The Business Behind a $2 Billion Startup | Joe Yaffe, COO of Cowboy Space Corporation (Podcast 593)

My bigger concern is with people starting out their careers that way, they don't have the perspective of understanding that your career is a marathon. To do it right, it's supposed to last 30, 40 years. Doing that remotely, I think it's gonna be impossible. It's not fun.

My youngest son's been running his own business for a couple years already. He just turned 23 and he was doing an internship in the UK last year and they said that they'd give him an internship, but it was gonna be remote. My son's like, that's fucking stupid as an idea because I don't wanna be on a Zoom call 3 times a week with people. I want to be in an office around people, immersed in the, in the middle of the culture.

You pick up habits just from seeing people in person you'll never get off the Zoom.

All right, this is a great episode. You're going to love listening to this one. Joe Yoff is the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Cowboy Space Corporation. Don't laugh at the name. This is a real big company. They just raised $365 million at a $2 billion valuation with only 60 employees in their Series A round. They're an orbital energy infrastructure company founded by the Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt. And in his dual role, Joe oversees operations, legal, and regulatory affairs as the company works to bring AI data centers to space. He brings more than 3 decades of experience advising technology companies in the Bay Area, working with founders, boards, and strategic transactions, governance, and legal transactions. He's also been the managing partner of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher Flom, which is a Palo Alto office, and a partner at Lotham Watkins. Again, you're gonna love this episode. He brings some really good insights into what it's like to scale up a company and also work in a company that's growing at this speed, and also one that's doing something so incredible like building data centers in space. We'll see on the inside. This is absolutely gonna be an episode that you'll wanna share. With your tribe too. And you can also watch all of our podcasts on our YouTube channel. Okay. A quick note before we continue. Today's episode is sponsored by our trusted partner, Next Level Growth. They work with CEOs and COOs who are growing fast and starting to feel the strain, seeing some priorities slipping, execution slowing, and even leadership being stretched thin. Next Level Growth guides leadership teams to get aligned, establish real operating rhythms, and execute better without burning your people out. This is practical operator-level work, not theory. Check them out. Proactive always wins over reactive. Details are at cooalliance.com/partners. That's cooalliance.com/partners and go check out Next Level Growth. So Joe, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Thanks. Thanks for having me, Cameron Herold.

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. When my team showed me that you were on the slate to, to chat with, I, I got a good chuckle right away with the name, and then I got kind of more intrigued when I realized this was legit. This is not just a, you know, random cool branded product, but I also think back to when I first got involved in the tech space back in the late '90s, there was a book called Don't Make Me Think, and it talked about simplifying every aspect of your tech business so that your customer understood you right away. And there's something about the name Cowboy Space Corporation that just kind of makes sense to people. What's the company do? Where did the company name come from? Kind of give us some background there.

Well, first, I'm super glad to hear that you like the name. We tried to tell the story with it. So Cowboy Space Corporation, the company was started by Baiju Bhatt, who co-founded Robinhood, was co-CEO at Robinhood, longtime friend and client of mine in my prior life, with a mission to build the first orbital energy grid. The basic thesis of the company is that space is a new industrial sector, that it's a natural place within which to conduct a lot of business, and it is a result of a variety of things, technological developments, in large part due to, due to the efforts of, of other companies over the last several decades, you know, together with some of the most pressing needs on the planet, make space the right place to be doing things like powering, for example, AI data centers. The original, the original idea of the company was actually to not only build an orbital energy grid, but build applications that plug into that grid and take advantage of the limitless supply of power in low Earth orbit from the sun. And our first mission as a result is actually not orbital data centers. Later this year in October, we're scheduled to launch our first satellite, which will collect solar energy in low Earth orbit and beam it to Earth via infrared laser.

Crazy.

Which is an old concept. I know it is crazy. And one of the reasons that hooked me into joining the company. So we're taking what is, well, what is science fiction for, you know, 50 years, 'cause NASA wrote about this, the Department of Energy wrote about this, Department of Defense. And we're turning it into science reality. Along the way, we started thinking about other natural applications for solar power in orbit, and it became very obvious that addressing really one of the biggest energy capacity gaps on Earth, namely powering AI. AI data centers was the right next place to focus. We started thinking about it 12 months or so ago and trying to architect exactly how we would attack it. Between now and then, it's become obviously a much bigger topic of discussion between SpaceX and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and others. People have now started talking about orbital data centers and they've become very real. Happy to get into more details with you, but we're kind of attacking it, we're approaching it from a different direction, but that's what the company does. Energy from outer space.

Okay. So I need you to explain this to me like I'm a 10-year-old. And because I think a lot of people have been hearing about these, you know, orbital data centers or data centers in space. And when I originally heard of the concept a couple of years ago, I thought they were talking about these massive data centers, but they're not, right? Are these data centers more the size of satellites?

Oh, it's a great question and I'm happy to explain it to you.

Are you building the data centers in space? Are we launching these kind of micro data centers up to space? And then the second part is how the heck do you get that, the data back or the data or the power back down to Earth? And explain that to us.

