The race to prove which space startups are real 🚀 Philip Hover-Smoot

If I'm good at what I do, I will kill a bunch of well-funded companies. Everyone claims success. It doesn't matter if your satellite blew up, you still had a successful test. I'm introducing professional sports to space. So think America's Cup or Formula 1 meets the new space economy. Uncrewed, state-of-the-art spacecraft competing head-to-head in low Earth orbit. I've had some feedback from investors that I have today that have been like, hey, go raise $30 million, not $7 million.

This week's Millennial Master is Philip Hoversmoot. He left his job as CEO of a space company build the Atlas Cup, a racing league for spacecraft. Philip watched space companies raise millions before proving their technology works, and now he wants racing to test those claims in public, even if investors lose money. In this episode, we talk about what counts as progress when revenue is years away, attracting sponsors before the first race, And giving up the CEO title to start again on his own. Philip, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining us from today?

Yeah, thanks for having me, Daniel. I'm here in Santa Cruz, California, so I'm at home here on this Friday.

And we're going to be going into space very soon. But before that and before Atlas Cup, you were running Scout Space. So I'm wondering, Philip, what that business actually looked like when you took it over?

Yeah, sure. So my history with Scout went, I think, about 6 full years. So to back up a bit, I started as outside counsel. So I've always had a repertoire of different small businesses that I've helped advise. And they were a part of that group, joined their board as well before joining the company, was an investor as part of their seed round, then started as general counsel and then very quickly took over as CEO as part of a leadership transition. So it was a strange, unconventional arc for me to end up in the CEO role. It's not Every day that a company lawyer is usually appointed by a board to take over a business. But I think because of that—

More like a movie scenario.

Exactly. It's one of those improbable hypotheticals that doesn't ever really happen, but did. But yeah, so Scout was a phenomenal business. It's still a phenomenal business. Uh, it's run by the team that I put in place while I was there today. But yeah, I helped take it through its seed to Series A stage. So I joined right at their seed round, a handful of people. I think it was a 5 engineers and a handful of managers, exited the original CTO and CEO over the first couple months, and then rebuilt the team. So we did space-based optics. So we're talking large performance telescopes and cameras, primarily for the intelligence community and US Space Force. So $10 million mini fridge sized things that sit up there and track spy satellites, that kind of technology. And we had a couple billion, a couple million, a couple billion, I wish, a couple million in bookings at the time that I took over and we built that. So replaced the team, changed technical leadership, took the handful of managers that were in place and transitioned them out, replaced it with effectively me. So our overhead from an administrative perspective went from half the company to a single person. And then stacked the roster with engineers. And I just got very, very lucky hiring some really, really smart, very, very good people who are still in the business today, helped them get them what they needed to go off and go be successful. They sold a bunch of really cool tech. And then eventually we raised more money leading up to us getting our Series A commitment from the lead investor that eventually led the Series A and And then I exited the business at the end of last year to go start what I'm building today.

So then, Philip, you then left a company with real contracts to build a sport that never existed. What made you think that was a sensible risk? Yeah.

Well, so I've been working on this idea for 6 years at this point. So I've been in aerospace defense for the better part of a decade, probably over a decade now at this point. But I had this idea back in about 2020 and started working on it meaningfully on the weekends and free time, sussing out the concept. Working even with some marketing teams to go develop the initial go-to-market plans and things like that. But it wasn't the right time to go do it. What's happened between 2020 and the end of '25, when I pulled the trigger and told my board that I was quitting this growing company to go off and go do this, was the methods by which people consume sports have changed completely. So just to give the listeners a quick primer on what I'm doing, I'm introducing professional sports to space. So think America's Cup or Formula 1 meets the new space economy, uncrewed state-of-the-art spacecraft competing head-to-head in low Earth orbit. Now, 5 years ago, the majority of sports content was consumed in traditional linear 2-hour formats. So think a 2-hour live event on a Saturday afternoon, traditional sport. This year, so this is now 5, 6 years fast forward. This year, the majority of the primary golden demographic, so we're talking males between the age of 18 to 34, are going to consume the majority of their sports content in social, mobile, and streaming and in short format. So in half a decade, when I first had this idea, I would have had to, had I started then, I would have had to have gone to market and put together a business model that allowed me to go produce linear broadcast capable live event in space on a recurring basis. The cost for that would be absolutely astronomical. We could do it. The technology exists, but for me to create a live event in space every weekend would be very, very hard. But people are now consuming sports content in 30, 60, 90-second clips on TikTok and Instagram on their couch on a Tuesday morning or a Saturday afternoon. And I can go create short format content from long format events in space very cheaply and on a recurring basis that is really, really attractive. So whereas every other sport today, having seen what's happened in the last 5 or 6 years, they're all trying to take their 2-hour live broadcasts and figure out how to create this social mobile friendly drip feed of content that happens 365. I don't have to do that. I'm creating something that's optimized for that today. So that's really what changed to answer your question. Is I went from the role that I'm supposed to, everyone's supposed to want, everyone's supposed to want to get promoted to be the CEO. And it was going objectively well. We built the team, the team was happy. I had basically 100% retention on my team that I built, which is unheard of in the aerospace industry where there's a lot of moving around for roles. My team was happy. We were selling technology. Our customers were happy. It was good. But this opportunity is real and this opportunity is timely. And if I didn't do it now, I was going to miss out. And Insanely enough, I'm not the only person doing sports in space. There's probably 10 other companies today that are actively building sports capabilities in space. And if I don't move now, I miss that first mover opportunity. So it was really important for me that I go off and go do this, even though I had a good thing going and they're doing great. I love them. I'm still, I talk to them every single week. It is just too good of an opportunity to pass up to not go try to be the first person to produce sports in space.

