Here Come The Space Lasers - EP 62 Baiju Bhatt

You are in the new version of our studio.

Yeah, it's actually really nice in here. It's really nice in here.

We didn't have items before, and now we have— we got items. Okay, so we make a video show as well where we go all around the world. So the goal is to like get objects from people as we go and keep decorating this back wall. But there's— so you're gonna be haunted by my metal face.

Oh, and for all the shit that is haunting—

for people who are just listening, you're gonna have to— you're gonna have to go to the YouTube channel or the Substack to see what talking about. Welcome to the Core Memory Podcast, friends. This is Ashlee Vance, and I'm with Beju Bhatt. How are you?

I'm great, man. How are you?

I'm good. I'm good.

I love this neighborhood. We talked about this a little bit before.

Yeah.

Started.

Yeah. Okay. So we'll get right, super quick, just so people know. I mean, you're the co-founder of Robinhood.

Yeah.

You are now running, um, a space energy company called Aetherflux. And so this, this is some of the background. You went to Stanford, co-founded Robinhood, did that for a while, now are off in spaceland. But you were saying, so Robinhood, you, you started in this neighborhood.

We had a couple offices. Well, there were, there were many offices that led up to it, but this one was like the, this one was the, uh, this one was the important one in my opinion.

Okay.

So this was like right after, I think we, we launched the product out of that office. And I'm saying it's like literally on the corner of this building. Um, we launched the product out of that office. We did the big public release there and we, I was like 4 or 5 years there and it was like all, like, I remember that was like the really fun, exciting, Time.

Yeah.

Like that. We did options there. We, we launched crypto out of that building. Yeah. We did a bunch of stuff out of there. I, I have like such warm memories of this. I remember like we moved into that building and like we, when we first moved in, we didn't have like, they were still doing construction on it. And so this building used to be the Fry's building.

Yes. No, we're in it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I remember I remember when we first moved in, we didn't have bathrooms. So if you had to go to the bathroom, you'd have to like go run over to Fry's to use the bathroom there.

Yeah, this is hallowed ground for people. I, some people who listen will know, but we're in, we're inside of Playground Global. This is where I set up my studio. It's in Palo Alto. And yeah, this used to be a Fry's. It was, it was like the, the Silicon Valley Fry's. There was one in Sunnyvale, but this is, this was—

this one was the weird one.

Yeah.

This one was the really weird one.

If you don't know what Fry's is, you should, you should Google it and then weep that it doesn't exist They evaporated. Yeah. Yeah. They shut them all, man. It's very sad.

Yeah, that is really sad.

All right, well, let's jump into it. I, I listened to a few interviews with you. You seem like a very chill, interesting guy. There's a million different directions we could go. I'll go biographical for a minute. Your family's from India. You kind of end up in Alabama and then Virginia.

Yeah.

I think you're an only child. Yeah. Yeah. And your dad ends up at NASA Langley in Virginia. So you're kind of in this space. I guess it's in your blood a bit.

It is. I mean, my dad is, dad has been like, it's been kind of a pretty central figure in my life. So he had this dream of always wanting to study theoretical physics. Like he was always very interested in quantum gravity and Grand Unification, which I think continues to be like the holy grail of intellectual endeavors in my humble opinion. But my dad, his, um, his, my grandfather, his dad in India was one of the first Western trained eye doctors in India. So he had like an optometry practice and he was like, all of my children are going to be doctors. Right. Um, and this is in Bhavnagar in India.

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And my dad was the youngest of all of his family members, of all of his brothers and sisters, and he always wanted to study physics. So the story he tells me is, you know, he starts out undergrad doing biology and sort of creeps his way towards chemistry and then starts a PhD in chemistry and then sort of transitions to physical chemistry and then leaves that to go and join my dad, my grandfather's optometry business to do contact lens. And then he's applying to PhD programs in the US to study physics, and he's applying and he's applying and he's applying. And the story tells me is he's like, you know, he's like, I decided that I was going to be— I was going to devote myself to science. I was going to be a bachelor. And so he, he puts Kumar at the end of his name, so Prafull Kumar, which apparently means that you're going to be a bachelor. And then I think he was applying and applying and applying, kind of was like, I don't know if this is going to happen or not. Ends up getting married to my mom. And then the rapid sequence of events, as he's told me, is like, they get married, he gets into the University of Huntsville, Alabama, my mom is pregnant with me, like kind of all in rapid succession. My mom had like no interest in coming to America. She didn't speak English. She was also the youngest of like all of her siblings, and she was very, very family-oriented. She wanted to stay in like, you know, be with the family in India. And, um, she kind of got thrust into coming to America because what she tells me, she goes to the embassy and they're like, oh yeah, you were, you know, you have a, you're pregnant, you have a little boy in there. They just like stamped the visa. It's like, the little boy's going to be in America. And my mom tells me she like leaves the embassy in tears, like doesn't, doesn't want to do this. And Yeah, so I end up in Alabama and the way my parents described those first couple of years, like, oof, seemed rough.

It's gotta be just a massive shock, especially, I mean, Huntsville, I guess, is Alabama and not in some ways just because it has so much research and science going on. And so it's maybe a little less stereotypical than what people might think of, but then also plenty of—

But then again, it was the '80s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was a very different time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they were, they were probably like one of the only Indian families in the, in the city.

Yeah. They had a couple of Indian friends around. I remember the way the story my mom tells me as I was born, they knew one Indian family that were doctors in, um, in, in Warrensburg, Missouri. So right outside of Kansas City. And my mom was about to give birth to me. And so she just goes there because I don't know if they could really afford medical treatment. And so they're like, okay, we're just going to go. You're gonna give birth and just stay with the doctors that we know in America. And so, yeah. And it was pretty crazy 'cause like within the first couple of years of them coming to the US, my dad's kidneys failed.

I was, yeah, I was, I was digging in all this. I mean, and very dramatically, I mean, a multi-year, multi-year health life and death struggle.

Yeah. He was on dialysis my whole childhood. Yeah. And it was like, Yeah, it was, I didn't like, I mean, I was, I was a little kid, right? And so I kind of was like insulated from it in many ways. And my parents were, this was like kind of the thing, right? It was like my dad was very adamant. He's like, education is the way forward. He's like, education, education, education. That's, that's your path forward in life. And all, you know, kind of that plus like they would tell me, it's like, look, we're making great sacrifices to be in this country. And because they, you know, they had all this family in India, obviously, you know, they're better, well-to-do in America, but like they had like such a rich life in India and they're like, we're, you know, kind of making a sacrifice to be here. Um, and so that was like kind of, as I got a little bit older, you know, cause education was kind of like the thing that I kind of anchored myself on. So I do really well in school. That's kind of like my path.

I wanted to ask you about this 'cause I, I heard you talk about it, uh, and I found it unfulfilling on a couple levels. I mean, so you were saying it, my sense was like you were, you were not like an academic all-star until you made, you flipped this switch in your head. What, what age did that lesson click?

Oh yeah, we're gonna get right into it.

Right.

So this was like, um, it's a, it's a pretty, it's like probably one of the defining moments of my life. So my dad, His kidneys failed pretty soon after, um, come to the US and he gets a job at Langley, NASA Langley, working as a scientist. And it was really good cuz that was like how they were paying for all the medical bills. And my dad was on dialysis my entire childhood. So I remember there's like the big dialysis machine that my dad would have to, you know, use every night. And then when I was in 8th grade, my dad's kidney disease kind of took a turn for the worse. So he had some sort of infection of his inner stomach cavity, which just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And then at some point, you know, he had to stop working and then he just went to the hospital. He was in the hospital for a long time and had like multiple medical procedures where they kind of like, you know, did big surgeries on him to try to save him from this. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, holy shit, like, you know, I'm only child, like, I, you know, God forbid the worst happens. Like, what the heck am I going to do? You know, and like, even as such, like, we were pretty poor family in Southern Virginia, which is to say, we, you know, like, it's not the wealthiest part of the world to begin with. And I'm like, I kind of convinced myself during this period of time that I'm like, if I do really, really well in school, like, that, that'll be like my path to, to stay, you know, even if the worst happens to my dad. Which, by the way, he's healthy and happy, and I'm gonna see him probably 2 days from now. Um, so just want to, I don't want to make it sound too grim, but like, I remember during that time I was like, kind of flipped the switch where I'm like, I have to do really fucking well in school because that's how I get to stay in America, basically.

And so like, I mean, clearly you're a bright guy. You just were not— you were what? I mean, what were you doing before that? You were just not super driven? You're kind of phoning it in or not?

You know, I like, I did okay in school before that. I remember I took the one thing that felt like kind of a gut punch to me right before that and was like 7th, 6th or 7th grade. I took the PSATs and I remember I did not do very well on that. And And that was like the first time where it was like, Biju, you, you are not growing up in an English-speaking family. Like your vocabulary is like super, super set back.

Yeah.