Yeah, I'd be happy to. So it's probably helpful to sort of start with thinking about where the commercial space economy is and how it evolved there because it whether it's SpaceX or Blue Origin or Rocket Lab. To date, the way rockets have worked is that they're designed with a first stage, a rocket, and a second stage, which is a big container to carry your satellites or other people's satellites up into orbit. That necessarily means they're not small necessarily, but they're smaller because that is the, the, the way that the state, the, the way the business effectively evolved. And it makes a lot of sense because the original commercial applications for space were telecom satellites or Earth observation satellites. And if you think about those use cases, they're— you're better served by having a large number of smaller satellites spread out across the atmosphere.

Sure.

And so there is an approach you could take with respect to orbital data centers where it's simply another smaller— the numbers we, we think in terms of power. So like, you know, 50 to 100 kilowatts of power, think the size of a large refrigerator or maybe a little bit larger.

Okay.

Um, with large solar panels, there is a way you could build data centers that way on Earth, pack them into the payload bay of a, of a second stage of a rocket and launch them in, release them from the second stage in orbit. What we're doing though is something different and, and our data centers are much larger. So this is a different approach, which we had the ability to engineer because we were approaching this from kind of first principles. We weren't necessarily tied to how the commercial space economy head of all. In our design, you still have the first stage of the rocket, which lifts your second stage into orbit. But in our case, the entire second stage of the rocket is the data center. So to put that, and there are a lot of really interesting economic and packaging efficiency reasons for why we're doing it that way. We think we, we frankly have cracked the code on making orbital data centers cost effective. Competitive with terrestrial GPU hourly costs. But the essential difference is that our vehicle as a result is much larger. So we're talking about a combined rocket and second stage that will be 60 to 70 meters in length to give you a sense. And when it's in orbit with the solar panels deployed, it's about the width of a football field.

Holy shit. Okay. But these are, again, they're being made on Earth and launched. We're not making them up. Okay. That's what I missed. I thought we were building these things up in space. I'm like, this is fucking cray cray.

One day, one day, but the technology's not there.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So then, then we've got these things, they're up there. We've got these big solar data centers up in space that are the size of football fields. How are we getting the power? If we're generating power in space, are we generating power and beaming power down to Earth? Or are we just putting the data back down to Earth?

No, another great question. So remember I said our first mission is gonna be to collect solar power in space and beam power down.

Yeah.

Well, we're, well, we're actually, the way that our data centers will work is that that same optical back, the lasers are going to be used to do optical data transmission. So the way that the data center works, gets into orbit, solar panels effectively unfurl, collect a lot of solar energy, power the, the chips. In orbit that generates computed data, and that gets beamed back down to Earth with the same laser system using photons, but not quite the same as using electrons. So you're beaming data, not power, back down to Earth. So we're using it. That's the evolution of the technology that we've developed.

Okay. That's where I kind of just went sideways. I thought I misunderstood, thought we were now pushing power down. Like, it's been hard enough to wrap my head around the fact that we can charge our iPhones without plugging them in. I, I, okay. That makes sense. All right. You are a former lawyer who has now come into an org as a COO. I love that. My undergraduate degree is in law and I, I was always told to be a lawyer and I was like, no, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to be in business. But I think there's a lot of practicality. What kind of practicality do you think you bring from, from being a lawyer into business that, because most lawyers when we hire them are the ones that are saying no. If you're the COO, you're probably not saying no as often. Maybe you're saying not now, but how do you become, how do you stay as a lawyer but also really build a high-growth company?

Yeah, I mean, there are natural strengths that I think align between the two professions and then some natural deviations that you just frankly have to be very cognizant of and know, understand that you know what you don't know, if that makes sense. Yeah. I think that the overlap is that being a lawyer and going through the process, in my case, I was a lawyer for 31 years in two large law firms. You are constantly confronted with different sets of facts, different problems, different issues. You really are learning how to think and react to an ever-changing landscape of issues that your clients are bringing to you. That's no different in the COO context. Maybe the cadence is a little bit different. You've got a single client, but you still have multiple issues across the course of the day. And you've got, you know, frankly, a great deal of experience with large-scale project management. In my case, I was with Skadden Arps and we did mostly large-scale M&A. I represented founders and high-net-worth individuals, but in every case, people called Skadden because it was something that was complex, it was sophisticated, it was either cross-border or it had, you know, a set of 50 different work streams in order to get a deal across the table. So bringing project management skills to bear in the COO context is really kind of pattern recognition with doing it as a lawyer. Where the two areas differ, number one, there's kind of the obvious, which is substantive, meaning I'm not an engineer by training. I'm your classic liberal arts major. I studied ancient Greek as an undergrad, which probably helped me learn how to think, by the way, and certainly taught me how to memorize. But I didn't know anything about rocket science and I didn't know anything about space other than like a lot of people, it has kind of strikes an emotional chord. So you have to be, in my case, and I have talked a lot with other COOs who I represented throughout the course of my career and have had the ability to kind of pick their brains. You just have to dig in. You have to teach yourself and learn and you have to ask a lot of questions and not be afraid to be the person in the room that's asking questions that maybe the engineers can immediately recognize that you're not at their PhD level, but it's okay to do so to to a place where you're able to then give them solid advice. In terms of the always saying no thing, look, I will tell you that elite lawyers—

it's risk mitigation that we're saying no because of, right?

