The insane grind of building a space startup 🛰️ Joshua Western

there is a freedom in the startup landscape that you don't have in working for the man. Equally, I wouldn't be who I am now if I had not gone on that journey. And you don't always have the opportunity to take many journeys, even coming from a place like the UK. So for me, it's still one of the best things I have done and I'm still doing. Even if people don't think it's hard from the outside, I know that it is, and I know that what I do matters. I think really the way I see it is seeing the team succeed.

This week's Millennial Master is Joshua Western, co-founder and CEO of Spaceforge. From pub chats to space factories, Josh took an idea, £10 on company's house, and a whole load of grit and turned it into a game-changing deep tech startup. In this episode, we get into The brutal reality of scaling a space startup. How to get investors to back you before you even need them. And why mindset and persistence matter more than talent. Millennial Masters is proudly sponsored by Jolt, the UK's top web hosting service. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling up a custom map, every great project needs a reliable home. That's why Jolt has hosting plans starting at just £3.95 a month, with unbeatable deals on domain registrations too. Why Jolt? It's a no-brainer. There's no waiting around with support within 30 seconds on live chat. Your site stays live no matter what with over 99.99% network uptime. And You can also pay with Bitcoin or American Express, so you can rack up those points too. How good is that? Sign up today and enjoy your first 3 months free. Head to jolt.co.uk to get started. This episode is brought to you by Offware. Gym memberships, gift cards, free coffee, and pizza Fridays. Well, these staff perks just don't cut it anymore. That's why OffWork gives your team something they already love—travel! They can book their own flights, pick their own hotels, and plan the perfect getaway, all with the travel fund you set up for them. It's super easy—just set the contributions, and OffWork handles the rest. Better time off means less burnout, more motivation, and happier employees. Give your team a perk they'll actually love. Check out Offwork today on offwork.com. Josh, welcome to Millennial Masters.

How are you? Yep, doing very well, thank you.

Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to it.

So am I. So let's dive straight into it.

I know you come from a family of chefs, you studied politics, and now you are at Spaceforge. What is the journey from the plate to space?

Nobody's ever put it quite like that before. Uh, yes, I am the black sheep of the family. Um, as the one person that hasn't ended up somehow working in a kitchen. Uh, Mostly because I think that's actually the hardest job there is. I think cooking is harder than anything. You know, if you're a chef in a restaurant, it's very rare that somebody comes back and gives you a compliment. Most of the time they're there to tell you that they didn't enjoy the meal. The hours are tough, the pay's rubbish. So apart from one summer where I ended up working in a kitchen because a chef quit at a pub I was working at. I haven't set foot commercially into a kitchen ever since. I do still love to cook. And yeah, so I was studying politics at university. I remember vividly having absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. And I was sat in a Morrison's supermarket cafe with my mum the year I was graduating and she was like, right, so what are you gonna do with your life? And at the time I thought I was going to become a lawyer. I studied, I did like a module in law and I fell asleep in the first seminar. So not even in the lecture hall where there's like 70 of you, I fell asleep in the seminar where there's 6 of you. So I realized law wasn't going to be for me. And so my mum was like, so what do you like doing? I said, well, I like I like writing and I like eating. And she said, well, unless you're going to be a restaurant critic, I suggest you pick two of the three. Although as a small aside, I did want to actually run a food blog and I used to get invited to restaurant openings, but very difficult way to make money. And as I was graduating, Tim Peake, the British astronaut, got selected for his mission to the ISS and that is where I learned that the UK even had a space industry. So I started applying for space tech jobs. I wrote to the CEO of a space company in the UK, Ben Olivier. He was running a company at the time called Thales Alenia, and he very graciously gave me a job interview, and that's how I got a job in the industry.

And how did we get on to co-founding Spaceforge?

That was a slightly different journey compared to the rest of it. So, While when I joined the industry, it was still quite a nascent sector, but burgeoning, uh, space in the UK has been around for quite a long time. Uh, quite a hidden industry considering how much it does. But, uh, I was so sort of thrust into Thales where I did all sorts of jobs, legal and contracts, marketing, government affairs, uh, which is where I learned I probably didn't want to be an MP. Then tried out, um, I did some sales and eventually sort of like business development type activity where I looked after all sorts of customers, mostly government, also working with the European Space Agency. Um, and then an opportunity came along in that role where I ended up being seconded into the freshly formed UK Space Agency. Um, so UK Space Agency is now, I think it's 11 years old, maybe 12. When I was seconded into it, I was sort of, I don't know, like the 40th or 50th person into the agency. So still quite small, hundreds of people now. And in that role, I did, I looked after some space weather items. So basically monitoring the sun in case of a solar flare. That was super cool. I then did some strategy development and some product development, and I ended up writing a very, very small piece of what ended up becoming the country's first national space program, which sounds way cooler on my CV than, uh, what part of what I wrote actually made it in. But the, so I was straddling two jobs. So I was in, I was in, uh, the space agency and I was also, um, still working for Thales. And one of the roles that I had at Thales was, uh, working with my now co-founder Andrew. He was head of what was known as the Advanced Concepts Team, um, in the Space Division. So he basically came up with really crazy ideas on how to use space, and then it was my job to go pitch them and sell them. We had as much success as you would imagine having with some of his ideas. Um, they were hotels on the moon, mining asteroids, how much people would pay to play Quidditch on on the ISS. Worryingly, that was the business case that closed fastest, actually. Most of the time, he would bring these ideas to me, and I would have to write a business case or a business plan for them. And I would just be like, there's no customers for this. It's just like, who's going to pay for this? And most of the time, his answer was, oh, government. And I was like, well, that's not really a sustainable customer. And then one day, he asked me for a pint. And I was like, yeah, all right, you know, we've been working together, we get on well, yeah, let's go do it. Um, and he was like, right, right, I've had this other idea. And that idea is the technology that now underpins Spaceforge. Um, and I went for the first time, you know, I was like, I actually think I could sell that. And he went, yeah, I think so too. How about starting a company? Um, and by that point we'd had 3 pints and then we discovered that it was only £10 on Companies House to set up a company. Uh, and it took 10 minutes. So we went for it. So like most great ideas in the UK, it starts in a pub.

Not only from the people I've spoken to, but of course. And how long ago was that?

That is now about 7 years ago.

