbnb?

23:08

I would love to. Yeah. Show me.

23:10

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.

23:11

Did you could have made him look a little better than this.

23:29

Well, we'll know for next time.

23:32

This is cool, though. This is really cool. Sorry, I'm getting fixated on how the guy looks. He is a handsome dude.

23:35

Yeah, he is a handsome dude. He works out a lot.

23:41

Yeah. Coming back to this theme of working

23:44

out a lot, do you think all great founders will work out in the future?

23:46

No.

23:51

Okay.

23:52

Because I think it's possible to be a great founder and just spend, like, a decade in Goblin mode.

23:53

Fair.

23:58

Just, like, subsisting on the sheer sort of power that comes from the chemical bonds that hold ramen together.

23:59

Fair. Yeah.

24:08

There's a meme that I saw which is, like, 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.

24:09

Yeah, I have noticed this. I think that was the Pavel Durov situation.

24:34

Oh, was him, huh?

24:38

Yeah, but with him, he was like, I don't think Putin was super happy with him. So that, that, that may cause a little bit of hair loss.

24:40

That would cause some hair loss for sure.

24:49

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.

24:50

CBM to Mars plant in the icbm. It's a cool idea.

25:02

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 a rocket and he was going to buy two. And I think it was initially like 20 million, and then he was like, 20 million? And they were like, fuck it, 40 million. But anyway, he didn't end up buying them. But there's been these different evolutions of SpaceX, and I think at any given point in time, like, you couldn't really know exactly how the business would develop, like, even until very recently. I was watching this interview with Elon a couple 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. I was like, seriously? Like, is that, that's what he said? And I was like, okay, is this how you came up with the idea? And then, you know, this may be some massive business where it just so happens that because he's decreased the launch cost to orbit, it works.

25:07

Yeah, right.

26:00

Is this the sort of similar thing 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 and 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?

26:01

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.

26:22

It's kind of like being on a Pirate ship. It's just a very small crew. But everyone's rowing in the same direction.

26:34

Everyone's rowing the same direction. It's. And it's, it gets harder to do as organizations get better, bigger. 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, the core thing. And it felt like doing adjacent things. We're like, ah, we know how.

26:38

Yeah.

26:58

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 I haven't been doing this for terribly long. Like I've been doing this a little less than two years full time. 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. So that's kind of. We're definitely, I wouldn't, you know, be so bold as to say that we're

26:59

there right now but you can see the trajectory.

28:05

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, what are the verticals of the economy that exist on this global distribution platform? And as I saw it, this is like a caricature, but still a paraphrasing of it's Earth imaging, it's defense stuff, it's telecommunications, and more recently it's Internet. That's not all that's going to exist in low Earth orbit. There will be other industries that natively exist. 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 inventing new things along the way. I'm like, well, 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, it's sort of maybe crescendoing. In hindsight, that's not right.

28:07

I don't think it's crescendoing, no.

29:57

In hindsight, that's definitely not right. Where we are right now 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, how would I do such a thing? What's the pattern to pattern match there? 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, 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. 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 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 were on. And speaking to the building of the intuition, the light bulb went off for me sometime in the sort of summer, maybe a little earlier than that of this past year, because we were talking about what can you do if you collect a lot of power in orbit and you beam it down? Well, 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'll 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. 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 it could be useful for that application. However, by the nature of power transmission, 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. 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. Then the intuition of going through and like, you know, doing design reviews for like this power beaming stuff and like really thinking how this works. It was in a conversation with a friend that the light bulb kind of went off. We're 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 laser system that turns it back into light. Then you point that light down to the ground, use effectively solar panels to reconvert that into electricity and then you plug that into the data center.

29:59

It's like a bunch of process steps that you can just eliminate entirely.

33:22

Yeah, well what if you just deleted all of it?

33:25

Yeah.

33:26

And you took the chips and you moved them right next to the receiver. It's like well what do 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 architecture that I think you would go with for this because of other constraints. But as a thought experiment, isn't that the most direct marriaging of the application and the sort of 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, et cetera, et cetera, 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 is like five to eight years. Like, there's a real crunch here. Right. This has the potential to be a massive accelerant in that. 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 Elon 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 the solar panels, build satellites out of them. Build stacks of these things.

33:27

Rent a Falcon and ship them up.

35:19

Exactly, yeah. And then as soon as they're in orbit, effectively, they're online. Right.

35:21

And then you put them together with lasers.

35:27

Yeah, yeah. So that's where the laser technology is going to, I think, be a very important, reused sort of core component that ties these two different applications together.

35:30

Yeah. I think one of the biggest critiques was just having, like, a massive megastructure in space, and, you know, slight, like, I don't know, like, variations or anything could just destroy the entire thing. And if you just have, like, small satellites, they're all networked together with lasers, there's not really any issue.

35:43

Yeah, Yeah. I think 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. It's just not terribly, economically feasible in

35:58

26, at least right now.

