#1180 Delian Asparouhov | INSANE: Space Factories Are Coming!

Delian Asparouhov is a principal at Founders Fund and the co-founder of Varda Space Industries. In this conversation, we talk about building space factories, what is going on in the venture investing community, why Delian believes more people should be starting tech companies, AI, and bitcoin. This conversation was held at Lyceum Miami. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Delian Asparouhov is a principal at Founder's Fund and the co-founder of Varda Space Industries. In this conversation, we talk about building space factories. We talk about what's going on in the venture investing community, and also why Delian believes more people should be creating companies, especially tech startups. I always enjoy talking to Delian, and this conversation was no different. It was filmed live at Lyceum Miami, which is a conference that I hosted earlier this year. Here is my conversation with Delian Asparouhov.

• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

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• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I think a great place to start is that you have tons of hot takes on Twitter, but really, the hot takes come directly from a degree of independent thinking that is hard to keep. Something like that. No matter how much people kind of keep hitting on you every time.

• 1:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Every time that we talk, I think that there's some new idea that we debate, that we're considering. There's somebody that we know that said something that sounds insane, but like. It's actually interesting. How do you think about the ability to think independently in a world where that is becoming more and more rare? But also, there's more pressure not to do that.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  It's a good question. I mean, I think definitely there's a part of it that helps knowing that there's very limited professional threat to me thinking through crazy ideas and expressing opinions. Like, a lot of times when I, you know, I'm debating or chewing on a particular idea, I'm typically doing it with somebody else that is like, you know, helping me think it through. But they may or may not be able to actually like go out, talk about it, explore it. Because like, they actually will like literally have their job taken away if they do it versus, you know, working for, you know, Peter, founders fund and starting your own company. It's like real tough to find the line at which one would get fired. And so I think there's definitely a part of it that is like, you know, having that type of, I don't know, professional financial security.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  I think another part of it is, you know, I was born into, and your wife as well, into a very, you know, sort of different culture than what the United States has, right? You know, I was originally born in Sofia, Bulgaria. And, you know, when I try to describe to friends what the culture of Bulgaria is like, I always try and tell them like, imagine yourself kind of transported to like 1960s US, but obviously like Sovietified. Everything from like the gender norms to like the way that people communicate to one another. It is just like so far off kilter in a way that actually I do think like changes how you think. And then being aware and present of this like completely different culture that I grew up in, also in the United States, makes you start to realize that there are these just like, almost like, you know, walls that you build up based off of like where you're embedded into and where you spend all day with.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  And having these two different viewpoints, you realize that all the walls are actually kind of fake. And it allows you, I think, to traverse much more easily than if you're like born and raised into a single individual culture. And so I think those are the two things that probably like influenced me the most.

• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

  As an investor, a lot of the investment returns over the years have come from either ideas that seemed stupid in the beginning. They seemed impossible, or they seemed kind of like, it's not stupid, it's not impossible, but like, it's not worth working on, maybe, is kind of the way I think about it. Does that? Create like this economic incentive to basically have to think independently and have to go outside of the consensus because there's not really returns in the consensus thinking?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Peter always gives this really great frameworks where we repeat on a regular basis at Founders Fund, which is if you take a two by two grid and you have like non-consensus and consensus and you have right and wrong, ultimately, there are a variety of different ways of making returns. Consensus and right is a place where actually there's a decent amount of returns to be made. Take companies like Uber, for example, relatively quickly in Silicon Valley, very rapidly became consensus, and it was actually like in some ways quite difficult to make returns if you look at it from like Series C onwards. Those investors actually had pretty shitty IRR. And so it's one way to make returns. You can be consensus and wrong, then you just look like an idiot. And the only real place to make massive returns is non-consensus and right. Now, ultimately, for a company to succeed at the grand scales, it eventually has to shift from non-consensus to consensus. So SpaceX, which Founders Fund was a very early investor in, is a great example of

• 4:48Speaker 03

  this, of like super non-consensus, even up until like 2012, 13, and then very rapidly shifted on a dime. And then nowadays, it's basically the hottest brand name on the planet, but like when Founders Fund originally invested in 2009, was definitely not. And so I think about that with like, if I look at, you know, in the past, I've been a venture capitalist now for about, you know, six years or so. My two best performing investments were extremely non-consensus at the beginning, and they actually had some interesting parallels to one another, where basically both companies, one was Ramp Financial, this corporate card competitor, corporate card competitor to Brex, and then Sword Health, which is this digital physical therapist. Both companies, when they were founded effectively at their seed Series A, had an incumbent tech company that had over a billion dollar market cap, had massive investors around the cap table that were all tier one, and had a ton of momentum.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  And so every single time, you know, anytime that I brought either of those investments to committee, both times, my, you know, sort of colleagues were like, what are you doing? Like, why would you go after this behemoth that is like clearly doing super well? And it's like, it's not like a behemoth that's like, you know, Amex that is like super antiquated and there's clearly angles of tech. You're going after like a tech-enabled behemoth that has a ton of momentum, talent, funding, et cetera. And in both cases, identified that I thought there was something basically fundamentally wrong with the product, and that ultimately, the founders that I was betting on had better engineering and product discipline, and that would ultimately play out over the course of the following five, six years, that would lead them to have differentiated sort of performance. And so if you look at both Ramp and Sword Health, I think, are truly outcompeting the incumbent tech competitors, Brex and then Sword Health, Brex and Hinge Health. Now, it's not the most interesting form of contrarian thinking, but it was one of these things where it's just like,

• 6:16Speaker 03

  you know, I approached a set of investments that just other people were deeply uncomfortable with because it was sort of thought of, you know, the consensus view was, oh, those markets are already fully tapped out. There's no more alpha to be had there. So if I look at my career, a lot of them are either like, go into areas that nobody's fucking comfortable with. I like space manufacturing, so there's clearly no incumbent. Or go into areas where the incumbent has proven that there is a market there, but are clearly not going after it in the appropriate pattern.