7 years. Yeah. So fast forward to today, you are based on the outskirts of Cardiff. And you designed and built the first satellite to be produced in Wales. Tell me, tell me a bit more about what's the idea behind Spaceforge, what those three pints produced behind the idea, how it evolved, and what are you working on now?

God, that's a lot in one question. We'll break it down. So really, so to start with the technology that sits behind Spaceforge, it's really twofold. Spaceforge first and foremost is a materials company first and a space company second. What I mean by that is we produce advanced compound semiconductor substrates. If that was a load of words that might not make sense in a row, I will try to also break that down. Uh, so, um, a semiconductor is basically the material that goes into a computer chip. The material you might be familiar with is silicon. That is basically the one that we use. It's, it's literally everywhere. It's on all the ways that we're using to speak right now. It's in everything that's behind us. Um, it is cheap. It is plentiful. It is an industrial marvel. It's literally made out of the right type of sand, and we've been working with it, as a civilization for sort of 80-odd years now. Um, and we are approaching its fundamental physical limits. In order to get around those limits, we are looking to try and find new materials that help us reach the next advent of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, renewable energy, transportation, aerospace, whatever. So we're moving to compound semiconductors. Those are the things that we are interested in making at Space Forge. Compound semiconductors are very difficult to produce on Earth because the things that make Earth a wonderful place to live, our gravity, our atmosphere, and our temperature, are all bad for industrial processes because you have to fight against them to produce almost anything. And that is especially profound in the case of something like a compound semiconductor. So compound semiconductors, two materials, you're trying to effectively fuse them together to get the properties of all of the different materials that you're mixing together in some harmonious form that allows you to reduce your energy bill, improve performance, uh, make a device last thousands of times longer. They exist, they are already in deployment elsewhere, but they are very difficult to produce. Space allows you to overcome those barriers to production. You have microgravity, so weightlessness. You have an incredibly pure vacuum, which we would basically find impossible to try and create here on Earth in terms of the contamination levels inside of it. And just depending on which way you are facing, you have plus or minus 250 degrees Celsius. So you can be extremely hot or extremely cold pretty much at the same time. All of that combined gives you a much better starting point for almost any industrial process. The one we are concerned with is basically the production of those semiconductors. Producing a semiconductor in space can yield up to a 5 order of magnitude improvement in the purity of the crystal compared to one that you make on the ground today. That purity translates into massive energy bill reductions, massive performance improvements, massive lifetime extensions and expansions, um, and really allows us to continue moving forward as a civilization while also reducing the burden that we have on the natural world around us. So one of our aims is to also be the world's first carbon-negative space company. Now, having the technology to produce the pool that makes those semiconductors is just one aspect of Spaceforge's business. 'Cause it's all very well being able to make them, but you actually also have to be able to get them back, otherwise you can't use them. So the other very core aspect of Spaceforge's business is the development of our own reentry technology, which allows us to bring these back from space to the ground safely so that they can be put into the rest of the manufacturing process that goes beyond us and actually turned into something useful. That technology is called Pridwen. It's named after the mythical shield of King Arthur. It is best described as Mary Poppins from space. It is a large space-grade deployable umbrella that effectively slows us much higher in terms of altitude compared to most vehicles and allows us to descend very, very gently all the way down to the ground. Those two things combined come together to form the architecture that we call the ForgeStar. Those are effectively our micro-orbiting, self-returning factories that we put into space. Uh, we had hoped to call it the Star Forge, uh, but unfortunately we found out that that's trademarked by Lucasfilm. Um, so it was not a patent battle that we wanted to get into when we were two guys in a garage, um, uh, on the outskirts of Bristol when we started. And so those two technologies have been core to Spaceforge's story. Since day one when we were sat in a garage with a 3D printer, a Domino's pizza, what else did we have? And a vacuum pump. Those were the 3 things that we started Spaceforge with, prototyping furiously. Those 2 technologies have been with us the entire journey, and obviously they've massively improved since our first initial assumptions and assessments of them. Um, but it's rare to get to work on something for so long and see it come to fruition. And that's, that's really, I think, the journey of Spaceforge since we, we were funded to now. So we started, or we were having that conversation in the pub in the summer of 2018, um, which is also roughly when we incorporated. Uh, and then for 2 years, we still worked our other jobs while doing this on the side. Um, so all of our evenings, our weekends, trying to find a bank that was open after 5 PM in the UK so that we could actually like access the account, trying to find a bank manager that didn't think we were absolutely crazy, um, was also interesting. So there was this 2-year period where we were frantically working. Uh, and then lockdown hit. So the week I had gone full-time on Spaceforge was the same week Boris announced do not go outside, block all the doors. If you're sat on a park bench, you're cheating or whatever it was, I can't remember, but the very, very interesting time to quit your secure job and go all in on a hardware startup. And even though my, even though my mom had had that lovely conversation with me about what is it I want to do in the future. I had a very different conversation with her when my now wife let my mom know that I'd quit my job.

So you didn't tell her, your wife did?

No. Yes. Yes. And I had about, I had enough savings that I could pay the rent, but nothing else for 5 months. So that's, that's what we were doing.

So that's when the clock started ticking.

That's when the clock started ticking. There is nothing to focus the mind like dwindling savings, um, on making something a success. Uh, and so, um, not long after having gone full-time on it, we closed our first contract, um, €200,000 with the European Space Agency to develop properly our reentry technology. We closed our first fundraise, which was, um, $250K from an angel group and another $250K from the Development Bank of Wales to encourage us to move over the bridge to Cardiff, which also came with a whole bunch of other perks. It's much cheaper real estate than Bristol. Engineering talent is top tier within the semiconductor landscape because Newport has a huge semiconductor community. You can see, you can walk to the sea in about 10 minutes from our office, which is quite nice. And also Cardigan Bay to the west of Wales is also a desirable location. To be able to return a satellite. So that worked out quite well with us. And, you know, we did that when we were 2 people and we are now 72 people as of, I think, last week. So the intervening sort of 5-ish years has been filled with an intense amount of growth. I think I answered about one of your questions there in all of that.

