Programming Sunlight: How Reflect Orbital Is Building Satellites to Redirect Light From Space (Ben Nowack, Founder & CEO)

You are doing one of the boldest, weirdest, most interesting things in the world at the moment. What is it that you are trying to build?

We are building the tools to control sunlight. So right now it's completely impossible to control the amount of sunlight you get at night. We are building a constellation of satellites to change that. You can use it to grow plants, you can use it to power on solar farms at night, just an absolute ton of things.

What are the pieces that you think folks tend to miss most about where this is headed?

You can just keep adding satellites together and keep increasing the power. You can have 4,000 satellites working together at one time. You could have 10,000 satellites working together at one time. You don't have to have the satellites talking to each other to do that. You just have them all pointing at the same spot at the same time.

So I'm curious what it was that gave you the confidence and the agency to think, yeah, I'm the type of guy who might be able to figure out beaming sunlight from space down to Earth.

I would get obsessed with ideas like, this month I have to build an underwater vehicle, I'm going to figure out how to do it. And I just like did all these weird projects, like I made a jet boat. I just went kind of crazy. And that gave me a ton of confidence that I could do basically anything if I just tried hard enough.

Here's a crazy idea. What if the solution to humanity's rising energy needs isn't nuclear fission, fusion, cheaper batteries, or geothermal, but massive, carefully engineered mirrors that bounce sunlight from space straight down to solar farms on Earth? That's the wild future that Ben Noack and Reflect Orbital are working to make a reality. And though it seems like a concept straight out of science fiction, which it is, it may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. In the 1990s, Russian engineers succeeded in bouncing a beam of light from space to Earth, and it was actually about the brightness of a full moon. This year, more than 30 years later, Reflect plans to bring that technology back to life, using modern materials to direct a ray of light To our planet. Now, remarkably, getting one of Reflect's products into orbit may be less than half the battle. The bigger challenge will be to transform its potential constellation of space mirrors from an incredible science project into a viable business capable of meeting customer demand, earning real revenue, and turning a profit. In today's episode, Ben and I dig into these questions and what it took to go from a high schooler building a fusion reactor in his spare time To a founder trying to change something as fundamental as the way that light reaches planet Earth. I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist. Well, Ben, uh, I've been super looking forward to this conversation because you are doing one of the boldest, weirdest, most interesting things in the world at the moment. And maybe let's start there, uh, for folks who aren't familiar with you and Reflect, what is it that you are trying to build?

We are building the tools to control sunlight. And allow people to program when, where, what sunlight they're going to get. So right now it's completely impossible to control the amount of sunlight you get at night. We basically get none all around the entire world. And we are building a constellation of satellites to change that. So if you, you know, this is the Earth, you imagine the sun over here, it lights up this half of the Earth and this half is completely in shadow. If you put a mirror right here, you can reflect the sunlight that misses the Earth down onto a specific area. And we do that specifically with a constellation of satellites that are arranged in rings just like this. They're sun-synchronous orbits over the terminator, and you can keep adding rings to go all night. And then as a satellite is passing over an area, we can reflect sunlight down onto that spot. The spots themselves are very precise. It's, you know, basically smaller than the point of a needle at this scale. And we can place that anywhere on Earth for any amount of time. You just hand it from one satellite to the next. That way you can go all night. And then if you want it to be brighter, you just add more and more satellites to one area and you can get whatever brightness you want from full moon brightness, which is like 0.1 lux, all the way up to about a million times brighter full sunlight, depending on how many satellites you have working at one time. It's really cool because, you know, if somebody wants some sunlight back here and they hit a button on a Garmin inReach or whatever it is, a satellite-connected device, we can just rotate a satellite and send sunlight down within 30 seconds. Because our constellation will be up there all the time. So you could use this for basically anything. I mean, you can use it to grow plants. You can use it to see at night. You can use it to power on solar farms at night. You can use it for mining operations, keeping people safe. You can use it for increasing like growth in forests, absorbing more CO2, just an absolute ton of things. We keep hearing about new use cases every single day. I mean, sunlight is the source of 99% of life on Earth. It's one of the most fundamental resources. The sun is the most powerful resource in the whole solar system. Like it's powering basically everything, like, you know, even fossil fuels are sunlight with extra steps. And we currently have very little control over it. You know, it's, it's either sunny or it's not sunny and there's not much you can do about that. Well, we're trying to change that for the first time ever. Yeah, it's, it's quite an aspirational project. It's, it's a ton of work. But now a lot more people are working on it. It's It's getting really exciting and, you know, the technology is there to support it, right? You have the rockets, satellite technology is quite advanced these days. Um, and we've spent a lot of time developing the couple of extra missing pieces. And, you know, we're launching a couple of vehicles this coming year.

I'm excited to get into all of those pieces. For, for folks that don't have the video, this is, you know, one of the podcasts where the video really helps because what, what Ben was really showing us was sort of this model of the Earth and the constellation of satellites really in this ring. And you mentioned sort of sun synchronous. Uh, and I think the other thing you talked about was like the terminator line. For folks that aren't familiar with, with that terminology, can you explain, you know, how that's the sort of beginning place for Reflect and, and then you are able to do this sort of scaling out where you can start to create these, these outward rings such that you could get full coverage of, of the Earth in some, you know, future state?

Yeah, the terminator ring is basically just where the shadow starts on the backside of the Earth.

From day to night.

Yeah. Yeah. If you imagine just holding a basketball outside at noon, like with the sun coming straight down over it, the bottom of it's going to be in shadow. The terminator line would be that line around the center of it. So that's just where the shadow starts. I mean, the nighttime is really just a shadow on a ball. Um, the Earth is just a ball and then one half is behind and one half is in front. The half in front is day. The half behind is nighttime. Um, and yeah, the terminator separates them. That's where it, where it transitions. So yeah, it's, I mean, the geometry is pretty simple, right? It's just, you're not able to get that high. I mean, the ancient Egyptians were doing this back like, you know, 3,000 years ago. They would put mirrors outside and they would reflect light into shadowed areas like indoors. No way. Yeah. They just, you know, they didn't have rockets back then, or maybe the aliens didn't give them access to rockets. Um, but, but we're, yeah, we're doing a very similar thing. Uh, we're, you know, we're just going up a lot higher because we have access to these rockets. And a sun-synchronous orbit is a really cool orbit. It's, it's a little bit complicated, but it's what they use for Earth observation telescopes, where if they want to take a picture when there's no shadows, they'll get an orbit that's synced up perfectly. So it's at noon every single time the satellite passes over. And the way you do that is you actually have a very polar orbit with a very high inclination and you have it slightly offset. So it picks up the Earth's Oblateness. The Earth is a little bit squashed and that perturbs your orbit just so. And if you pick the exact right inclination, it will perturb it exactly the right amount so that it does one full rotation every single year. So it precesses once around the Earth every 365.25 days. So it's exactly synced to one specific time. What we do is we select, you know, 6 PM L-TAN and we just stay at those exact times. So our satellites are are a little bit timeless. They're actually locked to a specific time of day. So the satellites will be passing overhead every day at 6 PM. And if you do one at 7 PM, it'll be every day at 7 PM all around the world. So it'll be 7 PM on the East Coast of America. And then 3 hours later, it'll be 7 PM on the West Coast. And then a couple hours later, it'll be 7 PM in China. And then a couple hours later, it'll be 7 PM in Europe. And it just stays at that exact time. It's not locked to a location on the Earth. It's locked to a time, which is really cool. And this is a standard orbit that has been used for And

there's some really interesting sort of market reasons why you want to sort of target that, you know, that part of the day that we'll get into. So, you know, I'll save that for a moment, but you mentioned that this is really a big year for you guys and really this sort of first half of the year when you're going to be sending these things into orbit. What exactly are you planning to send up and what are you hoping sort of to de-risk most in that first initiative?

Yeah, we're building 3 satellites right now. Um, and we're launching them all a few months apart and we're launching the exact same satellite for all 3 of these vehicles. Uh, we really just want to get something up, something working, and it's a very new vehicle. So there's a lot of risks and the way we're de-risking that is launching multiple vehicles. What we're launching is an 18-meter by 18-meter heliostat. And I have a small model kind of what it looks like.

Amazing. That's a beautiful silvery sail.

Yeah, it's a small little bus. It's a SpaceX quarter plate, about 130 kilograms. And it's, you know, it's like 2 feet by 2 feet and then it deploys out to 60 feet by 60 feet. So we have some very special deployable boom technologies. And once those booms are fully unrolled, they unroll kind of like tape measures. They're actually 2 tape measures stuck together, but made out of carbon fiber and much bigger. So they're very strong. They'll hold about 220 pounds in compression. Those unroll, and those are basically the masts that pull the reflector tight. And then we hoist the reflector out onto those masts. The reflector itself is a very thin material made of a very special plastic that's coated in aluminum and a couple other layers that prevent degradation. And this is a similar model. When you pull that material tight, it gets incredibly specular and it turns into a very good mirror. And the quality of the mirror is very important because it keeps the spot that we're reflecting very sharp. And that keeps sunlight from going into neighboring customers when you're serving one person. It reduces light pollution. If you're serving one city and you want to go a couple miles away, you actually won't see the satellites because our reflectors are so perfect. That's critical to the technologies, delivering photons to customers and not to people who didn't buy it. So we spent a lot of time on the mirror and the mirror is really cool. It's only a few thousand atoms thick. The whole mirror, the whole 60-foot by 60-foot mirror weighs less than 2 kilograms. Wow. The entire thing. So it's really a crazy material. And micrometeorites can pass right through without damaging the whole thing. We have a lot of ripstop layers. And there's also a bunch of special qualities in the mirror itself that prevent things from growing, like holes from growing and things like that. So we're quite excited about this mirror. We've put a lot of novel technology into it. We hired a lot of experts who had worked on similar things before.