• 6:39Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see those companies kind of grow so quickly, even though there is the tech incumbent who, to a non-tech incumbent, looks like the challenger, right? How much does that reinforce the idea that it's all about the execution and the idea doesn't nearly matter as much versus like, no, the idea really did matter, but the execution is, you know, as important, if not more important?

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, if there's one thing that I feel like I've learned over the last decade is like, all that matters is that early team and DNA that you put together. Like, take the company that I started, Artispace Industries. The idea of microgravity manufacturing, the particular materials that we're going after, has been discussed and thought about every single decade, basically, since the 1970s, and a significant, you know, sort of financial pursuit was gone after it. So like the 1970s, we funded Skylab, Senator Bill Nelson, the current national administrator, was literally up there doing a protein crystallization experiment, trying to figure out whether or not that would be something that could be brought to market. In the 80s and 90s, you had nonstop, basically, projects going on on the ISS. In the 2000s and 2010s, there was an early set of, like, you know, sort of venture-backed companies, Made in Space, a few others that basically got started. And so it's not as if the idea is particularly different that we're pursuing.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  It's just the fact that we're pursuing it maybe at a time that is different, but I think in particular, the reason that we're able to recruit the team that we're able to is because the time is different, but then ultimately that team is what makes it absolutely out execute. And it's one of these things where it's like, when you put that initial sort of group of like 10 people together, it ends up self-replicating and it's almost impossible to steer it sort of off course, even if you wanted to. And so, you know, if there's another thing that I've learned is like, once a startup is past 10 people or so, the sort of like, you know, end outcome is effectively baked in. Like, there's limited amounts that you can do either as a founder or as an investor to really influence it at that point, if you haven't made that right call in the first time.

• 8:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I'm an investor in Varda. You guys continue to do a great job. But talk a little bit about time as an important part as well. Because one of the things that is interesting about this business specifically, there are certain technologies that are available now that previously weren't. There's also this like sexiness around working on space-related technologies because of a SpaceX. There's also what I would consider like fertile recruiting grounds, where like maybe somebody went to work at SpaceX or another space company for three, four, five years. Now they're like, hey, I want to go earlier. And so you're able to kind of capitalize on that. Like, how do you think about time? And do you think maybe Varda wouldn't be nearly as successful as it has been already? And hopefully will become if you started maybe even just like two or three years before you actually did it?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  No, I think the timing is critical on this stuff. Like, if you look at the early teams that started the most influential aerospace companies in like 2008 through 11, they basically had no, what I would call traditional like Silicon Valley DNA, except for maybe like one founder effectively that was like, you know, like Elon bringing the capital to this table. But if you look at the broader team that like, you know, Elon basically recruited, none of them had worked at like Silicon Valley companies. They'd all been at like NASA, you know, Aerojet Rocketdyne, basically like working at like, you know, defense contractors. And he was the first one to like sort of put them together. Same thing with Planet Labs, it was effectively a bunch of like basically ex-NASA, you know, engineers that put it together and got venture capital. But like they themselves had no, you know, sort of Silicon Valley DNA. And a part of it was at the time, it was not thought that sort of Silicon Valley, you know, sort of venture funding was at a scale where you could pursue these types of super ambitious projects.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Compare that to, you know, even 2017, you still kind of had that being the case. Like the next set of startups that got started are like Relativity is probably, you know, the most interesting one from that era, Astronis. Those were founded by people that, okay, maybe had worked at like SpaceX for two or three years. But again, like, you know, they didn't have like Silicon Valley, you know, type DNA. It's only like 2019, 2020 where I really started to notice two things happening. One was you actually started to have people that were like, you know, sort of top-tier Silicon Valley operatives going and joining SpaceX, which I'd never seen before. So like the example that I like to pick is one of my, you know, friends was one of the very early employees at Open Door, I think like number six or seven or something that went and basically was like head of all international business development for Starlink. I was like, whoa, the like DNA is starting to cross. And then when starting Varda, my two co-founders, very much so aerospace, but like basically our very first hire, who's now our, you know, chief business officer.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  He was straight and narrow, like, you know, basically Silicon Valley. He was like, you know, first 15, 25 employees at Stripe, led business development there. Then he joined ZipLine, another Silicon Valley company. Like, his entire DNA was basically Silicon Valley. And I think a lot of what ultimately makes Varda successful is the fact that we started the company in 2020. We built that company and the early team in 2020. And now is the very first time where like Silicon Valley and aerospace were intersecting. That makes it so we can tackle a more complex problem that does actually require skills that aren't just strictly basically aerospace skills, right? You do need to like build the satellite, the factory, et cetera. But there's a lot of other things that involve traditional sort of business development, growth, et cetera, that are much more applicable to like Silicon Valley-type companies than the everywhere of SpaceX. Because SpaceX ultimately really only like sold to the government for a very long time.