We'll stick to this one because I want to, I want to ask you about funding, because I know a lot, it's the journey of a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of entrepreneurs are interested in how to, to get the funding. And you shared your first, uh, you had a contract and then you had a couple of angels, so to speak, for your first round. And if I understood correctly, you also raised a $10 million seed round alone. And you also had some extra funding recently from the NATO Innovation Fund. As well as the UK Space Agency. But I also know from my experience, angel funding versus VC funding is a totally different beast. Besides that, the amounts are vastly different. So I wanted to ask you about your learnings and how you adapted your pitching and your perspective when you move from your first angel funding, which can be just as hard. As a raising VC and try and get a bit of wisdom and learnings from you in that department.

Yeah. So, well, I've got, I have got some very exciting news on the funding coming soon. But even I'm being embargoed at the moment from speaking about it. What I would say is every round is as hard as the last one, but they are each time hard for different reasons. So the things that used to keep me up at night on the angel round don't even bother me now. The things that kept me up on the seed didn't, haven't harmed my fundraising today because of the way in which I've learned the lessons, so to speak. I'm sure it's different for serial entrepreneurs who've done this countless times. But they don't get any easier. It's just the problems that you have change with them. In many ways, I think that's fantastic because it's a sure sign of personal growth that the things that used to worry you now don't. I think as an entrepreneur, it is important to exercise in abundance stoicism. There are a huge amount of things in the fundraising process that you cannot control. You know, we, we investors might get ill. If they get ill, then they're not, they're not working with you. Then you don't have the personal relationship with the other investors that are picking up the slack. They're not as interested in it. So the deal doesn't get done by their side. Angels go on way more holidays than I've ever had in my life. So trying to, trying to corral sort of 30 different people who are all, you know, on yachts or cruises or skiing or whatever while you're frantically, you know, making sure you can pay that month's rent. There is a, it exposes you to a segment of society that you just didn't even know was there. And I mean, I mean that wholeheartedly in a good way. But I think what the key, the key lesson at every stage of funding is alignment. So you have to make sure that you are aligned with your investors in what you are looking to do and how you're going to approach it. Because if there is that mismatch, that's when people start to fall out.

And how do you find that alignment? Let's, I'm trying to squeeze a few tips from you, something practical that people can pick up.

Practical tips on alignment. Build the relationship with your investors early. So don't, don't expect to have produced a pitch deck, wheel it out in front of a whole bunch of people that you've never met and then get a yes immediately. Because they don't understand who you are. They see hundreds of pitches a year, maybe even thousands if they're a big fund. So you have to put in the legwork to build the relationship. And that relationship is not necessarily built in the meeting room or over the Zoom talk or whatever it is that you're working with in order to achieve that fund. So, um, there are a huge amount of investors that we have on our cap table at Spaceforge, um, that we met in a variety of ways. Some of those were entirely serendipitous. Uh, so for one of them, I was at a conference in Washington, DC in 2019, uh, and I got invited to a house party in Virginia. And they were like, oh, come along. Oh, by the way, we might have some investors coming. So I was like, okay, yeah, why not? You know, that's something I'd say yes to. So went to this house. I mean, the, I mean, house party is an understatement. The living room was bigger than any place I'd ever set foot in the UK apart from like the House of Commons or something. It was enormous. But there were loads of investors at that conference. At that house party. They were also attending the conference I was at. But the, you know, you were in a completely different setting. It was very relaxed. This is at a time where we weren't looking to actively raise money for Spaceforge. You know, we were still really teasing out the concept and everything else. But what's interesting is everybody that was at that event that was an investor ended up coming into that seed round we did. But because for sort of what the intervening 2 years or so between going to that event and then doing that round, I'd maintained a relationship with them. So they knew that some random guy from the UK talking to American investors was not actually some random guy from the UK because I'd, I'd been speaking with them for 2 years. And I don't think that preparation can be underestimated. I think I would also say seek alignment in the investors you're choosing, actually invest in the things that you do. That is particularly difficult in something as complex and technologically advanced as semiconductors and space. There just aren't that many hardware or deep tech investors in the UK and Europe. And I put deep tech, I'll do it in air quotations, deep tech. I cannot tell you how much time I have wasted with investors that say that they invest in deep tech, and it turns out they only do software, or they only do SaaS applications. If anybody in the deep tech ecosystem, the true deep tech ecosystem understands the components to it and the complexity of it. And you don't build a generational business in SaaS in the way that you do in deep tech. You know, we're working on fundamentally a life-changing problems that if they can be solved, remove some of the most intense crises that we are facing right now, opposed to making it, I don't know, 0.5 of a second faster to check out or whatever. I don't know. That's, that shows you how I feel about a lot of fintech, doesn't it? The, And those investors are out there, but you have to, you have to put in the work. What I would say is finding out who the investors aren't also gives you a great way to practice your pitch on people that you're not worried if they don't invest. So hone the messaging before you go in front of those big investors that are the make or break ones for your deal. Um, there you go. I think that's 3 pretty well-rounded tips there.

The key there is creating then relationships with the investors. More so before you pitch and then also after you meet them, even though you haven't pitched yet. So it's a longer game than what people would expect. Especially you go pitch and then you, you get a yes or a no.

Especially in deep tech. Um, because by, by the very nature of the sector, it's very long-term, very patient capital is required. So you need investors that possess that patience and understand the complexity of what you're building. Now, most businesses at the same, at the kind of, at the foundational principles are the same. You make something and you sell it. That's also the case for deep tech. It's just the thing that you're trying to make is far more difficult at an atomic scale compared to many of the sort of, you know, typical sort of venture capital landscape things that you might look at. Uh, and, and that's something which Europe is getting better at. Um, uh, and I really quite like the way that we are approaching sort of, um, real technology, um, from a UK and, and European standpoint compared, um, compared to how we were maybe 5 or 6 years ago, certainly when I entered the industry.

So for something like Spaceforge, are the majority of your investors UK or Europe-based? Or like we keep on hearing in the tech and deep tech area, most of the funding comes from the USA?