36:10

Not right now. I want to come back to something.

36:12

Okay.

36:14

And I want to share a little wisdom with you young padawan.

36:15

Okay.

36:19

This is coming back to that rendering of Brian Chesky. The.

36:20

The asterisk.

36:25

This.

36:26

That was, like, three years ago. We've got a little bit better Beijing. Thank you.

36:26

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, it's for our founding fathers. Right.

36:30

Totally agree.

36:40

Look at. Look at the. The peck muscle definition that George Washington has. Next time, you should just make, you know, whoever said founder is, so make him jacked as unbelievably ripped.

36:41

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.

36:57

Yeah. Just make him look like a superhero. Like, really, really ripped.

37:07

Yeah. These are the.

37:11

I don't know why I'm Fixating on

37:13

these are the things. Well, because you notice something that should have been done differently and you care, you know. Yeah.

37:14

Also, if you ever make any renderings of me, I would, you know, just go.

37:20

I'll make sure that you apply that

37:23

to me as well.

37:25

Yeah, yeah, no problem, Beijer. 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 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. You aren't going to actually do the thing that you want to do if you do that. Nope. 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?

37:25

Yeah.

38:11

To basically have that cycle fast.

38:11

My philosophy is get your failures out of the way quickly.

38:13

Okay, what's an example?

38:17

Oh, my gosh. So get your failures out of the 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 Robinhood. 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. And so there was this question of how do you go from not knowing how to make a consumer product to being good at it? Ideally, how do you learn the thing? And one really sage piece of advice that I got early on was get your failures out of the way quickly. And so what does that mean? It means don't be too precious with the idea. Just try it. Even if the idea is not perfect, you're going to learn way more by going from. By completing the loop. So from, like, idea to, like, finished version of it to did the finished version when released in the market work or not work? Right.

38:20

It's like the Brian Armstrong thing where he says, action produces information.

39:44

Action produces information. Yeah. That's a smart thing to say. Yeah, yeah. 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 Robinhood, 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 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 Robinhood.

39:48

Why'd you name it Analyst?

40:29

I don't know.

40:31

Just a reason. Just random. Yeah, you're thinking financial stocks, Analysts.

40:32

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 Robinhood. But that app, we release 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. Asymptotes to zero asymptotes to zero asymphotes to a non to, not to a non, zero number. And we're like, that was wrong. 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 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 Analyst Robinhood 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 is they think about them as, like, functional buttons. Right? Like, this is the map button. This is the calculator button. This is the weather button. Right.

40:37

I get some distinct, like, concrete, understandable value by taking this action, opening this app.

42:09

Yeah. 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. Then you can look. You can look up the earliest versions of Robinhood was this incredibly reductive take on what it was. It was your account value at the top, a sparkline and a list of the stocks that you owned or that you were following and nothing else. That was kind of the main thing. Right. 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, baiju, 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.

42:14

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 gonna run with it and I'm gonna go down. Like, I, I. The way that I think about. I think I've kind of. Yeah, this is not.

43:45

This is like, this is not wrong. Yeah, yeah.

43:56

The way that I've. The way that 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, hit a dead end, walk back to where I came, run down the next path.

43:58

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 going to do that? Are you going to do it by like just thinking about it and like looking at it and being like.

44:22

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.

44:36

Start doing the maze.

44:46

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 going to build the everything app for finance kind of, you know, you're going to get your finance news, you're going to get your stocks, you're going to get your information here, you're going to 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 going to click on my app for? And we're just going to do that really well and then we'll hide everything that is in 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.

44:47

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 is the 80% use case? If that's the 80% use case, your form and function. Right. The form should match that function. Right? Now if you take the 20% of use cases and you treat them like they're 80% use cases, 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 and you want to think through all that stuff. But people are going to have very specific usage patterns or in our case, like they look at it and they put it down. Right.

45:18

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?

45:58

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

46:09

path and it's unclear.

46:15

Yeah, like how are we going to build an energy grid in orbit? 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? We'll have to figure it out. Right.

46:16

The great thing is, and I, I've, I've thought about this a lot recently too is you want to basically build a culture. So with, 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, it's a lot more difficult because your iteration loops are way longer, way longer and way less clear. Like if you're, if you're 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 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.

46:45

Yeah.

47:22

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?

47:23

I think it's actually interesting to look at this power beaming like the hardware that's behind you right over there from this perspective. So space based solar power, collecting power in space, beaming it down for earth for use. Right. This is like a 70s idea. This is not new at all.

47:31

This is one of those things where they just like assumed that this was the future.

47:49

Yeah, people kind of assumed this was the future and then nobody actually did it. And if you look at the history of why, and I took like real intellectual issue with this, right. Where if you look at why it's that original idea for space solar power, just like the way the idea was constructed, it didn't work unless you had a really big satellite like the size of a kilometer or multiple kilometers.

47:53

And why was that?