Because I didn't learn English until I was like 4 or 5 years old. Like I learned Gujarati with my mom and the two of us learned English together watching TV. Okay. So I remember before that kind of just like not having a ton of confidence in my academic abilities. And then when I entered high school, like right as my dad, you know, that really bad turn in his health kind of takes, he ends up recovering from that and he recovers from that. And I remember he gets a kidney transplant within a few months of that. They were like, give this man a kidney. Yeah. For goodness sake. Um, and then when I get to high school, the, like the, the switch flipped where I'm like, I'm going to be very, very, very dedicated to schoolwork. And I remember thinking math was— math in particular was like very challenging. And at some point it stopped being challenging. I kept like doing it enough where it started coming naturally to me. And it kind of taught me this thing where if you don't understand something very well the first time, you can just try to learn it again. And like every time you learn a difficult concept, like you learn it once, You put it down, you learn it again, you put it down, you learn it again. Every time you learn it again, there's like some part of the thing you didn't understand that starts to feel intuitive. So the next time you go back to it, you're like, okay, I kind of believe that, that I believe my understanding of that thing. And you can kind of build and build and build on top of that.

I'll ask you a question that's not terribly novel, but I wonder if you, you think about this as you, as you're like starting a family and, and everything. I mean, you know, I grew up. My, my dad was a lawyer for Exxon. We were quite— we were well, you know, well off, fine, um, not terribly, uh, I would say kind of like challenged, um, as a human. And, and then my parents both had cancer when I was in my teenage years, and my mother's cancer was quite, um, quite bad. And so, you know, I remember that being this massively, um, having this kind of huge impact on me in the moment of, of, uh, like it, there were a couple times when it seemed like she, she was not gonna make it. And, and then, you know, it's kind of funny cuz I always felt like I was, uh, I was bright, but I, you know, I did fine at school, but I was never like, um, someone who was just really dedicated to like, you know, to, to school. And, and this is, I was just gonna do everything possible to do well. And, and it's not like that switch flipped, but I, I feel like this, all this stuff that happened. Me as a kid kind of then had these knock-on effects later, right? Like you sort of want to sharpen the steel a little bit and build your character through these events. I think about this all the time because it's like, as a parent, you want to make— you don't want to make life easy for your kids, but you don't want them to suffer either, right? And you don't like actively seek out tragic events to—

You don't want to make it fake hard for them.

Right, right. And I don't know what the answer— you know, I write all these books about people, and there are some common themes that seem to occur, and difficult childhoods are often one of them. And you know that as a parent, you're like, you're like, what are you supposed to do, man? Are you supposed to— you're supposed to torture these kids just to kind of sharpen them and give them this character? But you know, having gone through—

Have you figured it out?

No, not at all. And then this is like something, you know, you just kind of continually battle with. I'm not sure there's a right answer on this. I just, I write enough about, um, fairly eccentric, overachieving, um, exceptional people. And, and they're really, there does seem to be, you know, it's not totally universal, but it's, it's pretty, it's fairly close in some ways.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's at least for me, right? It's like the biggest challenge, like the biggest sort of The biggest competition, the biggest sort of like struggle that I'm over trying to overcome is usually internal, right? It's like me versus my own perception of what I think I can do or what's possible.

Yeah.

And I've kind of, so on the kid side, I don't, I don't know that I've got an answer to that. I think that the place that I've kind of landed is, is like my kids are going to have totally different upbringing than me. And rather than trying to pattern match to something that I went through, it's like, be honest with the situation, right? They're well-to-do kids. They're going to have access to a lot of opportunities and kind of tell them like, whatever you do in life, um, I wonder if they'll listen to this someday. Um, whatever they do in life, right? Like, just make sure you try to be the best at it. It doesn't matter what you do. Just try to strive for the best that you can possibly be at it. And I think that that's, you know, you can do that without a ton of struggle too, right? Like there's a lot of examples of like lots of scientists that are like the children of successful people, right? So like you can, I don't think you have to go through trial by fire to end up with the drive.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think there's at least optimist, the optimist in me hopes that that's no, no, I think there's, I think there's, you don't have to have just like a shitload of tragedy.

There's this book, The Hintons and the Bulls. Um, I think that's what it's called. It's, it's about these two families that are just academically and, and like worldly exceptional for centuries, you know, and they are quite well off and privileged and going to like Oxford and Cambridge and all these things. And Geoff Hinton is one of, of these.

Oh, is he?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, they like, you know, there's somebody who invents everything from like the playground to GDP to the tesseract. I mean, it just, it goes, it goes on and on and on. Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a little dry, uh, but I think about 5 people have read it, which is sad, but it's, uh, it's fascinating.

Um, the Bernoullis were like that too, right? There was like generations of Bernoullis that were prominent scientists.

Yeah, yeah, it's wild. This, for this family is incredible. I recommend people at least, at least go to Wikipedia. You can just by clicking on their names, you can keep going down this rabbit hole for hours.

How many How many generations does that go back?

I mean, it's, it goes back to, to the mathematician Boole, right? I mean, it's, it's like we're talking 300 years or so, I think.

Yeah. All right. Kiddos of mine, if you're listening someday, strive for that.

So you end up applying to Caltech, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, and I think that's it.

Yeah, that's right.

Right. So you're, so there's gotta be like some measure of confidence that you've done some exceptional things in high school to feel like that can be your short list of, of where you're going to apply.

That was my optimistic list. I applied early to all of those.

Okay.

And so, you know, Stanford was the one that if I got in was binding.

Was binding. So, but I've just been going through this process with my son, and when I heard your list, I was like, okay, this dude, this dude was feeling, he was feeling it right there. Yeah. So what, what had you done in high school? I, I'm assuming you did fine on the SAT, you had good grades. Like, had you, what had you gotten into in high school that made you feel, um, this, this confidence going in.

Yeah, I was really into science, so I worked a couple of summers at this place called, um, Jefferson Lab. You know about this? It's a particle accelerator.

I do a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

I worked there, I did some research, um, published that, sort of like was on the science talent search sort of track. Um, I was also very driven at math and physics. Very, very, very driven at math and physics. And I knew, um, when I kind of discovered that love, when I kind of realized that I could do— that if I just tried really hard, I could do well at math and physics, and that it was actually kind of hard for everybody, but if you just kept trying, you would get better and better at it— that was kind of the thing that motivated me to go down that path. And also growing up around my dad's love of it was like very infectious, right? So like, he was very interested in the idea of grand unification, the idea of quantum gravity, and had his own sort of take on like why others might have been wrong about their take on quantum gravity. And kind of growing up around that, I was like— I remember the first time I kind of thought about this, I was like, is there, is there a theory of everything? Like, could, you know, could that actually be a thing? And if that is, like, What, what else in this world could possibly be worth understanding if not that? Like, that seems like the most interesting thing you could possibly study. And so that was kind of like the, the passion that took me to physics, but like what, what gave me the confidence to do that? I did really well in school and high school, right? I was like, okay, I actually, this is, I think one of the first examples of like a thing that. As I reflect back now, this is actually one of the first examples of a thing that I learned about myself, that if you just set the goalpost, like, arbitrarily ambitious, right?

Yeah.

You might, you probably end up doing it. Like, if you just want to do the really, really, really ambitious thing, which in that case was like, why can't I get into one of the best schools? Like, why not? I'm like very good at school already. Like, why can't I go to Stanford? And granted, in the high school that I went to, I don't think that anybody had ever gotten into Stanford. Little town, a little, a little high school called Pocosen High School, which I have extremely fond memories of. Um, but I'm like, why can't I do this?

But you didn't, you didn't tuck a safety school in there.

Well, I was going to apply to a ton of schools if I didn't get in. Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah. And so I got, I think I got, um, waitlisted at Harvard. I think I got waitlisted at MIT, which means basically just chuck you back into the general pool. And I got into Caltech and Stanford, and Stanford was binding, and I'd never been out here before. I was like, all right, here we go. We go on, you know, the website and buy a hoodie.

Yeah. All right. I'm going to ask this next question with— comes from a place of respect, and I'll ask it, but this is not meant to be mean-spirited or anything. No, I'm just not into finance. Tech. I never have been. I'm into machines and engineering and all this stuff. And clearly, look, Robinhood worked out okay for you. So, so God bless. But, you know, you're this kid who's into math and physics. It's obviously a calling. It's a passion. Clearly you're coming back to it in life. Did you not— when you start your Stanford and you're starting to do stuff in finance and then you're having the idea for Robinhood. I mean, were there, were you, were there questions about, is this the best way to, to use my brain and spend my time?

I mean, at some level. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my, my love of physics and math is like, you know, that's been like the intellectual North Star my whole life. And I remember when I first, when I was graduating from Stanford, um, with my master's in math, I was like, am I going to apply to PhD programs? Like, what am I going to do? And this was right before the 2008 sort of like collapse. And I remember around that time my dad was like, you know, like you should start looking for a job. Like you have, you know, like a big student debt situation. Like, you know, we, you know, and like you should start making some money., and I was like, frankly, I was like, fuck, I don't want to be an academic. And so I started applying for jobs and I'm like, well, I'll apply for jobs and maybe I'll do that for a year. And there was just a lot of economic uncertainty and my dad was kind of like, you should take a serious look at getting a job because there was a chance that he was going to lose his job. Um, so I think I went into the idea of getting a job very begrudgingly. And I also pretty quickly realized that I had basically no marketable skills, which was—

I was a philosophy major. I understand this feeling. Yeah.