Uh, we are in a very unique position as Spaceforge that our single largest investor is German, um, which is not a combination you hear of often. So our, our largest investor is World Fund. Um, since the seed, they've invested at every event I've done since. Um, and they are absolutely fantastic to work with. By number of investors, then yes, most come from America. There is a speed of action, I guess almost an urgency to the action that you find in the American venture capital landscape that you don't elsewhere. Um, that can also come with its risks. I don't think really at Spaceforge we've experienced many of these, but I hear of others that do. I think it is probably the best way to say that. And the, so the interesting mix that Spaceforge has is, so our largest investor is from Germany. We have the backing of NATO. We have a smattering of UK investors. There aren't that many that do deep tech. And there are even fewer that actually do real deep tech. It's like 3 maybe. And I think I've got one of them. The, and then we've got fairly global reach in terms of the rest of our investment base. So we have some, some from America. Um, we have, uh, Singapore, Korea. Um, I think we've got one based in Australia as well. So there is, but part of that I think was actually accelerated by COVID because you couldn't, you know, I couldn't get on the plane to go to the West Coast and meet with all of them and everything. I was just able to have conversations with people that normally I couldn't do. Um, I'm not sure how much that, that holds up anymore. But to bring in that kind of that speed element, that is really the difference between the US and elsewhere as a venture capital market in my own experience. So, you know, on one side I had a call with a guy in America and the whole 23 minutes long the call was, and the whole time he was eating a massive sandwich. It was like the biggest thing I had ever seen. And I was just like, this guy is just totally uninterested, you know, just munching on this big, big sandwich, you know, and I was just like, well, he's just really not interested. Well, you know, I've taken the meeting, whatever. And at the end of that 23 minutes, he went, yeah, this sounds great. Put me in for 300K. And I couldn't believe it. I just could not believe that there was somebody who was able to deploy that kind of capital after that kind of meeting. So I think again, that shows After a big sandwich as well. Yeah. But I could, I don't think I could afford that sandwich. So there was, there was that to it. That's for sure. The, whereas, you know, in the UK, I've done a year of diligence meetings with a fund in the UK and then had them turn around and say no. So one of the, one of the other things I say, and I say this equally to the venture capital committee community, as I do startup founders, is actually like a, a fast no is one of the best things you can get, because then you know that you're not going to waste any more of your time. It is punishing for the soul to keep going through the drudgery and the persistence that you need to make it through a DD process to find out that they're not coming in. I do know what that feels like. The other mismatch that I think you see between sort of the US as this sort of venture capital holy land and elsewhere is the upside. So, you know, by an American venture capital firm, I'll be asked, how big can this be? How can you basically take over the entire market of whatever it is that you're trying to do? Once you've done that market, what are the other things that you can move into? How can we get you enough capital so that you can actually do this fast enough, meaningfully enough, and in a way that allows you to, you know, build your moat as big as you can. A British investor will ask me, if everything fails, what's the value left in the company? Like, you know, how much are you, how much is the kit on the bench worth if none of it works? And I don't think that's necessarily a mindset. I think it's the way in which the ecosystems have emerged. And because of the way that they've emerged is the way that therefore they are maintained. So if we look at like angel investment as an example, you know, a lot of the UK angel investment protection is about basically downside protection. So, you know, you get to write some money off your income tax and you won't get charged tax on when you exit. I think is how it works. I don't know. I don't have it as a problem. On the US side, it is basically your upside is tax-free up to £10 million or $10 million. And that's up to $10 million off the upside. So if you invested $1 million and it became $10 million, there's no tax on any of that $10 million. So the focus therefore on America is making the upside as big as possible. Whereas the questions I have had from UK angels is, you know, how, how do I protect their tax incentive or whatever it is? Um, I think that's beginning to shift. I think we're seeing some things in government that are, uh, looking at how to best incentivize investment in the UK because it is needed in incentivizing in the venture capital asset class in the UK, definitely needed. But I think it's also due for a change. That being said, we make more startups now as the UK than ever before. So I think we're actually going to see like a new class emerge of people who've successfully exited companies in things that, you know, 10, 15 years ago didn't even exist. As that comes forward, you're going to see this new entrepreneurial class created, which has the founder grit and knowledge, but also has the ability to deploy capital in a far more meaningful manner than we've ever been able to do in the UK previously. And so I think we are actually soon going to enter a golden age of investing in the UK, sort of maybe I'm going to give it say 10 to 15 years. I reckon that age is going to come forth.

That's a long time to wait, because what other entrepreneurs have told me on this podcast is that in the UK, it's relatively straightforward to get the initial funding for your startup if they like your idea. But the challenge then becomes when you scale up and you require bigger amounts of funding in order to build the business and grow it. And that's where the US then tends to win and attracts most of the value, as then the companies tend to either move their business to the US, or most of their operation, or go on the US stock market rather than here in London.

Yeah, I couldn't comment on IPOs or stock market preferences. I'm not quite there yet. I think certainly, again, I mean, speaking for deep tech, there is normally a strategic reason for your business to succeed, to exist, and to be supported. And the rationale for that will change on a country-by-country basis. So I think, I think I think that would apply to anybody as to whatever decision that they make. They go through that. I mean, I know of a— I met recently, I think it was, might have even been an American semiconductor company, but it listed on the Korean stock exchange because there are lots of semiconductor activities in Korea. So because of the investment that they were trying to attract, that's what did it for them. So I mean, I think there is a very well-trodden path to the US for a great deal of companies, I think it makes sense and may one day make sense for Spaceforge. But it also might not. We are, I think, I like to think of us as strategically important to the UK. We're incredibly well supported by the UK Space Agency and wider UK government, having the backing of the NATO Fund, having European investors, there is a position for the UK. You know, it's often talked about sort of as like the special relationship or whatever, but I really do think of the UK as a bridge between the US and the EU. We will soon have operations on all three continents, or sorry, all three, I should say, well, both continents, but all three jurisdictions would be a better way to describe that. To be able to facilitate getting our product to as many people as possible. And so I do think it's possible to find other ways. I'm not saying it's easy. It might not be the path for you. But it's one that so far is working really quite well for us.

Let's talk about scaling up. You shared how it started, just two of you in a garage. Obviously fueled by pints, pizza, of course, like every good entrepreneur. And now there's 70+ of you in the space of 7 years or so, or especially the last 5 years, as you shared, that's quite an exponential growth in both hiring, managing people, and developing them. And you as the CEO and co-founder, have been at the core of that. How did you find this scaling up journey? I've been told again by other entrepreneurs, the first 20 hires are crucial, and they carry the ethos of the company that you inspire and you give them. But after a certain point, typically after 40, 50, even as a CEO, you tend to lose control of the hiring process and— you start delegating and other people take it. How were these stages for you?