• 11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain what you guys are trying to do with Varda and kind of when successful, not if, when, what the ramifications of that are.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, Varda was predicated off a very, you know, simple thesis that, you know, I can't even take sort of full credit, you know, myself for. I give a lot of credit to, you know, probably Robert Zubrini, where he wrote this book, originally that actually inspired Elon way back in the day, The Case for Mars, which was basically like, how do we get to Mars? Elon read the book, interviewed Zubrini, got really excited. I think he even had some early SpaceX shares. Zubrini followed that up. That book was basically published in 1998, I want to say. He followed it up basically 20 years later with this book called The Case for Space in 2018. Highly recommend reading it. But he basically goes through like, what does he think the future of space, you know, looking like? And in it, he actually does specifically talk about this business model around in-space manufacturing for goods that you don't necessarily use up there, but actually bring back down to Earth. So this isn't like build space hotels or infrastructure or like a lunar base. This is, hey, there's these set of materials.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  It analyzes three different use cases: fiber optics, semiconductors, and biopharmaceuticals. Now, you might wonder, why the hell would you go through the expense and the pain of like sending a biopharmaceutical up to space and then bringing it back down? Well, it comes down to this very simple, you know, sort of reason due to physics, which is in microgravity, when you're, or sorry, in space, when you're up there, you're experiencing what's known as microgravity. What that means is you're basically orbiting the Earth fast enough that you basically have a centrifugal force that is perfectly equaling out the gravitational force on literally like an atom-by-atom basis. And that actually changes a lot of how sort of chemical reactions and a variety of different sort of transport and convective mechanisms basically work in space. The simplest analogy. The analogy that you can use is if I lit a candle here in front of us on the table, you're taught as a kid when you put your hand above it, the hot air rises. Now, why does that happen?

• 12:45Speaker 03

  You basically have a combustion reaction that is transferring thermal energy into the atmosphere around it. That atmosphere is then gaining kinetic energy. It then becomes less dense. And what happens when you're in a gravity field, where we're sitting today, the less dense gas basically rises to the top of the room. And then the more dense gas basically, you know, shuffles in basically to replace due to the negative air pressure. And so what happens is as a candle, you basically have what's known as like convective currents, right? And that's why when you put your hand above a candle, the hot air rises, you can feel that heat. Take that same experiment and do it in basically microgravity. What happens? You still have that combustion, you have the thermal energy, but there's no up, there's no down. So that less dense gas that forms around it basically actually just slowly dissipates the energy into the rest of the room. And so if you put your hand above a candle in space, you don't feel any heat, at least not for a very long time, until it very slowly dissipates away.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Interestingly enough, the candle actually in space will go out after a couple of seconds because on Earth, the candle actually relies on those convective currents to bring in net new oxygen to keep the reaction going. So if you take that sort of macroscopic analogy of a candle and take it to the microscopic level of like a particular atom that you're trying to place onto a semiconductor wafer or into a fiber optic or a molecule they're trying to fabricate in a particular way in a biopharmaceutical reaction. And all of those cases, you typically are applying some level of heat into that reaction. You're trying to place a molecule. When you do that on Earth, there's basically constantly these convective currents that are moving the molecule around that affect it in a sort of chaotic, unpredictable way. They basically lower the quality of the good. Versus if you do that same thing in space, you can actually very precisely basically arrange and place the molecules. And that allows you to create super high-performance semiconductors, fiber optics,

• 14:14Speaker 03

  and basically versions of drugs we can't actually make down here on Earth. And so I think in some ways, the way that I like to say, if Varda is successful, ideally call it, you know, no later than five to six years from now, there will be a life that we can point to, no save due to a drug that was only possible to be manufactured on Earth.

• 14:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So as you guys-

• 14:29Speaker 03

  In space.

• 14:30Anthony Pompliano?

  As you guys build this, you have a very specific mission. You have a very good idea today as to what you think is possible once you get there, once you kind of do all of this. One of the things that's interesting about SpaceX is I was at Facebook in 2014. Internet.org was a huge effort. And at the same time, there was- Project Loon and a bunch of stuff at Google. They were trying drones. They were trying hot air balloons. I mean, literally, should we drive trucks out into like some African nation and like put up like a a mobile, you know, like a receiver, all kinds of things like get internet to people somewhere on earth. The critics would say that's because they were running out of people to sign up and so they needed more people to have internet. They would say, hey, we're trying to bring internet because it has all this like economic value.

• 15:14Anthony Pompliano?

  They both were unsuccessful for the most part in doing this. Even though they were pouring tons of money, tons of intelligent people, like all this effort, whatever. SpaceX like snaps their fingers essentially and kind of backs into the Starlink, which is solving a very similar type of problem. They don't talk about it necessarily the same way.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Totally. Same problem though.

• 15:34Anthony Pompliano?

  But but they basically said, hey, wait a second, we can put satellites up. Why don't we just beam the internet down? And so I look at that as like one company was very focused on accomplishing this for business reasons. The other one kind of seems, at least from afar, like they just backed into it and it ends up being this big multi-billion dollar opportunity. Is that how you evaluate that playing out? And then are there things with Varda that maybe you guys have thought about where you're like, we'd have to get up there and see if it's viable?