Wow. Fascinating. And with that, you know, first, first test, so to speak, these 3 satellites going up, I think you said, you know, you want it to be working in some capacity. Are you targeting, hey, we really want to, you know, shoot for X luminosity or, you know, a certain number of customers within this first batch? Or is it sort of just like, hey, if we can, if we can get this up and running in some sense, like that's the right place to begin?

That's a great question. For this first vehicle, we initially were just going to do an engineering demonstration. Where, you know, you send something up, you measure a little bit of brightness, you're like, oh yeah, we got some photons to the ground, mirrors are working. Like, now let's build the real thing and then make some money. It turns out it wasn't that hard to just build the one that can make a lot of money on the first vehicle. Wow. So that's what we ended up doing. And part of that was realizing there was a market for much lower brightnesses than we initially expected. When we started this company, we were originally going for energy alone and just lighting up solar farms, providing power, doing that whole thing, competing with electricity as a commodity. But then when we started looking into it and the other markets for sunlight, we realized there's markets for much dimmer service, particularly moonlight was really interesting. You can go surfing during a full moon. You can go hiking during a full moon. You can land a full-size aircraft on a runway in the middle of nowhere, just with full moon brightness. And it's, it's literally like 500,000 to a million times less bright than the sun at noon. And it's a useful amount of light. So we discovered that there's this really useful amount of light that's a ton easier to achieve. And we could do that with just one relatively tiny satellite, you know, instead of tens of thousands of satellites, you know, and like these huge constellations, we actually had a market with just potentially a couple of very small, very easy to build satellites. And that was a really big deal. The other thing that was really interesting about these markets is people are willing to pay a lot more for it. You know, if you look at energy for one of these satellites and the amount of money that you're going to make per satellite, um, you know, it's in the, like the tens of dollars per hour. And you can make the economics work. Like you can build a satellite that's cheap enough. You can get it on a rocket that's cheap enough and all of that. And it does work out. But with these, these lighting customers, people are willing to pay thousands of dollars per hour per spot. Um, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour per spot for some of these services. And it's like hundreds of thousands, like literally can be hundreds of thousands of times easier to build. So we realized actually this, this is fully commercializable right now. Um, and we can build something that can make money immediately. So that was a huge game changer. So our first 3 vehicles will not be engineering demonstrations. They'll be full revenue generating vehicles. We'll be able to make money with these. Um, obviously it'll just be 3 of them. So we won't have constant service, but the year after we plan to launch basically a full rocket full of vehicles. We're not sure if we'll fill it up completely. If we filled it up completely, we could fit 150 of our satellites in a Falcon 9. Um, we'll probably underfill it a little bit, but we could launch, you know, that many vehicles and that would give us continuous service for a number of hours. And then the product kind of goes from being a concept sketch to, oh, wow, you can just buy sunlight every night. Oh, wow, it's on the shelves. It's like being on the shelves of Walmart instead of just being a concept sketch. So that's, we'll have the constellation very shortly after having the first couple of satellites. The first couple of satellites are, you know, kind of like, oh, wow, I tried it, you know, but I couldn't buy it yet. But then the year after, we'll have the full-on constellation.

Well, I'd love to take a step back and talk a little bit about the journey that brought you to Reflect, because one of the things that I thought was was so interesting in reading about this company, reading about you is the way in which from a super early age, it seems like you have sort of been scaling your ambition around, you know, what you want to build. Uh, and I'm sort of perhaps because I'm, you know, a newish parent obsessed with the childhoods of, uh, remarkable people and, you know, people, I think, you know, even in this current generation who show signs of this exceptional ability or exceptional ambition. And so I'm curious what it was you think about sort of your environment, the inputs that you had that gave you the confidence and the agency to think like, yeah, I'm the type of guy who might be able to figure out beaming sunlight from space down to Earth.

I've talked about this a lot with my parents because I've been kind of interested in it too. I ended up building a ton of stuff in high school, but even in the early years, I would build all kinds of things, even when I was like 3 Or 4. And my dad said one time, I think I was 2 or 3, and I was like, oh, I really want like a saw. Like, you build all the stuff with saws. My dad was a carpenter. He built, you know, all kinds of houses, like these super mansions and stuff. And I was like, oh yeah, I really want a saw. Like, I'm super interested in this thing. And he was going to like the toy section of the store and he was like, oh, I'll get this like plastic saw. And he was like, this is stupid. Like, why am I gonna get him this thing? Like, and he just went right to the tool section, bought me a real metal saw and like a real metal hammer and all this stuff. and gave it to me. And then I just started like using these things when I was extremely young. I, I was using a table saw when I was like 3 or 4, um, and I would build like little cars, like little blocks out of wood, all sorts of stuff. I also built a ton of things with like Lego and stuff, but really I think the woodworking was a lot better because I learned how to use real tools. Like I was using a drill press when I was super young and all of that. Um, and then through like elementary school, I would help him build houses here and there. Um, like I built like playhouses, sheds, things like that. And then like, you know, all the science kits that, that I could get my hands on. Um, and then it wasn't until middle school when I started building RC planes on my own. Um, yeah, I kind of started with just a bunch of foam board. I like took an RC car apart and turned it into a foam board airplane, like 6th grade, and just trying to fly that thing around. And then like one thing led to another, you like, you find all the like RC Powers videos on YouTube and stuff, and then you like start downloading the plans and putting things together. Taught myself how to fly. Like I would fly all these planes in a local field near my house. I don't even know how many planes I built, probably like 30 or 40. I have like pictures of a ton of them. Some of them would go like 150 miles an hour. I started putting cameras on them in like the 2010s, and then I could fly down cliffs. Like I flew down Cannon Cliff on the East Coast in the White Mountains, which was super fun. And I could fly these things like 10 miles away. And I'd make videos about it on this old YouTube channel. And that was super fun. And I just like, really got into these planes. And that's, I think that was kind of the first breakthrough. Because when you're like really young, you know, I was like 12 or 13 flying these planes and like all these adults would walk up and be like, oh my God, how are you doing this? Like, did you build that yourself? Like, how high does that go? How fast does that go? Like, no way. How'd you do that? And it's kind of like, I don't know. I just kind of put it together. I actually thought I was really, really dumb in these years. I was like, I don't know. So that was a huge confidence builder initially. Um, is like building these planes that people were really impressed by. Um, and I think that was really special. And then in high school, I just started getting into building crazier and crazier stuff. One day I built an X-ray machine, or I was like, I really wanna build an X-ray machine. I think that would be super cool. I could just like get all the parts on eBay. It'll be like $100. Can I do that? And my dad was like, sure. And then he told one of my teachers that I was doing that. And my teacher was like, what the hell? An X-ray machine? That's the craziest thing ever. If he writes a paper on it, I'll give him school credit. Um, and then I was like, really? I can get school credit for just building things? This is crazy. So then that was a huge hack. Because then I could have the right idea, get like school credit for it. And then actually sometimes my teachers would help me buy some of these projects. So like that teacher actually ended up buying me a metal lathe, you know, which is like $1,200. Oh, wow. Um, and then I could build like rocket engines and I built this like little vapor deposition system. I built like a sputterer. Um, a sputterer is really cool. You put it in a vacuum chamber and then you can basically deposit thin metals onto surfaces. You actually have like these magnetic flux lines that have electrons spinning around them and it pulls in argon nuclei. They chip off components of the material, they fly up, they deposit on a surface, and you make like clear flexible circuits and things like that. So I just started getting into all this crazy stuff. This was all in high school. You know, I built this thing that could liquefy air and it was just like one thing led to another. I would upload the videos, the videos would get traction. Um, and then it, it kind of just kept snowballing and the cooler things I built, the more people would trust that I could build a cool thing. And then they were more likely to give me resources to do it. I also found a ton of stuff at the dump and like, you know, I would take like lawnmowers apart. I spent one summer just breaking grills. And like melting the aluminum down and like make— and making muffin tins like the whole summer, every single day. I would just go to the dump, get all the grills they had and like break 'em down. And I just like did all these weird projects. Like I made a jet boat, like, I don't know, just, I just went kind of crazy.

Just nonstop. Yeah.