So I would start by saying going from 50 people to 60 people was harder than going from 2 to 50, because there is an almost seismic shift in the company at 50 people. Whereas even, even going from 50 to 51, the things that you set up, the ways of working, what little processes you try and have as a startup, all fall over at 50+ people. And so then that's when you actually have to start, start integrating processes. And you want to do it in a way that keeps it light, but also make sure that you can, you know, you can check in with everyone. Getting the balance wrong can be catastrophic, because it becomes incredibly heavy-handed, your team gets sucked into doing process work instead of actually working on something that, that delivers shareholder value., and, uh, moves the technology forward. I think, um, I don't know if I would say the first 20 hires are crucial because every hire is crucial. Um, I think the way, the way in which we've approached it at Spaceforge is we defined our cultural values very early on. Um, so we were 7 people the organization. The way in which we defined our cultural values at Spaceforge was we just went to the 7 people in the team. And we just said, what matters to you? Like, what, what gets you out of bed in the morning? Why are you here? Why are you, why are you doing this? Hopefully, why are you enjoying doing this? Fortunately, nobody's first answer was money. So that was good. And that allowed us to create a set of 5 cultural values. Since that point, we have interviewed everybody that joins the organization against those 5 cultural values. We then added a 6th cultural value last year, might have been the end of '23, which is get shit done. But that was only because we had another value, ambitious and resilient, which didn't really convey the sheer persistence that some of the team were putting into solving the problems. So it doesn't necessarily advocate for speed at the expense of quality. But it is a way for us to highlight where somebody has truly persisted in the face of adversity to get something over the line. And the other non-value that we have, but something that we do is we have a failure of the month at Spaceforge. So when it was those 6 or 7 of us, we just used to be like, right, Andy, right, Josh, you're the You've got the failure of the month because you forgot to, I don't know, attach something incredibly important to the biggest proposal you'd ever written, or you thought that widget was waterproof when you dropped it in a drop test and it turns out it wasn't because you forgot to put it in the housing. Whatever it is, you've got failure of the month. We did it as a way originally just to keep ourselves accountable, but as the team grew, it became a very important mechanism for spotting things before they become problems. So, Failure of the Month is entirely self-nominated, you have to put yourself forward for it. And at the monthly company all hands, the entire company gets together, the people who have self-nominated put themselves as to why they deserve Failure of the Month, and the rest of the company votes. So it's a great way for us to understand things before they become, you know, basically catastrophic for the company. It helps us highlight things that have broken for far faster than in work environments where you're basically encouraged to cover it up and pretend it wasn't you. And to date, we have yet to repeat a failure that has appeared on the wall of failure. So when you walk onto the manufacturing floor plate at Spaceforge's office in Cardiff, you have to walk past all of the failures since November 2021 before you get gowned up to start building the next satellite. And those things have allowed us to keep a very central theme to both our hiring and the way that we work as a team. Um, and it's probably one of the things that I'm most proud of at Spaceforge is the way that we've managed that. So even though we're now 72 people, there's still a very good cohesion to the team. There is, um, you know, we still manage to get everybody together, um, each month. Um, And in many ways, the other way that we've done that is with the cultural interview in terms of aligning to those cultures is we train the team on how to run those interviews. So—

I was gonna ask you about interview questions because I'm sure you carried out quite a few of those, well, hirings and firings. So I wanted to know from your perspective and with all this experience now, what are the red flags and the green flags in an interview for you?

Oh, I can provide some very concrete examples of red flags because I tell them often because they still make me laugh. So, one of the questions we ask is around our value of being a reflective learner. So that is, you know, it's all very well having a failure or doing something or making something, but what, how did you, like, what did you actually learn? And how do you share that with the rest of the team? And I remember vividly, we interviewed one guy and the question was, how do you embed learning in your day-to-day work or outside of life? And he shrugged and went, well, I got a master's, so I've sort of learned everything I need to. Just like, ultimate red flag. There's nobody has learned everything they ever need to. There was a confident to the answer that was rather surprising that I haven't really forgotten. I think one of the, one of my favorite questions to ask is, can you tell us about a time where you solved a problem? Because on the engineering side, you can tend to get technical answers. On the business side, you tend to get business-focused answers. But you also get remarkable answers from all walks of life. Um, and you know, we've had, we've had everything from, you know, oh, I found this bit wasn't working, so I sprayed some WD-40 on it and it saved the, you know, I don't know, aerospace program or something through to—

so WD-40 in space, just to say.

I mean, it's, it's fantastic, right? I mean, if, if literally you just, if you just answered WD-40 to that question, I'd probably hire you. I know that there's somebody that knows how to solve something. The, you know, we've had all the way through to, oh, one time we were hosting a visit for Prince William and Kate, and it had rained. So I went and found a load of wet and dry hoovers, and I literally hoovered the ground to make sure that it was dry enough for everybody. So you see some real out-of-the-box answers in that. But what that really allows us to do, those questions that we ask, is not only assess are they going to fit with the team, but if they actually feel like it's a team that they can integrate with. And in a few places, we've had people just duck out of the process, and they've just gone, actually, no, this isn't, this isn't how I like to work. Alright, cool. No worries. Thanks very much. But getting the team to run those interviews, so that we always try and and make it such that roughly each person that joins will have met at least 4 different team members before they join in terms of going through that process. So we run a, we run the, what we call the cultural interview. And then we run the technical slash skills interview. So we first look to assess effectively team fit, cultural fit, how they work, understanding if that's something that's going to work with the team that they're integrating with. And only once we've assessed, yes, this is somebody we think we can work with. And they've gone, yes, this is a team I can work with. Do we then actually assess their technical capability or their skillset, maybe in a business role? Ultimately, that's because you can teach somebody how to engineer on spacecraft. You know, we have people that come from the music industry, automotive, aircraft, naval, yacht building, all sorts. The real difference in that sort of engineering between any of those and space is the suit that you're wearing to do it. So we are a firm believer that passion cannot be taught, but the ability to engineer on spacecraft can. So if you come with abundance, the former, we can probably help you with the latter.

How do you operate? Is everybody based in the offices or at your HQ, or do you have hybrid or fully remote workers? What's the combo, especially as you went through the pandemic as well, so your business experienced both sides.