Yeah. I mean, saying no is always the easy answer. And so I found that being a great lawyer required me, even in that industry, to not be the guy that just says no. It's got to be the, you've got to be to succeed at a high level in the legal business. Even there, you had to be the person who said, look, what you just described isn't the best way to do this. Here's a better way to do it that will both accomplish your business goals and mitigate the risks that I've identified. You also have to be ready to say your job is to identify the risk, not necessarily cleanse the world of risk. You know, being, being somebody who's able to balance risk with business goal is a critical part of being a high-functioning lawyer. And it takes time to get there because when you're just starting out, it's very easy to say, well, the statute says no, so therefore no. You're much better served if you say the statute says no, but if we restructure this arrangement this way, we've got some daylight to get this done. And that's kind of the thought process I bring to bear as COO, which is my job isn't to say no, my job is to figure out how to make the business succeed. Being cognizant of the risks. And if that requires telling people to do things a little bit differently to get to the same place, you know, that's the, that's the right outcome versus no.

I love that. I love that saying no is the easy answer. And, and you're right. I mean, in the legal space, problem solving, um, detail orientation is huge. Being able to communicate, um, in more of an executive summary fashion to the, to people, 'cause you're, you understand the legal precedence, but nobody really needs all that information. They need the, The kind of one-pager, those are all huge for you. How was the transition for you going from law into the, I don't want to say the corporate world, but, and would, would Cowboy Space Corp, would it be an entrepreneurial, what's the size of the company that you moved into from the legal side?

So, so, I mean, we're, we're still a startup, but we're a startup that's kind of rapidly becoming a medium to large size company. So we've got about 60 employees now. We just raised $275 million in our Series B. At a $2 billion valuation. I'm old enough to know when, you know, if you were $2 billion valued at $2 billion, you were—

that was real money.

Well, that was real money and it's, look, it is still is real money. So we've raised about $365 million in total to date. We're on a roadmap to hire, you know, at least another 90 to 100 employees, 150 employees if we can by the end of the year. We have operations here in San Carlos in Northern California, two facilities here, and we have facilities up in Seattle that we're building out up there to do light manufacturing on the rocket system and the satellite design.

And it's insane. Okay. What was it? Were you there when you were raising the money?

Yeah.

Why did, why did you join the company? What was it that attracted you?

No, it's funny. Technically, I'm supposed to be retired. Right? So I practiced for 31 years. You know, I always kind of had pictures of myself, you know, being one of those lawyers that brought it into the office way past the sell-by date, but nonetheless just took up the corner office, you know, into my golden years. I joined the company because my practice as a lawyer, I was somewhat unique. I represented, I did, I worked with all the clients at Latham Watkins first and then Skadden Arps where I was. Partner and managing partner of the Palo Alto office. And those were largely large publicly traded companies, late-stage private companies. But I spent most of my time, frankly, over the last 20 years representing founders and CEOs and high net worth individuals. And that put me in the orbit in Silicon Valley of a whole bunch of interesting people. I began working with Beiju Bat, you know, back when he was still with Robinhood. He and I became, We didn't build just a good working relationship. We frankly became very close friends. When he stepped away from Robinhood, he sent the deck over to me of what he was proposing for this company. And I've seen a lot of different things over the years and I've had different potential opportunities, but none of them really excited me. This one, I told him two things. The number one, you have to do this, and if you don't do this, I'm going to get very upset with you because this is big. This is going to be the right next thing to do after building such an important company with Robinhood. And if you do it, and I really honestly, Cameron said this without thinking, if you do this, I'll leave SCAD and I'll come do it with you.

Whoa.

And he said, he threw a pause on the phone. He said, did you just mean that? And I said, yes. And then it took about 18 months of spousal negotiation for my wife to get on board. Um, because she too was looking forward to an actual retirement.

Yeah.

So I, I, I supported the company from the outside. They were clients of the firm. So helped them get incorporated, helped them through, you know, just doing outside counsel stuff. And then retired at the end of last year, took 6 hours of not looking at my phone at all, and then hit the ground running on January 1st.

All right. So I just looked up Cowboy Space Corporation on AngelList. You're not there yet. I'll somehow place you on my watch list when I can get in. I got in luckily on some early, early rounds of Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX a few years ago.

Good for you.

I, I, I, well, I moved my company to Dubai 3 years ago and my residence to Dubai. So I started taking 33% of my personal, well, I used to pay pay in tax. And I started doing angel rounds off, but I'm doing all the Series B, C ones that at least I have a shot at something, but I'll put a bet on you guys. I think there's something happening. Raising $365 million at a $2 billion valuation. What was that like going through that round? And that, what did you learn from that?