48:19

It has to do with what's called diffraction, limited optics, like basically like what is the aperture size that's projecting the light down, what is the aperture and the frequency of light that you're projecting down and over a certain distance, like if you have a receive aperture, how much of that are you going to capture? Right. And it turns out that over the distances of, for example, geostationary to low Earth orbit with microwave frequency light, you need an enormous aperture in space and an enormous aperture on the ground. If you Hope to collect 80, 90, 95% of the light that would be coming down, assuming you're able to make it point down straight. Nobody's done that. Like, that doesn't exist. That's an idea. And it's frustrating because the idea has then since been intellectualized and people have written books on it. Not to say that there's anything wrong with people writing the books and kind of pushing the frontier of knowledge forward, but like, when you put your pens down and pick your, you know, like your keyboards and your cat up and your screwdrivers and when you actually start making it. And so as that applies to this, I kind of ask the question when starting the company, it's like, what is the straight line, direct, shortest time period, path that I can imagine to realizing this idea. And so the approach that we took was, are we going to build something that's going to be 100 kilowatts, you know, a megawatt of power?

48:20

No.

49:55

We were like, could you do this with a small satellite? What's the smallest satellite you could do this with? What is the sort of like cutoff threshold of power where you're actually beaming power as opposed to, like, you know, using lasers for communications? Right. Like that is a thing. So the number that we came up with there was about a kilowatt of power out of the satellite. That's what we declare as power beaming. Right. That's an energy application. That's not just a data beaming application. And so then you kind of ask the question, like, if you scope it down to that, how much, how much time does it really take to do this? Right. Like, could you do it in a year? Probably not. Like, you might be able to, but your odds that it doesn't work are very high. You're increasing them, right?

49:57

Yeah.

50:50

Could you do it in two years? Yeah, I think you can. All right, well, if you can do it in two years, then, like, it may not be the future thing forever and ever. But let's do that. Let's just go and do that and let's learn exactly how this works and then from that understanding, start building up the more commercially relevant the higher power system, the one that is designed with a better understanding of the physics in real life. And so that is actually what we're doing. That hardware behind you is scheduled to go up sometime this summer. And I left Robinhood full time, like February, March of 24. Like, it'll be two years and three months.

50:51

One of the things that I've talked with a couple of different, like, space founders about is specifically, like, on the Falcon launches, you have to, basically you're constrained by SpaceX's ability to ship, you know, launches to orbit. And the timeline for this is like, if you want to book a launch window that's like, I think a year plus out, at least right now, which means that you have to say maybe, maybe it only takes two years to actually put the thing in orbit, but you have to say in like six months in or a year in, we're doing this. Commit to SpaceX that you're doing it well. Yeah, and then make sure that you actually hit that timeline because the rocket's going up with or without your, your

51:39

payload, which is exactly what we did. When I started the company, I was like, I'm willing to spend a little bit of money to just put this on the accelerated timeline. So I seeded the company with $10 million of my own and use that money to hire a small team, book a ride share, buy a satellite. Actually, there's a funny picture when we booked the satellite, when we first put the purchase order for the satellite in was like, literally right after I left Robinhood. And this was one of the last projects that I worked on was a gold card. Yeah, it's a gold card. And I actually, like, did the layout for this version of the gold card, worked with the design team on it. And so I was like, yeah, I'll put my deposit down with my gold card. It's a really goofy picture of me, like, holding this with the founders of Apex being like, yeah, I just bought a satellite, guys.

52:18

Is that what you did?

53:13

Yeah, I mean, it was just a tiny little deposit on it.

53:14

I mean, crazy.

53:17

That is an expensive piece of hardware. I did not buy the whole thing with my credit card.

53:19

So I know with, with Elon, with Xai, he's able to just talk with Jensen like there. He's gotten a competitive advantage in that, that he has the, the credibility and the track record and everything built up where he can literally just call Jensen and say, hey, we need this. Are you good to do it? And things are. Things happen. Whereas other companies literally can. Are you. Have you been Able to kind of accelerate anything because you were able to do have that sort of relationship.

53:23

So I have not called up Jensen. Yeah, if you're watching Jensen, we should chat. I've not called up Jensen. I think that there is. Here's how I think about the question that you're asking, which is like, how does one go about building space companies or ones where there's a lot of contention for these resources? The dollar figures are all really big. I think it's quite challenging. Right. I think our ability to do this in this timeframe benefits from the fact that this is not my first startup.

53:51

Right.

54:22

Like, there's a level of people that I've already met in the industry, the sort of know how of, like, how to actually build a company. Like, so you don't just spin your wheels for a couple of years, a

54:22

bunch of money, burn a bunch of time not actually driving forward, no investors.

54:36

Right. Like, have intuition for how to spend money on things and, like, you know, intuitively ask the question, like, is it okay if we run a little rich on this? Should we really run cheap on these other things? There's not a book you can read or like, I guess if you watched a ton of podcasts, you can start to build some intuition for it. But I've done it before and I kind of have the muscle memory of those kinds of decisions. Maybe wouldn't do those again were these. I'm like, I would absolutely do that again.