So the economics of it, you realize that in half a decade, you are able to produce this content cheaper, and the distribution method as well was becoming cheaper because you didn't have to do the linear stuff. You realized you had to do, to be among the first mover advantage. That then moves me to my question on the business side. What made it feel less like a mad idea that you would sink millions into and more like a business that would also generate money?

Yeah, 2 things. Primarily, it's the maturation of the infrastructure itself. And then the point in time that we have, right, where space in the social zeitgeist is substantially stronger than it has been in 50, 60 years. So let me talk about the first part of that. So the infrastructure itself, there has been a huge amount of investment that's gone into space over the last 50, 60 years. And that's only accelerated in the last 5. So in the last 6 months, for instance, more than a billion dollars has been put into maneuverable platforms alone. And that's outside VC investment. That's over a billion in just 6 months. So we're seeing a lot of maturation. We've got SpaceX going to space nearly every day. We've got a number of other launch companies going to space very, very soon. We've got commercial space stations coming up. We've got 150 companies building maneuverable platforms. We've got 450 companies building propulsion systems, i.e., motors for satellites, right? We have a mature industrial base that can support things like this. And if you look at any of the things I've written or some of the talks I've given recently, I talk a lot about this idea of we're at the This, I hate the term, we're at this inflection point in the space industry, similar to the 2000s in the internet age, where up until 2000, we were all very myopically focused on building out the railroads and the roads of the internet. It was all about network infrastructure and laying fiber and network switches and server racks. And then suddenly around 2000, people started building out what became social media. And suddenly we're like, wow, you can build applications on top of all that infrastructure and make a lot of money off the applications. And you don't have to build any of that infrastructure. Substantially lower overhead. Lower CapEx, lower OpEx with bigger upside. We're at the same point here where to date, the primary focus for investment and operation in space has been around building out that infrastructure. And that's great.

And the capability to launch into space and return cheaply.

Exactly. But I hate to say it because there's a lot of engineers that would hear this and chide me for it, but it's largely solved. We have reliable, robust, iterable capabilities to go off and go solve all of the things we need. We can get to space, we can move around space, we can image space, we can sense space, we can return from space. We can do all of those things today commercially, right? So we've now got to the point where we're able to focus on building the applications. We can take all that technological ecosystem and we can reconfigure it and figure out new ways to go make money from. And that's exactly what this is. I'm just looking at a whole bunch of different stuff that's happening in space and thinking, wow, we've got the maneuverable platforms, we got access to launch, we got sensing, we got cameras. What can we do with that? Well, hell, that's all the things you need to go create a sport. Why hasn't someone done that? That is doable. It is objectively doable with existing commercial technology. Let's go try it. It's as simple as that. We're just at this point where we can. And the beauty is, the opportunity is that there's not a lot of people who understand how space works or really understand the ecosystem well enough to know what's possible. And the people who are in the space ecosystem are largely, for obvious reasons, focused on building out that infrastructure because there's a lot of money in it right now, especially in the defense world. So there's not a lot of people looking at building those early applications. And I see us as one of those. So that's the first part. The second part is to this idea of timeliness. And I think that is also really why this is actually doable and it's insane, but totally doable. We are in the next 24 months going to have an absolute sea change in what we see from an attention economy in space. So we've got the first commercial space station is launching in the next 24 months. We've got China. In theory, going to the South Pole of the lunar surface. That's a huge deal. And we've got Americans going back to the moon. That's going to be the most watched broadcast in the history of broadcast. That's going to be 250 million live viewers. That's more than the best performing Super Bowl by about 100 million people, right?

But less than Eurovision.