I mean, that's an area where I was kind of in my comfort zone, right? I've done, I've worked on financings for a long period of time. Smaller than this, much larger than this. And so the operational kind of legal admin side of getting from start to finish was kind of right in my wheelhouse. Keeping the team organized. We had great outside counsel, the team from Fenwick West. I was very happy with what they did. We had folks in-house, our head of strategic finance is somebody who's got a lot of experience working with venture capitalists and, you know, the legal side, I don't want to pat myself on the— it was kind of like falling off the log, not a complex transaction and one that I knew how to make sure everybody was keeping up with one another to get it closed on time. I think what was super interesting, it was the first time I've been on the inside, right? Usually you're on the outside and you have, you're representing a company raising money or you're representing a fund deploying capital. It was interesting to see, to go through the multiple pitch process and to do it with somebody who's a prior founder of a very successful company with a lot of, with an incredible track record and frankly making money for investors, kind of, I wouldn't say puts, you don't hit the easy button because if you're still asking people to believe in a very complex idea and you have to get people up to speed that this is reality, not craziness with what we're doing specifically. But, you know, I'm working with a pro.

Yeah.

Basically knows how to raise money.

A couple of random guys that have never done anything before.

Yeah. And that makes a big difference. It's too bad because you want, you know, I'm a big believer that best idea should win regardless of who brings it to the table. But when you've got a great idea and it's brought to the table by somebody who, you know, took another great idea and made it reality and grew a 5-person company into Robinhood, you're kind of lapping the field already.

Yeah, I was a reference for Elon and Kimbal in January of '95 for Zip2. And it was—

Is that right?

Yeah, it was. They only had— I think they had less than a half a dozen employees. Kimbal used to work for me in Toronto for College Pro Painters back in the day. And when they were raising money for Zip2, Elon had never done anything. It was their very first business and they were undockable. Now you'd be like, well, of course you'd bet. Like, not then, man. They were showering at the YMCA next door. They were sleeping at their office, like they were unbackable. When, when you're coming in with, with not a pedigree, but people that have done it before, it makes it easier. The big question I've got is how do you attract and keep people in a market that's so competitive right now where it's almost like if you're one of these big companies, you can throw money at people to attract them. How do you do that when you're small and how do you keep them? How do you keep people for more than, you know, 12 to 18 months?

Yeah, it's, well, the good news is we haven't had any, we haven't had the attrition risk issue because we're young enough. So I haven't gotten to the 12 to 18 months because most people have been here much less than that, to be candid. Um, but look, it takes a lot of work and recruiting, frankly, whether it's recruiting into large law firms or recruiting into space startups is all about elbow grease. It's all about just making the phone calls. Getting a recruiting team assembled, having them have processes and procedures so people aren't bumping into each other, and putting in the elbow grease to meet as many people who are qualified at the top of the funnel, expanding that funnel so that you're putting in the work to get to folks. You know, that, that's, that's just old-fashioned work in my experience. Um, and sitting back and, and waiting for the right folks to come to you is a recipe for not getting there. So you got to make the phone calls, you got to put them in the time, and then when they're on, On-premises, you got to really put in the work to assess and make sure you're hiring against the standards that you got. You know, we spend a lot of time agreeing on what those standards are. You know, Bei Ju's got strong feelings. I've got strong feelings about what, what a great candidate looks like and the difference between that and a good candidate and be disciplined enough to make sure we're constantly hiring the best of the best. All that said, I will tell you there's in this area, attract a very interesting sort of person. Number one, there's kind of a, there's a feeling of not a renaissance isn't the right word, but that we're in the early innings of, you know, the great next space race. And you can see it. I mean, the excitement that's being generated with the SpaceX IPO and the moon project with NASA, like space is, is in the common vernacular.

Yeah. And it wasn't for 40 years. It was gone for 40 years.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And it, and it doesn't feel like it's going to be a flash in the pan. There's a lot of governmental support.

Yeah.

And just the simple economic success and financial success that people are enjoying.

Yeah.

And it's not just SpaceX. There are other companies, Rocket Lab, Stoke, others that are doing quite well in the area. And so that attracts, that attracts the opportunity that people see from a pure financial perspective, but also this business attracts people who are just emotionally attached to it. And when you give them the chance to not just go work for a large established company, because you've got, you know, like Blue Origin has been around for several decades, you know, so SpaceX, you give them the chance to come in on the, the ground floor and, and say, we need your help designing this from a blank sheet of paper into something that we're going to put on a launch pad and launch into, into space. That gets this type of person extremely excited because they— that's what they live for. That— and they want one more shot at it. If they weren't involved in the original rocket programs at SpaceX or Blue Origin, they want a shot to do it here.

Okay, so you've got the magnet of this— of the industry that's, that's, that's attracting people. Is that some of what you're using the $365 million for, is to attract and to, to, uh, pay people? Like, do you have to overpay when you're against all this kind of war on talent in that, you know, the engineering niche?