I remember I like, I interviewed at like Apple, I interviewed at Google and I just got, I just got the door fucking slammed in my face. Like you're, we're not hiring you. Like, and the big thing then was I was like, well, I'm a mathematician and I know physics., but they're like, these are software jobs. And I'm like, I probably should have taken some software classes at Stanford. And I just remember when I was applying to these jobs, like I did not know how to write code. Like I just never really studied it. And I was the kid in, at Stanford. I was like, I'm here to study physics and math. And I'm pretty sure that I can learn the rest of this stuff on the job or at later point in life, but I'm not going to get a chance to learn foundational physics and math, but from like the greatest sort of students of this in the world, which are at Stanford, the professors at Stanford. And so I was like, I was, how to say it, I feel like I was a bit of an intellectual snob in that regard. And I probably should have like applied for more jobs. But yeah, so that's kind of how I ended up applying to a bunch of jobs. I was like getting turned down a bunch. I ended up getting a job in finance in in Marin. And I remember I was like, okay, like, do I— how do I feel about this? Like, do I care about this? Do I not care about this? And I remember pretty early on, um, it did capture my imagination, and I'll try to explain why I found it intellectually interesting. A part of studying math and physics is the number of people that understand what you're doing, the number of people that care, As you get deeper and deeper down the research rabbit hole, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so there was the distinct feeling that I was kind of wrestling with, which was like, I don't know that I'm doing something that's super relevant for the world if I'm going to go down the academic route. Because if you're studying, I was like very interested in this topic called algebraic geometry and in particular, like the you know, the, the zero sets of complex, you know, complex polynomial equations, like what higher dimensional sort of shapes look like and stuff like that. But I was like, who the fuck knows what this is or cares? Or like kind of thinking to myself, like, is this ever going to be relevant for humanity? Like, might this be relevant in 100 years, 200 years? Like, what is the, what is the point of this? And I remember getting into finance and kind of doing that in the beginning and realizing that I kind of saw the parallels between concepts that I'd learned in physics and these concepts in the markets. And, and the one that I think really was the first one that captured my imagination was the idea of degrees of freedom.

Okay.

Right. Because if you think about the idea of like the stock market as emergent phenomenon, versus the sort of primordial interactions, right? The primordial interactions are like buy and sell orders, right? And you put a market order, a limit order, a buy, replace, cancel orders, right? And you have each individual market participant, which, you know, has its own set of agendas. Like some people are, you know, you know, they're doing arbitrage. Other people are sort of doing long-term investing. Other people are doing statistical arbitrage, so on and so on, right? And each, each person is doing, or each, you know, market participant is doing these like little primordial interactions with it. But the emergent phenomenon is the stock price. The emergent phenomenon is like the market as a whole. And as you, as you have more and more people doing it, like you can't, you stop being able to draw a direct through line between the emergent phenomenon and these individual interactions. Which is very similar to statistical mechanics, right? Like, if you— the example, the obvious one is like grains of sand falling down from like an hourglass, right? Like, how do you explain that shape of like the little— the way the sand slides down?

Sure.

And so kind of that was, I think, one of the, the first times where I was like, oh, interesting. Like, this is— I can kind of use the physics brain that I have to think about this. On top of that, this is relevant for people. And I, and I kind of realized that that was like this thing that I was really craving and that I, that I didn't feel like I had really any exposure to academically. And so I think that was the thing that, that sort of sparked my love of it.

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My journey through building Robinhood was, was very focused around the products, right? And like, Why do people use these? Like, why is this useful for people? Like, what is the— how do you build something that— and this is kind of like the big intellectual question, right? It's like, how do you as a person come up with something that millions of people find useful? Like, that as an intellectual challenge felt utterly insurmountable. Like, because if you think about that, right, it's like the, the world is a very efficient place and we all have things that we're doing in our lives and use cases and the way technology fits in. And like, how the heck are you ever gonna find something that like is a big missing need for tons and tons of people? Okay. Yeah.

Well, I wanna ask you a question about that. I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna warn people, we're not gonna go Robinhood heavy on this podcast. Like when I looked at some of your other interviews, that was like, there were huge spikes every time you talked about Robinhood. So maybe that's right. Yeah. Maybe I'm self-defeating here, but, but you know, I'm very proud of the company. No, no, no. I, I just mean I'm more, I'm more space land than, than finance land.

So you and me both at this point.

It's just, it's just kind of where my, my head goes. But I did, I did, you know, so if you go back, you got 2008 financial crisis, you've got Occupy Wall Street, people are angry at, at the banks being bailed out. They're angry at the greed. They're angry at a lot, you know, the, the whole situation. And then I have to confess, I mean, I obviously I know what Robinhood is, all this stuff. I again just don't use these things on like a day-to-day basis. So some of this is coming from a position of naivete. But, you know, things like I have been in the stocks my whole life. And so it's like, you know, we'd gone through this era where, where the cost of trades had just been going down towards zero for a long time. E-Trade, you know, decades before was kinda like pioneering some of this stuff. And so like when Robinhood comes out, I actually do not, I mean, I have a, I have like a anecdotal sort of visceral sense of why it took off. But was it in this moment? It gets pitched as like you were creating a trading app for the people and, and you know, so, coming out of the financial crisis, the common man, the common person had been trod on. But then I was trying to wrap my head around this too, 'cause it's like, oh, but you could trade for anyone who had money could get on and like trade on a brokerage account. It wasn't all that hard beforehand. What was, what was the thing that made Robinhood take off?

Yeah.

I mean, I, because, you know, in just context for people, I mean, you guys were offering like free, free Through trades, zero commission trades. Yeah. And, and a really polished app and like kind of, I would say like, like a mo, you know, a modernized—

It was a very different take of what, what investing in the stock market looked and felt like. The—

Are these questions offensive?

No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. I'm just kind of gathering my thoughts here a little bit. The thing that was, this kind of comes back to what I was saying a second ago. Like my love of doing that fundamentally was about like a love of understanding how people think about these things. And so I, you know, in the process of kind of figuring out this idea of product market fit, like how do you build something that people find useful, right? Like how do you do that? Like what does it even, you know, cause is it just like, oh, I had a good idea and because I think it's a good idea, other people are going to think it's a good idea. I don't, I never found that it really worked like that. And what was a pretty early lesson for me was, 'cause we, when we started the company, one of our first investors was Google Ventures. And I remember early on I was very interested in design. Like that was the part of it that I wanted to get good at. 'Cause I had a huge love of Steve Jobs. Like Steve Jobs was my idol as an entrepreneur. And I'm like, man, that guy did amazing stuff with design. Like how did he come up with these products that people loved? And in those early conversations with Google Ventures, they were like, you should talk to customers, like you should interview the people that are going to use your products because there might be a pretty big gap between how you think people are going to use it and how other people are actually going to use it. And I think finance is this thing that really puts that in utter and complete focus because the way that people use financial products, if you've got a lot of money, Totally different than how the ordinary person does it. I contrast that with something like Google Maps, right? If you're Bill Gates and you're using Google Maps, probably the same as you or I or the average person on the street, right? You have to like figure out where you're trying to go, type in the name of the place and you just go there. Or Gmail, right? And if you're a super wealthy person, you might have more emails in your inbox, but you're still using Gmail probably, or Apple Mail or one of these things like they're, the product doesn't look and feel fundamentally different based on your life circumstances. Finance, totally different. And what I remember thinking was, and using all the products around the time, is like, these are really targeted for people that are at or around retirement age. Like that's kind of what the value proposition of these were. And I remember looking at the kind of people that use the stock market before Robinhood, and it was an older demographic of Americans, and it was usually sort of upper middle class, like kind of not quite the people that were using the wealth management, high net worth people, but the upper middle class people. That's kind of who it was targeted at. And I remember thinking to myself, there's a reason young people don't use this stuff. Like it doesn't really fit the needs that young people have. And like, well, how do you do that? So what we did early on, and I, this was the part that I really loved, is we would take the prototypes of the products that we build, and we would go and interview an audience of people that were just not really spoken to by the financial markets. Like we would actually go to Stanford campus on Saturday mornings and go hang out outside of the coffee shop and recruit college students and be like, how would you use this? Like, what part of this is useful for you? And the stuff that kind of came through that was in retrospect, a very big deal was like when you had an account minimum, right? It's like you had to have $5,000 to get started. That was a pretty huge intellectual burden for people because it's the idea of like they don't really know if they want to do this or not. And then you make the gravity of the decision of whether you should invest in the stock market get that much heavier by being like you have a minimum before you get started. Yeah. Or the idea of like having to pay a commission every time you trade, which was like actually a pretty big, big deal for people. Even if you look at it, it's like, well, what's, you know, $5 or $10 here or there, which is kind of what the commissions were back then. It was a big deal for people and it was like the thing that made them think twice about whether they wanted to do it or not. And so kind of systematically understanding the sort of preferences and like how younger people or younger generation of people would think about this. And building the product for that audience of people with the kind of thesis that if you can make something culturally relevant for young people— this is my viewpoint— if you can make something culturally relevant for young people, it's actually the burden of the rest of society to understand why it's cool.