Fair, fair. And if we're talking about global broadcast, it's a little bit funky. But to be fair, we're talking about an event that will perform far better than the best performing sports event of all And that's how I think about this. And if you look at the best performing media broadcasts in the US to date, top 10, number 2 through 10 are Super Bowls. Number 1 is still the moon landing. So even today, 50 plus years down the road, the best performing, most eyeball catching event in Western media history was the moon landing. So I'm, I see this as combining 2 very logical things. 2 of the things that capture the most attention, sports and space. I'm just putting them together and we're taking sport in a really proven sense. I'm not recreating some weird new space-based sport. This is traditional blue-chip heritage racing. Think Kentucky Derby, America's Cup, F1.

And that's what I wanted to ask you, Philip. What sort of craft are we talking about? Because for anybody who has not heard of this before to understand, what sort of stuff will you be racing in lower orbit?

Yeah, sure. So initially, right, we have many plans of things we can grow into, but fundamentally the first format of racing is very simple. It's large, performant, maneuverable chemical propulsion satellites. So in simple terms, think a Mini Cooper with 20, 30-foot solar arrays off the sides powered by a rocket engine. I think the engineers might quibble with my use of rocket because technically it's not a rocket, but it's a chemical propulsion system.

And unmanned or remotely controlled?

Correct. Unmanned and remotely controlled. Now, here's why it's also interesting in the age of AI. We as an industry in the space industry, of course, are looking at AI quite favorably thinking about, well, this could be really phenomenally useful for what's called dynamic space operations, which is this world where we've got so many things in space that things have to be maneuvering all the time to avoid other things. Doing that with a human in the loop gets very difficult at scale. So many companies are building guidance and navigation systems based on AI to autonomously maneuver. And that's partially from the risk and operational perspective, but also partially because the way you communicate with things in space requires effectively line of sight. So there are points during a 45 to 90 minute orbit where you're not able to talk to your satellite. So that gets really interesting from a gamification perspective for us, because if you're a competitor and you're trying to perform a maneuver and part of your maneuver occurs outside of a window where you don't have line of sight and can't talk to your spacecraft, having some autonomous capability to make decisions on its own about maneuvering, of course, would be a competitive advantage. So, yes, so uncrewed, Potentially partially autonomous to start, but of course we have interesting ideas around doing fully autonomous down the road as well.

So you're going to have teams entering the Atlas Cup, and your site now says teams are committed. Wondering about the mechanics, do they put money in? Do they sign an obligation? Do they provide their own hardware or do they work on improving a particular benchmark type of hardware? How does it work?

Yeah, sure. So very simply at this point, we have letters of intent. So we're 7 months old as a business. So there's a lot of detail to scratch out around what the actual race competition rules look like, what the orbital formats look like, what regulatory opinions might shift here and there around what we want to go do. All of that's going to get sussed out in the next 6 to 12 months. But fundamentally right now, we're talking about letters of intent to go off and go race. The expectation from the teams is very low. So we are Entirely new. No one's done this before. So I couldn't go to the market and say, SailGP, give me $25 million and that'll give you the right to fly a satellite and race a team. That is a somewhat more traditional model, selling equity stakes in leagues to allow participation. It creates scarcity. It allows for a path to near-term fundraising. But we couldn't do that here in this industry. That would be a distraction. A lot of these companies that have committed to racing are companies that are serving a primary market and their primary customer is the US government. They are building warfighting capabilities to go fight you know, Russian and Chinese satellites in space. If I were to say, hey, go take $25 million of your hard-earned investor cash that should be going towards technical development and go give me a check for the privilege to go race, I don't think those conversations would go very far. So what we've done is we've simplified the process and we've lowered the barrier to entry to allow people to take stuff they're already building and flying and go use it to compete. And there's 2 angles to this. One, of course, is, as I've mentioned, the economics of it, which means If you're already building a bunch of satellites to go fly them and demonstrate your capabilities, and you have additional time and propellant, then why wouldn't you want to go potentially race your satellite and demonstrate how amazingly capable it is against your peers? It's good marketing, it's good branding, it helps you demonstrate your capabilities, it's a good testbed, and they're already spending the money on it. So that those satellites are already being built and flown and tested today. So why not just assign them a different task while they're already in space? The second part of that though is we want to go create this apples to apples comparison, if you will. We want to create a real benchmark around what good is in space because space is hard. Space is a long ways away and getting good data from space is sometimes very, very challenging. And companies of course are self-interested. So they are flying their own satellites. They're testing them against their own benchmarks that are all proprietary. They don't share them. And then everyone claims success. Everyone claims success, right? It doesn't matter if your satellite blew up, you still had a successful test. So I don't think that's healthy. I think the industry needs to have the same thing that happened early in the automotive industry where racing created this testbed. It created this real assessment of new technologies and it helped accelerate the industry in its earliest days. So I want to go create this apples-to-apples comparison of real-world tech in space to go prove who's real or not. Because I mentioned there's 450 companies building satellite propulsion systems today. Half of them are probably nonsense, at least, right? And they shouldn't be here. They don't deserve investor money. The economics of capitalism needs to remove them from the herd. That is what racing can do. We can take companies that are real and we can celebrate their excellence. And we can demonstrate objectively and through a data-driven process that those that are not real don't deserve to be there. And they'll be very publicly proven to not be real. And that's scary to some people. I think in our industry, A lot of people have made a lot of money selling snake oil and raising a lot of money off of a PowerPoint, and they don't have real technology. A competitive ecosystem separates that wheat from the chaff very, very efficiently. And I think it's good. It's good for government buyers who are spending $100+ billion a year on space technology to buy real space technology. It's good for the industry because it means those that have real technology will be More easily identifiable by investors and thus investment dollars will get the best return on technological advancement. I think it's a healthy thing for the industry that we need. And that's also been something that I think the teams that I have heard are willing to go and compete, which costs money. They're going to have to go fly with propellant and spend time and they're not, they're giving up opportunities to go do other things to go race. They like the idea because of that. We're so early. It's not like they're looking at this as a sponsorship or a marketing or an advertising opportunity. They're looking at this as, hey, if I can go do exactly what I just described and create this apples-to-apples comparison, the ones that are confident in their ability to go do exactly what they promised they're able to do are thrilled to go race because they want to prove that they're real because they know exactly what I just said, that half these companies are—