You know, it's kind of interesting. I don't believe in overpaying as a term. So I'll challenge that just a little bit, Cameron.

Yeah, please.

I mean, I think you need to pay what it's going to take to get the absolute best folks in the organization, especially at the leadership level. The market here is, I would say probably less defined, less extremely defined than you would find in other places. But like all startups, we also lean, you know, very heavily on the equity opportunity. This is about attracting people who are, you know, not as interested in getting a lot of cash to go buy things on a day-to-day basis and much more interested in the equity opportunity.

So you are able to lean on, on, on, on, okay, that makes a lot of sense because then you can have people come in because it's early stage, because it's in the industry, they have a shot at something really big. And you really, you are attracting space cowboys to work at Space Cowboy, I would think, or Cowboy Space.

No, that's right. That's our, our mission. Our values are a whole bunch of cowboy-related sort of things, you know, be careful with the rations, you know, that sort of thing.

I like it. The offshore question. Are all of your employees at a location? Are you hiring globally? What's your plan there?

We're doing our absolute best to keep everybody on site to be in person. And the reason for that is you're building hardware. It's very difficult to run a company with remote or even hybrid employees when you're actually building things. I mean, downstairs from me now, we've got, you know, our satellites are in a clean room downstairs. There are people actually taking real tools to pieces of metal and building things. And that's just something you got to do in person. One of the challenges, and I've had a little bit of experience with this, is, you know, we'll have a distributed network of facilities because we've got this facility, we've got Seattle, we'll be standing up a large-scale manufacturing facility probably somewhere else in the country. And so keeping discipline across multiple sites is challenging. And you do have, I mean, you know this post-COVID and your own experience, you have a lot of people who enjoy the hybrid lifestyle. Or enjoy the remote lifestyle. And so we have those discussions to, and the key is creating the incentive for them. This is why it's going to be better for you to be in the office.

Dude, I completely think not only is it better for them to be, I think it's almost more, I think it's got to be a requirement. My youngest son has been running his own business for a couple of years already. He just turned 23 and he's, was doing an internship in the UK last year. With a, a great 900-person digital marketing agency and they said that they'd give him an internship, but it was gonna be remote. My son's like, that's fucking stupid as an idea because I want to go, I, I don't want to be on a Zoom call 3 times a week with people. I want to be in an office around people immersed in the, in the middle of the culture. And he convinced them to make sure that it was on site.

So yeah, I totally agree, man. I mean, everything I learned, I, Mike, I, I view careers like you gotta build this foundation to a house.

Yeah.

And that foundation is so shaky and I, I don't think we're going to see it so shaky with people who, who grew up in their careers in a, in a Zoom-only environment. And it's not, my bigger concern is what people starting out their careers that way, they don't have the perspective of understanding that your career is a marathon. Like it's to do it right, supposed to last 30, 40 years. Doing that remotely, I think is going to be impossible. It's not fun. I, you know, it's not fun to do.

Yeah. Where I, where I think the hybrid part works is allowing people that are already on board or already immersed in the culture, they're already up to speed and stuff, taking time away from the day-to-day to be, yeah, let me go work from Barcelona for a couple of weeks. Cool. Go do that. But then come back to the office again, or let me work from home for a few days. Cool. But, but not starting your job that way and certainly not setting it up. I agree. Always. You know, you're always going to be at home. It just doesn't make any sense to me. And I don't feel like—

I totally agree.

I don't feel like it's a, I'm not a boomer, but I don't feel like it's a boomer mentality.

Oh, and I think it's interesting. I mean, I've got two kids who are just joining the workforce and neither of them are the same as your son, not excited about opportunities that are remote only because they want to get in there and meet people and they want, you know, I don't think they understand candidly that that you learn by observing, like this kind of, you know, ocular osmosis, I call it. Like you pick up habits just from seeing people in person that you'll never get off of Zoom.

Yeah. When you're in the startup phase and you guys are past the startup phase now, you've raised all this money. What do you think shifts for a leadership team with your approach to kind of the day-to-day? Like what do you focus on day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month right now when you're, when you're small at 60 people, but when you've also raised all this money, what do you focus on? What are you doing?