54:41

Elon, in the early days of SpaceX, he had this mental model that he kind of tried to impress on the team, which is basically, he calculated that every day, at some point in the future, they'd be generating something like $10 million of revenue every single day. And that every day that they delayed basically getting that first launch to orbit and all these other things was a lost day of 10 million of revenue. And because he had some resources from the Zip2 and PayPal, like sales, you know, if he, if he made some calculation where, yes, we can book, like a private flight and spend $100,000 today, but then that will move us one day forward, like a little bit faster by shipping a little bit faster, it made sense to do that. Is there something in your head where you're seeing, you know, three, five, ten years in the future and you say, this is where we're going to get to. Every single day that we don't get there just that little bit faster is like a lost, you know, revenue or lost progress, that sort of thing. I very much feel about that.

55:12

I very much Feel that way because I guess to me intuitively, this broader concept of like a power grid in orbit, I believe that this is going to happen. And I believe that, like, the sooner it happens, the sooner we can start putting bricks into that building, sooner we get to, like, realizing the benefits of it. So to take a step back and kind of reflecting on, not necessarily, like, my view of this, but kind of how it must have felt like an early SpaceX. The part that comes to my mind is like, there is an incredible level of individual conviction, right? There's an incredible level of individual conviction where it's like, I've thought about it, I've turned over this idea enough in my head and I now very, very deeply believe this to be the case.

56:07

Right.

56:59

And it's like, what is the. Like, what is the mental math that you did to get there? And like, what are the experiences that you've had where, like, no, this is actually not a bottleneck. This could just happen if we just worked a little bit harder and if we actually got it to work, thing we're trying to do is very doable. We don't know how to do it just now, but, like, the more we work on it, the closer we get to being able to do it. Basically, if we can make this happen, this is a good idea. I'm kind of paraphrasing the way I think about it, and if that's the case and it's a good idea and it's really effort limited, it's like, let's work our butts off to get there sooner. I do feel like I'm getting there with this where I wouldn't necessarily. I mean, I wouldn't, like, I don't know I was necessarily there on day one of starting this.

56:59

No.

57:50

Because I kind of mentally budgeted a little bit of time of exploring and kind of building intuition for how to build hardware. Because again, I was a finance bro, like two and a half years ago. Like, by and large, finance bro.

57:50

Is there anything that you had to unlearn to basically get good at building this type of company?

58:08

Yeah, yeah, actually it's the. The willingness to be scrappy again and like, kind of marriaging. The willingness to be scrappy again with the areas that I don't want to be scrappy.

58:13

Talk about both those.

58:28

Yeah, I mean, because think about my. The last, you know, 10 to 15 years of my life, I go from like, seeing Robinhood as this little twinkle in our eyes to a rapidly growing thing to a thing that was very big and was Managing a hugely important amount of resources and money for the

58:29

Americans and millions of people using the product.

58:54

I mean, the way you operate when you have tens of millions of people that use your product is decidedly more mature. And the sort of like risk aversion, risk tolerance matches like what the. It matches like what the actual thing is that's doing. Right. That's not to say we were like, flippant in the past, but there was a gravity and a seriousness that it was exactly the right way to operate the company as it got bigger and bigger. This is Robinhood. Now, that's not necessarily the mental model you want to apply to this on day one, because this is not mature. It's an idea that's like sprouting out of the ground that will hopefully, you know, like, produce a flower and then, you know, continue on from there. So, like, what are the things that you want to do? Right. What are the things that you want to or you want to get really, really, really right? Like, I saw it in the beginning or like towards the ends of doing Robin Hood versus what are the things where we're okay with like, like basically figuring it out. Right. And I think it's evidenced in some of my actions so far. So we announced like a week or two ago that. Where is he? Yeah, a guy sitting two seats behind you. Joe Yaffe joined as both our chief legal officer and our chief operating officer. Like, we're entering a space where we're going to be beaming power down from space. Like doing this in a regulatory forward way, working closely with the regulators, taking sort of all the compliance aspects of the business and, you know, being very sort of like disciplined and determined and systematic about that from day one was the right thing to do. And even before that. Right. Like, I think one of our first 2, 3, 4 hires was our laser safety officer. Right. So kind of like importing the knowledge of having seen something that got really big and like knowing that if you could do something brand new, brand new from scratch, these are the things that you'd want to shore up pretty early on. Whereas other parts, like the exact engineering system design, right. You don't want to apply that same level of, like, you do want to be rigorous, but you don't want to be like, rigorous in that way when you're getting it started for the first time.