So, obviously the pandemic forced us to be entirely remote. We have lots of stories about different parts of vehicles and subsystems being made in bedrooms all around the world. So there was one of our colleagues got stuck in Romania for a few weeks, so developed a subsystem control prototype for one of the vehicles., in a room there, stuff made obviously in a garage in Bristol. The first time we were successful in generating, requisite plasma in one of our payload tools, that was done in a bedroom in Farnborough. So we got very used to working remotely on hardware over the pandemic. It's very difficult to do remotely. That said, we operate a hybrid structure at Spaceforge. I think it would be, it would probably be unfair for me to ask everybody to be in the office every day with how much travel I have to do personally, because I'd hardly be there every day. I tend to manage about 2 days a week in the office and 3 days I'm everywhere else. The nature that we run, or sort of the practice that we run at Spaceforge is come into the office if you have to be in the office. I mean, outside of the manufacturing floorplate, we only have 7 desks. That's not enough for 70 people. So we are forced to operate in a hybrid environment. But it's also one that just, it just works for us. You know, the team come in when they need to, they work what they need to, they get the tasks done when they need to. But that flexibility in terms of being able to work not from the office when they don't need to be there, it's usually helpful to them. We don't subscribe to core hours at Spaceforge. On the most part, you're still roughly working some sort of 9-to-5 schedule. But, you know, some of our team have childcare commitments and things in the week. So if I'm working on a Sunday, I'll see a few other people working on a Sunday. You know, I'm not, uh, we don't really It's not something I really worry about in that way. I think, you know, if the work wasn't getting done, then I'd be concerned. But we know that it is. And ultimately, I think, you know, one of the privileges of running a startup is you get to trust people to help build your vision. And if you don't trust them, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it. And I guess that's really the way I look at it.

Speaking of a trusted partner, you've had one from the beginning, or if we, based on your story, he trusted you with his vision and idea to move this forward. How do you reflect on the co-founder dynamic, uh, pain points and advantages 7 years in when you clearly, you appear to have a, a clear separation of roles. If I understand correctly, you are operational and fundraising while Andrew is on the technical side. Yeah, very much so.

It is the most important relationship you will have inside the company and alongside your startup journey. It is always the most important relationship that you will have on that journey. Andy and I are incredibly fortunate that where my skills end, his begin, and the other way around. So we complement each other fantastically. And that made us avoid a huge amount of pitfalls that we would have had if either we were trying to do this by ourselves or if we had, if we just had founders that had similar skill sets to ourselves. So it is one of the, it's one of the great perks. Of running a company is having a co-founder. I mean, a real hat tip to anybody that does this solo, because I couldn't do it solo. And not just because I'm not an engineer, but the main thing I'd take away, or sort of the main thing, the main things I'd offer from having now done this for so long is Andy and I already knew we worked well together because we were working well together. Before we try to do this. And I think that's incredibly important is, is knowing that you can already work well with someone before you embark on a co-founder journey with them. I think second is Andy and I check in with each other, probably on around maybe like a quarterly basis, in terms of are we still aligned? Do we still want the same thing from this company? Do we still have the same vision? Do we still have the sort of same end goals in terms of, you know, like what an exit might look like and that sort of thing? And to date, we still do. There could very much be a time where that's not the case. And that will be a whole new experience if we need to work through that. But I think as well, the you know, because we work well together, we also, we also get on well. So we still regularly go for a pint. That's always helpful, because you can, you can just cut the noise away from the rest of the organization and trying to catch 30 minutes with each other in the office when everything else is going on is, can be purely chaotic. So I think, you know, an important thing is really is that we do, we structure time for each other. I don't know, it sounds like we're married, doesn't it? But the— It's a business marriage. It is. It is. There was, no, there was, so Andy and I both got married within about a month of each other and we had to explain to some of our partners at the European Space Agency because they thought we were getting married to each other. So that was a particularly interesting meeting describing that one. But it is, you know, you have to, it's a relationship you have to work on. Like other ones. And I don't mean work on like it's hard, but I mean, you've got to put the time into it to get the rewards out of it. And I think the fact that we've done that successfully for as many years as we have done is a real testament, not, you know, to both of us really for doing that, but also the support networks that we have around us. And you will disagree on things. That's okay. Just make sure it's the important things that you disagree about and not the things that don't actually matter.

Speaking of support networks, in, in a startup, especially growing so quickly as Spaceforge, it can take a toll on you, time-wise, pressure, and working hours. What are the type of habits and routines that kept you grounded sane during this insane time of growth and development? What relaxes you? How do you keep it together?

So I would, I would say I am, I am unfortunately one of those people that thrives under pressure. And I'm incredibly highly strung. So things that people would just let go, I don't. And I think that's probably why I push so much is because I'm so determined to make it work. And I don't mean that in a way that you often hear in the sort of venture-funded landscape, but I mean in just a, you know, it would apply to anything I was working on, let alone the company. I feel that way about, you know, when I'm cooking dinner, how, like, it has to be good. I cannot abide.

So you still kept that habit of cooking and the heritage. Yeah. Yes. I cook every day.