I mean, the mental image I've tried to build for myself is I'm trying to build the scaffolding and, and sort of the scaffolding. It's like, think of it as building a skyscraper and, and the skyscraper is going to have 4 or 5 different towers, right? We've got a rocket tower, we've got a satellite tower, we've got a data center tower, we've got, the, on the operation admin side, a compliance tower. We've got a sort of general business administration, you know, HR and IT and all that stuff tower. But what I'm trying, the way I'm trying to approach it, and it's been kind of validated by some of the folks I've spoken with, you know, who have been on your podcast, is to, you know, not try to build the final version of the skyscraper today, but build the foundation so you understand what you want it to look like in 6 months, 12 months, 24 months. So, you know, hire really good leads in each of those areas. They can start to build teams around them. Being compliance leaning from the outset so that that kind of ripples through all of the other work streams that are happening and making sure you've got expert assistance on that front because it's a heavily regulated environment. We do everything we do is export controlled. Everything we do is subject to regulatory approval if we ever want to actually get it done. So that means we have to probably be much more mindful, which again happens to play into my wheelhouse, much more mindful of dotting the i's and crossing the t's from the, from the jump. But where I find myself constantly remind— I have to constantly remind myself because I'm used to a large lot, like I'm used to Skadden Arps where the skyscraper is done. Like what you're doing is you're, you're, you're shining the windows on the beautiful skyscraper. So I'm constantly having to get comfortable with. And, and there is discomfort with the fact that like this thing's not done, right? There's a lot of chaos and it's not going to be perfect and you're going to have to go back and rebuild part of the second story. You know, by the time we're already at the fifth floor, like just getting comfortable with that discomfort is, has been a big part of the learning process.

I think that that's kind of what my question was, was what I's and T's do you worry about crossing and what I's and T's Do you kind of just let, not let go, but I've always said that it's not even about MVP, it's like minimum viable product. It's more about minimum viable everything. It's like get it done and out the door and momentum creates momentum. How do you balance the desire and really 31 years of history of making sure the I's and T's are dotted on everything to now it feels like your real core role is recruiting, hiring, and delegating, right? Continually to get more stuff off your plate, is it hiring people that will focus on the details for you? Or is it hiring people that will put the systems in place to ensure stuff gets done?

I mean, we're not, I would love to get there. We're not at a point where I can afford to not focus on the details, to be honest. So, so it's, it's, it's just, it's a lot of work, hard work, a lot of time. It's a lot of triaging, identifying if you've got 1,000 things on fire, You know, what are the top 10 things that could be big conflagrations that will burn down the whole forest? And putting those out today, understanding and going to sleep, you know, knowing that you've got 900 other fires that you're going to have to tend to tomorrow, or they're going to grow into forest fires. So in practice, what that looks like is, you know, constantly evaluating when to put, when, when when to let go of something and let it run and when to jump in and say, we got to put this on pause because, you know, I need to really focus on the details of this and think through what the consequences of this particular contract are, of that vendor relationship. Are these one-way doors or two-way doors? Will we be able to get out of this if we need to? Are we going to lead ourselves down a path of spending a ton of money for something that just doesn't make sense? Those are just judgment calls. And the big difference between my prior life and now is that it kind of happened, you know, 50 times a day versus, you know, once a week in my legal practice.

Is your life right now with Cowboy busier than it was when you were in the legal space? Or is it, are you running the same amount of hours because you've always operated that way?

It's a lot of the latter. I'm kind of wired to just do it.

Yeah.

I mean, if you spend your entire life recording your time in 10th of an hour increments, you become acutely aware of the passage of time. Oh my God. And so you just, you know, you're kind of, you have, you end up having this very unhealthy focus on trying to fill empty time with getting stuff done. But I think because it's so multidisciplinary and because there's always something to be done and because we're just at the beginning of this journey, you know, it's definitely probably more working time. It's a lot more pleasant though, because it isn't, billing the hour it is than turning around and having to worry about collecting that time and that sort of thing. So I'm having a lot more fun.

Well, it's almost like in the legal space when you're billing by that, you know, you're billing by those, the 10th of an hour increments as you put it, and you, you know, you're getting your, your effective hourly rate is so much higher than who you're delegating it to. Now it's almost like you want to be delegating more, but in legal it's like you almost don't want to be delegating.

Sort of. I mean, even in legal, I mean, the secret to making big money and I, you know, I happen to do a whole separate thing on how to run a large law firm. But the secret to making big money in law is delegating because if you can delegate work to an associate who you're paying a fixed salary, but build them out at high rates and the more of them you can do and you think of each of those little associates as a profit center. Now I can afford to be cavalier about it. I wouldn't have talked this way a year ago. You know, that's how you can maximize your profits.

If you—

because there's a cap on how many hours you can bill yourself. So getting others to bill their time on your behalf while you also stay busy is kind of the key to maximizing profits. So that in that regard, it's kind of similar.

Let's piss off the law firms for a second. How do, how do, how do entrepreneurial companies work better with their law firms so that we get the advice and the work that we need, but not the invoices that they want to send? Like, how do we negotiate better? How do we control their time better? How do we operate better so that we don't, you know, we don't set up a 1-hour call that could be a 2-minute email and, you know, get billed for it? Can you give us some tips?