58:56

This is the fascinating thing that I, that I've noticed about Elon as well is if you look at his companies, they may be firing, you know, SpaceX is firing on all cylinders now. Tesla is firing on all cylinders now. But if you look at like year eight of SpaceX, it's going bankrupt. Year eight of Tesla, it's going bankrupt. Like, they're a couple days away from not being able to make payroll eight years in. If you look at boring company and Neuralink now, it's like, okay, Neuralink is doing human trials today, but they took 10 years. I think they were starting like 2015, 2016 to get there.

1:01:18

Yeah.

1:01:51

And it took a very long time. I think if you start a company and it's super successful, it's a little bit like you start out just planting one seed and you water it and you take care of it and maybe it dies and then you learn something and then you plant another seed. And you know, eventually, if it works, you have this big farm. And then if you decide to go start a new company in an entire entirely different industry, you've been this big farmer for the past five or 10 years or eight years, and you've got this massive field, like a thousand acres of these, you know, crops that are growing like crazy. And then you go back and you're like, oh, now I got to go back to planting just one seed and then kind of like watering it all nicely and giving it the miracle grow and like hoping to God that it, you know, grows a little bit. But you can't just yell at the, you can't yell at the plant. You can't like play Beethoven music to make it grow faster, turn into a field.

1:01:51

God damn it.

1:02:37

Exactly. Was there anything when you started this company where it was a little bit like yelling at the seed to try to make like.

1:02:38

Yeah.

1:02:46

Wanting it to grow?

1:02:46

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah.

1:02:47

What was that?

1:02:49

I mean, it's like on and off all the time. Right? But, but like, look, I mean that if you do something that's very big, you strive to do big things again. And at the same time you kind of have to be. I have to be honest with myself about the path. There is like a long and arduous one. Right. Moreover, the path, as I look back to my past experience, was the fun. You know, one might think that like, it's like, well, you become successful and you're like, haha, hahaha, this feels great. This is what I was aiming for for the whole time. That wasn't really my experience. My experience was like, you get to some point of third party validated success and you're like, man, I had so much fun getting here. And the real, the pursuit of it is the joy. Yeah. The real high about all of this was when I went from not knowing and being unsure of my ideas to knowing that my ideas were right and being like, yes. Like, it's the intellectual sort of, like, journey that. That, like, in hindsight, is the thing that I've glamorized, the thing that I've, like, you know, drooled over reliving. You know, it's not the IPO day. It's the day seven years earlier when we made a breakthrough in the product. And, like, ha. Didn't know how to solve that. Didn't even know if that was the right problem to solve or if it was solvable. We did it. That's the fun stuff. And that's kind of how I think about this.

1:02:49

Right.

1:04:35

It's like. And we're kind of getting to some of those points now where I'm really excited for the summer, where hopefully this thing is up in space doing its thing, and we're like, ha, crack the nut on this one.

1:04:35

You know, if you had to think, like, forward, let's say, 12 or 24 months, and everything in your mind today for what can go right does go right. What kind of information and feedback would you like to see from these first tests and stuff? Oh, a year or two hours.

1:04:49

I think that's very dangerous thinking.

1:05:05

Why is it dangerous?

1:05:07

Because I don't think everything's going to go right. You know, I think I'm being intellectually honest. Things will go wrong. I think I actually am much more of the opinion, like, when is it going to suck? Because that tends to happen at some point in time. Right. Like, when are we going to be eight years in, on the brink of bankruptcy? Hopefully this never happens to this company, but when are we going to be in that sort of pit of sorrow where I feel my back against the wall again, and I just, like, declare to myself. I'm like, it's not over until I fucking win, you know? And, like, when is that going to happen? Because when you get to that point and you get to the other side of it, you're like, it's very difficult

1:05:08

to stop you at that point for a long time. You basically have this mission of, like, democratizing finance and making it easy for people to invest in the stock market. Have you gotten some joy in basically recreating a new narrative, a new story about what you're going to be working on and the mission that you're pursuing for kind of this next generation of who Baiju is and what you're working on?

1:05:56

Yeah, it's really fun. I would like to have several meaningful chapters in my life. Right. I mean, there was a chapter before that. Right. The chapter before that was when I was a kid growing up in like Alabama and Virginia. Right. And like pulling myself up out of poverty basically and like willing myself to go to a really, really good school to pursue physics and math, which was, which was the singular pursuit, I would say, of like the first 20, 25 years of my life. 22 maybe like it was math, physics or I didn't give a. I guess I shouldn't be sort of like it was math, physics or like working out, which I cared a lot about, or like playing in a band, which I care a lot about. But every other thing was just like complete noise to like conquering the world of business and in particular building something that was useful for millions of people. That was like a very important thing for me. This chapter of life for me is like, how can I build something that speaks to my lifelong love of science and the great beyond and make a super meaningful contribution just based technology and ideally science that it enables. And then there'll be more chapters, but you'll have to interview me in like 10 years for that.

1:06:17

I remember I was watching this, maybe 15. That's the beauty of this model is you basically do an interview as early as possible with someone working on something really hard and then you do a follow up the year after and the year after and the year after. You keep on doing this and you basically document the growth of the company and the person over time.