And that's a challenge to them and to the entire industry at the same time. that you're doing, but it's a first in a way. Nobody has done this before. I'm wondering, Philip, if the Atlas Cup changed your view on what founders should count as traction, while traditionally, say, in investment, they look at traction based on the number of subscribers or customers you would have if we would be giving a SaaS model here.

It's interesting. So I think space is a little bit different, and I'm writing a paper right now. I'm giving a speech in Antalya, Turkey in about a month. And that speech is based around this idea of the space industry's government and private funding apparatus have effectively mischaracterized success and reward the wrong things. And that's hindering our ability to go off and go create technological maturation in space. And it sounds weird. So I hear you from traditional SaaS perspective. What's your MRR and how many subscribers do you like? And okay.

That's all I hear about when I talk to both the Entrepreneurs and investors.

But space is weird, right? So space doesn't have recurring revenues in a lot of senses. Some of the data-based businesses do, but most don't. Most are deep tech. So it's a totally different model of investment and what traction looks like from an investor's perspective. You invest some, some money today to go off and go do some development work, eventually fly a demo and maybe go sell something to government. And that revenue won't happen for 10 years. So you don't, have traditional easy metrics for traction. A lot of times investors are trying to figure out what are the government relationships that have been built and trying to look into the crystal ball of where government funding is going to be in the future or where industry appetite might be. And those are all very high risk propositions. Government is highly political. It's highly volatile. Companies that sell to other space companies, of course, are at even larger risk because of that volatility inherent creates these massive cycles and troughs that Have killed a bunch of good companies in the past. So it's hard, but as a result, because there's not good, clean, easy data, investors make the wrong decisions. And they end up, it sounds so perverse in a lot of ways, but they end up baking success off of one's ability to go raise. And it becomes this pure ecosystem supported delusion of success to where we've got companies And I'm not going to name any because they'll get mad. But we have companies that are building rockets that have never flown, never flown at all. And every 6 months they raise another couple hundred million dollars and they're well over a billion dollars raised at this point. And they've never flown. Or platform companies that are selling along with, by platforms I mean satellites, that are selling it to government. And they're one of 20 companies, all of whom have the same business model going after the same pot of money. And everyone's valuations are assuming that they get some substantial chunk of the same pot of money that 20 other companies are going after, common sense dictates that many of them won't have any of that pie to take. There's too much competition and no magical other pot of money that's going to appear. And that pot of money might not even happen in the first place. And yet these companies still managed to raise a lot of money. And if you listen to people in the industry, we are not as celebratory around highly challenging, innovative new technologies and big bets. on new things were more celebratory around amounts of money raised. And then investors celebrate amounts of money raised. And it becomes this weird self-supporting cycle of, it doesn't really matter if you are a seed investor and pick a company. And if that company goes and raises more and more and more money, it doesn't matter if they ever fly anything or are real or have a real TAM or can go capture that TAM. No one cares. They just keep raising more and more money. And space has created this really quite perverse incentive framework because of the timelines and because we don't have those good, clear indicia of success early on. Investors can play this game here where you just keep rolling and rolling and rolling and you mark to market. So your investment keeps continuing to go up on paper and then you just hope to God someone rolls them up before it actually all comes crashing down and it will. And that's why I think what I'm proposing here, I worry that investors will understand what I'm getting at here. And it'll freak them out because I am trying to create that early dataset that says, look, even if you're an early entrant and you're flying your first or second demo satellite, maybe you're on that carousel of going and trying to raise money. And you like the idea of being able to have some opacity in your operational successes because it allows you to go tell that more successful story. If I'm successful, I remove that. I create effectively the earliest objective gate through which someone needs to cross to prove that they're real. And those that don't will fail very publicly and earlier. And for the investors in those companies, I represent real risk. If I'm good at what I do, I will kill a bunch of well-funded companies. And I'm a capitalist. I support that. I embrace that. That is my job. That is how the market is supposed to work. And I'm supposed to make it as efficient as possible. But if I'm right, I will cost a lot of investors lots of money. And if they're looking at me They may view me as risk because of that.