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think ultimately if you look at like Project Loon, etc., and some of these, you know, other, you know, internet access projects, they ultimately were coming from a place of like social good, nonprofit, etc. But ultimately, you know, one of the core philosophies of Varda is that like the only incentive that ultimately affects change in the world is economic incentive. And without that, you're just never going to affect sort of true change. And so a lot of the prior projects trying to work on in space manufacturing sort of have that similar feel to the, you know, sort of Google Loon, you know, type projects where they're trying to pursue it. They're maybe trying to make some drugs in space, but they're doing it for like the good of humanity, etc., etc., versus like for a pure economic reason. And ultimately, you know, the reason that SpaceX was doing it was because they were going to go out of business. Otherwise, they needed something that could justify valuation that was, you know, far above.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  You know, launch is an interesting market, but probably gets you capped out at like roughly five billion in market cap. Elon clearly wanted to build something much larger and so it was through economic desperation, retrofitting it and, you know, talk about the Mars, you know, vision, etc. But like ultimately, if you like, you know, talk to the folks at SpaceX, they're clearly just trying to make money. Whereas the people at Project Loon were never really just trying to make money. And so Varda is one line. Our mission that we actually started the company with was expand the economic bounds of humankind. We are doing this purely for economic reasons and trying to make it so that there is economic activity outside of space. The upside of that is if something like Varda does work, we do start to produce drugs or semiconductors or fiber optics at scale in space, then the economic implications of that, I think, are very interesting to humanity where I actually tend to believe, you know, sort of shooting a large rocket towards like Mars, the moon is unlikely to make it so that we have a multi-planetary presence.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  The only way and the only incentive that gets people out there is ultimately economic because like the lunar base, you know, if you think, you know, oil rig worker has got to get paid 500K a year to like spend two weeks a month, you know, in an oil rig, the moon's gonna be a lot worse. You're gonna pay people a couple million bucks, you know, a year to justify that because not the easiest flight up, down and not the, you know, sort of prettiest, you know, environment around you. And so I tend to think, you know, if Varda's successful, that's what will lead this like sort of compounding economic activity where you start with small factories, then bigger factories, then eventually we're consuming so much water that we're like, hey, we'd actually make like a lunar ice mine and start to get the water from there. And then once you're starting to expand that, then you can eventually start to think about, okay, what are the economic incentives and why? Go pursue Mars, Jupiter, and so on, the rest of the solar system.

• 18:04Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things I think I appreciated as you guys started the company was this idea that you're mentioning around Google almost had like, they were choking on money, right? Like there was so much money that Google was generating that they started thinking to themselves like, where can we stuff it? What can we do that may be something else that's interesting? SpaceX, on the other hand, you call it economic starvation, right? Like they literally were starved of resources and they had to figure it out. And so it was kind of innovation came out of this need. Startups, for the most part, are usually starved of resources. The last two or three years, not so much. And you and kind of the way that you built the business, where you work on the venture side, the network that you have, you could have raised a hell of a lot of money for this thing. You didn't do that.

• 18:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And so talk through a little bit as to like the discipline of really embracing like the milestone-based funding of venture capital and like, why kind of not just go raise a hundred million dollars and say, hey, fuck it, let's see what happens?

• 18:57Speaker 03

  You know, I will say in the grand scheme of things, we did raise a boatload of money, but you know, mostly, you know, put it aside in fixed income interest accounts that, you know, basically cover a decent amount of our burn. And I think it took some, you know, discipline. And I even, you know, credit my co-founder. It's funny, we were going through this interesting argument over the past like two or three days about like what ultimately amounts to like a 30K per year expense. But the fact that, you know, we actually like debated it back and forth was so interesting to me because I relayed this anecdote to him. I was in a meeting with this investor in Miami. This is like, you know, I won't, I won't name them by name. But they are a very solid space tech investor. They had some pretty great performance. And he was, you know, catching up with me about Varda. And at one point I was talking about, you know, I was in DC last week, uh, meeting with, you know, some, you know, Space Force Air Force generals. My like flight got delayed on the way back.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  And he was like, oh, like, why, why didn't you just like fly private? That way you don't have to deal with like commercial delays. And I was like, like, bro, like I, you know, I want liquidity. Like, he's like, well, like, but like Varda, you guys have raised enough. Like, why doesn't Varda pay for the private jet? And my jaw like literally just completely dropped. And I was like, is this guy fucking serious? And he wants to invest in Varda? Like,

• 19:59Speaker 03

  like we are clearly, and I think he started to sense it too, that I was like so deeply uncomfortable that I like froze for so long. And so I was joking with my co-founder. I was like, bro, like, somebody asked me if we were going to take a private plane to like Washington. We're debating this like 30K a year, like, you know, investment for like, you know, over an hour, like, yeah, it's just completely, you know, sort of different world. Uh, and in some ways, honestly, like credit to my co-founder. I think he's done a great job of like, you know, I think I've generally been economically disciplined, but he even more so than I is extremely, extremely scrappy. Now with something like Varda, SpaceX, et cetera, there's no way to do it with like true scrappiness bootstrap, et cetera, you know, the equivalent of like what people have done, you know, in software. Ultimately, in order to build a satellite, in order to fly it, in order to get onto a SpaceX rocket, you're talking about millions of dollars by default. There's no way to do it without those millions of dollars. And so I think we take a prudent approach of like, we did raise a boatload of cash at a time where like the interest rates were super low.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  I talk about this sometimes. Part of why I started Varda was in like May, June, um, 2020, uh, chatting with my, you know, partner and, um, you know, uh, sort of mentor, Key Drive Boy, uh, about how frustrated I was that we weren't investing that much. I didn't have that much money on my hands. And he was like, well, you should think about what you could do in this period of time, maybe start a company. And I literally tweeted this idea out where I was like, hey, in a low interest rate environment, this is probably one of the best times to start hyper capital intensive businesses that maybe would be viable in a couple of years. But sort of low interest rate environment is actually bringing that sort of future forward. And literally I tweeted that out and then I thought about it for like 24 hours. And I was like, fuck, I've got to start this space manufacturing company. I'm so screwed.