Okay.

Right. Like, young people are the ones that are the tastemakers in our society. And so, like, really focusing on that as the product was emerging from nothing was was what the strategy was. Okay. And also that was a fundamentally underserved audience and one that we were like, if we want to change the trajectory of how people on the whole think about money, which was another big part of this, was like young people. I remember at the time it was not cool to, to be on top of your finances. Like there was like a sort of you're like you know, it's like, well, I don't care about that stuff, was kind of like a badge of pride. I remember thinking to myself, the fuck is that about? Like, that's— it's not cool to not know what you're doing, especially when it's about you. You got to take care of yourself. Yeah, right.

Yeah. I think my perspective is all skewed. My dad had me trading stocks when I was like 8 years old.

Oh, did he?

Like, tell me about IRAs and things. So I think I probably— yeah, I think I'm messed up.

So those are, yeah, those are some of the thoughts going into it.

Okay.

My mom actually was the one that got me into investing.

Yeah. Yeah. When you were a kid?

No, a little bit older, like in college.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. My dad was cool, man. He, he would let me buy with my allowance, like 1 or 2 shares or partial shares, you know, and we would just keep track of it on paper. And just because for some of the reasons you outlined, I couldn't have my own brokerage account and buy these, these small, chunks of things, you know, cuz if you bought one share of whatever and you're paying this, this $12, $15 commission on it, it was, it was a massive percentage of that share that you were buying. So he would let me buy. Exactly. He should have, he, he was on the, he was on this early, man. He, the, so he would let me buy them and then I remember every 3 months I would go and tabulate all my dividends and come back to him and he'd pay me out. Yeah. Those. Yeah.

It's, Yeah. I mean, that's very cool. I kind of looking back on where the impact of like the thing that they created today, it's like there's a complete vibe shift amongst the younger demographic, right? Like people care about their finances. And I think that's a good thing. Okay.

This is my other, my last, my last possibly hostile question. I think when I—

Dude, I've gotten way more hostile questions than that.

When I, you know, same thing when I was going through some of your other interviews and, and then I hopped down into the YouTube comments, which was always a dangerous place to go.

Oh, Jesus.

And you know, no secret that, that during, during the whole meme stock GameStop era, people got really upset because you had this, this group of people that were trying to fight for the, the common man again and, and take down the hedge funds and the short sellers and everything with GameStop. And, and they felt like they were having a moment there and, and you guys paused trading and for a couple of days, I think. And, and yeah, so it was like this thing that, that you guys had kind of pitched as being for the common person was now it felt like it was being turned against them a bit. And so, yeah, I saw you on the Sean Ryan podcast and he went into this a little bit and then the comment is just riddled with people being like, he didn't explain the GameStop saga, you know, satisfactorily. And I obviously you guys were going through this big, I mean, it was like a black swan type event. So you got to manage the having enough money to backstop all this stuff. You've got to manage the technology and then you've got to manage the PR consequences of all of this as well. But I felt like obviously it kind of dinged you guys with a certain group of people that, you know, like a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And probably sugarcoat that at all.

Yeah. And ones that had actually been Robinhood, you know, inclined. So the— yeah, I don't know. Well, so the, the commenters were obsessed. They felt like didn't get into that enough. You, I, I felt like you addressed it. I mean, you describe it as this very difficult moment. You'd been pulling back from the co-CEO role a bit and yeah, like a month or two before. Yeah. So, so, so Vlad, the, your co-founder, he's in, he's in the thick of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So really rough.

I mean, so what's your, what's your take? I mean, was that, was that hard to see this thing you'd built? I, I guess the other knock sometimes is I, people feel like it's like the gamification of finance a bit and, and getting people, um, maybe to like be gambling, you know, more than their resources might allow. Um, yeah. I mean, how do you, how have you processed all this stuff?

Well, I mean, looking back on it now, which luckily we can look back, I think it was like 5 years ago, a couple of days ago.

Yeah.

Um, you know, we had spent the better part of our adult lives at this point, like on this mission to democratize finance for people. And to end up in that situation where like, as we had kind of brought this thing to the mainstream, this like, you know, once in a generation event happens where like the way I kind of reflect on it looking back is like all— there was a few forces that were on an absolute collision course, right? One was like internet meme culture, which like we, you know, we, we can't control that. Like we have. That's like a, that's like a thing that's happening on Reddit. Like there's, there's no way you can put any kind of bounds on that. Like, and we're not running Reddit, right? We have, it's like on another platform that that's happening. And at the same time, there was like all of like, people were in a shoebox for a couple of, like the better part of a year at that point with COVID and just sort of like everything that was happening on the internet was just getting exploded up.

Yeah. We didn't know anything else to do, man.

Yeah. And that all that stuff on a collision course with like capitalism basically. And we were unfortunately right at the center of that. And I remember when it was happening, right? Like our focus was on how do we, how do we like do the right thing here and how do we survive this situation? Because it was extremely taxing on, you know, like from the financial side of the business to the technology side of the business.

Like you guys needed money to cover these trades. I mean, this is why you, you had to pause.

Yes.

Yeah.

Um, and there were all these conspiracy theories that were happening. And at some point it was like, like the conspiracy theories have kind of cemented themselves in reality and the number of, like, regardless of how much we push back on it, people just don't believe us. We're like, well, what do you do in that situation? Right. And it was kind of the realization that it was going to be a long slog. To get back, right? It was going to be a long time before this thing turned around. Um, which, I mean, as a person that was one of the two creators of this thing, right? It was brutal personally. Um, but it was also one of those moments where it's like, we have to, like, we have to fix this. We have to like bring this thing back. Like we have to do what it takes, even if it takes a long time to do it. And I remember I, you know, I was like, all right, like I just stepped back, but like, there's no way in the world that I can't not be spending 100% of my time focused on this thing. This is like, this is my life's work at this point, right? It's incredibly important that we get this thing back and like, make sure people understand, like we're doing this to, again, that was like the North Star for us always. It's like, why does this company exist? It's the mission. Democratize finance for people, right? And it was a very simple and kind of pure thing, right? It's like, as long as we're doing that and we're giving people access to it, over time people are gonna realize that that's the real, real reason that we're doing this stuff. There's not other reasons behind this.

Is it annoying to have to, you, you might have to answer questions like this for a very long time.

No, I don't really care. I mean, look, it happened. It, it was a At the time it was, um, I mean, it was just like overwhelming. Like the amount of negativity was overwhelming. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, do you use the product? Do you like, do you realize you're not paying commissions anymore? Like, how do you think that happened? Like, who do you think did that? Yeah. Right. It's like, yeah, we're not perfect, but like, how can you not look at the volume of what we've done? And, and just think we're horrible because of this one day.

It's a revolution, man.

Yeah. Um, but it was, yeah, it was, it's kind of wild. It's 5 years ago at this point, right? It, from my perspective, it both feels like yesterday and 20 years ago at the same time.

I mean, it launched like, at least I remember there were about 6 movie pitches within like a week of this happening and, and books like Ben Mezrich somehow, you know, uh, I don't think he Probably does as much reporting as I pride myself on doing. He seems to turn these books around pretty quick. Um, you know, did you, did you read any of these books? Did you watch any of the movies? Nope. None of them. Nope. Nope.

I have no interest in that. Like, I live the real version of it. I don't need to live, I don't need to see the fictitious versions of it. But I remember as this was happening afterwards, I'm like, you know, various people on our team are like, there's a book being written, there's a movie being written, there's another book being written. The first couple of times you just get like, You know, like heart palpitations, like, holy shit, what are they going to like, what fictitious version of this is going to show up? And are we going to have to defend ourselves against some fictitious version of what happened here? And then at some point you're like, you know what? You can't control the internet. People are going to do what they're going to do. We're going to control what we can control. And that, you know, it's like at some, at some level, I feel like I kind of left that situation. With a level of zen.

Yeah. Well, I mean, cuz you're about to get social, you could get Social Networked, you know, pretty, uh, I mean, we, you did, you did. Although, you know, Social Network is one of these movies that's entered the cultural pantheon and well, that movie was good. Right, right. That's what I mean. And the, the, the GameStop ones felt like they, they clearly did not. Yeah.

I feel like I could poop on those movies. Yeah.

They, the funny, I remember, um, there's not, how do you know they're not good if you don't watch them?

Yeah. I actually don't know. I have no idea. I remember the Dune The dude that played me, I remember hearing that he like, he didn't actually grow his hair out.

Okay.

And it was a wig, which I just want you to, here, pull on it. This is real.

I appreciate it.

This is completely real.

Um, okay. Um, and okay.