I cook all the meals. When I go away for work, I batch cook a load of meals for Em and leave them for her so that I know she's eating properly while I go away. So cooking every day is a good way to stay relaxed for me. I like working in the kitchen. I like working with my hands. Another thing I do is I make a lot of bread. So I have a 100-year-old sourdough starter from Italy. I call her Nonna. I've owned her for— how long have I had Nonna? 5 years now. Picked her up just before the first lockdown, which was great for lockdown because, you know, when people were running out of bread, I could just buy flour and make my own. So I, yeah, I bake a loaf every week and then that's the bread, that's the bread for the week. That helps keep me, keeps me relaxed. Don't really look like I enjoy it, but fitness. I run a lot of obstacle courses. So my, the longest one I've done is a marathon-long obstacle course, which had 200 obstacles in it. Ran that up in I think that was Nottinghamshire did that one. That was great. And huge amounts of reading and watching things that are nothing to do with space. So one of the great challenges of, I think any deep tech founder has this, is that people therefore assume that your entire personality is the thing that you're working on. Yes, I love space. It's really cool. It's a really cool thing to work on. That does not mean I need 4 sets of Lego of the same shuttle bit of kit that I've had God knows how many times. Doesn't mean that I need every space book under the sun. I mean, the amount of times I've been gifted Tim Peake's autobiography and his photography book, they're very, they're good books, but I don't need more than one copy of them. So I really enjoy reading things or getting to understand things that are just completely outside the thing that I work in. I think that's incredibly important because, you know, people talk about sort of silos in the organization and that kind of thing, but you can very end up, you can end up quickly siloing yourself unless you're willing to broaden the ecosystem that you're interacting with or your knowledge base beyond what your core focus is. So yeah, I mean, really, it sounds like the rundown of, you know, about me bit at the CV, because I like, I like the things that other people like, you know, eating, drinking, socializing, that kind of thing. But, um, those are important things to still do because, you know, a startup is going to be one of the most important things that you work on, um, if you're willing to put your, put your life into it. Um, at the same time, you have to look after yourself. Um, So that's, that's been a real thing for me, sort of over the past sort of 6 to 9 months is really making sure I take care of myself in a way that I wasn't previously. So when we geared up to do our first launch, there was a lot of television coverage, sort of in the run-up to it. It was hilarious, because you just see me getting fatter as we got closer to the launch. And then about 4 months after the launch, I'd lost all of that weight. So there was a brief period in the middle of 2023 where I was probably at my best because I lost it all. But that's something I really carried forward. It was like, jeez, I can't go to a launch looking like that again. And I think that's been something that's really important. And equally, you're on the road a lot. Finding good healthy food on the road can be difficult. So the amount of times I end up with a plastic fork and what I've been able to scrounge from Paddington M&S, for the last train back to Bristol does not bear repeating. But those, those are the things, you know, I think people often think about downtime in terms of like a weekend. It can even be the hour on the train. You know, I mean, I, I work a lot on trains because that's actually where I get some of my best work done. Nobody can pull me into a meeting. No distractions. Yeah, no distractions. The connection isn't good enough to do much of a phone call. So I just get to do deep work for an hour and a quarter. And so some of the best things I've done for the company have been on that journey to London or going somewhere else.

You said you enjoy reading non-space-related stuff. Understandable. Have there been any business books that you read and helped you in fine-tuning your vision, the development and the growth of the business as a CEO that you would recommend to others? Not one.

Uh, um, so I mean, there's, there's nonfiction I've read that's been helpful. So I mean, you know, anybody that wants to learn more about semiconductors, I highly recommend Chip War. Um, but on the business side, no. Um, to be honest, I've read most of the business books, you know, that people recommend startup founders read, and I thought they were shit. Um, so many of them are filled with incredibly dated references to ecosystems or architectures of ways of doing things that are just no longer applicable today. I get far more from reading, I guess, like autobiographical work and understanding people's characters more than anything. I think that probably comes back to me being interested in politics and having studied it. So I'll read a lot of political biographies. I really enjoy, oh God, I've forgotten his surname, but Rory from The Rest Is Politics. And he did things like he walked, I think it was in the '90s, he just walked across Afghanistan. And his book, The Places in Between. It's incredible.

That was because we didn't have internet back then and you had the time to do that.

You had to do other things, right? I mean, you know, I remember the days of a teletext holiday, but the, you know, I enjoy reading sort of personal stories and things. And I think there is a fortitude that you can unlock in reading people's personal stories that you don't get from a business book that's like, oh, you know, divide everything into quarters. And then welcome to the world of KPIs. Deep tech just doesn't work like that. You have to think about the world differently. And I think the way that you understand the world differently is by reading lots of different people. So my recommendations tend to either be people's biographical work that I've enjoyed, or in the nonfiction landscape, the books that have really shaped me. Sorry, in the fictional landscape, the books that have shaped me because Nobody reads Peter Thiel's Zero to One when they're 15 or whatever, and then they're like, wow, this book changed my life. They're instead like, the first time they picked up Lord of the Rings or His Dark Materials or a Brandon Sanderson novel or something instead. And I think you learn way more about the person for the fictional books that they recommend than anything else. And then when they tell you that they don't read fiction, I know that I'm not gonna get along with them.

So do you have any role models then from the autobiographies you've read or from your wider circle of life? Do you think, what would Steve Jobs do?

No, never. Yeah, well, I probably do when it comes to food and I'm like, oh, he wouldn't eat it anyway. I think having current role models can be a dangerous thing. Mostly because sometimes I've had— So not Elon Musk? No. I have met Elon, but you, when you idolize somebody and when you meet them, I have had don't meet your hero syndrome many times. How was he walking? Oh, it was, that was fine. Just, he's just never been a role model for me. I think the, God, this is, this is getting quite profound, but I've got a couple more questions, Josh. I think really when it comes to role, I'm really trying to think if of a role model that I have, but no, I don't. I mean, certainly not like a, There isn't like a space or a semiconductor person. I think, no, I mean, he's pretty topical at the moment and I got a lot of time for him. So I'll say Jensen that runs NVIDIA. Not for all of the everything current right now. I mean, I love the fact that he's signing autographs and stuff and he's been treated like a rock star. But I think he has some admirable qualities because NVIDIA is actually a pretty old company. So I, you know, I can remember building my first PC, what, 20-odd years ago and buying an NVIDIA graphics card. They were graphics cards. Yeah. So you can run all the latest games. Yeah. So to me, that's what NVIDIA is, right? Like that was, that was the thing that, you know, allowed me to play Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2 or whatever it was in the latest release on Steam, um, 20-odd years ago. Uh, and I, but I think what's really impressive is to see, is to just see a company go that long. Um, and equally it shows the ability to, to ride a wave in terms of like the growth of artificial intelligence and data and for it to be realized that Nvidia graphics cards could be used for that sort of processes and allow them to expand, I think is really cool. But I don't know the guy, so I can't, I can't speak to much more than that. So those are, those are the sorts of things I look at in the deep tech landscape of the companies that are still around, you know, venture-backed companies. There are, there are loads of us, but the, some of the most interesting companies from a longevity perspective have absolutely nothing to do with me. You know, I mean, there are glass companies going back hundreds of years. There's a drum company going back more than 1,000 years. There's a, you know, Victorinox who makes Swiss Army knives, the way in which they stockpiled cash and then deployed it into things like kitchenware and all sorts of other things because they realized that travel banning with small knives was going to be bad for them. So there are sort of like elements from many, many companies that I'll pick. As a job, job well done, um, that I think is really cool. But, um, it's very difficult for me to point to a figure.

You briefly touched on AI, and, uh, I wanted to ask you, especially as it's been picking up steam a lot in the last couple of years, has it changed anything for Spaceforge in terms of what and how you are developing, but also in your day-to-day life? For, for example, productivity or operational reasons?