100%. Because I've seen it both ways. I've— Right. The critical thing to do when you're on the inside and you're looking at outside legal counsel is you have to, you can't expect your outside advisors to be part of the team unless you meet them in the middle. So you have to extend yourself and create opportunities for them to feel as if they really are part of the team. That means building real, first of all, being very discriminate in who you're hiring. Hiring by the firm is a mistake. Hiring by the individual, in my experience, finding the best people that you have a connection with that you then make part of the team. The only difference is they're not on your payroll, they're on the law firm's payroll. And then to be simple about it, I always find you just catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar. You have to be firm. You have to be very clear in your directions, but people and put even your outside advisors and counsel in a position where they feel disappointed in themselves if they disappoint you. And that's very different than taking the approach of we're running the company. I mean, you're just a hired hand on the outside to give legal advice. We're not going to give you the whole picture. We're not going to invite you in to really feel like you're a part of the team. We're just going to shoot facts at you and expect that we'll get pristine work product back. And by the way, we're also going to treat you like shit, right? We're going to tell you that you're not building anything, you're a cost center, and we're going to quibble about every single bill. Like that is a recipe to get, you know, good work product and you'll find lawyers who will still jump as high as you want with that attitude. But you're not going to get the folks who will stay the extra 2 hours on a Friday night to get it out the door versus Monday because they care about you because they think that you care about them. And that, you know, there's a lot of detail there and how to do that because you also can't get taken advantage of, you know. No, that's, I don't know if you know this, but some lawyers can be unscrupulous.

But if they feel like they're on the inside with you and they're a part of your culture, they're a part of your vision, they, they like the team. Yeah, they're gonna work harder for you. They're not gonna take advantage. They're not gonna even try to.

And to be honest, that's how I've always tried to manage people generally, which is, you know, make them feel— when people feel valued and trusted and respected to the point where they will feel badly if they let you down is when you get the best work product out of them. In my, in my experience, if you're given clear, transparent guidance along the way and setting expectations, you're just going to increase the odds that you'll get better work product.

Okay, that makes sense. I want to ask a question about when you're an executive in a company like this and you know that you're signing up for something that is going to be busy. I mean, you have pretty clear— you get a lot of clarity going in day one that I'm going to be really busy for the entire time I'm there or for the next 2 or 3 years. What do you tell your wife and kids at the beginning of this thing? And for real, like, how do you sit them down and say, What's going on? Because I feel like you're a good dad who wants to have that. Like, what do you say in that situation and how do you set them up to know what I'm up to and I still love you at the same time? How do you do that?

Oh, so one thing. So for 31 years I was a lawyer. I never had my kids when I came home. And my kids, by the way, my son's 26, my daughter's 23. So they're out of the house now, which simplifies things a lot.

Yep.

In terms of managing work-life balance. But for 31 years, I never had either of them say, Dad, like, tell me about your day. What'd you do today as a lawyer? You know, tell, tell me about that, you know, memo you drafted or that conference call you said. In the time since I've been here, I would say 3 or 4 times a week, my kids are so into the space thing and they're so into the, you know, we're building rockets and we're going to build space lasers and orbital data centers. Now they're constantly like, what's going on in the space world? What'd you do today? Who are you talking to?

Who you meet? That's cool.

Which has been kind of cool. So there's just something very different about what I'm doing now than what I did. Um, but in terms of what you're really asking, I think Cameron is, you know, how, how do I think about managing work-life balance? And, you know, not to be cliché about it, but it starts with finding the right partner. And I'm very fortunate in that I've got somebody who herself, she was in the large law firm world. She understood the whole time that practice was happening, what it kind of took to succeed and supported it. Um, doesn't mean it wasn't without its stress. I always tell people. The practice of law and being COO of a company like this is not necessarily in and of itself stressful. It's balancing that with everything else in your life, you know, the work-life balance. And that takes somebody who is understanding and compassionate about it and supportive. And that's what my, my significant other, my wife's always been, which is helpful, but she's got her eyebrows raised. I'll be candid with you. She's kind of like, When is like, when is your real retirement happening? You know, like this is not retirement. When are we going to sit on the beach and just feel sand between our toes?

Yeah.

And I tell it, you know, soon as my favorite fortune cookie says, soon and in good company.

How many hours a day roughly do you work? How many hours a week and how many weeks vacation do you take a year?

I'll start with the last one. I've actually never really taken a formal vacation, at least not in years. I've always just worked from different places on the planet. Okay. I'd love to take a real vacation. If by vacation you mean like really unplug and not check emails. I'm genetically wired to check my emails. But I would say in terms of the actual work process that I've got, I've always been an early riser. I've always worked on an East Coast or European timeline. So up super early, try to beat everybody else to their desks for, you know, I had, I took misguided pride in being the guy that always had the best parking spot next to the office when I was just coming up. None of which I'm saying is like the right, honestly, the right way to do it, but it's just part of who I was. And I continue that. So I get up early. I'm in the office usually by 7:00 AM. Try to, try to work, you know, don't leave the office before 6:30, 7:00. Go home with the kids out of the house. It's a lot easier. Grab dinner, try to decompress for a couple of hours and then, you know, probably do another couple of hours of work online. And get organized for the next day. I'm a big believer in kind of setting up your dominoes for the next day. Clearing to-do lists, creating charts, creating outlines. Like, what do I really have to hit the ground running? Like, how do I stack rank it? You know, how do I, and did I accomplish, what, what did I leave unfinished today? And every day there's, you know, there are 20 things where I smack myself in the head. I'm like, oh, I meant to call that guy and I meant, you know, I meant to, to give this, this woman this report that she asked for last week. And you know, you just line them back up and try to hit them the next day.