So yeah, I mean, I think on this kind of bookend this, right? I think there's, there's like, I don't know if there's a super like one-line satisfactory answer.

Yeah.

Like it was a difficult thing.

Yeah. Yes. Um, okay. So you, you come out of that and then you're, this is like a return to his roots. I was thinking about your story a little bit. There's another guy who I'm familiar with who had a very successful finance tech exit and then got into space, you know, and so you're kind of following this Muskian path a little bit. Well, let's— so tell me, tell me that what's happening coming out. You're already, you're already pulling back a bit at Robinhood. You clearly were starting to think about maybe the next chapter of your life. And, and so yeah, walk me through this path. You get through this crisis now, and then I assume you get to regroup again and—

Yeah, I mean, there was years and years of rebuilding.

Yeah.

Right. And so I left Robinhood full-time, like February, March of '24. It's almost 2 years ago now.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Still on the board, still involved with the company. But I, like, my journey into this was like back in like 2010, 11, 12. Um, I remember just being very, very interested in doing something, one, energy related and two, space related. Like I remember back then there was this idea of like, I remember reading in the wee hours that Vlad and I would stay up like writing code, reading about people that were like, doing helium-3 mining on the moon and being like, whoa, like, why do you need helium-3? It's like, oh, and the people doing fusion and these sort of like frontier tech things. And at the time, having a physics background, I'm like, I don't know how much of this stuff is like actually doable versus I kind of put in the bucket of like the string theory bucket where it's cool ideas, but nothing material is going to materialize in your lifetime. And I remember just being like, man, if I ever get a chance to do a space company, like that, that's something I'd really like to do., and also watching, um, SpaceX try to launch and land rockets and just watching that with a level of fascination and being like, oh my God, is this actually going to happen? The other part of this also was that book, The Case for Mars, which I'm sure you've read.

Right, super into that.

Yeah, that book left a very, very big impression on me. And even as recently as like, you know, 2 or 3 years ago, like I would, give that out as like required reading for people at Robinhood because I just love the idea of it so much and the sort of like engineering approach to space exploration versus the government approach to space exploration and kind of the, the idea that there were some connecting threads between what we did with sort of bringing capitalism to the masses and that there was this important role that capitalism needed to play in the space industry to sort of get it unstuck and kind of asking myself, like, is there a commercial thing that people haven't really thought about in space yet? Where if you look at it from components and first principles, it's doable, right? One of the thoughts that I kind of had going into this was like, if I wanted to do something space-related, I was not interested in a science project. Like I did not want to do a science project because I, while it's interesting, I think it's the dream was to try to do something commercial. Cause if you could do something commercial, I could, if I did something commercial, I could kind of take the, and the engineering and the business mind that I developed, you know, in the ensuing 15 years since I graduated, plus the fact that I loved and understood physics to like break ground and the idea was if you could make something that's commercial in space or a new application for space that's commercial, we, I could have a similar impact on that industry that I did to finance. And in that, I mean, a generation of young people were, went from thinking finance was not cool to being like, oh, not only is this interesting, but maybe I wanna work in this industry. There's a lot of good jobs there.

Yeah. Arguably even more possibly because I mean, space remains a terrible commercial exercise in many, many ways. You know, rockets, rockets is about the worst business you can be in. SpaceX is clearly the best at it. I'm still not even like fully convinced that they make that much money from the rocket launches themselves. You know, Starlink is really sort of this miraculous revenue generator for them and one of the biggest businesses in space. You've got imaging satellites, which is like a pretty good business. It's like, you get the spooky stuff, you got the spooky, but you know, so that's still clearly you have, you've got all the like government. I mean, it's still the government will pay for things. Scientists will pay for things. Then you've got communications and imaging and then the list starts to run out very, very quickly of like, okay, we're in this new era. Rockets are cheaper than ever before. Satellites have finally kind of entered the consumer tech wave where you can make cheaper satellites and they can do all kinds of, you know, the economics are, are changing. Um, you've got way more rides to space than you've ever had before, so you, you can actually get up there on a decent timeline. Um, if you, you got two this year, two launches for you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I want to get in all this, but you know, it's, it's been— I wrote a book that's called like When the Heavens Went on Sale. I mean, it's the rise of commercial space, but it's been frustrating because it's, it's like, what are the— there's this feeling we're in like this internet, you do with era, right, where it's like you're— we're building the infrastructure, we're giving you all the tools, but it's like, what do you— yeah, what do you do with it? And so people for a long time have talked about we're going to grow new kinds of chemicals and pharmaceuticals in space because a lack of gravity lets you arrange molecules in interesting ways. Space data centers have been around for a long time. Suddenly they're in vogue again as an idea. And then, and then energy, you know, has been energy, manufacturing. Oh, there's all these fascinating ideas, but clearly hard things to do, hard things to get off the ground, hard to build a proper business around it. So Aetherflux fits into this energy category. And so I love it because it's like this new— this is this new avenue we could be pursuing. And clearly energy is a big, massive business. So I just, I just like this. I like the, like, It's not imaging, it's not communications. We're heading somewhere new with like a real proper business. So that part I'm so into. Explain.

That was kind of the idea.

Of why it would be interesting. And same thing, like you said, I mean, I'll shut up here in a second, but this is kind of my, I spent years on all this stuff.

No, dude, you're, I love hearing you talk about this. Like you're, you're like a, I was kind of fanboying on you when I walked in here, right? Like your take on this stuff is super interesting.

Oh man, that's very, super kind of you. I mean, we had this awesome era where old space had gotten so boring. So if you were a 20-something-year-old coming out of one of these schools, it's like, do you want to go work at Boeing or Lockheed, or do you want to go work at like Google and Facebook and make some money and, and do stuff, you know? And then SpaceX changed that clearly. And you have this like golden era decade of, of now there's like cool rocket companies you can go work at. But I've always worried, it's like, it's like kind of like what's next? Because if we don't make money from this stuff, if, you know, all the energy gets sucked out and you lose young people. So this, you know, when you were talking about that, it was like, this feels like the moment where we need to see if these things check out.

Yeah.

So, so tell me, I mean, I get the basic, I'll do a bad job explaining it and then turn it over to you, but you've got the Sun, you know, this massive energy source that's kicking off all kinds of light and good of things that we can harness. And so you want to put something in space to try to gather up a lot of this light that you can. And then, and then you guys are trying to essentially with like lasers, I think, channel that energy, send it back to Earth where you can shove it into some solar arrays and then a battery and have kind of like energy on demand wherever you put these, these battery systems, whether they're relatively small for maybe like a military, um, that's out in the field, it needs energy on the fly, or obviously you can, I'm sure, make 'em bigger and bigger and bigger and sort of have like a central thing. Um, but yeah, can you explain how Aetherflux works?

Yeah. So first kind of starting out with the idea. So the idea was around building an energy company in space and well, why, why, why that sort of like simple description, but why does it matter? Because a decade ago, the idea was to build a finance company on mobile, right? So in both cases, the idea is there's this emerging platform and the thought process is like, what are, what is a vertical of the economy that doesn't yet natively exist on this platform? And if you could do that, like there's, there's a huge opportunity if you could make it work. It's like an entire industrial sector on a new platform., and I was kind of thinking about like, well, what are these applications for space that people have not thought of yet where the component technology is there, right? Because you could definitely imagine use cases for space, which are just science experiments for a decade, two decades. My thesis was that the energy industry was kind of ready for, for space. One, because if there's going to be any economy in space, you're going to have to have energy as a component. Number one. Number two, the component technologies, in particular solar, like we're kind of, we're kind of building on the work of generations and generations of work to get the cost and the efficiency of solar to the point that it is terrestrially one of the, if not the cheapest forms of energy. But like, if solar is so great, like why are we burning hydrocarbons all the time? Right. And my kind of frustration point was like, solar doesn't actually work that well. And California is a state that's invested heavily in solar. And like, I don't think our energy grid is like the shining star of the world here.

Because you have to store it because the sun goes down and because you have to transmit it somewhere.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

And because it uses a lot of land. And the idea is that if you collect solar power in orbit, in particular these sun-synchronous orbits, dawn-dusk orbits, you can have your solar panels illuminated nearly continuously. And that this is actually kind of coming back to the point from a second ago, low Earth orbit is actually a very hospitable environment for electronics applications. So like the idea behind this was, can we build an energy grid in space? And if so, what are the applications for this? And on the application side, this will kind of be the bridge between where we've started and where I think the company is going. We started with the idea of of, um, well, the, the way that things have matured in the, the space world is you, you find a new technology, you find a use case for it that's like government, DOD, military related in some way, mature the technology there for a while and see if you can get the economies of scale and the design sort of like to the right place that you can compete terrestrially. And so that was kind of the pattern I was trying to match with that, that I'm kind of trying to match right now with space-based solar power is like, in fact, there's a pretty concrete use case for this that the Department of War has spelled out around getting battery— around getting energy into contested environments where there's no existing grid. And that if you could have this sort of persistent, um, orbital energy grid that you could get power down with very little infrastructure on the ground. And that's kind of the the thing that we're going to be demonstrating starting this summer. And on this point, the, this sort of flows down to even how our ground stations work. Our concept for these things are they're unpowered and they're non-cooperative. So we actually are able to use reflective optics to have the satellite and the ground system recognize each other and know where the transmit power is being transmitted.