So day-to-day life, no, not really. I have mucked about with the AI art tool a couple of times, the one that Microsoft provides, can't remember the name of it. No, it's anyway. I so far have been able to spot ChatGPT a mile off when it's being used in a LinkedIn post or on somebody's CV. We actually had somebody apply last year and they had forgotten to remove the part, they'd forgotten to remove the query or the prompts that they'd given ChatGPT, which was, how do you answer this CV question? And had left it in. On a, on a broader business spectrum. So this is where I struggle with the term AI is because rarely is it actually artificially intelligent. It is often artificial. It is rarely intelligent. And really what we're seeing is artificial intelligence today is actually just machine learning coming to the front. You know, large language models, that's machine learning. So the way in which we deploy AI at Space Forge is really in the machine learning elements, which are more sort of better adopted than they once were. So we are using that in instances such as to control our industrial processes better that are taking place inside the toolset on board the satellite. But it will be I'm much more interested in intensifying and delivering on that aspect than I am starting to dip it into everything that we do.

I wanna go back to your journey, Josh, and something that I ask everybody towards the end of the interview, especially when we get a bit of introspective and they don't expect it, is what were the sacrifices you've had to make to be where you are today? To be the CEO and co-founder of a space company with 70+ employees, venture-backed, and basically working in deep tech in the next generation of semiconductors?

So I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if you get the, like, time with people as an answer often. Um, but to be honest, yeah, we're, we're in a, we're in a world where we talk about basically, you know, we talk about the world basically as pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. And for a couple of years after the pandemic ended, the conversation you'd have with friends was, oh, I haven't seen you since the pandemic. And I think a lot of what the pandemic forced in terms of inability to go out, inability to travel, that kind of thing, you know, waving at mom and dad through the window or whatever, sort of made the sacrifices for me in a way. So when Spaceforge emerged, into a quote unquote post-pandemic landscape. Well, we were, we were made in the pandemic. So, uh, the things I think about from a sacrifice perspective are the ways that life was pre-pandemic. Um, and I think that, that really meant that because I'd sacrificed the things in a different way. That while I feel the loss of not spending as much time with people as I would like to, I'm still just sort of coming out of the pandemic really in a way that others would've done. So I don't think I have like, I don't have a particular thing to point to or anything because in sacrifices that other people might have made, I I haven't necessarily had to do that. You know, I mean, I'm incredibly well supported by my personal network that I have. You know, they've been understanding when I've had to cancel things at short time, you know, short timeframe or whatever. My wife's been very forgiving to me when I've had to bail out of going to a gig because I had an opportunity to go do a thing and she understands what it took and what it still takes to do So, it's not to say that it's easy because it's not. I think, again, a bit like the relationship me and Andy have as co-founders, you have to check in with people. So, you know, like cooking dinner, I make sure that I'm at least doing one chore around the house. You know, making the time to actually sit down and have a proper dinner instead of doing it in front of the computer screen. Is an important thing. So I think there are, there are plenty of things that you can do that aren't necessarily grand gestures that still demonstrate that you care about the support network around you. And I think provided you can stack up and do enough of those, then that network will continue to be there for you while you embark on this thing. I think to talk about the startup landscape, in the sort of language of the hustle, the grind, the sacrifice, the work hard, play hard, just does it a disservice. And isn't actually a true representation of what working on something for a long time is actually like. And so I would say there is a profound difference in going to work and working on something. And I think that's probably what the creation of Space Fortress made me realize around the language of something that like you would say, like sacrifice is actually, you know, people know that I'm happier working on something than I ever was going to work.

The reason I asked this question, everybody, is because through my own experience, I understand the work and the time it takes. And it can look easy from the outside, thinking, oh, they got to this point overnight and everything was handed to them on a platter, or they got funding and all they have to do is spend it. And I know it takes more than that. So I like to get people to spell it out rather than state the obvious.

Yeah, I will always be forthcoming about how difficult it is.

And speaking of that, 7 years in, what would today's Josh tell Josh 7 years ago about what will come and how to deal with it? What are your lessons to wrap up?

That's a very good question. I think I would tell younger me that he needs to do this. And I think anything else I could say would only be embodied in that. You know, I've learned things that I never thought I'd need to know. I've learned things that I wish I didn't have to know. The one of the reasons that Andy and I did this, you know, I was, I was in a position where I was waiting for my manager to retire so that my team lead could get promoted so that I might get promoted. And there was a 20-year age gap between my manager and team lead, and there was a 20-year age gap between me and the team lead. Um, and that was 7 years ago and they've still not retired. And I realized I had to get out of an environment where, uh, I was literally waiting for somebody to retire so that I could have a career. Uh, and so one of the bets that Andy and I made when we did this was if nothing else, at least we've become more employable than we were beforehand. For giving it a go. Now, whether or not I'd ever want to be employed again is a different question. There is a freedom in the startup landscape that you don't have in working for the man, so to speak. Equally, I, you know, I wouldn't be who I am now if I had not gone on that journey. And you don't always have the opportunity to take many journeys. Even, you know, even coming from a place like the UK. So for me, it is, it's still one of the best things I have done and I'm still doing. And I think that's, that's really the, that's really the beauty of working on something that actually matters is I get to say that, even if people don't think it's hard from the outside. I know that it is, and I know that what I do matters. And I think that's really encapsulated not in anything that I'd say to my younger self or any, any kind of profound lesson I could impart on your listeners. I think really the way I see it is seeing the team succeed. You know, I started working for myself because I thought I wanted to work for myself. Once you get into the venture capital landscape and, and advisors and stakeholders and customers, you don't work for yourself because you end up very quickly, you can feel like you work for them. Really, I work for my team. You know, I'm responsible for making sure 71 other people get paid on time, get their salary. That salary allows them to have a roof over their heads, that some of them have been able to buy their first homes. You know, they've been able to provide for their, for their children or their immediate families. Across that team of 72, we've got 23 different countries. So some people support their families back home, some of whom are from developing nations. So to know that something I've done helps do that means that the impact of Space Forge is already felt before we've been able to achieve our grand vision, is that it's already leading to good. And that's the thing that gets me going way more than, than any of the other stuff.

And that's why, Josh, you are a millennial master. Thank you so much for opening up and sharing the wisdom with me and and everybody tuning in today.

Thank you very much for having me.

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