Yeah. Just nonstop building. And I mean, obviously that, that gave me a ton of confidence that I could do basically anything if I just tried hard enough. And people would always ask like, oh, where do you learn how to do all this stuff? I would just look, look up YouTube videos. Or like pictures or like read documents. As soon as you want to build something, and I was like, I would get obsessed with ideas. I'd be like, I'm obsessed with like underwater vehicles. Like this month I have to build an underwater vehicle. I'm going to figure out how to do it, whatever I need. Oh man, like I need an Xbox controller. I need Arduinos. I need to figure out how to control it. Okay, cool. Like let me start writing code. And I like literally didn't sleep for like 2 weeks while I like wrote this code for this underwater vehicles. control system. So I could like, you know, move all the motors around and like literally fly it underwater. And I was like, this is great. And then I spent like 10 hours just like building the cable for it, like the tether. It had like fiber optic lines and like all these wires and stuff. And I just spent 10 hours doing it. And really, I think that's it. You just get obsessed about something, you start doing it. But then once you build enough stuff and everything kind of builds on itself, and you have this huge base of things that you know how to do, and you also have the track record of like, oh, well, everything I've wanted to build, I've been able to build. And then you just like end up with this confidence. And then I ended up getting— so this was all in high school and I was like, oh, I should probably go to college, kind of do the normal thing. I had a couple projects that I like tried to turn into companies and it was very clear that I was just like one kid in the middle of nowhere who had never worked with a real team before. So I was like, you know what, I'm just going to go to college, do the normal thing, try to get a job at a really cool company. I ended up getting very lucky. Somebody was watching my videos at SpaceX. And a bunch of SpaceX people reached out, um, my freshman year of college. I was able to get an internship at SpaceX my freshman year of college. And then that kind of kickstarted my real career. That was a huge resume builder. And then, yeah, I don't know. The rest is kind of like more standard. It's like, oh, I got this cool job and then like finished my degree and like got this other cool job and all that.

Totally. I mean, there's so many interesting threads there and I'm, you know, I think, I think I watched a bunch of your videos in preparation for this, but even in just you going through this, there were probably like 3 dozen different projects that I never heard about. So like the depth to which you were doing this was, is really quite striking. It really stays with me the fact that your dad decided, hey, like let's give him a real saw and a real hammer. Like there's something about that that does come up actually a ton, I think, in, in reading about some of these, you know, unusual childhoods is just an adult really treating their kid at a very young age seriously. Yeah. Um, and sort of taking their interests seriously. And so that's so, so interesting that that was so formative for you. Uh, I, I think there's the, you know, the fact that I'm sure you've heard that something like 4 out of the 6 members of the, the PayPal founding team had built a bomb in high school. What is the percentage at Reflect? Because it seems like it's at least 50% from what I could tell.

Yeah. I don't know if it's 50% at the whole company. Of

the founders, because you built one, right?

Yeah, I've built some things that blew up fast. Oh, I guess we do have a lot of rocket engineers here. Yeah, you know, it might be around 50. It might be a little over 50. I don't— there's definitely some people here who have never built a bomb.

And those are the pariahs.

Which sometimes is a good thing. Sometimes you want people who've never built a bomb. Like, you need to have a place, healthy balance, you know?

Exactly. The yin and yang, uh, the 2 types of people in the world. Your career is sort of, you had this SpaceX moment and then you had actually sort of like a period at, uh, I think it was like a, was it a bicycle helmet company where it was like maybe the one thing that I could see in your track record where I was like, maybe this product project didn't work. And it wasn't you that, you know, you know, you weren't the founder of it, but it was a sort of bicycle helmet company that, you know, raised some money on an Indiegogo or a Kickstarter or something like that. And it never shipped. And as you, I wonder like how that stays with you. Is there something about like that period where you're, you took some lesson from how that company run or how that project ran that, yeah, has informed how you do things?

Yeah, that was kind of a big risk that didn't really pan out as I wished it would have. Yeah. So I had done 2 internships at SpaceX. I worked on Dragon 2 prop tanks and rocket engines, had an unbelievable experience. It was clear that at SpaceX, the thing you had to do was go and work on Starship. and just like absolutely send it, live in Texas, never sleep, like basically have no social life and just only work. And I was pretty down for that, but I was like, oh man, everybody else is already doing this. And all these people at SpaceX are so much smarter than me. I'm definitely not going to be the best down there. Like what I am the best at is starting brand new things and doing stuff that's super hard and kind of taking things from literally nothing to something. So I'm going to try to take something from almost nothing to something. I don't want to start my own company yet. Let me learn how to do that. And one of my friends from SpaceX was working at this company. He was like employee 3. And I was like, he was like, dude, come, come work here. Like as an internship, you could be employee 4 at the startup. It's gonna be super cool. We're making folding bike helmets. And the entire idea behind these folding bike helmets was people have traumatic brain injuries because they aren't wearing helmets. So the problem with helmet, like, and if you're wearing a helmet, it's fine. But the problem is people aren't wearing helmets. So if we could just make a helmet not even safer, just easier to bring places, more people would wear them. And especially with like the rideshare days, it was like, oh, we can make it foldable, it could fit in a water bottle container. That would be super cool. Like, we'll make a helmet that's basically a baseball cap, but it's super safe. And I was like, oh, that's crazy. That doesn't exist. Let me try that. And I was pretty interested in the consumer market as well. I was like, I want to learn more about consumer markets and what people buy. Like, obviously, the rocket industry is this, you know, crazy thing that's totally different. I was like, I want something that people can just buy. I was also a little bit mad at like, oh, you know, SpaceX, we're going to Mars. And I was like, Mars? Like, yes, Mars is really cool, but there's like so many other things we can also do. Um, what about consumer markets? Like, what if you could make something valuable for people today, tomorrow? Um, not in like 20 years. So that was a big, a big thing. And I was like, yeah, I think I can maybe make this work. Um, and I really did just start as an intern and I did like, you know, the fall and then they were like, Oh man, Ben, you're you're cool. Like drop out of school and join us. And I was like, I don't want to do that. So what I ended up doing was driving back and forth to Boston like twice per week to go to classes while I was working at this company for basic for three semesters. It was actually kind of insane. And they ended up like you know I went to China for like nine months out of the year as well. Like all all in like one year. So I was like working like crazy at this company and. Honestly, we just couldn't really make it work with the resources we had. Also, the bike helmet market is fairly small. So it's not like a trillion-dollar market, you know?

Yeah.

You can't go fully nuts on it. Like, you know, you can't have the resources of SpaceX going for folding bike helmets. It just wouldn't make sense. Like, you'd never make a return. So that became kind of clear. And the scale of the problem was pretty difficult. And there were a bunch of disagreements with the founders, and I was like, dude, I'm, I'm literally just trying to finish school here. I should just do that. Like, why am I getting so involved in this?

This isn't my battle.

This is not my idea. I don't think this— like, I joined after they had done the Kickstarter, and I was like, yeah, I think I can maybe make it work. And, and I realized, actually, I'm not as good as I thought. I can't do everything. I was kind of a jerk before that, honestly. I was like, I can do literally everything. I can fix any problem. I'm the perfect human being. Like, I'll do everything perfectly just in Exactly right. Like, I can fix it. I'll just figure out a way, you know, I'll find a way. When I was there, I was like, oh, I can't find a way here.

There are limits.

There are limits and they're real. And yeah, I think it was, it was really humbling for me. And then right after that, I kind of jumped into a similar situation. I actually worked at a company that was embedding electronics in oil and gas pipelines with a rocket engine closeout technology. And it was the same thing. A couple friends from SpaceX were starting this company and Yeah, I was employee 4 again. And as we got into that technology, we kind of realized exactly what it was and they ended up getting acquired. And I didn't stick around for the acquisition. I ended up getting the job at Zipline then. But it was a similar thing. It was like, we set out to solve this big problem. Let's get data from the bottom of an oil and gas wellbore. Like you basically get no data from these things. Like they're going down like 20,000, 30,000 feet and they have mud pulse technology, which gets you like a couple bits per minute. It's like It's crazy how low the data rate is. Or there's this like multimillion dollar fiber line that can go down the side of the pipe, but then you have to drill a way bigger hole and then it's millions of dollars per well. So the idea here was just embed something on the side, some electronics with a bunch of connectors. So you could get like megabits per second. And then you could do like seismic readings, you can do pressure readings and you can figure out exactly where the oil is in the formation. So you can get more oil per well. And I was like, obviously I hated the oil and gas industry. I hated fossil fuels. Like, I had tried to build a fusion reactor and stuff, realized like, you know, fusion is not going to work. So maybe fossil fuels is the only way for a little while. So I'll try to make that better. I also hate hypocrisy where like people drive to work in a Prius and complain about the climate crisis. And it's like, you drove, like you're driving a Prius, but it's still burning gas. Like, what if we could make the oil and gas industry a little better? Like if you could make it even like 1% more efficient, you're making a huge difference today.

A huge difference.

Yeah. That was kind of the thought. And it's a startup. It's not like a big evil oil company or whatever. So I was like, you know what? this will be good. Um, like, maybe I can figure out a way. Um, and again, like, we kind of figured out some, some things that were cool, um, and then got acquired for that. But, you know, it was, uh, it was a similar story. And then after that, I was like, I'm done with startups, I'm joining a big company that's fully there. And then I joined Zipline, and Zipline was like unbelievable. Like, I absolutely loved Zipline. Um, but then I had the idea for Reflect.

Before we jump there, uh, you said something that I thought that I, you know, reminded me of the fact that, yes, I read somewhere that you built like a basic fusion reactor in your basement or something like that in high school. You know, we've talked about some of the things you built. So I don't mean to belabor this point, but it is quite important in understanding why you ended up doing Reflect and taking sort of a very alternative path to a lot of other folks when you think about, you know, how to increase energy usage for humans. What does it mean to build a fusion reactor in your basement?