Okay.

Um, and we could talk about that a little bit more as well.

Yeah. Okay.

Yep. But the, the interesting thing is, is like, as, as time has gone by and I would say, you know, earlier last year was when it was becoming clear to me that the entire energy industry was becoming about artificial intelligence.

Yeah.

Right. And that we were kind of living through this period of time where the energy use for artificial intelligence was, I think when I started it,— like a massive driver, energy use. And I kind of thought that that would be one of the applications that we would medium to long-term be able to put some useful technology against. But I kind of realized that actually this was the problem to solve and that this was a more acute energy problem than I was probably going to see again in my lifetime.

AI or—

AI. Yeah.

Okay.

And so a lot of the conversations early on were like, well, what if you, you know, collect power in orbit and you beam it down to a data center, right? Like what, what about that idea? Why don't you do that? Right? You're, you're collecting power and you have this laser power transmission system as effectively power lines from space. And the conversation was like, well, yes, you could do that, but you actually lose so much of the energy in the transmission process that the first use cases for this technology are going to be really where there's no existing power grid. And then as the satellites get bigger and as the scale of things get bigger, then we would be able to kind of start solving for these data center applications, which are incredibly power dense.

I got you. So it's just, it's like Starlink. I mean, it's not competitive against fiber in, in the first instance, middle of a city, right? In the first instance. And so you're, you're going to these remote places where you can't get high-speed internet. And then over time you realize the convenience of all this and it becomes this fabric that's, that's like interlinking a whole bunch of stuff. But, um, okay. So I get that.

I get that. It's just economies of scale, really. Um, and the light bulb goes off sometime the sort of first, first half of last year. I'm like, actually, we kind of talk about building an electrical power grid in space. We talk about this environment being pretty hospitable for electronics applications, which by the way, the laser power transmission is silicon semiconductor based, right? Like the photodiodes that go from electrical to optical, these are semiconductors.

And it's hospitable because there's less radiation and the temperatures are cool. And yeah, there's less radiation. Like there's.

There's the geostationary and sort of deeper space environment, which is much more complex.

Hectic. Yeah.

Um, and then kind of light bulb goes off. It's like, well, we actually could do something really useful for this artificial intelligence problem by actually just putting the chips up there, right? Where a lot of the work that we've kind of, and this is where I think a big focus for the company is going to be going, um, into this year or next year is is that actually directly solves a lot of the energy problems for AI. And in particular, the kind of power scale that we're talking about is actually maybe not directly in the first instance applicable to the training problems or the ones where you need gigawatts of interconnected power. But the inference use cases are where the majority of the energy use is projected to go, and that these are, use cases where you're talking about, you know, 10, 20 interconnected GPUs where to run inference on a model, you're kind of talking in the, say, 10 to 20, 30 kilowatt range that you can actually do in space. And the advantage there, I'm kind of bridging between two ideas here, is, you go from the terrestrial option, which is you get the silicon chips and then you take it and turn it into a construction problem and, um, a connecting to the grid problem, a building a power plant on Earth problem.

You need thousands of people, you need turbines, you need all this stuff.

Or the alternative here is you turn it into an industrial manufacturing problem, which by the way, that's how you got the chips in the first phase is industrial manufacturing. And so like from that perspective, this actually should map pretty closely to the speed of it.

So you're saying you put like a little mini data center in, in space and then you're using the energy of the sun to, to power it. And then, but, and then you still have to transfer these inference results back to Earth. Obviously we can do, like you would be piggybacking on Starlink or you'd be building your own?

Yeah, I think we'll, there's a lot of options to get it down right now. You can use RF. I think the longer term version that we see is actually a lot of the advancements that we've made in the laser power transmission system. Actually directly translates also to optical data transfer.

Okay. I want to get into all this. I want to explain just super clearly to people the very basics, like the, the thing that's orbiting in low Earth orbit is doing what? How is it, how is it gathering energy from the sun and then transmitting that to Earth?

Yep. So our first mission this year, goes into space on a rideshare mission with SpaceX. And the, the way the satellite works is built on top of a satellite bus from a company called Apex. So that, that system provides the power. So there's deployable solar arrays that collect power by orienting the panels towards the sun. Those solar panels, like our 3-5 cells, they go from incident sunlight to electrical, uh, electrical current, which then energizes a big battery on the satellite. And so we actually charge that battery up as the sun, as the satellite is orbiting the, the planet. And so that's the power generation side. The other side is the power transmission side, which is an infrared laser system that's connected to the battery. Um, and, um,, basically an inverted telescope. So a set of optics that points down to the ground. And what it does is when it, when it's sort of, when it's over the area where, where it, where it knows the ground station is, which the first demonstration's gonna be at military bases and controlled airspace. Um, what it does is it, um, starts drawing power from the battery into the laser system. So the laser is a set of photodiodes. That goes from electrical to optical, like honestly not altogether different from like screens and stuff like that. And you have a bunch of these working in parallel. They energize and they combine into a fiber optic. There's another stage of the laser that takes that sort of divergent light. You can think of the diodes as basically flashlights and it takes the divergent light and it straightens it out basically so that when you project it down to the ground, you get a tight spot on the ground because you got to cut through space and atmosphere and, and all this stuff. Yeah, and you need to achieve like a, a, a useful level of power density to then be able to rectify the power into electrical current on the ground. So if you just diffuse the energy over like a football field or like 3 or 4 football fields, you might not be able to actually generate any power from it. And this kind of also maps to the longer-term use case for this technology, which is having small portable receivers that diameter, you know, in the future state, I think going to be on the order of like 5 meters in diameter or smaller. In the first instance, it's going to be 10+ meters in diameter spot that it projects down on the ground. So satellite's passing overhead, it starts sending out a test signal where it thinks the ground station is, and the ground station is effectively a solar array that's tuned for the frequency of light that we're transmitting along with reflective optics on it that take a percentage of the light that hits the ground station and bounces it back to the satellite. And on the satellite side, there is another set of optics, which are kind of the receive optics that looks for that return signal. And when it gets the return signal, it's like, all right, that's a ground station. 'Cause we're seeing the light that we're shining coming back to us. And then from there is able to basically like say, okay, this is the ground station. And it's going to stay pointed on that target as it passes overhead.

Gotcha. Okay. And Aetherflux is based in San Mateo, I think.

San Carlos.

San Carlos. Okay. And so, and, and if you've got Apex working on the satellite bus part, which is, is kind of this common equipment that anybody doing satellite type stuff needs. So it's great. You don't have to like replicate all that. You guys are focused on the optics. Yeah. On this laser, on all the battery, on all the energy. Be parts of this. And then—

And also in the timeframe that we've done this, right? Like I started working on this full-time March of 20— is it 24? 25? 25.

What year was that? Jesus Christ.

2 years ago.

Okay.

2 years ago.

Yeah. So moving quick.

Yeah. And you can't, I mean, It's pretty difficult to go from zero to like manufacturing a whole satellite, all the components of it, and to build this very bespoke first of its kind power transmission system. And so the idea was like, how can we demonstrate this? It's going to come back to this central thing that I keep saying without turning it into a science project. How do you do this with engineering and economics?

Because that you could be on a 20-year money-bleeding venture. And so when you, and you're on a SpaceX rocket in June, July?

Yeah. Target is June.

And then you have a second one after that, which is also this year.

Yeah.

So you're trying to build two of these systems this year to go up and do these demonstrations. And so you think the first one goes up and then it's sending back to a receiver on, you said kind of like a military base or something like that. And, um, so you guys are in a, we are, I don't know when this will air. We're recording this at the very end of January.— you know, you got to get on the rocket, get certified, usually have to do that a couple months ahead of time. So, but you guys are feeling okay about that?

People are working overtime right now. We're, we're discovering problems and then fixing them and discovering problems and fixing them. Like our team is working nights, weekends, long hours.

Yes.

It's grind fest right now.

And so when people hear about, you know, an energy plant in space sending this stuff with lasers back to Earth, it's a very sci-fi concept. Concept. I think aether flux—

does that come from an Asimov book, or, uh, uh, the concept of space solar power comes from an Asimov? Yeah, the aether flux comes from, uh, the old aether theory of light.

Okay.

And like the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Okay.

I just— I love that.

Can you explain it real quick?