• 21:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about attracting your co-founder and kind of building up that initial team. You said earlier that the first 10 employees basically are the death sentence or ultimately it will be the tailwind. Where do you find those 10 people? How do you vet them? What do you look for when you go after talent?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, starting Varda, I was sort of very nervous going into it. There was even a period of time where like, you know, with some pillow talk with my then fiance, I was almost like about to back out and she even encouraged me, she's like, "Diane, like this is going to be your life's work. Like you really got to stick with this." And the reason that I was so nervous was I started my first company maybe about, basically, you know, four, no, six years prior to starting Varda is when I started my first company. And it effectively failed miserably in the grand scheme of things. We got to like ramen profitability, you know, type revenue, went through recombinator, raised a small seed round, but you know, return no capital back to investors, you know, no major you know, sort of outcome for anyone. We ended up just like selling, you know, the software to one of our customers at the end. And so when I was starting it, I was like, "Man, I've got this like really great gig where I'm investing. There's a huge opportunity cost to like starting a company, especially since like as an investor,

• 22:21Speaker 03

  if I really wanted to start something, like I should really make sure that there isn't something else out there that I can just invest in." Because like you kind of get the same economic upside as like starting it, you don't have to, you know, sort of spend as much time on it. But ultimately couldn't find anything. And so I was like, "Okay, if I'm going to do this." And it was like a big if for me at the time, it was really reticent. I was like, "I need to find the perfect team." And there's sort of two, you know, pieces of DNA that I was looking for. One, somebody that was like a scientist that had done microgravity manufacturing before, but like wasn't so deep in academia that their like mind was corrupted by like just wanting to publish papers, but like really wanted to bring a product to market. And so thankfully, actually, that one, you know, in some ways like found relatively quickly. But the other one was even more critical because I realized a lot of the company ultimately, while it was this like microgravity, you know, pharma, semiconductor, et cetera, you couldn't do that unless you built a good spacecraft to like do the whole manufacturing portion of it.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  And so I realized there's like the most critical component that a lot of my engineering friends told me was actually that reentry vehicle. Basically, if you do, you know, anything in space today, especially on the ISS, like microgravity manufacturing, you kind of get a free ride down from the government. They take you down on the crew or the cargo dragon, the Soyuz, the Cygnus, there's a couple of vehicles. If you're often on your own doing your own independent microgravity manufacturing, you got to bring those materials down, but it means you got to build your own small-scale reentry vehicle. So I was like, "I need..." Specifically, somebody who is an engineer that has worked on a reentry vehicle has like leadership experience. So a bunch of people will follow him because a lot of the first 10 people are going to need to be people that have also worked on the reentry vehicle with him in those other sort of domains of engineering. And ideally has entrepreneurial spirit because like this person probably needs to be the CEO. Ultimately of a, you know, largely spacecraft company, you need a spacecraft CEO.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  And so thankfully had a couple buddies from my team that went to SpaceX after college. Basically like mine through their networks gave them my list of criteria and thankfully, you know, after about, I don't know, two months or so of like interviewing various candidates. Came across my now co-founder, Will Bruy, and he literally, if you look at it, like matches the exact set of criteria that I had. He basically worked at SpaceX for seven and a half years. He was in mission control, flying several of the Dragon missions to the ISS. He'd worked on the avionics team there, building out the early avionics. And ultimately, the, the number one thing that I did in that first year of 2020 was like convincing him that he should, you know, join me and start the company. And incubate it, you know, within Founder's Fund. So beyond those initial three co-founders, there was then the, you know, first set of the broader team. Credit mostly to my co-founder for like, call it like eight out of those next 10 were basically all his recruiting. And largely honestly, just a network of people that he worked with at SpaceX.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Which has made it to that, that risk of that first 10 being like, you know, a sort of killer outcome versus death. Now it was a lot easier because like he worked, if you look on average, the first 10 employees at Varda. You know, they had probably worked with our CEO for five and a half years or something like that on average, which is like very difficult to do. If you're like a fresh grad out of school or if you've been hopping, you know, jobs and stuff. But he had this like extremely deep network and there's basically like one BD person and one ops person that I basically helped bring in in the very early days. And so I think that's what really set it up for success was like aiming for a co-founder that I knew specifically both had a skillset. But then also a network to then build out that first time.

• 25:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Getting the right people there is important, but the culture that you build, the, the actions of what you do early on is really important. I know one thing that I think you've borrowed from the Ramp guys is counting the days since founding the business. And I love that. I try to tell every single company, I'm like, dude, I don't understand why. Just put this on and count and like it will make you do shit. And so like, are there other things like that that you guys have done to either reinforce culture or like specific actions that you're like? Again, maybe you understand why it works or maybe not, but like if people do this, it seems to have this, you know, kind of push to actually be more productive or get more done.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of the things that I really liked that in some ways is a corollary to the counting days thing. So this habit that Pom is talking about is the very first Ramp Board meeting that I went to. They basically put day 33 of the business. And then every single board meeting after that, they would talk about it in relation to the days and the average progress they'd made per day. And so definitely took that at Varda. One of the ways that it plays into something like an aerospace company versus a corporate card company is how you think about launch schedule and how to track things. And me and my co-founder had really talked about this extensively when we were first starting the company. But he'd obviously been at SpaceX for an extended period of time. That was basically largely his only professional experience. I'd been at a couple of different companies, but largely an investor. So obviously, most of the corporate culture was going to come from SpaceX, especially since we were bringing eight over the first hand. We're also going to be SpaceX.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  So we talked about, okay, what parts of SpaceX's culture do we want to have and what do we not? The first that we quickly read on was like, look, SpaceX works very hard, but they sometimes go to the level of being an asshole. So let's get the hard work ethic of SpaceX without the asshole side of it. And the second was, how do we think about and communicate launch schedules? And at SpaceX, there's actually two launch schedules that people maintain at any time. There's one, the Elon-preditated launch schedule, which they're never going to hit, but they just upward manage and make sure that Elon sees something pretty. And then there's the real launch schedule that everybody manages day to day. And our whole thing was like, we are only going to maintain that real launch schedule. And it comes with trade-offs of not having any super aggressive fake schedule or being willing to push things back. So if you think about it for our first mission, one thing that I think my co-founder has really instilled into the team is the trains take off on time.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  We basically committed to our investors when we started the company. We were going to be launching two years and a quarter from the founding date, our very first mission. We're basically roughly there now. We're actually launching in about two and a half months from today. And ultimately, it did come with trade-offs where as we started to approach a year out from the mission, we had a set of engineers that wanted to work on a project to think of it as increase the feature set and the capabilities of the vehicle. But it came with some associated risk of potentially not being able to hit the launch deadline. And ultimately, we made the call like, look, while our customers might value that a lot, while we might be able to make more money on Mission One, if we did include these features, we are not going to do it because ultimately, look, the trains take off on time. There's a train that hits three months from today, and then there'll be another mission that launches six months later. We'll make that one the more fully featured one. But the important organizational habit to build

