Finding Opportunities in the Space Industry | Ryan Mclinko

So I've got a couple slides here on how to start something yourself. I don't know what kind of the rest of your guys' curriculum is, but I understand it's mostly about entrepreneurship. So I suspect that this is going to match very closely with what you guys kind of generally learn about entrepreneurship, but it's possible that this might have a little bit of a twist from a space perspective. So how do you start something yourself really comes down to The right idea, right team, right time. It's no different in space than it is in anything else. And that's actually something that I think is important to kind of convey, that space isn't fundamentally— building stuff for space isn't fundamentally different than building something for anything else. It's just different boundary conditions. And some of those boundary conditions might be big deals. They might be hard. But taking somebody who has no space experience and then plopping them down into doing something that is space-related is just a matter of learning a few different boundary conditions, a few different side experience and things like that. It's not changing fundamentals. The fundamentals of how something works is no different on the ground versus in space. How do you find opportunities? This again I think is very similar to what you guys are probably being taught about entrepreneurship from anywhere for any other sort of industries. Giving a slight spin on it for space-related stuff, following space news, seeing where pain points are. Hey, getting stuff to space is really hard, but maybe you have this idea of how you can do something differently that hasn't been done before, or you're looking at Earth imaging and maybe you have some other idea of something that seems like a really good idea. Again, just learning about industries, maybe joining an existing company, seeing what pain points are. Once you're actually doing something and building something, you see all sorts of ideas of things that are just completely broken and you want to see a new way to do it. And then again, just looking at things from first principles, one of the things that Elon posted about with rockets, I think, was going through and looking at what is the actual cost of a rocket in terms of propellant, the only thing that necessarily has to get expended. And that puts a floor on the cost of getting stuff to orbit. In reality, there's realities that make that not possible, but If you go and dive down to the very nitty-gritty details of just basic hand calculations on something, then how does it fundamentally line up and how does that compare to how things are currently being done? The bigger that gap, the more opportunity for an industry to be disrupted. How do you evaluate opportunities? Again, I'm sure this is very similar to what you're being taught for anything else. Talk to possible customers, learn what you need to build, learn the skills, learn the boundary conditions, how that's different than what you're experienced with, Find the right people that can augment your capabilities. Consider what's currently being done. Consider it. Don't necessarily do anything that way, but consider it at least so you know what the options are, what people have been trying. Prototype it. Test it over and over again. How is starting a space industry unique, or a company in the space industry unique? I think I've gone through most of these before, but basically it comes down to a lot of things are long lead. A lot of components are. If you're going to commercial off-the-shelf components, COTS components, then that helps a lot, but certain things will still be long. Sales cycles are long, especially if you're dealing with B2B, business-to-business sales. It's a long cycle developing hardware and then putting it into orbit, whether that's for testing, whether that's for deployment for service. Those are long cycles and relatively hard to do. So you figure out what are shortcuts that we can take? What sort of testing can we do on the ground to short-circuit our development cycle? Deployment schedules are often difficult to control, because launch is often not something you directly have control of. Inability to access the product once it's deployed. When you're in space, it's hard to do that. It's out of a lot of people's experience, but again, that is not necessarily a reason to not get involved with something, or for somebody to not get involved with something, just because they're not experienced with space, with those boundary conditions. And the final thing is that it's capital intensive. It's not as bad as it used to be. You don't need to be a billionaire to start a space company anymore. These days you can go with the normal VC funding rounds. You can even oftentimes, in certain cases, bootstrap something and kind of put together an idea for very little money, then go after contracts to get you rolling, and maybe you don't even need VC money. It's gotten to a point with small satellites that you can actually build stuff on not— Ridiculous amounts of money. And that's it. If anybody has any questions— Thank you.