1:07:38

See how gray their hair goes over that time.

1:07:53

First you lose the hair slowly over preceding rounds and then eventually it all comes back and then it goes gray.

1:07:58

Yeah, yeah. There's the, there's the hair loss from the stress and then there's the hair transplant from the ipo and then there's the slow graying over time, but still with a full head of hair because you got the transplant.

1:08:04

Exactly, exactly. And eventually you go to the full blown blood boy situation just to survive as long as possible.

1:08:17

Oh yeah, that's, that's, that's the, that's the next state after that.

1:08:23

You were talking with John and Jordy from TPPN a couple days ago, I believe, and you mentioned you, you would have thought that the, like building a company the second time would be slightly easier than the first one, but I think that hasn't probably been the case. Like, it's just, I think it's probably just as hard. Even if you have resources, it's just as hard.

1:08:26

Yeah.

1:08:46

The second time, how did you kind of think about that going in? And what made you reevaluate that?

1:08:47

Look, starting a company at a small stage is, like, full of stuff not working, right? You hire two to three people to do a function, you hire one person to do a function, that one person is good, and they up and leave. And you're like, I am back to absolute square one here. And I have to, like, go and do this again. And that's not easy and it's not fun, right? Or you hire a team of people and, like, maybe there's a couple of people that aren't the right fit on it, and then you have to get rid of them. And then you have again, not enough people to do the thing that you're trying to do. And you're like, fuck. And you're like, how are we going to fix this? Well, we need recruiting. And then you're like, wait a second, we're not very good at recruiting. They're like, ugh, gotta figure that one out. By the way, I think we are pretty good at recruiting.

1:08:52

It's hypothetical.

1:09:50

So, like, that kind of stuff is. It's hard, right? It's not like I did it before. And so these problems evaporate. It's like, no, these problems are just like they were 10, 15 years ago. They're oddly similar, but, like, what's the difference? I honestly think where the first time around, some of these things would happen and they would feel existential, right? Like, oh, my God, like, what if. What if this happens, right? Like, what if this other thing happens? Like, it's going to be catastrophic. Where this time around, I'm like, nah, I'll figure it out. It's like, yeah, it's much more of, like, a lot of things with the sobriety of experience don't look catastrophic, but they look annoying or they look like a paper cut where it's like, yes, this is not good. It's a problem that has to be solved. It will take some time to solve the problem in between. We're going to have to figure it out, but we will solve it. And then guess what? We're going to have some new problem to solve and the same thing. You know what I mean?

1:09:51

Sam Altman talks about this specifically where he says, the first time you experience a company killing or an existential event, it feels like the world's falling apart and everything's going to shit. But then you survive that, and by like the sixth or seventh time, where you feel like there's this company killing existential event, it's like, well, we survived the first six, so this is probably going to be similar.

1:10:57

Yeah. And it's like the. The mental models for it are like, if you're in the middle of some catastrophic thing, which, you know, fingers crossed, never happens here, but I'm sure inevitably will at some point. And what do you do? Well, you control the things you can control, and you put one foot in front of the other, you have a realistic view on what the timeframe is for it to resolve, and then you just fucking do it. You know, like, that's. It's nothing more, it's nothing less. You just approach it with the sort of, like, calmness and the sobriety of having done it before and realizing that there is a path. Like, if you're not breaking the laws of man and you're not breaking the laws of physics, there will be a path.

1:11:16

I love the line of, if you're going through hell, just keep going.

1:12:04

Yeah, Yeah. A lot of the times the answer is not, like, the only way out is through. Right. So just go do it.

1:12:08

Yeah. You mentioned that you like, love music and you worked out a lot as a kid. Did you play any games or what? What are the favorite. Your favorite, like, games to play?

1:12:16

I love Magic the Gathering.

1:12:27

Okay, what about that?

1:12:29

I loved it as a kid. It reminds me of. I love many, many aspects of it. It reminds me of my childhood, which inherently, I think, speaks to the monkey brain in some way. I love the artwork. I love the old cards as well. I love all things 90s because it kind of. I think we were talking about this. I can't remember if it was right at the beginning of the podcast or right before about, like, what the human brain was like before every plug mobile phones. But I remember, like, the artwork from old magic cards and the way that they made me feel like I grew up pretty poor. And so I didn't have definitely not the magic card collection I do now, but I had some cards back then. Yeah. Very nerdy hobby.

1:12:30

Talk about IPO day is basically just, I get all the magic cards I wanted. Yes.