Yeah, the fusion reactor was one of those school projects that I was going to write a report on and get some credit for. I was like, oh yeah, I think I can do this whole thing for like $1,000. Um, you know, you can look up a couple of videos of people doing like Farnsworth fusers. I think like 14 kids had made one. And I was like, oh, that's super cool. Like I could be one of like these 14 kids that have made a fusion reactor in high school. And then I just did it. It took like a month. It was like a welding project. You buy a bunch of stainless flanges, you buy a TIG welder, you like weld all the stuff together. It's how I learned how to TIG weld. You make a high voltage power supply, you need like minus 10 You need negative 30,000 volts at 10 milliamps. You need like a bunch of high vacuum feedthroughs. You make this little thing on the inside. You have to get deuterium. That was pretty hard. You have to register with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and get all of that. But then the actual tank's like $300. And then, yeah, you just like, you put all the parts together. It's, I wouldn't say it's like particularly difficult. It's just like a month of work.

Why did that make you bearish on fusion?

The way you tell if, if your fusion reactor is working is if it's making neutrons. And you have to go and measure the neutrons. So there's a couple of different ways to measure neutrons. You can either do a neutron detection tube and a hydrogen moderator, and it's basically like a Geiger counter, but it's specifically tuned for neutrons. So when a neutron goes through, it changes the charge in the tube, and then you can detect that and get a count. The other way to do it is you have, again, a hydrogen moderator and then a piece of silver, and you can transmute the silver— Yeah. Silver-109 into silver-118 or something like that. And then it decays with a half-life of 18 seconds. So you can measure that half-life decay and see if it's working. And there's a couple other ways to do it. You also, as you're running this thing, you're getting bombarded with like, oh man, it was like 60 millisieverts an hour of X-rays. And like I was hiding behind water because like neutrons get slowed down by water. But I was like trying to measure these neutrons and they're super hard to measure. And I just started looking into like other fusion reactors that are out there. And Like, yeah, it's all basically like these neutrons and you turn the neutrons into heat and then you use the heat to run steam turbines and then like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was just like having such a hard time thinking about how this was ever going to work. I was like, how would this ever work in reality? Like, let's say I wanted to actually go and build a real fusion reactor because I kind of got into this fusion reactor because I was interested in energy. And I was like, this just doesn't seem like the thing. Like, what would be the next step after this? It's actually not that different. Like I knew this fusion reactor was going to be terrible and never going to produce power.

Sure.

But I kind of realized the real ones are basically the same thing and they're struggling with a lot of the same problems. And it's just so much less efficient than what the sun does. The sun has a ridiculous amount of gravity and it just pushes atomic nuclei together because of that. And it does fusion and it's very efficient. Every time we try to do it on Earth, we're, we're like slamming these things together at very high speeds or confining them in these magnetic fields that are incredibly dynamic and very hard to stabilize. Even at the National Ignition Facility, where they do those giant laser pulses, if the little sphere that they have is off by like the diameter of a bacteria, it won't work. It'll go unstable. The lasers have to be perfectly balanced. So you just end up with these things that, that have to be incredibly smooth. And it's like, you're basically trying to push 2 springs together or 2 magnets together and they, you know, they always want to explode. And it's hard to create the pressures necessary. Like it's hard to create the pressures in the center of the on in this way. And I just, you know, got into thinking about all of that while I was building this fusion reactor and all the challenges and all the radiation and, and all of the, all the stuff about it. And I was like, man, I don't know if fusion's the thing. Like, it's really cool research. I mean, it was super fun to build the fusion reactor, but I was like, I don't know if this is better than just like a solar panel or better than just, you know, burning some, some fossil fuels. And I was kind of thinking like, you know, I burned a lot of energy. I actually used like a whole megawatt hour of electricity in high school.

Wow.

And like, my dad was kind of mad about that. So I was like, you know, am I the problem with the world? Like, am I just creating like all these problems? Am I making all this CO2? Like, oh, I made this fusion reactor and it's like actually even adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. It's like not making anything any better. I was like, man, I really want something that will just work. And I started working on antimatter a little bit, um, which is even harder than fusion, but it's like a storable, you know, fuel source. It's just like even deeper in physics and even, even more removed from reality. And then I kind of realized like, I probably won't solve the energy thing. It might be like much more difficult than I can do right now. Like I'm just going to do the normal job thing. And that's kind of when the SpaceX thing came out. I was like, you know, energy is very hard, like, like super, super hard. If I come up with an idea that, that might address it later, I will definitely do that. So I kept thinking about it all the time. Um, but I really realized like, wow, fusion probably isn't the future. Um, it's probably something else, maybe antimatter, but that's even harder.

And, and so was that, you know, you'd sort of been thinking about this for so long and, you know, had explored these other areas that you thought, hey, you know, I don't see this working. And then it was at Zipline that sort of you had a little bit of a, what sounds almost like a eureka moment where you're like, hey, actually, I think there's, I'm putting this in, in sort of air quotes, a simpler, uh, way of doing things. It's not, you know, simple to, to beam sunlight from space, but simpler than antimatter to, to make this happen. What, what was that moment like? Like what, what clicked in your head? that you suddenly thought, hey, this is viable?

Yeah, by the time I was working at Zipline, I was trying to have creative ideas and I was trying to explore them very quickly and basically see if they're a viable company or toss them out. And I had been doing that like probably for a decade. Like, I'm honestly, since the Ben and Builds days, I just, every new idea I'd come across, I'd look into it and see if it was worth starting a company around. And I was doing the same thing at Zipline and I would, I would have like brand new ideas, like probably once a week and almost all of them don't work. So Reflect started out as that. I was basically watching this video on sunlight in Africa and there was this project to move sunlight from the Sahara Desert to Europe and they're going to spend like $40 billion doing it. And it just, something just clicked in my head. I was like, oh, sunlight is a resource that you can move around and potentially get paid for. And I just saw it like it was It was oil or a resource in a way that I had never seen it before. And honestly, I'm kind of embarrassed that I hadn't seen it that way before. It seems so obvious now. It's like, oh, if you could just move sunlight from here to here and get paid for that, like you could create real value because you could move sunlight from, you know, like a solar farm down here up to here and you could make this one generate more power. So like in Germany, they'll make a third, a solar farm will make a third the amount of power it would make in Africa. So if you could move the sunlight in Africa, to Germany, it would make triple the power. And if the solar farm was making $100 million a year, now it could be making $300 million a year. And I was like, oh, so somebody could maybe pay me like $200 million a year to do this. I wonder if I could do something like this for like $200 million a year or less. So then I started looking into all these different ways to do that and eventually landed on the Reflect idea.

And how did you start to like crunch through the— credibility is not the right word, the sort of Uh, viableness of this, the viability of, of this project where you were like, you know, one, you have to sort of validate it on some level on the scientific side. And, and there is this sort of rich history of, you know, maybe the Egyptians, but also, you know, in researching this episode, I learned about sort of the Russian efforts in the 1990s and stuff like that, uh, which we can talk about. Uh, but also, you know, the viability on the economic side, just to say, hey, yes, maybe we can, can beam this, but is there enough of a market for Or sort of full moon level, you know, and beyond. What was it actually like to, to work through those questions?

Yeah, the objective was very clear, make electricity cheaper than the alternatives. So batteries are like $150 per megawatt hour. Normal fossil fuels, like a natural gas peaker plant would be actually around that range, but a combined cycle natural gas plant is like $56 per megawatt hour. Um, solar during the day is like $40 a megawatt hour, maybe like $30 a megawatt hour in some places. Nuclear power is like, you know, in the $140s to $150s per megawatt hour. Um, so I was kind of like, you know, coal is like $109 a megawatt hour. So I was like, okay, these are like things to shoot for. Maybe you make something that's a little bit expensive at first, beats batteries. Then you get better, you beat combined cycle natural gas. And then you get a little bit better and you beat just solar during the day. Like, oh man, if you can make something for like $30 a megawatt hour, everybody is going to use that. So that's, that was the goalpost. And I looked into what launch costs you would need, what satellite costs you would need, how thin the reflector would need to be, some of the designs, and basically just put it all into Excel. And it didn't work at first, right? It's like, you can apply things wrong. And then like, you know, a week later I was like, oh, I could do this like sun synchronous orbit thing. And then that completely improved the economics because instead of the satellite passing over once a day, you know, basically going through the day-night cycle with the Earth, it's like, oh, You can use the satellites all the time, then you can serve hundreds of solar farms at once. So you can spread one satellite's cost out over hundreds of solar farms, um, very large solar farms. So that's like a huge breakthrough. And there were a couple of these. There was another breakthrough that actually was like a dead end path where I was trying to decrease the spot size with Cassegrain optics in parallel. And that was like, oh no, because then you could serve a small thing in a city without having light pollution on the surrounding area. It turns out there's enough big customers out there that you actually don't need to do that. Um, so you can just delete all that stuff and keep a very simple satellite. Um, but I did spend some time working on things like that. A ton of different, like, you know, crazy materials, things like that, that would, that would completely change the economics. Like going from, you know, the Mylar you can buy on Amazon to some of these space materials was a massive improvement. Yeah. But really a big grounder for the economics was NASA's ACS-3 vehicles. Um, they're these solar sail satellites that had these super lightweight booms and this very thin material. And they had a certain mass and they had a certain size. And if you just made that thing reflective or something a little bit larger, the economics were very close to closing with a couple of these markets. So with just a couple of changes, it was basically workable in the right orbit and the right altitude and everything like that. So I was like, wow, this doesn't take any enormous breakthroughs. We've basically already built this thing.

