A Desire For Adventure | Nadir Bagaveyev

I don't know about others, but everything I say could be completely not true. Process everything through your own noodle and critically decide what will apply to your business and what will not. And that goes for any speaker, whether he's Tim Draper or God himself. Be really critical about everything that is being said, because only you know your business better than anybody else. So, So try to use your own judgment as much as you can instead of trying to get advice here, advice here. Listen to advices, but have your own judgment about it. So I started my rocket company 2 years ago because I wanted to go to space. And I thought I have higher chances of going to space on my own rockets than with government. This is the rocket launch that we did last year. This is first ever 3D-printed rocket engine that ever powered rocket flight. SpaceX did it 3 weeks later after we did. So there we got ourselves a little first one. So we started 2 years ago. First, I was funded by Adam Draper from Boost Accelerator. After 3 months, we raised some money. Well, raise money, spend money, raise money, spend money. Then we got to Y Combinator, and in 4 months— well, they asked us, can you build a rocket in 3 months? And we built it in 4, launched it. So it helped us to continue our development. But our main goal is to open up space to Silicon Valley. So teams of 3, 4, 5 people can get together, build a nanosatellite. I don't know if you guys know about nanosatellites. They're small satellites between 1 kilogram and 10 kilograms that can do something useful in orbit. For example, you put a camera on it, it takes pictures of Earth every day, and then sells the data of weather, agriculture, I don't know, fuel lines, ships, anything. That's just one example. Some laser communications would be another. Scientific experiments would be third. And now they— everybody has to wait for 1 or 2 years with those small satellites to piggyback on big rockets to launch with them. And they don't get to decide where they go. With us, they should be able to launch next week, $1 million per rocket or $100,000 per kilogram. So a team can get together and say, hey, let's build this. Build this, come to an investor and say, we need money to launch it. Investor gives money, next week it's in space and it proves either it's a good idea, viable idea, or it's a stupid idea. So investors can decide whether continue as a supporter of the company or not. So this is our first product. Hopefully after that we will get into human launch business. Hopefully we will take 2 people to space for a honeymoon for a weekend, something like that, for a couple of million dollars. So my motivation is to go to space and I think I didn't even know what exactly to say. I would say go back to very inner, inmost desire that drives you. And I thought to myself, what is my inmost desire? It's not even, it's not rockets, it's, you could say going to space is a motivation, but it's even deeper than that. It's a desire for adventure. It's exploring something new. Although I haven't been to many countries, well, I've been to a few in Europe, Asia a little bit, South America, but it feels like I already know the world. You've seen all the pictures of the world from everywhere. You will go to Mount Everest, you will see a bunch of mountains there, and you'll climb and you'll freeze. But space, so few people have been there, and it's not about counting how many people, but nobody has experienced weightlessness, or at least more than, I don't know, 30 seconds on one of those airplanes, except astronauts who went to space. That is a completely new experience that I would like to experience, and something like that drives— You. me to wake up every morning, go to work for 2 years so far, and it's going to be another 2 years until— well, probably 1.5 years until we reach the space and 2 years until we become profitable. Now it's the most probably tough technologically time when we need to make sure that our pumps work and they blow up all the time. But in such difficult conditions, you have to find out what is the inmost desire that will drive you. It's unlikely that money will drive you. Money's awesome and cool, but in the end, what are you going to get? A yacht and cool life? It could be a good motivator, but I think there's much more deeper motivations. One of them is desire for freedom in one way or another. Another one is desire for home or for security of one way or another. There are probably more of those, I just cannot get them from the top of my head. So I guess this is about thinking big, right? Like who thinks the biggest here? Like who has the most expensive, longest-term project here? Tell me. We're regenerating body parts. Regenerating body parts. Like, for example, build your clone, make him a vegetable, and let him grow till he's whatever, and then take his parts? No, mostly foreskin. OK, why would you want to regenerate that? To enhance the pleasure of sexual intercourse. OK. All right, how long is it going to take? 5 years. Who will beat him? Who will what? Who has a project that may take longer than 5 years here? All right, you're the winner so far. Well, that's kind of a— I mean, it's a simple example of I know what I'm going to do will be beyond my lifetime. I will build spaceships and I will die of old age at my workplace building spaceships. I mean, that's how far I look into my business. It would be great if everybody would do that, but not necessary. For some people it's serial entrepreneur, just drive the excitement itself. For somebody, I don't know, start here, go somewhere else and— build a life somewhere else. At least that's my vision. That's the way I look at the business. I'm not in it to sell quickly, to make money. Although I probably wouldn't mind to sell this small business of nanosatellite delivery for larger goals if it gives me money in the beginning. And again, don't take my words as a— Rule of law or anything like that. Everybody has their own way and their own decisions to make.