So how do you break that chicken and egg problem then without pretending that the market is further along than it currently is?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think there are enough good technology-driven, engineering-focused innovators in the market to allow me to do what I need to do, where those that are skeptical or concerned or want to deselect to protect themselves, they can do that. That's fine. I expect that. I simply need to go get the ones that are confident to go off and go execute. And then my hope is the active choice not to participate. If I'm successful and we drive traction and we start doing more and more events in different formats, it will become just like in the automotive industry. You're really not an automotive supplier unless you provide capabilities into the race ecosystem.

Hmm.

I think about it the exact same way. If you're not participating in this ecosystem in 5 years, everyone will know that you're not participating because you can't, you can't, you're not good enough to go off and go do it. And I think that becomes a self-validating acceptance. So I'm very, very grateful for the teams that have decided to race because I think they are demonstrating the right mindset, this, the celebration of engineering excellence, the celebration of realness. That's what we need. And I love the fact that people are embracing that early on and those that don't, good luck to you.

I'm curious how you are approaching potential sponsors, media partners, investors, and so forth, trying to pitch something that has not been done before.

Yeah. Well, and it's a really interesting challenge. We are fundamentally unique. No one has done this before. We are a completely new category, a completely new vertical. We're premised on some exceedingly cutting-edge technologies that very few people actually understand. So it is a challenge. So let's talk about BD first before we talk about the investor world. From a sponsor engagement perspective, we're actually making better headway than I thought. So to back up. When I started this company in January, I went to my investors who funded me. I did a little seed, pre-seed round in January as I kicked off. And I told them, I was like, hey guys, I don't expect anything to happen in the first year. The first year is going to be me kissing babies and shaking hands and going to events and trying to get people excited about it. But I expect the first year will be people telling me, you're an insane person, leave me alone. And it'll take some time for people to start to actually engage. That hasn't happened. The industry engagement has been great. We already talked about that, but even on the sponsor side, I brought on a fractional head of partnerships to go help do this. Someone who has a long history in sports, early challenger sport, competitive environment development. And he's done great. So we're in active conversation with 4 different leading global brands about sponsorships today. So I can't name them, but I can give categories. So we've got an aerospace defense prime, a name that everyone on this planet would know. We've got a leading global beverage brand, a name that absolutely everyone would know if I said it. We've got a leading apparel brand as well. And we have a well-known IT services company. So those conversations are in process. We're not done. These conversations will take at least 6 months.

But continuing a conversation like that and getting a foot in the door is also usually the most important part.