Yeah, so there was this theory, um, pre-Einstein, that light as a wave behaves like other waves, meaning it's got a medium that it's transmitting through, right? Because air— sound travels through air, waves travel through water. So if light is a wave, like, what is this medium that it's traveling through? Well, people were like, well, it's called the aether, right? And well, pre-Einstein, there was this question of like, okay, well, if it's traveling through this medium, let's ask some of the basic questions about how light works. In particular, how fast is it going? And so there's this famous experiment called the Michelson-Morley experiment, which takes takes a light source and basically splits the light, passes some of the light in this direction and the other light in an orthogonal direction, reflects it back. And presumably, um, if you're doing this, then because the light source is on the Earth, which is rotating around its axis, and this also rotating around the Earth, that you should expect to see light moving slightly faster in this direction versus at a 90-degree angle, right? Because like, if you're on a car and you have a baseball in your hand, the car's going down the road this way, you throw the baseball, the speed of the baseball that you see on the ground is the speed of the car plus the speed of the baseball while you're throwing it, right? And so they do this experiment and it comes back and it's the exact same. And they're like, what the hell just happened here? They're like, well, And then there's all these like ways that people try to explain this, like, well, maybe the aether is this like very viscous substance that there's effectively frame drag as the Earth is rotating and sort of around the sun. And like, that's why you get these effects. And then Einstein comes along with the special theory of relativity and he's basically like, all y'all have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. Like, this is not how it works. Light is the same speed in every reference frame. And it's actually, you know, this concept of time dilation and length contraction that sort of explains why, independent of the reference frame, the speed of light is this like, um, it's like this like sort of like, you know, this sort of like precious thing that doesn't change. And I always just thought that was like a very, very cool story. And I've always loved, um, old science and kind of the way that people thought things would work versus the way they actually work.

So you adopted it. And how do you think, like, how are people going to react to— I mean, I get the science is like, I'm sure it's probably fine for us to have laser beams of energy beaming down all over the place from space. But yeah, are people going to, you know, if this is like a one-off, it's okay. But in some future scenario with all this stuff raining down upon us? Do you think people are going to react to this idea?

I think we have to make it safe. Yeah. That's kind of the point you're getting at, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is it, is it safe to have, to have all these energy beams?

Well, we're designing it for safety and I think we have to show that it is right. And, and the, one of the things kind of related to, to the safety system that kind of has to do with this reflective optics concept is we have you have the, the receiver on the satellite that's basically asking the question, like, am I seeing a return signal? And the concept is, is that if it stops seeing a return signal, that either that means that there's something in between you and where the ground station is, and so it just turns itself off. And the question is, is how quickly can you turn it off if something is in the way? And the answer is the speed of light, right? Like, it's kind of theoretically fastest way. Like there's, how could you tell the satellite, stop it? Well, you would have to encode the stop doing it signal in light and a direct path. And so that's kind of the way it's designed. Um, worth noting that this, the system that we're launching and putting into space is intended to be safe, kind of, you know, on the ground as such, like the power level is low enough that it's safe.

Like what would be the things people would be worried about? Um, there's just this, Is this like, is it energy hitting a person, hitting an object? I'm not sciency enough to know the—

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, we have to just show that we're not going to be beaming power where we're not supposed to. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.

What were the— when we were talking about some of the military applications a while ago, you used a couple phrases about this. It was like words. This check, this check between them. You used a couple phrases that I hadn't heard before, just to describe that process. It was something about the coherency of the connection.

Oh, linking the two satellites?

Yeah.

Satellite to ground station?

Yeah, yeah. There was, I think you were using lingo to describe what we just talked about, about this process where you're making sure—

Oh, getting the return signal?

Yeah.

Yeah, the, the receiver on the satellite is basically busy polling the return signal. Like if return signal, then transmit kind of logic.

I'm forgetting this phrase. I just, I wanted to make sure I was, I was thinking about the right thing. Um, when you, okay, so you guys are getting into this, so you have to build for this launch. Are you, how are you on the receiver technology? We're also going to build that, but you feel like that's, you're going to do the launch, satellite will be up, and then you will have the receiver done relatively quickly.

Yeah, I think we'll have it— I mean, I think we'll have it ready on time.

And then, you know, when I was looking through all this and I was digging on LinkedIn, I noticed you guys have these laser engineers. And then, you know, when you're on LinkedIn and you type in space laser engineer, SpaceX is just full of hundreds of these people because they've been doing Starlink for a while and they have these communications between the satellites. It did raise the question in my head. This is clearly probably within SpaceX's skill set to do something like this. I feel like they've reached this point where they're such a giant and they have almost a monopoly over launch to some degree that anything they want to get into in space, it's like this— it's like Google, Unearth, you know, whatever they want to barge into and disrupt whatever some startup has been working on. Is that a concern that, that Elon decides, oh yeah, this is a good idea. We're, we're, we're gonna do this too.

I mean, I think it, it is a concern. I mean, it is and it isn't, right? Like that, it's always theoretically possible, but I mean, just kind of remember the world that I came from here, right? Like I, it was like two scraggly-haired dudes from Stanford that were like, we think we can do something that the rest of the finance industry could clearly do. Cool. Um, but we think that we have a path to sort of like get there anyways, right? So I think there's, I, I think if, if we stay focused on what we're doing and we do a good job at it, like that's how we control our own destiny basically. And there's always going to be people that can compete at the thing that you're doing. Um, but I, I don't always find that to be a super relevant thing as an entrepreneur to like over-rotate on. You kind of have to, before you get to that, the prerequisite is like the thing that you're doing has actually work. So just focus on that. And if you're pioneering the thing that you think is important, like, you're gonna inherently have, you know, the, the lead on that in many ways, because you're going to be the people that sort of went from like idea to reality with the concept.

You talked about not wanting this to be this 20-year science experiment. There's cool stuff here where you're— it reminded me of some of the things Elon has done where um, really in the early days of his companies, what he's best at is like integrating existing technologies. You know, it's like the, the Falcon 1 was not some super original rocket in many ways. We've known how to make rockets for 50 years. The physics— there's only like so much creativity you could actually have, um, in doing it. The Falcon 9, kind of the same thing. And then he kind of gets to this point where it's like, okay, but we are We are innovating on the electronics, we're doing them cheaper, we are making some tweaks to the materials. And then obviously you get to things like reusability. But those initial years, it is funny because it's like, like you said, sort of in the finance industry, like somebody else could have actually done this. It didn't— it didn't require a breakthrough that we didn't know about. It just took this focus on doing it this better way. It seems like with you guys, all the technology bits and pieces actually like exist on some level already.

Yeah. I mean, large deployable photovoltaic arrays doing it very cheaply. Like these are not new things. Like we, other people have done this before. Right. Also the, the radiator systems cooling the thing, like people have done this before, right? There's also the laser system and the, and the diodes and how do you get power scaling at this sort of like larger power level? It's like, well, people have done this before. There's industrial tailwinds behind each one of the component technologies that even independently of what we're doing, people are maturing those things. And I think that's a great place to be, right? Like you, you want to be building things that are greater than the sum of the parts. Yeah. And I think that's what, in my opinion, is like the role of the entrepreneur is like, yes, there's going to be times that you have to invent things or kind of create things from scratch, but like, how can you take take things that exist today and do stuff with them that people hadn't thought about doing before. And I think this idea is very much captures that concept very cleanly, I think.

And you said not a 20-year mission. I mean, my experience, almost any hard tech company that leaves a lasting mark is at minimum a 12-year experience. Is that, um, look, man, you made a lot of money. I've seen countless Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, all kinds of dudes who want to do cool stuff, super well-intentioned, way into it. Um, they for some reason don't stick with it. They lose interest. They, um, are not sleeping on the manufacturing floor keeping things going at this pace. I just see it like again and again. It's hard to have a second act. It's incredibly hard to have a second act on something that's bloodware, sci-fi. Yeah. So, you know, if you're on this 12-year possible mission to actually see all this come through, um, is this something you personally are on, like, doing this day to day, or, or it's more like you want to assemble the team and somebody to, to drive this forward?

No, I'm, I'm doing it. You're in all day and all night. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I, I, I, it's kind of interesting because my, my wife probably sees this, but like, this is the most like, I— this— I— there's like a renaissance of like sort of like the creativity, the excitement, the enthusiasm to like want to stay up and be working on this after the kids go to bed. Like, two nights ago, I was like probably working on stuff until like 11:30, midnight. Like, it is the alpha and the omega of my life, and I've kind of, um, I mean, yeah, because I want to succeed at this, right? I mean, whether or not I do or not, time will tell. But this is not, this is not a, this is not a one of many, many, many things that I'm doing. Like, this is like the main thing I'm focused on.

Okay.

And I kind of am that sort of entrepreneur. Like, I'm not the entrepreneur that's doing a ton of angel investing. I do some angel investing for sure, but I'm not trying to sort of like peanut butter myself over a lot of different things. I think it has something to do with who I am, right? Like I, and how to say this without sounding like a, like a toolbox in the process. Like I'm fundamentally very interested in my own ideas and I know other people have very interesting ideas and I can appreciate them. But the way that my brain works is I want to make the thing I'm working on work.

Yeah.