1:13:15

Give me the magic cards. No. Although I think I did have some magic cards with me on the IPO trip to New York. I'm pretty sure I did. Magic cards. Yes. I love the artwork. I also loved playing as a kid, and I rediscovered it in, like, 2015 or 2016. Somewhere in that time frame, I was actually walking around Berkeley and I walked into a game store and I was like, I remember these things. That's really fun. I was like, Maybe I'll just buy some cards. I think I still know where my cards are at home. And I started going through them and it gave me that feeling of awe and wonder as a kid. And then I started playing the game and a whole nother light bulb went off, which is this is a thing to do with people that is purely analog. And you can sit down with another person and you can engage with them and your phones are nowhere to be found. And like it's an hour of you and that person, like, engaging in an intellectual way with one another. And it's also super fucking nerdy because you're like pretending to be a wizard and casting spells. The game, I believe in my experience, the game has like a real longevity to it because the way that the game is made, it was made by a mathematician, a combinatorics mathematician. And so the game is not simple and there's always room to get better. So, like, the best people, like, have win rates of like 65, 70% against other really good people. And it kind of speaks to the fact that it's like, it's a game of skill. There's also like a randomness to it. Exactly.

1:13:19

From what I've seen, the very, like the best place I used to play magic when I was a kid, I didn't ever. I got really into catan and I have like, against people that don't really know how to play, it's probably like an 80, 90 win rate, which is very easy. But I would just like play online. But there's, there's something definitely special. Like business is not in building companies, is not. It's not guaranteed. It's, it's. And it's also fun to understand that there is risk, that there is chance on some level. But then try to understand, like, where are those points of failure? And then systematically, like eliminate or lower the probability. Like, part of the reason why, you know, a really pro magic player might have that type of win rate is because they understand their deck. Like, they've, they've, they've constructed this deck for a specific style of play. And then by the time that they're actually doing that for, I don't know, hundredth game, they know what they're doing and they kind of understand where is the risk in my deck.

1:15:05

Yeah. And they know if they lose a game where the mistake was like a basic part of this actually relates nicely to the get your failures out of the way quickly. Like a part of being successful, in my opinion, is being comfortable failing.

1:16:04

Yeah.

1:16:18

And when you play magic and especially if you're playing with decent people, like, you'll lose games pretty often. Right. And how do you respond to losing? You just, like, move on to the next one. Right. Like, you don't let it get to you. And flip side, also, if you're doing really well and you're winning game after game, you don't really try to let it get to you too much. I always like that aspect of it.

1:16:19

Do you kind of like to remove the emotionality and just kind of look at it from more of a, like, critical view of the situation and you understand that you're not going to win every single game sort of situation?

1:16:43

Yeah. And also the broad strokes, which is like, it's a Saturday. I'm chilling. I'm doing something I enjoy doing, and I'm going to be doing it for the whole day. And so just enjoy the day. Like, I love playing cards, you know.

1:16:53

Yeah.

1:17:06

And I want to win the games, but sometimes I'll lose them, and sometimes I'll be on days where I'm like, man, I just, like, you know, won five in a row or something like that. Then there'd be other days where I, like, lost five in a row and I'm like, no, it kind of sucked. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I'm like, well, I'll just do it again. Or if I feel really salty about the fact that I lost a bunch, then I'll spend a little bit more time and, like, think about it and, like, try to, like, play again relatively soon.

1:17:06

You talked a little bit about, like, Goblin mode, and some founders will go into Goblin mode for maybe even years at a time where they're just completely locked into the detriment of, you know, their family relationships or their, like, health or all these other factors. Um, but I think in order for. For most of the people that I've seen, in order to stay winning and, like, stay in the game, you kind of eventually have to go, like, maybe the early stages of a company, you have to Goblin mode it. But then eventually it flips back to, you need to prioritize some of these other things. Like, Pavel Durov did start working out. Brian Chesky works out a bunch. Like, you know, I think TVN talks, you know, John and Jordy love to talk with him about how much he's, like, lifting and what his, like, PRs are and.

1:17:32

Yeah, but those guys look like they work out, too.

1:18:13

Yeah, exactly.

1:18:16

Super tall.

1:18:17

They're super tall. John, I think, is like 6, 4,

1:18:17

6, 5, yeah, I ran into them in LA. I was like at a hotel and they were there. I was like, holy, the guys were that tall.

1:18:20

Yep. How has your thinking kind of evolved over time on what you decide to prioritize so that you can basically just design your life to stay in the game for as long as possible without having like, massive troughs of like, sorrow and, you know, discomfort?

1:18:29

Burnout.

1:18:44

Yeah, burnout.

1:18:45

It's very different for me now. I have a family. I have three boys and I have another one on the way right now. So I'm soon to be the father of four. And my boys are unbelievably fun and awesome and I love them more than I knew I had the capacity for love in my life. And so if any of them watch this in the future someday, I love you guys. And I make it a point to tell them I love them every day when I leave and every night before they go to bed. And I try to prioritize spending time with them like every day. And it like kind of comes to a head, right, because tonight there's a meeting that I kind of want to have at 5:30 here, but I want to go home because I want to exercise. I've got my workout from 5:30 to 6:30, and then right after that I'll have dinner with my family and then I'll hang out my kids, probably from 7 to 8ish, before they go to sleep. And I'm not going to compromise on that. It's not the right thing for me to do as a human being, regardless of what's going on here. And that's, that's just harder. Right. But at the same time, you know, rewind the clock. Ten years ago, like I was in the office most days until nine and I'd go home and I'd hang out my wife for a little while and I'd fall asleep and I'd wake up at seven and I'd be back in the office at eight. And that was like, that was just normal course of operating. And I'd actually work out every day at lunchtime. That was my routine. And then oftentimes I'd be like pretty sweaty for the rest of the day and just be like, yeah, you got a problem with that?