Exactly. And for us, that smacks of validation from an engagement perspective. I think if we were not interesting enough to talk to, they would simply say, hey, no, thank you. We defer and we don't want to talk, but they're actively talking to us. In fact, one of them I would mention. Actually already had a space-based advertising campaign planned for 2027. So when we approached them, we were like, hey, we want to do this thing in space. We can do these activations. Here's how we think you would fit into the ecosystem and what a sponsorship might look like and some of the costing. And they're like, we should talk. We're planning '27 space campaign right now. Let's figure this out. So I think that realization is phenomenal. I've got a slide that I share with investors that outlines some of the more recent Advertisement opportunities that have happened in space or product placement opportunities in space. And there's a lot. Columbia Sportswear did a project with a lunar lander. Prada is doing a spacesuit program. IWC Schaffhausen has done a deal with a sensor company. It's all over the map. Hilton and Vast are putting together an early concept around a space hotel. People understand the value of consumer and service goods being Proximate to space because space has this inherent magical connectivity for people. I would note a good example of that is during the Artemis II mission, which just flew for a moment during the livestream, a Nutella jar twirled through the screen and it wasn't a product placement. It wasn't planned. It was just someone had snuck a jar of Nutella on and it got more impressions in 24 hours than Nutella has ever received on any paid campaign imaginable. And I think that demonstrates the mere presence of a brand, the mere presence of a product in space still has this really magnetic pull. So I think we're seeing that. So that's been really, really positive. And we're really excited to see that engagement. On the investor side, it is interesting, but it's also very fresh. So we just opened our seed round. So we're out raising $7 million to go off and go fund our next 18 months of operations to get us through our first year of racing. And we just opened those conversations literally a week ago. And we already have multiple pitches lined up. I was talking to an investor this morning. We're seeing good engagement, which is great because there was a real risk that I could have gone to the world of investors and they could have been like, no thanks, this is too much for us. But we've got multiple calls lined up and already had one this morning. So I'm feeling very good about that. Time will tell, of course, how that fundraise goes, but we're at least talking to people and that makes me very, very happy at this point. From a validation perspective, that's one of these things that I didn't expect to get this year that we have got. So on the advertiser, the sponsor front, the fact of these conversations with leading brands, I think that's phenomenal. The fact that they picked up the phone, the fact that we're on 3rd or 4th or 5th conversations, great. But we're also seeing that from traditional media. So to this theme of unexpected successes, we had a major television broadcasting channel here in the US reach out to us a couple months ago and say, are you really doing space racing? We heard about this. How can we work together? Can we put you on TV? And we ended up filming a fully produced broadcast segment that hopefully will be going live in front of 8 million people at some point in the next couple months before the end of the year. Knock on wood that that actually happens on time. And it was phenomenal. We have a fully produced multimedia segment, full production environment, and they approached us. So when I'm thinking about this, I guess how I undersold my investors in January of like, hey, look, don't expect anything for this year. I've got teams signed up. I've got dozens of partners signed up to early affiliate MOU deals. I had a major channel put us on primetime in front of 8 million people. I've got real brands talking to us about sponsorship. There's so much more appetite than even I expected. And I, of course, have to be an optimist here to do what I did to quit my job and start the first professional sports league in space. I have to be an optimist, and I didn't even as an optimist expect to have this level of engagement. It's been phenomenal.

So with your fundraising journey, I'm wondering what traditional advice you and lessons you used to fundraise and what worked and what didn't work. Obviously, FOMO create is good, especially in this case, whether you can prove yourself on time and the validation for that. But you also said with it being an unproven category to an extent and also being a first mover into the market. The options and opportunities are different.

If you talked to any of the people that I've worked with in the past, they'd probably say, I don't know, I don't think I'm a very good fundraiser, to be totally honest. I don't think I'm that guy. Yes, I'm an investor, right? I've got positions in a half dozen plus space companies and a couple of other things. I've taken companies through IPOs. I've taken companies through PE exits. I've raised seed rounds. I've raised Series A. Cool. But I don't think I'm good at it. I honestly don't. And it's because I'm an attorney. And this is not a, not a—

So you argue yourself out of it. Yeah.

No, it's about something that got baked into me very early on about just not being willing to dive into the storytelling to the extent that a lot of startup founders dive into the storytelling. I like things that are real. I like things that are measurable. I like things that are logical and explainable and yes, scalable. And yes, I want my hockey stick chart to go up like everyone else. But I'm not going to go tell some story that's total nonsense. I'm just not. And I've had that feedback in other businesses where they're like, look, this is a solid business, but it's not aggressive enough, or it's not fast enough, or you don't have a big enough TAM. And I think that, that drives me nuts. Um, but it's not going to change how I approach things. Um, and I've had some feedback from investors that I have today that have been like, hey, go raise $30 million, not $7 million. Go focus on putting humans in space to go race. Go after the big idea today. And I'm like, no, I want to focus on what's doable. This to me is crawl, walk, run. I'm going to crawl. I'm going to demonstrate it with uncrewed. Then we're going to go bigger, uncrewed, different formats. And eventually, sure, in 10, 15, 20 years, maybe we'll go figure out how to have humans race in space. But I'm not going to pitch that today because I can't do that today very well. It's doable, but it's just wildly complex and expensive and a totally different business model. But that is, I think, how we've, how the industry, especially space or tech generally in the early stages, has been acculturated to this idea of like, go big or go home. And to go big or go home, yes, I understand from the VC's perspective, that's how they make, they make their money. But it does mean that a lot of really good risk-adjusted staged progressive businesses don't necessarily get funded, even if they have the big upside, because I still have the big upside. My financial model has the hockey stick chart. Sure. I just want to go at it in a structured way where I prove it out at a simple format. And then I make that format bigger and more complex. I just don't want to go there day one.

Yeah.

So I think that mindset is anathema to how VCs think about the world a lot of the time. To be fair though, VC is one type of investor. I think family offices and angels think about things differently. PE people have a totally different understanding. We're not really at that stage, but I think they're a little bit more understanding of the, like, you know, build something stable and structured and then scale from there. And maybe in 20 years, they'll want to go do a roll-up with us. Cool. But I'm unable as a professional. to sit in a room with an investor and tell the story of like, I'm going to go sell $1 billion next year. No, I'm not. Right. I'm going to do $2 million next year. And that's fine. That's the intent. And we scale from there, but that is not for everyone. And I recognize that. And that's totally fine.