Yeah, you know, we, I mentioned sort of the, the Russian experiments in, I think it was maybe 1993 when there's this, this sort of quite famous Russian engineer from what I was reading about him. I can't, I can't pronounce his name. It's like Sera Matnikov. Uh, you, you might, you might know it.

His anomia is even hard to pronounce.

Yeah, exactly. Um, uh, which, which translates to Banner, I read. So it's this project called Banner and they sort of managed to create a mirror in space and beam about a full moon's level of brightness back down to Earth. But when I was reading about this project, he tried for a really long time, right, to raise money, to bring it to reality. And it never worked. You know, I think people will know what's changed in some level, but on a really granular level, like what has changed from that era to today that, you know, makes that gap closable? Uh, on the financing side, but also just, you know, launch costs, technology, all of these different inputs.

Yeah, launch costs have gone down by, I think, 97x since then. You know, back then you were, you were shuttle, um, and they were a Soyuz mission. They were on the Progress spacecraft. Um, so today we have SpaceX Falcon 9 launch costs. Rideshares are, you know, $6,500 a kilogram. A full Falcon 9 is $2,500 a kilogram. And Starship is going to be a lot cheaper than that, um, once it's available. That was not around back in the '90s. The other really big difference is solar was not around in the '90s. There were about 200 megawatts of solar farms around the world. And our chief strategy officer has built like multi-gigawatt solar farms. Like we have nearly 2 terawatts of solar around the world today. So it's, you know, you go from 10 to the 6 to 10 to the 12 watts of installed solar capacity. So it's, it's just completely insane. the difference in solar. So Zenomia was launched without solar in mind at all. They actually had a mine fund them for their first mission. And yeah, so it was pretty interesting. It was just lighting, like just lighting up Siberia.

No way.

Yeah, that was kind of the impetus. And it's actually pretty similar for us. Like, we're huge in Scandinavia, like northern areas really, really like the idea of sunlight. I mean, obviously, you know, unsurprisingly. So it's unsurprising that the first satellites were from Russia, where it's super cold and super dark in the winter. But yeah, it was really just to light up areas. And I mean, the reason it didn't work, like with anything, it's usually the funding. Like, and that's been a thing, like even in high school, like if you can find the funding, you can usually build the thing. Znamya was able to find funding for this first mission. They launched a second mission and the second mission, honestly, it was kind of a stupid error. Like not saying that it's impossible for everybody else to do something like this, But they basically deployed the antennas before they deployed the reflector. So the reflector just like hit the antennas and then ripped up. And then that killed the entire program. Um, and it's like common in space for things like this to happen because the pro— you're so constrained and it's, it's very easy to make mistakes like this. And, and yeah, that basically just killed the entire program. So they had one mission that went up and they had one demo. It was on the Progress spacecraft, which was going to dock to this you know, the Mir space station. And they deployed it and they basically had like one pass over the Earth to test it. And it was, it was just cloudy on that day and it wasn't bright enough to break through the clouds. Obviously, if you're bright enough, you can break through the clouds, or if you have enough passes, you can get a day that doesn't have clouds. And they weren't able to line those 2 things up either. So they basically just didn't get a chance to show that it worked at all. There's some cool pictures of it in space, but, but that's about it. And yeah, since then, nobody really had picked it up. I mean, this, this has been an idea since the you know, the 1920s. Oberth wrote about it in a book. As soon as rockets worked, like it was shortly after the first liquid rocket engine worked, somebody wrote a paper about like mirrors in space that are going to light up the world. And it's kind of been a thing like here and there at NASA and places like that, but nobody's really done it apart from the Russians.

So, you know, we've now sort of, I think, fleshed out the core concept here. And to sort of go back, you have this eureka moment, you bring aboard one of your Zipline, uh, sort of colleagues, uh, Tristan Semelhack, and, and raise funding. What was it in Tristan that like felt like the right sort of partner for you that, you know, you guys sort of felt like you had the rapport to do something like this?

Me and Tristan are just on the same wavelength at a level that's, that's pretty hard to describe. I mean, you can describe it with stories and examples, um, but we'll, we'll just like see the exact same situation and have the exact same thought. like just the exact trajectory after that. And he is just incredible. So Tristan was a high school student working full-time at Zipline on one of the most important problems there and doing exceptionally well on that extremely important problem. And everybody there knew who Tristan was. They were like, oh my God, this fucking kid like works circles around me. Like, I can't believe it. Wow. Like, and he was just completely insane and just so good. And as soon as you meet him and Work with him, you're like, oh, wow, he can just like do that and that and that and that. And he can explain this in that way and like pull out this insight from this impossible thing and like really just like find the path in the complete darkness. Like Tristan is amazing, all in high school. And he knew me from my YouTube videos back in the day. So he was like, oh, you're Ben and Builds. Like we should be friends. And honestly, he probably wouldn't have been friends with me if that wasn't the case. Um, cause like he was like, He was obviously like mega famous, like as this high school kid, like he was awesome. And yeah, we just became friends at Zipline. We started like basically walking around like every day after lunch and just like talking about the various problems we're solving. We're on different teams there. We would go on like hikes together and stuff. We ended up like in the same friend group and yeah, just became friends. And then yeah, after I left Zipline to start Reflect, you know, I was working on it for a little bit and Tristan actually went to Stanford. got into Stanford and was doing the thing at Stanford. And he got through a semester and a bit more, and he was like— and Reflect was kind of taking off then, and he was— we started working together a little bit more, and he was like, you know what, I'm gonna drop out and just join you, Ben. Like, this is totally the path. And I mean, the rest is history, really. Like, he added so much value, so much clarity to Reflect. Like, immediately started like cutting out things. Like, actually, it was him that He cut out like the, you know, the Cassegrain optic thing, like simplified the entire technology, like totally simplified the pitch, basically invented the lighting market as well. And it's just like, you know, me and him since then.

You've raised, I think somewhere, you know, let's say $35, $40 million from folks like Sequoia and Lux and so on. One of the interesting quirks in your cap table is that the former founder of Robinhood, Baiju Bhatt, Uh, was one of your early investors and then sort of created a competitive company that has since pivoted sort of in your same space. Was that something that you were aware of when he joined? Did that create any friction or are you sort of, of the opinion we need as many, you know, things in space happening at the same time as possible?

Yeah, we were definitely aware of that, uh, before he joined. Um, we were having a ton of conversations about how to do space solar and all of that. And he was, just super excited about us, really cared about more companies building cool stuff in space and really making money in a brand new way, right? Like space has been so boring for so long. It's been telecoms, some Earth observation and a lot of defense stuff and, you know, the Mars pitch and all of that, but really it hasn't had commercial businesses in lieu of that are just making money. He was interested in developing those. He had always been interested in space. Like we bonded over that. We bonded over our love of technology and it's It just made sense. Um, and then, yeah, we knew, we knew he was interested before he joined. Um, and we're just honestly super excited to work with him, um, a bit closer. I mean, yeah, Beiju is pretty awesome. I love hanging out with Beiju. I would say it's a competitive technology, but the, like, really a rising tide raises all boats. Like, we're all booking the same launch. We're all increasing launch demand. We're all going to drive down the cost of rockets. We're all going to get better at building satellites. Um, I don't see us as competitive with other space companies either. I don't see us competitive with other energy companies. I think these markets are all in the trillions and there is a ton of value to capture and we're all capturing pretty different pieces of the value. We may be all kind of bundled into the same bucket right now because we're just starting to grow. But as we grow a lot more, I think it's going to be very clear that we're in entirely different industries and the entire space industry is so much bigger than anybody thought.

It's interesting to me that his company Aetherflux feels like it's sort of pivoted more towards orbital data centers. And it feels like that's going to be a trend as we see You know, demand in AI, you must have, you know, considered for a moment at least like, hey, are we, are we running the right race? Should we be changing tack? Like, why did that not make sense for you or not interest you?

I think everybody's probably going to pivot to data centers in space except for us. Um, I like tweeted about this recently and it's the same thing, right? There's very few good businesses in space. Most of them are just defense companies and defense companies like missions, like Yeah, that's definitely in the billions. Um, it's, it's cool and it's super cool and it's like great money and the government loves you and you can be, you know, the government can be a great customer. It's not the same as like the iPhone, right? It's not the same as the, the internet. It's not brand new. It's not changing the world. It's not doing all this stuff. Um, data centers in space. I mean, it's AI, right? So it's like, obviously it has all the AI stuff and it's potentially a cheaper way to do AI. So that's pretty cool. Um, and there's a ton of AI hype right now. So I think it's super easy to raise money for something like that. And theoretically it could be cheaper than a data center on the ground eventually, um, which is pretty cool. And like, I think Elon's pitch where it's like, we're going to build the mind of a sentient sun. That's pretty awesome. I think our species—

As a tagline, pretty amazing.