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Is not building the most fully featured sort of version of the spacecraft on day one, but instead just making sure that it launches on time and building that muscle of launching on time will make it to that over time, your spacecraft is much more capable because you're just launching it every six months super consistently. And that type of iterative design culture ultimately actually stems way back to like the Apollo days. And you know, I think SpaceX has done a great job of sort of, you know, reinvigorating that and bringing it back, you know, to aerospace after, you know, aerospace kind of lost its way for a couple of decades there. So I think, you know, the corollary to the days thing around like maintaining launch schedule and that being sort of the ground truth and sacrificing. And ultimately, I think any sort of principle needs to have the counter principle of like, what are you sacrificing? Like if you, you know, prioritize, let's say, you know, peer-to-peer kindness, you know, at a company, it comes with a trade-off of, well, then maybe people don't get the feedback that they need to grow.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Or if you prioritize like, you know, hours in the office, it comes with a trade-off of like, you know, potentially people, you know, burn out at certain times, right? And so I think it's really important when thinking about sort of the principles of your company, practically thinking about, you know, I think too many times people be like, I want my company to be like, you know, hard work ethic and integrity and et cetera and this. And it's like all these like positive things, but it's like, okay, of course, everybody wants to be the most perfect positive version of themselves. But you need to think through what are the principles that actually do come with realistic trade-offs that when it comes down to a particular decision, the employees have thought about it, they know about that fundamental principle and are making that trade-off. Because like ultimately my co-founder can communicate it, but like if there's three engineers in a room that are debating about a particular technical problem and there is that tension of, hey, should we build this feature or should we make sure that everything ships on time? He's not going to be there in the room every time, but making sure that people know that

• 29:25Speaker 03

  that is the trade-off that we make, that we say, hey, we ship on time and we'll deal with the like extra features later, I think is really important.

• 29:31Anthony Pompliano?

  How have you changed your investing style based on things you're learning as you're operating a business, especially one that is, I mean, pretty dead on, right? It's a tech startup with venture capital funding that you're seeing a lot of success with, it's growing at a very fast rate, like all the things that you'd want to see in the companies you're investing in. Has it made you a better investor? Has it made you make less investments but more concentrated? Like what's changed?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's happened in float. Obviously, of the six-year career in venture, two and a half of Varda, so a significant portion of it has been Varda. The very first year, interestingly enough, was like my highest volume year. And I think it was a combination of, obviously, both it was the 2021 financing environment. So there was a lot of deployment happening across the board. And then also is the fact that, especially in the early days of Varda, there was a lot of attention and a lot of founders that were super intrigued by it and wanted to work with me on it, with me because of it. There's a huge increase in sort of top of funnel and conversion rate in the investments that I wanted to make. There are some things that I think have stayed roughly the same in that as I assess founders and think through them, I don't think it's actually changed that much with starting Varda and that like, I assessed my co-founder in Varda and I'm very happy with

• 30:40Speaker 03

  that, but it's not like it's given me like an infinite number of reps. The one area that I think it has is like I do really obsess now, this doesn't really work for a pre-seed or seed company where it's just the founders, but now anytime that it's a Series A company, I was never as diligent about this before, but now I literally go through the LinkedIn of like every single employee. And you can't perfectly gauge somebody off of their resume, but you have a decent sense on average of like, what is the quality of people that this founder is able to attract to their company? And generally, if I know their prior backgrounds, the companies that they've worked at, I can even go start to reference, like I never did this before, I'm now start to reference like random engineers basically at a Series A company and use that to basically gauge like what is that bar that that founder is recruiting towards. And so I think that's one tactical thing that has really changed. And the second is, in the world of, let's say, like more strategic BD and especially

• 31:23Speaker 03

  with the DOD, I now have a much more intimate sense of what those deals take to get across the line. We have a big one that we'll be announcing March 15th, so look out for that in Bloomberg. But it was supposed to happen two days ago, so I was hoping to talk about it today, but unfortunately, I'm still, whatever, on the exclusive. So anyways, coming soon. But I have a much more accurate ability to assess what is that sort of contracting process looking like and how is that company going? And then there's also some amount of tactical, like I know a lot more about spacecraft than I did three years ago. Like, I'm not a spacecraft engineer myself at any point, but we have this habit of, at the company, everybody sends a sort of like, roughly call it like two paragraph long weekly update of like major accomplishments, etc. And I am religious about, even though we're now at like whatever 65 employees, so it takes me to solve like two and a half, three hours to read every single week, I do go through

• 32:08Speaker 03

  and I read through and I really try and understand exactly the engineering problem that every single employee is working on, partially just for making sure that I feel like I have a really good sense of the business, but also it's like one of the best ways to learn about aerospace is like, how are these engineers thinking through the very problem that like my company is trying to solve?