Then, Philip, I'm wondering, what have you changed your mind about since you started Atlas Cup?

Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah. So I think it really does come down to, it's going to sound contradictory to what I just said, but it's not. So my approach is still crawl, walk, run. It's still risk adjusted. It is structured. But from a narration perspective, when I first started in January, it sounds like a long time ago, but in January, I would never mention humans racing in space. I assumed that if I ever even mentioned those words, people would laugh me out of the room. And curiously, that's not the case. So investors are Generally more interested in that than uncrewed. And that makes sense because there's an easier appreciation of the human emotional connection to sport because of that. We get emotional about sport. There's something about that, the magic of seeing human competition and someone will just make the shot that you never thought is possible, or the ball will turn in some way that doesn't make sense. We want to see that magic. That's part of the reason why we watch sport. That's part of the reason why people bet on sport. So we need to tell that human story. And we've got a whole strategy around how to tell that human story and drive interest in the teams and the people and the technology and the funders behind those teams. And we have a plan there, and I think it's a solid plan. But it is very easy for people to wrap their minds around the idea of, okay, well, cool. You put humans in a capsule and fly them around space and make a competition out of it. Absolutely. There's the human story. It's there. There's no question about it. So I do talk more about that than I did. And that's been a big shift. It was Lord Voldemort. It was a thing that shall not be named.

Mm-hmm.

For the first 4 or 5 months of the business. And then I've had a number of conversations with some larger sovereign wealth fund investors a couple months ago in London. And they were focused on that bigger story. And that to them was just a given because I think they think about the world in a scale that is different from how I think about the world. And they were like, well, of course, well, that makes total sense. Why are you not doing that? And I parried that and said, well, we're focused on proving out this at a low technical risk stage, and then we'll go build from there. And we're not saying no to that. We just want to be realistic about building the initial infrastructure and build fan base and we'll grow from there. I don't want to go for the moon day one, haha, proverbially. We want to go be wise. So I guess it sounds contradictory to what I just said in the answer to the prior question, but I talk more about that broader picture, even though it's not in my materials. It's not in my investor deck. It's not in my financial model, but it has become something that I'm more comfortable talking about because frankly, no one has laughed me out of the room when I brought it up. In fact, it becomes the point of focus. It becomes the thing of like, Well, my God, if you can do this, if you can put humans in space, that's going to be the most watched sporting event in the history of sport. You're going to have 7 billion smartphones get a push notification saying humans racing in space for the first time, click here. 6 of the 7 billion smartphones will get pressed. That button will be pressed and we'll have the most watched broadcast in the history of any media event ever. And it's going to be a sport and it's going to be in space. That story really resonates with people. But I just, I don't want to go that path today because it is exceedingly difficult.

But you got adapted to being more comfortable talking about it, even though it's not in your actual documentation, because that's where what you're building now leads.

Exactly. Yes.

So, Filip, I'm wondering, what did you have to sacrifice then to get from the scout role into building this from scratch? Your idea, your vision, not taking on from somebody else.

Yeah, sure. There's the fundamentals. Well, look, I'm a startup. I don't pay myself. So I'm getting close to a year now of making $0. That's certainly an impact. Some of my own money as well has gone into this, of course. So, you know, there's that personal side, but that's just math. That's just the fundamentals of you prepare for that, you plan for it, you execute it. You just eat a little bit more ramen than you would otherwise eat. And that's fine. I think what was really hard for me was getting around the emotional Part of this. I grew up in the Bay Area. I've always had this level of comfort around entrepreneurialism. It's Silicon Valley. Everyone goes to a startup.

I've worked in a startup. Entrepreneurialism or risk. Yeah.