Well, and that's where I think it's also about delegation too, right? Like our to-do list doesn't have our name on it. Your to-do list doesn't say Joe's to-do list. It's just a list of stuff that could be delegated. And so, and then weekends, are you working weekends too?

Yeah, but I really try, I think we were napping and I catch up on my sleep on weekends, to be honest. You know, so I try to, I try to take it a little easier on the weekends, but it doesn't matter what business you're in, you know, whether it's the podcasting business or the lead, the space business or legal business, like the world is just a 24-hour-a-day place now. Like people reach out to you and if it's something you care about, you'll respond on the weekends. Sure. I do, I will tell you that not being an outside service provider has taken a lot of the stress out. Like I am the client now.

Yeah.

And so I definitely feel that. So I feel like there's been a little bit of air let out of the system, which is kind of nice.

Yeah, but, but when you're growing at this pace, you're growing and raising at the pace you're raising, you're not going to take the air out for long. Your mentoring and growth, kind of the last couple of questions I've got, you know, every day this is going to be the biggest business you've ever built. And especially as you start adding people and adding people, where are you growing? What are you doing to focus on your growth? Or are you—

I mean, one of the things I consciously did when Bajie and I were talking about how we were going to make this work, You know, one of the things that I realized early on is that I needed to add the benefit of working with a lot of really successful business people at high levels over the course of my career. Their relation, those are strong relationships, contacts, and I'm unabashedly plumbing the depths of those relationships for advice constantly. You know, whether it's, you know, a lot of CEOs and how they think about leadership, how they think about, you know, things like collegiality and culture and how they think about just, you know, org structures and picking their brains. You know, John McNeill, as I mentioned to you, John McNeill, you know, is a longtime friend. Like, he's just a wealth of practical information. You know, how did he set up his meetings with Elon and how did that work? And trying to pluck from each of them and exercise judgment, like, what will work with me and Bei Yu as my CEO here? You know, what are the differences in the organization? Lots of great examples of folks who went into brand new industries they had no experience with as senior executives, CEOs or otherwise, and how they got up to speed on the actual tech side of the new business and kind of picking and choosing from them. And look, AI makes everything a lot easier now in terms of, you know, if you need to get smart on something, you have a big leg up that wasn't there 2 years ago. So I'm a big believer and, you know, rely on all of those, all of the above.

I love it. All right. If you were going to go back to the younger you and give yourself some advice, maybe the 21 or 22-year-old starting off in your career, what advice would you give the younger you that you know to be true today, but you wish you'd known when you were younger?

Uh, but it's, I gave this advice just the other day to a younger person. Um, in the early part of your career, that's the time to build as many relationships as possible. And, and don't. Don't try to sort them by utility to you in the short term. Build them all with kind of equal fervor and intent because you don't know when the sausage company, you know, junior salesperson that you meet when you're 24 is going to end up being the CEO of, you know, a giant food conglomerate when you're in your 40s or 50s. And don't do it in a mercenary way. Do it because and I'm a big believer in this, like life is about collecting relationships with people. Like enjoy learning other people's perspectives on what they're doing and then taking and pausing and taking the time to figure out what you can learn from that, borrow from, steal from, and do that early because it really pays a ton of dividends later in your life. The other thing I would say, and I would say this to people not just starting out, but my age, like don't be afraid to take the plunge. You know, I had a lot of folks, you can imagine coming out of a conservative law firm, a lot of folks are like, you fucking crazy. You're going to go work at a startup. You're a Skadden partner. You can just, you know, you can just coast the next 10 years. Like you'll make great money. But that's, that wasn't for me. And just, you know, there's a little bit of anxiety involved, but you just, you're better off doing it. You only get one shot at this life. Like go for it.

I think you're gonna have a lot of fun at this one. Your first point reminds me of a quote that I heard years ago from one of our partners at the CEO Alliance, Joe Polish, who founded a group called the Genius Network. And he said, your network is your net worth. And I think there's something that, that is all about just getting to know people and like people and meet people and building those connections up again without, as you said, trying to figure out what the quid pro quo is. Just, just meet lots of people, right? Get involved and get out there more.

I don't think there's much more purpose in life than that. I mean, really, that's like, that's a big chunk of it. I mean, getting married, having kids, you know, and, and taking long walks in the park is really important too. I would, but, but we're a social people and building relationships makes you happier.

I love it. Joe, thank you so much for sharing with us. Really appreciative of this. I'm super excited to see what Cowboy Space Corporation continues to do, and I will be one of the first ones to jump in when these shares become available on, on AngelList. So thanks.

You're more than welcome. And look, come on, visit us anytime, Cameron.

Love to. Appreciate it. Thanks, Joe.

All right. Take care.

Bye now.