Yeah. I think our species will eventually do that. It's, it's kind of the thing to do long-term. It's just, you know, when do you do it? Do you do it right now? Do you do it in 50 years? Do you do it in 100 years? Being early is the same as being wrong. I think, uh, Mark Andreessen says that, like, you know, can you make your company last while it's insolvent for 50 years? Like, that's going to be pretty hard to do. Like, I've been in the liquid business for a long time. And I think Elon's willing to do things like that. You know, he's like, we're going to Mars, we'll figure it out. Mars had no market. Like, there's no market on Mars. How is that ever going to make money? Right? That was always the question. That's kind of why I didn't really want to stick around SpaceX. It's like, I don't know if this Mars thing, like, is really going to work. And Elon was like, I don't care. I'll figure it out. I think he's kind of doing the same thing with data centers in space. If you do the math right now, you can rent an H100 for like $1.33 an hour. That's like $40 a day. That's very little money. Like even with quite good solar panels, it would take like a couple decades to pay that back. So we're not going to do data centers in space. When that changes, we might. But right now, I mean, our mirror is like lighter than those GPUs, like it takes less power and we can make in the thousands of dollars per hour instead of a couple dollars per hour. So it's just so much better. It's obviously way harder to build. It's way harder to raise money for because people don't think it's valuable yet, but we're going to show them that it's valuable. We think we can do that. We already thought we could do that. We were already like biting off that problem. We're just continuing on the exact same path. And I think everybody will maybe pivot to us. once they realize our thing makes sense. But obviously they're pretty excited about data centers right now. And it's not just Elon, right? It's Google, it's NVIDIA, like Planet's doing it. Like new businesses in the space are really exciting.

For a lot of these folks, it feels like the, you know, it's hard to say lowest hanging fruit given it is still a really complex thing to do, but it's sort of the, you know, a natural evolution or a natural thing to want to try when the market's pulling in this direction.

And there'll be compute in space, you know, there's, Like $1.33, like you're not just going to do like normal H100 stuff. Like, you know, maybe you take a picture and then you do some AI on it and then you send it down. Like, I think there are applications for AI in space and there's many examples of that happening. And I think everybody's going to engage in that a little bit and it'll slowly develop. I guess I'm not worried about this becoming something that humans can do. And I think we'll probably do some AI in space for some applications, for some reasons. I'm sure everybody's going to do it to some extent. It's just, you know, the full-on Elon thing. You know, we're sticking with Reflectors.

Yep. Yep. Uh, there's been like plenty of folks that are skeptical about Reflect being able to be viable. And perhaps I'm just like too much of a congenital optimist in a venture sense, but to me, like, that's sort of a necessary byproduct of like any legendary outcome, I suspect, is that, you know, it's kind of a bullish signal if there's like a bunch of people who think this is impossible or Or not viable, because I think, you know, there's a really easy way that people get locked into a certain form factor of like, hey, this specific version doesn't work if I run the numbers, when the reality is like, I suspect you're making 1,000 little micro adjustments and tweaks along the way that mean the final form factor of what this looks like ends up being very different. And so I'm curious, as you think about that, like, you will have, of course, seen folks who think, hey, you're not going to be able to get enough Brightness to make enough money from this, or, you know, you're, you're, you're going to be able to get some amount of sunlight, but there's not going to be enough utilization on this or whatever it is. What are the pieces that you think folks tend to miss most about where this is headed?

The performance of the mirrors is quite significant. Um, as you mentioned, the value of even dim sunlight is also Insane. And the ability to add the satellites together, I think, is also a really big one. I think people miss that constantly. You can just keep adding satellites together and keep increasing the power. You can have 4,000 satellites working together at one time. You could have 10,000 satellites working together at one time. You don't have to have the satellites talking to each other to do that. You just have them all pointing at the same spot at the same time. So it's kind of, it's extremely parallel. It's like Jensen Huang talks about like this thing called stupidly parallel. where the best parallel systems are ones that take very little interaction between all the elements. It's the same thing with these satellites. They all just point at the same spot. It's really simple. They don't have to know where the other one is. It's not like a formation flight. So I think that's one that people miss. I think people also miss the, like that you can go all night if you keep adding these rings. Some of those rings are kind of special, but I don't know. I think people miss that one pretty often. I think the other one that people miss, I think some people think we're just like, reflecting light and not changing where the satellite is. So we're just kind of like lighting up the whole back of the Earth or something. We're definitely not doing that. You know, one satellite hands a spot off to another satellite and it's over a very tiny, precise little area. And like the satellite is rotating the entire time. We're able to do that. We've designed the satellites from the ground up to be able to do that. They have huge reaction wheels and all of that. So they fully rotate every time they're passing over a customer. And we can fully like move the Spot. We can even move the Spot while we're serving. Like, you know, say there's a really big music producer that's writing a song. You can move the Spot back and forth, like as the song is hitting. So it can be like, like when the music hits and everybody's freaking out and then like the music comes off and then we move it back on. We can do things like that, you know, track moving objects. You can do all this stuff. You can move the Spot around cities and areas like that so you can avoid different places. There's ways to actually like keep the satellite on the spot and then cut it off so you don't have a line going between 2 cities, so you're not lighting it up. There's just a ton of different things that you can do with these flexible tools. If you focus on building, you know, the brightest, most specular satellite, that's extremely dynamic and performant and very retaskable and infinitely retaskable. And all of these retasks come for free. It's all just reaction wheels. It's, you know, solar-powered motors. So I think that's a pretty big one. Like people get confused about our altitude. I mean, there's all kinds of space things. Like space is this place where it's just so easy to overthink everything because it's really hard to actually test in reality. But, you know, our vehicle has a full-on prop system. You know, we have, we have full-on radios. We're like a full-fledged satellite. You know, it's a couple million dollars to build one of these satellites. Like it's fully featured. It does all the stuff. Um, and it does all the stuff exceptionally well so that it can serve its boss as well.

Yeah. The multiple constellations or the multiple satellites at once piece sort of, you know, at constellation scale, I think is so interesting. And Maybe the analogy is it's sort of almost as if you have 100 people with a torch pointing it at the same spot, right? Like you, your brightness suddenly increases a lot when that happens versus— It's

100 times brighter.

Yes, literally. Um, and, and on the piece on, uh, you know, I actually haven't, maybe this didn't come up as much while I was researching, but the sort of market for this, uh, lower brightness version of things, you talked about this. You know, at the top and, and again now, like, where is the market pull coming from there? You know, is it like mining companies like the, you know, the Russian version? Is it music performing artists who are, you know, creating an incredible concert atmosphere? Like, where's that demand from that makes you feel like, hey, actually this thing that we once thought was going to be just an experiment as, you know, our first 3 satellites is going to— be economically viable already?