1:18:46

So there's two things there. One is Jeff Bezos's idea of like, work life harmony, where he, he talked about, you know, you don't really want balance. Like, there's no like, give or take. You really want something where the energy that you get from work and the Thing that you're doing, you know, comes home and like, has the same sort of vibe with the family, but also the fact that you have this very stable position in your house makes so you can go to work with confidence and stuff. But then the other thing too is he's got this idea of like the 10:00am meeting. And so if it's something like big decisions. Right. Like executives, the top executives at companies are basically paid to have a few right ideas or a few right decisions every year. And like, Warren Buffett would famously say that probably almost all of Berkshire's growth over time has been related to maybe like 15 decisions he's made over the last 60 or 70 years.

1:20:41

Yeah.

1:21:31

Do you ever kind of decide, you know, it's 3, 4 or 5pm and you could have. There's some big decision that you need to make. You're like, nope, I'm going to pull that off or hold that off until the next morning to decide.

1:21:31

I do that all the time. I mean, there's like a really simple thing. Right. You can just sleep on it a little bit.

1:21:44

Yeah.

1:21:50

Actually was. Was working on some stuff late last night. So, like, I was working on it from like, kids went to sleep. My wife also went to sleep kind of early. It's like sitting around like reading stuff and thinking about work stuff. And then I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna fall asleep. I'm gonna like, keep thinking about it, and then I'll actually just like, share my thoughts in the morning as opposed to like, word vomiting over a document at nighttime. Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think also kind of coming back to like the pre. Like my brain knows how to operate in the pre phone era. And it. That kind of feels analogous to that. Right. Like, you don't have to do it. Just because you have the buttons that you could press to do it right now doesn't mean you have to do it right now. Like, you can actually think about it a little bit more, see if you still feel that strongly about it in the morning. See if your ideas shifted a little bit. And, you know, oftentimes it doesn't shift at all.

1:21:50

But you gave yourself some time to decide whether, you know, have it percolate.

1:22:49

Yeah, have it percolate.

1:22:53

Interesting.

1:22:54

Slow form thinking is important.

1:22:55

Yeah. How often are your decisions kind of. Because you let that percolate, the creativity did spark and you were able to make a slightly different decision that was a better one.

1:22:56

Often we're like, yeah, those two things. But also this other One like, that's often the form it takes on.

1:23:04

Yeah.

1:23:10

And also creativity, I kind of think is. I've said this before, but, like, I've never found it possible to sit down with a sheet of paper and be like, ah, now I'm going to be creative. You know, like, that's not how it works.

1:23:11

You're just out for a walk or something and you. Something pops into your head and you're like, I need to write this down.

1:23:26

Or, yeah, I need to like, action this right now before I forget about it. But more generally speaking, my view is that the universe gives you creative ideas kind of at its own pace. The universe has its own clock where it will give you a creative idea when it decides, when it so deems that you deserve said creative idea. And so you kind of like, you need to be open to receiving them when they are, but you can't really force them. There's some ways you kind of can force them. You can load your brain up with a bunch of context and like, let it noodle it for a while. I find that actually, and I do less of it these days, but I should probably do more of it. But I used to really love the idea of, like, being in a bunch of intensive meetings and like loading my brain up with a bunch of thoughts and being like, I'll see you guys in an hour, I'm gonna go for a jog. And running is like actually a massive accelerant on creativity.

1:23:30

Interesting.

1:24:27

Because it just, when you hit that flow state of running, like running requires you to be in that flow state.

1:24:28

Yeah. It forces you to basically tune out everything else and just focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

1:24:34

And the ideas that are in your head, in my sort of simplistic way of thinking about it, they almost like line up in a line and you can pick them, you put them back, where if you're like, you know, drinking a bunch of coffee and like, you know, getting the nerd sweats or whatever, like those ideas are all mushed together.

1:24:40

Let's end on what's the hardest thing you've ever come.

1:25:00

Being overweight. I was very overweight as a kid. And when I was in 10th grade, I got teased for my weight and I took it super personally. And I proceeded to, like, at the same time I grew my hair out. I think I weighed. This is a long time ago. I think I weighed like 210.

1:25:04

But this was as a kid.

1:25:29

As a kid. And I got all the way down to like 140. I think I got into the high 130s, I lost close to a third of my body weight.

1:25:31