From space deployables to Talyn, YC and an exit
From Why Pure Software Is Uninvestable: The SpaceX & YC Way to Build Hardware on Deeptech Decoded, with Jamie Gull.
Transcript
All these other tools are better. that makes it easier. Like, you've got composites, you've got better engines, you've got better design tools. And if you think you can close the economics case, which was the hard part with Concord, with choosing the right size airframe and and use case and then all these advancements, then yeah, I think it's smart. I think it's really hard, right? Like having watched some aircraft programs that were supposed to be commercialized take drag
Hmm.
out forever and then and then die. but yeah, that was kind of my answer. And then you tried to recruit me, but I was, you know Duck at SpaceX and and Happy helped him hire one of his first engineers and we've been friends ever since. Like he's an advisor, he was an advisor to my prior company and an advisor of my fund. but that was that that watching that get built from the very early days, this was in twenty fourteen when I met
Mm.
was very, you know, helpful for me to watch that and we were in touch and see it get built. and then the other thing is like I had a bunch of friends from Stanford who were founders of like companies that everybody listening would probably know. and so they were very different world. It was all like social media or software and stuff like that. But you know watching that happen on the entrepreneurial side and like getting the wheels
Mm.
was inspiring. And so Yeah, I mean I I left in twenty sixteen after about six years and was a co-founder of a space deployables company in Denver. it's still operating. I did that for three years. the reason I left that is I was still in LA. My wife was getting her doctorate and it became kind of untenable for both me and the team to be in LA. Like it was
Okay.
it just wasn't a good fit. It was a ended up we thought it would work out and it just it wasn't smart. Like and it kind of ran know, strongly counter to my experience at SpaceX, where I was walking out to the fr the shop floor to like redline a drawing. I'm like, I'm doing engineering work in LA and then it's you know getting built somewhere else. It just it wasn't smart. so I after a few years, started another company with a friend from SpaceX. he was originally actually my intern at SpaceX and then we're calling And we started an electric aircraft company and went through Y Combinator in in twenty twenty. and then yeah, built that up to a twenty person team and we got a bunch of contracts with the Air Force and then got acquired in twenty twenty three. So we had a an an exit from that company.