True. And I think so I've had a higher than normal risk tolerance for forever. And this is not my first business I've started. I started a real estate development business that flopped because it was 2008. I've started an investment firm. I've started a business with my wife. There's been things that I've tried, but I'm, so I'm generally risk okay. But what became very hard for me was wrapping my mind around, I think you asked this, maybe this is the first question, is wrapping my mind around making the decision to leave the job that I had achieved that everyone's supposed to want to get. It doesn't matter what job you take. If you're an analyst at a Fortune 500 company, at some point your brain's going to be like, well, I can get this job and then I'll be a manager, then I'll be a regional manager, then I'll be a VP, and then I'll be CEO. Everyone has that path, but it's very, very rare to ever have that consummated. And I did have it consummated unexpectedly. It wasn't a, I didn't go to Scout thinking, okay, we're going to have the situation that we did and we're going to move the founders out and I'm going to take over as CEO. That was never, that was not the plan. And then it happened and I'm like, this is, this is phenomenal. I assumed I would do a terrible job and it turned out I didn't do a terrible job. I had a great team. I had a lot of fun. And then I'm like, I got to wrap my mind around leaving. And I did what I was supposed to do. I made it to the point where I'm supposed to have made it. And now I'm going to quit. And I had to reconcile that emotionally with the idea that the odds of my failure are exceedingly high. There's a million reasons why Atlas Cup may not work. In fact, the statistics would say it almost certainly won't. And I had to reconcile myself with leaving the thing that I had worked really hard to get to that was highly unlikely but did actually come to pass to go try something that is equally, if not more unlikely to be successful. And then rationalizing, you will probably do this for a year. People will probably tell you to leave them alone and that you're a crazy person and you will fail. And then you will go get some random job because you failed. You quit your job as CEO and failed at your startup. And I think that, that was really, really, really hard. That was the big sacrifice. It was almost like this part of my ego, a bit of my, my bravado and my, my position in society. I had to be like, I'm okay letting this go. I will no longer be CEO of a company. And that's the risk I'm willing to take. And that was the real sacrifice, is being okay with that.

And I know you've been doing this for a few months, a year, but it also feels like an eternity and that time has gone really quickly. But so if you could tell Philip that was about to leave Scout one thing in a message, what would you tell him to watch out for?

That's interesting. Selfishly, sorry, I'm gonna answer this 2 totally different ways. Selfishly, I would've told me to wait 6 months. Because the company has done phenomenally in the 6 months since I left. They closed the Series A that I lined up for them really well. They got a huge new contract. So hat off to Courtney and Josiah for that. They got a $60 million contract. It's crazy. We worked on that thing for years and it finally came through right after I left. And they deserve all the credit. They did all the work, but it would have been really cool to be around for that. It just, it's like, it's one of those things like to have worked for something for so long and then to leave right before it gets awarded. It's kind of a bummer. So really I would have just said to wait. That said, there's a whole bunch of reasons why the timing made sense. I think the business requires us to be ready to rock in '28 to coincide with Artemis 3 and 4. And if I had waited—

When there will be peak interest into that area.

Yeah, exactly. So I couldn't have waited. I would want me to know that it's not going to be looked at askance, right? The industry has reacted well. Sponsors have reacted well. The feedback has been positive. It also could have changed some of my early hiring. If I had known the level of interest, I probably would have brought on a full-time person to help handle some of that partnership interest. Early on, because I think we've missed a lot of opportunities where had I been trying to capture all of that and monopolize on it, we could have done more. We could have had 100 partners signed up and we could have had 12 sponsor conversations ongoing. We could have been doing more. So I think my risk, my fear there almost got in the way of us moving even faster than we are. And I think we're moving damn fast, but we could have done more.

And finally then, Philip, what are you still trying to figure out in life and in business?

Yeah, it's hard. I think, um, in life it's the perpetual struggle to go figure out things that are meaningful. I come from a family where basically all the men in my life worked until they died, not out of necessity, but out of sense of mission. It's just like they found things that they were passionate about and my father's still working. He should have retired 15, 20 years ago, right? It's just how we live. I want to find things that are meaningful and have the capability to go serve the future. And there's a poem called The River Duddon. And there's a quote from it that I'll butcher, but if something from our hand have power to live and serve the future hour, and if it's towards a silent tomb we go, through love and faith and hopes transpire some dower, we feel we are greater than we know. Basically, the idea being that there is something that we can do today that will persist beyond us, that will go off and go serve the future.

Right.

And that's really important to me, and I want to go find that. And that's part of the reason why starting my own thing, something that has this Real first mover feel, something that has the opportunity to become an instantiated element. Whether other people build other sports in space, great, cool, I support it, go for it. I want to be the first. I want to have that legacy. It's ego-driven. I just want to have that legacy, and this is my way to go get it. So it's very personal for me, right? I want to go build something that is good for my investors, but also good for me. This is a name creation opportunity. I want to be the Bernie Ecclestone of space. How old was Someone's going to go be the Bernie Ecclestone of space. Why not me? Yeah. So I think that's it. And for business, it's the stickiness. It's the one thing that keeps me up at night is how do I get people to come back, right? I'm confident that sports and space is enough to get people to click, but how do I get them to click a second time, a third time, and a hundredth time? That I'm still trying to figure that out. That's very, very hard. And I've got a bunch of very smart people advising me, but I think that's our challenge. That's what we need to go figure out to be successful here.

And I think a lot of people are looking for that answer Well, Philip, so sure. So thank you so much for coming on Millennial Masters, and I can't wait to watch the first Atlas Cup.

Very much appreciate you having me on.

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