This one is actually a lot deeper than most people realize. We have electricity because we wanted to light homes up. And even before the invention of the light bulb, like Rockefeller, Standard Oil, that whole thing was for lighting homes. It was, it was lighting and heating homes. That's, that's why we were pulling petroleum products out of the ground. And then we realized there was this byproduct of home heating oil that was super volatile gasoline that you could use for cars. And then it was like, oh wow, we have these cars. That's how we got into oil. And before that, you know, it was candles and stuff like that. It was just like lighting up areas. And then the light bulb was similar. It was like, oh, like I want the ability to light a home without a gas lamp because gas lamps are kind of smelly and all of that. Like, I wonder if there's a way to do that. You know, Thomas Edison, all these guys, like, you know, Nikola Tesla, they were working on light bulbs to light up homes without using oil. Um, and when they did that, there was no power grid. Like, the first electrically lit homes— it was, um, JP Morgan's house was one of the first ever. It had a generator in the basement, and the walls were full of all these crazy wires that would like light on fire constantly. The neighbors hated him. He built it, I think it was in Manhattan, and the neighbors absolutely hated this guy because he was running this generator all the time, which was super loud. Like, the dynamo on it was incredibly inefficient. Like, it was crazy. Um, and people hated it. And he was like, oh man, I don't know if this thing is going to work. Like, he had seen a demo of it at this mansion. He was like, I want this in my house. But then when he put it in his house, he was like, not happy with it. He was constantly complaining about it. He was like, these light bulbs kind of suck. Like, this generator is awful. And it caught on fairly slowly for a little while. Um, it was pretty bad. The point there is it was lighting homes before energy. And it was a couple of decades later that they actually started putting in the power grid and they were like, okay, we got to get rid of these generators in people's basements. Let's do a power grid. And then it was the whole like AC versus DC thing and all of that. And then everything took off. And a lot of this was funded by, by like JP Morgan. And like, he was just like a futurist after kind of seeing this stuff happening. And but people like hated lights. Like people were like, these things are going to ruin our lives. Like these things are going to completely change the world. You're going from candles to this, like nobody's ever going to sleep, you're going to ruin everything. And obviously we look back on electricity and the invention of a light bulb is a pretty big deal these days. It ended up mattering a lot. We're the same thing. Like our lighting market is replacing light bulbs effectively. It's the new version of light bulbs. You don't need a light bulb anymore. You just need to hit a button on a phone and then you can get the same exact thing. And all the negative stuff that people, like people say about us, you could also say about light bulbs. you know, oh, it's light pollution. Oh, it's like ruining the night sky. Oh, it's keeping people awake. People choose to install light bulbs in cities, um, for various reasons, you know, for safety so you can walk around. It feels good when you go to Times Square at like 2 AM. I loved Times Square. Everybody who lives in New York hates Times Square. I— when I lived in New York, I loved Times Square. I don't know why. I loved all the light bulbs. Like, I, I lived in Hell's Kitchen for a bit, um, and it was super fun. And when I would walk around at night, like, it just felt super vibrant. It felt like the city that never sleeps. It's like, oh, there's so much energy, there's so much excitement here, you know, that sort of thing. Like, people put light bulbs in for, for that sort of feeling. And you can do the same thing with our satellites. Imagine walking around Times Square and it's lit up by satellites. It's going to feel super cool. Or any city, right? And you— and we can adjust the brightness. I think the other thing people miss is it's fully dimmable. So we're not going to be sunlight at night, right? You can be, you can be 3 lux, you can be 0.1 lux, you can be moonlight. You can just be, you know, basically the light when security cameras turn on, and you can just see areas, you're not going to trip over something. You know, like a nightlight, it could be nightlight brightness. That's very important and people miss that. So we can— you can tune us a lot more. You can also turn our light on and off a lot more, and it's much more even than normal light bulbs. So when you have normal light bulbs, the, the actual street lights themselves, um, will be, you know, some distance apart and they'll be super bright. They'll be brightening the ground to like 40 lux, but then in between the street lights, it'll be like, you know, 3 lux, 9 lux. You know, the dark skies folks say 3 3 lux is all you really need. But usually it's, it's over bright here and it's, it's just very uneven lighting. So we can just light up the entire area to one even brightness. We can, you can select 3 lux, you can select 10, you could select 0.1, whatever, whatever the city wants. We can turn it off. You know, you could have like 3 lux at 7 PM and then like 2 lux at 9 and then like 0.1 at 10 and then nothing after. Or, you know, you could have, you could have 10 lux all night, whatever you want. You could select and we're fully programmable, right? It's just how many satellites are working at once. That's really easy. That's flexible. Our software just does that in like, you know, 2 math operations. Yeah. And we can do it for any area. You know, the city of Los Angeles is very big, but it actually takes 70 different spots to light up the entire city. So, you know, you can do different regions with different amounts of light. You can add the light together. You can do light that's not just, you know, 2 spots overlapping. You can do them like half overlapping where like the center is a different brightness than the outside. You can like basically build shapes. Like we could draw a picture of a dog with our satellites. Like with the light from our satellites. Like, I mean, it'd be really big, but like we can do all this stuff and you just can't do any of that with streetlights. It takes like months to build streetlights. You have to trespass on everybody's land. You have to build all the stuff. If you want them to like turn off at night, you have to like put in all these sensors or all these switches. With us, it's just a couple buttons. It's like, you know, it could kind of be the same as like a calendar, like a Google calendar thing where you just like have the different time with the different brightnesses on it. It's going to be much simpler. We're going to allow people to light up more areas. The other cool thing is you can just hit a button and turn us off if you want. It's not like, oh, we built all these streetlights, we got to use them. The sentiment changes for a particular community, we can just turn all the lights off.

It sounds almost like municipal lighting and that sort of market is maybe like one of the more attractive sort of beachheads for you where you see folks being excited to experiment with that, to see what that experience is like for people in their city. Is that Is that a fair reading or are there other ones that you think like, yeah, look, that's a, a very visible use case for the, for the consumer, but in reality, like the first, you know, 3 sort of customers we have to serve are, I don't know, solar farms or, you know, defense applications or whatever it might be.

Yeah, municipalities are definitely not our hungriest customer. Um, our hungriest customers are folks having emergencies. So if somebody falls overboard in the middle of the ocean and You know, helicopters are on the way. You can just hit a button and be there in 30 seconds. You can see the entire area around you. You don't actually have to wait for the helicopter anymore. If you're like lost hiking in the woods, like in the middle of the mountains, in the freezing cold, you can't see anything, your headlamp dies, but somehow your phone still has like 5% charge. If you can get a signal out, we can light up that entire area for a couple hours. And then you can see, you can get back. We can do things that are just otherwise completely impossible. Um, if there's a natural disaster, if there's like a fire that's going on or something like that, we can be there so you can fight the fire at night. I remember when the LA wildfires happened, they weren't fighting the fires at night. Um, we could potentially help change that, you know, um, set down a spot, you say, here's where the emergency is happening and we can be there. And that's definitely where you start. Like those, those applications matter so much more. The municipalities, we don't expect to happen for a long time.

Like, yep.

I think I'm, I'm very excited about them happening, but really it's going to be the, the hungry customers first. They're, they're going to be the laggards. The early customers will be these search rescue operations, these critical things. Um, as you get in a little bit later, then you start getting like northern regions. Um, you know, like folks up in Alaska, folks in Scandinavia, um, in these really northern towns where, you know, there's some valleys where it's, it's dark for like 4 months, and we can provide a little bit of sunlight, give people something to look forward to. Um, we got so many applications from these northern places saying like even just a tiny bit of sunlight like once a week would make a huge difference in my life. Like the whole town would come together for it. Like it would be so exciting. Yeah. Um, I would love something like that. You know, we'll, we'll absolutely be lighting those places up, even with the first satellite, we're, we're going to be lighting up a couple of these towns.

You know, those are maybe the, you know, the first set of customers. When you think about, you know, at maturity, does that become the time when, you know, solar farms do become sort of the biggest chunk of customers in your estimation, just because there's, you know, the demand for that, if you can deliver that energy consistently at a, you know, sufficient brightness at a valuable or at a, Decent enough cost? Like, or is that no longer as big a piece of the puzzle for you?

The lighting market is, you know, in the tens of billions per year, um, potentially in the hundreds of billions too, if you're in the right markets and you're starting to like grow new things. The energy, like we spend $2 trillion a year on electricity, um, and globally, and about $8 or more on including all the fossil fuels that we use in like cars and things like that. So it's an enormous market. Agriculture industry is actually similar in size. It's up in the trillions. You can increase plant growth and things like that. But really it's these behemoth markets like solar energy and agriculture that are going to be like our long-term moneymakers.

Yes.

The thing is you need a lot of satellites to open up those markets. You need thousands of satellites in space and they also need to be quite cheap, right? You're competing with commodity electricity prices. You're competing with PV solar. You're competing with, you know, combined cycle natural gas, competing with nuclear. You're competing with batteries. Nuclear and batteries are pretty easy to compete with. But like you are competing with these things for cost and competing with something for cost, it's really hard. Your thing has to be really cheap. You gotta be really good at building these satellites. They have to be really cheap. Launch costs have to be really cheap. You have to be launching a ton of things. That's expensive. It's, it's really expensive to make enough things that they become cheap. It's easy to say like, oh yeah, we'll just like mass manufacture these. So many companies say that and like a lot of them fail because of it, because it's actually way harder than they realize. You need to be making money with a small number of things in order to have the ability to make a lot to get cheap. You can't just like spend a billion dollars and like make a ton of things and make something cheap. You need to be able to do something useful with like, like maybe like a couple hundred thousand dollars or maybe $1 or $2 million. Right. Um, and you need to be able to make money like that so that you can actually get to the bigger markets and And then you're not just like, I need a billion dollars for this crazy project. You're like, oh, we're expanding and our revenue is this high. So we're also spending this money. And that's really why the lighting market is so important is because it gives us a way to build satellites that are expensive, that we are testing and some things aren't going to work, but it's going to be okay because we're making so much money off of these lighting markets that it's fine. Like the margins are so high. Um, we're not mentioning exact pricing yet, but, you know, some of these satellites are the price of like a few expensive lawyers. Like it's in the thousands of dollars per hour.

I love that as a comparison. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a funny cop.

It's a Zoom call with a couple lawyers, you know, which Zoom call with a couple lawyers could be like, you know, $5,000 or $10,000 an hour. Um, and, you know, if you're doing that like 15% or more of the time, um, for, you know, a couple of years, it's, it's in the, you know, it's a few million dollars per year. Um, so the satellites can make back all their money in just a couple months and they'll last for 5 to 7 years.

It feels like it, you know, it's, it's a super novel technology or, you know, at least a very novel manifestation of it, but like you're following a very tried and true strategy, right? You're starting with this lighting market where there's, where you can do something that no one else can do, at least, you know, in this sense, and there's really strong demand and you can charge, you know, some sort of premium for it. And then you're unlocking these things that where you're competing against everyone else on price, but, you know, the market is more or less unlimited. Um, and so, you know, you sort of grand strategy style grabbing each new opportunity as you, as you build into it.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. It's start with something that's, that's brand new for the world that people pay for the value they're getting. And then when you get good at that, then compete with things we're already used to.

Let's transition a little bit and talk about how you run the company. Uh, I always think that a lot of the founders that I end up being most excited by, they maybe do things that are not super usual. And so I wonder, culturally or operationally, what are the things about how Reflect runs that might be super different to Zipline, for example, or SpaceX, and that are really core to your culture?