• 32:22Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the economic environment, 2021 is all you had to say on the way up. Now, a little bit different. You all seem to be very methodical and kind of the bar maybe has risen in terms of what you guys want to fund and what you don't at Founder's Fund. Talk a little bit about how you're thinking.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, honestly, credit to our GPs, you know, Peter, Keith, Brian, etc. I think for being very, you know, it's always difficult with these things to perfectly, let's say, you know, call it. And, you know, can you actually predict it? Maybe, maybe not. But, you know, ultimately, I think Founder's Fund did a great job of in, you know, Q4, Q3 of 2021. We ended up distributing more capital than the total amount of capital that the fund had raised since lifetime, which I think is very rare for a venture capital firm, especially as you're growing. Because you're talking about like the funds that are returning all that capital were like much smaller than the funds that we're raising today. And even then, the rough math is like the firm has probably raised, you know, 13 or 14 billion or something like that. And we basically like returned that amount of capital to LPs just in those two quarters. After that, you know, we quickly realized that, you know, the markets were deteriorating.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  And at the end of the day, while we are very, you know, sort of long-term thinkers and still aren't, you know, letting sort of short-term market dynamics affect, you know, how we invest. Ultimately, there is this sort of downstream financing risk that any, you know, sort of company, you know, takes on. And while we are multi-stage and take people all the way, we do need to sort of underwrite, you know, what are the, you know, sort of potential, you know, downstream risks for these types of companies? And so we've definitely slowed down, you know, our pace and have been, you know, much more judicious. But at the same time, it's not like it's stopping us from, you know, tackling capital-intensive companies. Like, you know, just last week, we co-led the seed round for like a highly capital-intensive, risky, like basically aerospace defense company that's basically building like long range. Think of it as like a, you know, sort of competitor to like, you know, predator drone type things.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  And so, you know, we definitely have slowed down or more deliberate, but it's not as if we've totally, totally stopped. And I think we'll start to pick back up again, especially now that like, I think the bid-ask spread in the market is really compressed. If you look at like the, you know, call it Q2, Q3, Q4 22, I still think there were a lot of founders that both had this capital overhang, so they didn't have like a need to raise for their business. You know, rosy eyed, hope that like, you know, things would, you know, quickly return and bounce back. Now, as I think founders are starting to get into desperation mode where there's just much lower runways. People are starting to realize that the markets aren't necessarily bouncing back. There's a willingness to sort of accept term sheets at pretty reasonable prices. And, you know, I think we're very optimistic that this is going to be one of the best vintages of all time. Where I think there's such a broad swath of industries that tech startups are now tackling, right? And the dot com, you know, bust.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Tech companies were basically just like, you know, LinkedIn tackling, you know, sort of social media. Again, SpaceX was still a couple of years later, maybe Tesla was around then. But it's a pretty narrow set of problems that they were tackling. Now, you know, the startup world is basically tackling every single problem on earth. Everything from like, you know, logistics, space, you know, enterprise infrastructure, you know, just everything is being touched by software startups. And so I think it's a really attractive time to be investing.

• 35:16Anthony Pompliano?

  There's two other areas I want to talk about. The first is Bitcoin crypto. You are one of the only people I know who was, I don't want to say critical, but like, you definitely weren't super excited about it. And I remember you went, and I won't say who it is, but you went and met with someone. And then you started tweeting and you were like, hey, I'm trying to do this. It's broken. Who can fix this? And then like, it was like literally watching you debug problems live on Twitter. And what I took away from it was like, oh, like, whether you come out of this optimistic or not, like, you did the work. Which is a lot more than I think people who just kind of talk on the internet do. Where do you stand now on like, are there areas of that that are exciting to you, not exciting to you?

• 35:56Anthony Pompliano?

  If people read your Twitter, they know that like, the really speculative crypto shit is probably not your favorite. But like, where do you lay?

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know if you noticed, but on Twitter, somebody tagged the two of us, I think like 48 hours ago or something.

• 36:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I did not see.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  And basically had a screenshot of an old tweet of mine, which was, you know, I'll try and roughly paraphrase it, but it was like, I'm glad the world is finally realizing that, you know, the future is basically American dynamism and like, you know, reshoring, you know, manufacturing, you know, bringing America to the frontier and, you know, keeping our national security. And that all of crypto is basically a scam.

• 36:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So I look forward to pomp and dulling chatting. I mean, are you wrong?

• 36:30Speaker 03

  I don't think I'm too wrong. Yeah, I, you know, the weekend that you're talking about where I played around with crypto. Basically, I had a friend, you know, talking to me about DeFi specifically. And my mom's actually an economics professor. So I spent a lot of time, she actually is in this world of what's called experimental microeconomics. So what she does is she actually sets up fake market environments, pays basically, you know, undergraduate and graduate students actually trade in that market and actually gives them financial incentives of like ultimately if they do make the most sort of like money off of their trades in this like artificial stock market where she controls the interest rates, the inflation, the news that comes out, what earnings reports are, then ultimately the students actually do make, you know, sort of real cold hard cash. So I thought a lot about like, we like my, I literally helped my mom sort of build this like software interface that actually helped like liquidity and make trades. And so the concept of DeFi and actually being able to do this sort of like, you know,