You know, and that's kind of the way that I approached it last time around and I'm trying to stay humble to it and kind of say. I really want this to succeed. I really want to be one of the few people that's been able to do very significant things at unrelated topics. Like, that's kind of like the high water mark for me. Yeah. If I want to do that and I've done it once before, then the approach that I should take here should probably not be fundamentally different because then you're just kind of rolling the dice, right? Like I'm actually better suited to try to do this, at least the way I approach it, as similarly as I did the last time around. And the last time around I was in the office like all day. I was in the office from when, you know, right after the markets open usually until, you know, I'd go for a workout in the middle of the day. I'd actually usually go for a run every day at lunchtime.

I saw you on a runners podcast. Yeah.

Around Stanford campus. And I'd come back and I would be really sweaty in my afternoon meetings and I would stick around usually until 8 or 9 every night. Um, it's a little harder with kids because you're just never going to see your kids if you do that. Um, just got to put them on your back. Yeah, I mean, I, I remind my kids, I'm like, you guys are playing— like, my, my boys love, uh, Legend of Zelda, and so they love playing Space Link.

Uh-huh.

Like, I have no idea what this game is, but it's like, do you guys realize your dad is actually building space stuff? Um, Yeah. So I, remains to be seen, but like, yeah, I'm, I'm in, I'm in, I'm all in on doing this.

Have you been to a rocket launch?

I've never been to a rocket launch.

Never been. Yeah.

I want to go.

Yeah. I mean, obviously you'll go. Where's the, is it Vandenberg or Florida?

I think we're launching out of Vandenberg.

So I assume you'll go.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's cool. Um, yeah.

Um, okay. Just a couple more questions because you've been super generous with your time. Um, one company you have invested in, I believe, is Reflect Orbital.

Yeah.

And so— So it's been a while since I looked at them, but I remember, I mean, they seem to be trying to put something in orbit that would concentrate the sun down to solar panels so that you get more oomph and more concentrated light on the solar panels. And that you could, I think you could kind of go like 24 hours or as long as you were, you're able to point at the sun and kind of like keep it on the solar panels. Is that, is this like complement, it's just different to what what you guys are doing in a lot of ways, but I mean, is it complementary? Is it, is it, um, there's just totally two different problems.

I mean, well, we're fundamentally trying to solve similar— the problem at hand is similar.

This is what I was kind of thinking.

Yeah, very different approaches.

Yeah.

Our, our kind of take on this, and you're starting to see it as we sort of are putting a lot of focus now on this, um, AI data centers in space concept, like our idea is that the really interesting thing here is electrical power in orbit, right? Like space as a place for electronics applications, space as a place where you generate electrical power. That fundamentally involves having solar arrays as kind of the thing that you do in bigger and bigger and bigger scale. That's kind of the core idea behind this. And to kind of put a finer point on this, right? There's, if you have an electrical power grid in space, space, which I think we will. And I think that as we start running out of energy on Earth, it's a natural place to put these electronics-hungry applications. Um, there will be applications of it that will be power beaming. I think the power beaming side is going to find, um, use cases in contested environments where there's no existing power grid. But of this core idea, another application is actually using the electrical power in orbit for the very energy-hungry applications, which we're going to be investing heavily in building the artificial intelligence side of the business as well. So this kind of all is about electrical power in orbit and that there's going to be a power grid in space. That's, that's what we're trying to do. Reflect Orbital. And I, again, they're probably, if they listen to this, like, what's up dudes? I haven't caught up with you guys in a while. I probably owe you guys a call at some point. I invested in them because I really liked the two guys. I think they're, they're like, they're entrepreneurs in the way that you kind of, when you, when you see people like live, breathe, and eat their dreams, you're like, God, I just love to see that.

Yeah.

So I definitely see that in those guys. Their approach is about actually saying, hey, again, I don't want to be paraphrasing or, you know, putting words in their mouth, but my understanding is, is that they, They say, hey, instead you can just put up reflectors. And by doing so, your sort of power per mass is just the reflector. It's going to be very lightweight and that you'll be able to project down all the power that you reflect as opposed to incurring these energy losses from converting it to electricity.

Gotcha. Okay.

Um, I think, but I think both can work, right?

There's some crazy uses for their technology. Like you could, uh, light up a football field or you could have like a rave in the middle of the night. And, uh, I heard some, uh, about like in Dubai, like shine, you know, it's the middle of the night and you'd be sick.

Yeah.

Turn on the light switch at this one spot in the desert and then everybody goes nuts.

Burning Man.

Yeah.

Burning Man. Okay.

Those are the biggest questions I had with the last one just on a kind of like optimistic, everything goes right sort of timeline for this. I mean, you do these demonstrations, you, things go well, you're building ever bigger systems. What's, what's like to get to some kind of critical mass where you are doing something either with inference or, or powering something significant out in the field for the US military or something? What's your vision for sort of how long that takes?

I think by the end of the decade, it should be, you know, again, this requires a Herculean effort over the next 5 years. I think that's the timeframe where you start seeing this being being, you know, very relevant.

Yeah. Okay. So in— over this last 2 weeks, I have talked to companies that are trying to do inference in the ocean with like bobbing, uh, power systems. Up on this wall, there's a chip of rat neurons, you know, in a dish, um, trying to harness like the power of actual neurons to do computing in new ways. I lived through this once before in some sense, which is like during the dot-com boom room in the data center buildout, same thing happened. We were running out of energy. Everybody was trying new techniques. The second that the bust happened, and it just sucked all the wind out of all this stuff, and then we just went back to very traditional data centers for quite some time. So I feel like I'm having déjà vu. And then, you know, in like, in the, the, the things being thrown at me for where we do this computing are getting more and more radical. And I, I'm into them all, and I think they actually have uses, whether we're in the middle of an AI boom or not. But there's obviously a scenario where we've spent a ton of capital on this thing, even though I think AI checks out over the long term. You can, you can see a short-term vacuum of money, you know, waving out that kills a lot of these great ideas. Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, does that keep you up at night, or you're just, you're all in on this thing and, and, uh, you know, whatever happens in the macro, be damned?

Yeah, I think I'm in the category of the macro be damned. I think whether or something like that happens. I think I'm, I'm of the opinion that AI is going to be significant enough. Um, I think one thing that is, um, really interesting about this go-round is this sort of like sovereign nation competitive dynamic, which I think is like why it's a race. And I think that's, that's been very fun for me to kind of like seep my brain into more recently is like, it's not just about doing it well or like growing. It's like there's a race component to it. Who can do it faster? Who can build the bigger thing faster? Because the idea is, is that as you get bigger and bigger and you get more and more intelligent, obviously. Um, yeah, so I think that we're, we're still just— I don't like— me personally, I don't see us exhausting the use cases for AI. I don't see us plateauing to the point that like more investment in the infrastructure is like, well, who gives a shit? My personal gut feeling is I don't see that happening. But yeah, the question is like, is this level of intensity around infrastructure buildout gonna be around forever? I don't know. I mean, look, I think the other part is like, as we kind of study this market and, and the product that we're building there, which we'll have a lot more to talk about in the coming the biggest pain point that keeps coming back is like, in order to bring online new chips or new data centers, the time delay is enormous. It's like 5 years up to 8 years in some cases. Obviously some, there's, you know, some ways that you could do it faster, but on the whole, you're looking at multi-year waits to get new megawatt-class data centers online.

Um, yeah, like, isn't there like an 8-year backlog on turbines or something?

Yeah, it's crazy. Um, and, and, and when you talk to people that like think about the infrastructure for AI, uh, it's like, it's not, it's not like a, it's basically building a data center on top of a power plant, right? Not the other way around.

Right, right.

It is, it is very much about the energy infrastructure to get it to the next scale. Um, and that's going to take a while. And I think that, um, we're gonna be able to do awesome stuff with it.

Yeah.

Yeah. We're just gonna be able to do awesome stuff with it. I'm also not a doomer about this stuff.

Yeah.

I think, I don't, I think every generation of humans tends to be more creative and interesting than the last. Like, we will figure out uses for this that don't result in a job apocalypse. My humble opinion.

I, I tend to go that way as well. Pei-Ju, thank you so much. I was super greedy with your time. I think we actually just set the record for our— I do not do the Joe Rogan, Lex, you know, multi-hour thing. So you—

I got there though. I did it.

I clearly enjoyed talking to you very much. So I hope you did. I clearly did because I think we set a record here. You're just in the— you're doing so much fascinating stuff. You lived a really fascinating life and I'm so into this. I couldn't be more. It's like the one, I feel like I tried to predict a lot of things in my book and took some risk because it was still so attached to the government and some of this legacy money behind all this stuff. And so I've been waiting to see people like you come along and really, you know, add some new life to this space economy.

So cheers.

Cool.

And I mean, from my perspective, right? Like, thank you for, for writing about this stuff and getting a humble finance bro more passionate about this.

I always give the Carlsons shit. I'm like, what are you guys doing with your life, man? You're too smart to be doing this. It works out. It seems to be working out okay for all you guys.

I mean, look, life is long. You gotta do interesting shit.

All right, man. Thanks so much. I'll set you free. Really appreciate it.

Likewise. Thank you.

Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and/or Kylee Robison, or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and E1 Ventures for all your support. And thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.