I'll start with the things that we do similar. The first one is we really prioritize top talent. That is extremely important, like keeping a very high talent bar and making sure those people stick around and making sure you really only let people in who meet a certain talent bar. Like, is this person's Reflect quality? Is this person SpaceX quality? Is this person zipline quality? That was always a question that we were asking. And that's definitely the case at Reflect. We want to be just incredible and surrounded by incredible people all the time who are excited to be working on this stuff, who are at the top of their field, who are really the best and brightest. who are often like a prodigy in high school, like that whole thing. Like we're really looking for those folks. I think that's critical. When you have a team of those folks, you really want to enable them to do the best work of their life. And honestly, you will stop at nothing so that they can do the best work of their life. Like once you have a room of those people, it almost like happens naturally. You're just like, oh my God, I don't want anything to be in this person's way. And it just happens immediately as soon as you hire the right people. If you hire somebody who's bad, you almost want to get in their way. You're like, please don't do any work. I don't want to look at it.

Yeah. How can I put roadblocks here?

Yeah. But, but as soon as you get somebody good, it's like, dude, like I'll give you $5 million. Like, like I'll do whatever it takes to like keep you working on this thing. And SpaceX and Zipline did this really well. Like you basically felt like money was free when you were working there as an employee. As soon as you like had a project that you needed to work on, you're like, this, I want to build this thing. It's going to cost this much. They're like, cool, here you go. I worked at another couple startups that didn't do that. They were kind of too broke and it was hard to do anything and it felt bad. So we enable people to buy things quickly, as quickly as possible. Like, come here, you say you need to buy something. This is important for your job. Here's the reason why. All right, here you go. Here's the money. Like when our chief engineer joined, I think he spent like a couple million dollars in the first week.

In equipment?

Yeah. And it was basically like, you know, 4 months of work that we weren't doing that he just did in a week. And it's like, if people aren't spending money, they're not making progress, right? So you really need, and you need to spend it on the right things. Like you have to check that, but you want there to be no friction as soon as this is the thing to do. And I mean, that's a big thing with personal projects as well, right? Like as soon as you get the money, like you're able to build the thing, but then you have to go and spend the money. And I really learned how to spend money when I was building all these projects in high school. It's the fuel that fuels everything being built. And how you spend it's really important. Like you can spend money on the wrong things and lose money. Like you really don't want to do that. But you know, doing it the right way is definitely important. But a lot of times the right way is just really fast. Like, and it's funny how often people mess this up. If you buy something and it's the wrong thing, and then you gotta like buy it again, and then it's also the wrong thing again, and then you gotta buy it again. Each one of these cycles is basically a week long or potentially longer. Yeah. You know, it's coming in the mail. From whatever company. And then you try it, it doesn't work. And so you can burn a whole month just buying the wrong thing a couple times. And that's a month of like the entire company's burn rate, which can be in the millions of dollars per month. And that is unbelievably expensive. What you should have done to save money is buy all 6 of them immediately, get all 6 that week, try them all out, pick the one that's the best, throw the rest away. Usually that's the cheaper thing to do. So we encourage people to do things like that and actually think about the entire program cost, including your engineering costs and payroll, which is usually the most expensive part of the company as part of it and operate a lot faster like that. So anyway, that's the second one that we do to keep people going. And yeah, I think the last one is really like making sure that the company is all aligned and focused on the same thing. You know, you have the right materials, people are investing in the right amounts of infrastructure. You don't want to spend all day doing documentation or things like that, but there's a lot of really simple infrastructure that's that's great. Just like a spreadsheet that says everybody's ownership and exactly what people are working on, what they should be doing. Obviously, like making schedules, things like that, you know, having everything in CAD, like, you know, signed off, a drawing, a formal drawing review process. Um, all that sort of stuff is really important, um, to keeping everybody aligned on the same page, like, you know, doing work that they're, they're proud of. Um, and really making sure that you're catching mistakes. When you're building a satellite, you have to catch a lot of mistakes. Like, you know, people make mistakes naturally and you need a, You need to build a system that is naturally good at catching these mistakes before they make it into the vehicle.

What has been the biggest surprise of building this company and what has been the hardest day of building it?

The biggest surprise has been what an exponential curve feels like in an organization. Like our headcount has been exponential, like completely exponential. We were 14 people in July. Now we're 51. We were 7 people this time last year. Um, the year before that we were 2. The way that feels is, is like completely impossible to predict. Uh, it feels so much better than you would think. And the thing with exponentials is they always get steeper, right? And it's always like, oh my God, things are happening so fast. And then a month later it's like, oh my God, they're happening even faster.

Yeah.

That was completely unforeseen. I did not expect it. It's incredibly, incredibly rewarding. I love that. The hardest day, I mean, I've had a lot of hard days, like particularly, so I was just in a garage, like I actually started Reflect when I was like living in a van. I was living in a van while I was working at Zipline. It was honestly great. I could just like live anywhere. I loved living in a van. I was in like this garage for a while and I had initially raised like $50,000 from Rick Burton, who's fantastic. And was working on Reflect for a number of months. And it was like 8 months in or something like that. I had like $300 in the bank, like literally $300 left. And I had just had this huge breakthrough with the technology where the whole thing got a lot simpler. And I was like, should I go back to Zipline? Like, should I continue doing this? And some days you start doing the math and you make a mistake and you're like, oh wow, it's way less valuable than I thought. And then it comes back and then it's like, so there was this whole like couple of days there where it was like pretty gnarly. All of a sudden, like I found the problems in the math. It like actually started working out really well. And then I was just like, you know what? I can do this. I'm just going to go into credit card debt and just send it. And then I just started like buying tools and I was like, yep, I'm going to figure out how to raise money. I'm going to start buying tools. This is going to work. I know I can do it. I know I can build this. Like I'm going full throttle. And then like a month later, I raised $350,000.

How much debt had you gone into?

Oh, like $50,000 credit card debt. I actually, this was hilarious. I had $21 left of credit card debt. Like I, when the $350K came in, like I couldn't buy, like I could almost not buy a sandwich, but it wouldn't have worked if I didn't do that. I was like, it was a decision. I was like, and it was kind of partially because I like had done all the Ben and Build stuff. I was like, You know what, I can just like finish this. This is like so close. I know it's so close. I know I can do it. Um, and I know I just need to keep building stuff because like, if, if I'm going to ever get out of this, it's going to be because I built something that was valuable. And the only way to do that is to spend money.

People wouldn't fund you at that point. They were, they were, they wanted to see more proof before, before they would take a bet on you.

A little bit. Yeah. It also wasn't packaged quite right. Like there was like one critical test that I had to get done before I could go and raise the capital.

What was that? What was the sort of like threshold that you were pushing towards?

It was a bunch of ground tests with mirrors and the performance of the mirrors, actually like measuring the power on a little thing. Yeah, it wasn't the hot air balloon test. It was way before that. It was like actually a year and a half before that. It was like all these little ground demonstrations measuring the quality of the mirrors and all that.

How did you sort of maintain your poise during that period? Like, did every day just feel like you were in a dogfight? Or, you know, were you able to sort of block out the noise for yourself?

Yeah, I was just living in this, in this garage, sleeping on the couch, you know, getting DoorDash Thai food, just sitting at a desk, you know, just kind of working away. I felt like, I mean, it was pretty isolating. But it was, It was kind of fun. I was, I was kind of having a blast, like making stuff. You know, I was like, wow, I really might be ruining my finances here. I didn't want to tell anybody about it. I was kind of embarrassed, honestly. Like, I know all my friends were pretty rich or whatever, like had done well at their companies and stuff. So I was like, I don't want to tell anybody that I'm in credit card debt. That's, that's pretty embarrassing. But apart from that, honestly, I had been training for years for things like this. Even at SpaceX, I lived in a Miata for like four months just because I was like, I want to like if I ever go homeless, I was like, if I start a company, I know it's going to be crazy and that like maybe I'll run out of money at some point and have to be homeless. And I had been thinking that for like five years before this, so I felt like I had prepared for it and trained for it. I mean, it's kind of similar. So I I climbed Denali, like the highest mountain in Alaska, in in 2017. when I was in college. And one of the things I did to prepare for it, like, because I was like, kind of worried about sleeping on the sleeping pad on Denali. I was like, what if I can't sleep on that thing? And I get like bad sleep, and I like can't hike, and then I like die or something. And then I was like, oh, what if I just started sleeping on the sleeping pad at school? And, and that's what I did. So I just slept on the sleeping pad for 6 months before sleeping on Denali. And then when I went there, I was like, oh, wow, the air is way cleaner here than Boston. And it's like quiet, and I'm on the same exact bed, and it was just perfect. And I, I didn't worry about it at all. I got like the best sleep of my life when I was on Denali because I, I was just completely used to the sleeping pad. And I kind of see the same thing in a lot of things like this. Like, I was, I was kind of ready to be, you know, homeless, scrappy, like in credit card debt. I was prepared for it. I knew it was something that everybody else would look down on. Like, everybody else would look down on just like sleeping on a sleeping pad every single day. But I had been doing that for a reason. And it paid off.

I'm such a believer in the fact that every great company has multiple of these near-death moments. And I think it's amazing, you know, what you had to go through and power through to get to this point. So, you know, usually I like to ask a few wrap-up questions, but I actually think that was just kind of the perfect place to end it. So with that, I just want to say thank you. I really enjoyed this so much. And I think what you're doing is so awesome.

Yeah, it was a blast to talk. Um, really appreciate it.

That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.