• 37:14Speaker 03

  decentralized liquidity pools that allow you to trade into asset classes, I did find extremely intriguing, like theoretically over lunch. And then, yeah, I spent the full weekend and I was like, okay, like, you know, I have a Coinbase account, like, you know, it shouldn't take me like too, too long to figure this out. And literally spent like eight hours going from like that to I think like contributing to a liquidity pool to getting this like, you know, weird fucking QR code that I was like, I don't know what to do. If I scan it, it just takes me back to the QR code. And ultimately like figuring out how that actually like gave me some sort of like yield. And it was just like an impossibly difficult user interface. And it was one of these moments where I was like, in theory, this stuff like could have some like potential practical applications, but like we're so, so far from it. And it's one of these things that is like, it's so hard to, as I'm sure as a crypto founder, not get caught up in the speculation use case because that's the thing that makes the most money and it's the thing that the users are most interested in.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  And so actually trying to build something legitimate seems like almost like an impossible task. And like all these like crypto investors that are like still talking about their stuff and they're talking about like, oh, like gaming is like the future of like, you know, bringing crypto to the real world. I'm like, bro, I fucking game like way too much. I'm addicted to video games. There's no chance that crypto is going to be like integrated in these video games. And that's in all an interesting use case. And that's like, you're betting the hope of like the future of crypto on it. Just like store of value and speculation, great use case. Let's just like stick to that. Everyone should like quit their crypto jobs and just like hold, you know, Bitcoin or whatever for like the next year, decade. And it's probably going to be priced out at like, you know, 50K a year or like the price cap of Bitcoin is probably 50K and it's never going to get above that. It's never going to like, you know, shift massively, you know, below 25K.

• 38:37Anthony Pompliano?

  You think 50K is the top?

• 38:39Speaker 03

  I think 50K is basically the top.

• 38:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, we hit 69K.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  You know, and never again, maybe.

• 38:47Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, AI is all the rage now. All the crypto bros have run over to AI. I saw Elon tweet recently. He said, I found this new AI thing after I left my crypto thing.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Or whatever he said. What is the general sense around AI and kind of what you find interesting there?

• 39:04Speaker 03

  You know, before we touch on that, I always think it's funny to, you know, I've now been in Silicon Valley or like the tech world, which at this point is like an abstract concept, I feel like, you know, where it's Silicon Valley.

• 39:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, it's Miami Valley.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's Miami Valley, you know, wherever. But, you know, I've been in, let's say, like the tech industry now for like 13 years. And it's so fascinating to see that like, there are just like the exact same set of people over the course of 13 years, that every two years are working on like whatever is like the hot new trend. And the problem is, you never capture any value doing that. If it has become the hot new trend, you by default are just like the grifter that is coming in way too late into the game and like, you're not going to make any money off of it, which is fine, but like, it's amazing to see if these people really think that maybe like the sixth time around, it'll finally work and they'll, you know, find a way to capture value. And I think it's this, you know, commentary that I think is important for people's careers, I actually admire a lot what you've done over the past, you know, couple of years, which is like, you know, I think called pre 2019, I think there were a couple of different projects and things you were working on. And I think ultimately sometime in like the COVID era, I feel like you started to recognize,

• 39:56Speaker 03

  look, like media interviewing, like, you know, providing these, you know, conferences like this is ultimately like my core skillset that I'm differentiated ability at than anybody else in the world, and I'm going to lean into it. And as I was driving over here towards Miami Beach, I'm a big kite surfer and right now there's about 20 knots wind coming straight from the south. And there was just these huge eagles that like looked like so majestic, they were trying to like, you know, sort of feed on these fish that were in like the Miami ocean, and they were just staying afloat completely effortless. And it made me think about like, that is what a like ideal career should look like in that you should identify what is the thing that you are differentiated at better than anybody else in the world that sort of comes very naturally to you, right? That bird that's floating in the air, it's not thinking about it at all. It literally just sits there in the 20 knot wind, like opens its like, you know, basically wings and it sits there until a fish basically comes and then dives down immediately.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  If I try to do that, I'm basically like exerting all this effort on my kite and like takes me like five years of practice to be able to do the shit that he's doing when he's born. And so I think that's what you need to do when you're doing a career is like really focus on what is the thing that you're truly differentiated at that comes out naturally? And just focus on that. And sometimes That means, look, you know, maybe you're not an AI engineer. Maybe just like stick to the thing that you're good at. And then someday, hopefully, it'll be the thing that is hot in the world. And that's when you'll capture all the value, right? Sam Altman was not working on AI when it was hot. He was working on it in like 2014. But he's been working on it super consistently since then. And it's been his like life passion. And now that it's hot, he's basically getting to capture all the value. You've been working on, you know, showing that you have a voice and are able to interview. And maybe that wasn't like the, you know, hottest thing or whatever in like, you know, 2019. But like dedicating towards that and finding that and making that your life's work, I think, is what allows you to capture the value.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  So on the AI stuff, it's like, I think it's a very interesting field. I think all the people that are going to be capturing the value, the people that already started companies way before, you know, ChatGPT came out. One of my best friends is Guy Connors Wick. He runs this company Speak, which is like this like sort of AI tutor for language learning. Effectively, what it does is both, you know, recognizes super accented speech. So that if you're like a Korean that's basically trying to learn English, it can actually understand you if it's super broken. And then it basically gives you a sort of like, you know, choose your own adventure. You play like Hermione at Hogwarts and you basically talk to the thing. And it both real time gives you feedback on how you're talking and also, you know, guides you along through various subjects as you learn. He started the company in 2015. And, you know, turns out he's been grinding, building a great user experience.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  As AI has advanced, the tools that he has access to, the infrastructure that he has has improved. And of course, you know, this year, as you know, ChatGPT is coming to world, Whisper just came out, their new like speech recognition API by OpenAI. OpenAI leads the largest funding round that it's ever had into his company. It's a, you know, Series B, $20 million round, biggest check for OpenAI. And he's like the hottest thing on the planet. The company's revenue is exploding and growing like crazy. But it's like, it's not something where he's like retrofitted and like come into the market super, super late and just decided, hey, I'm going to build like a super thin layer on ChatGPT. It's like, no, he has like distribution, a brand, a set of like product, content, technology, a team that's been working this for like five and a half years. And now is getting the acceleration of it. And I think a lot of like capturing value in a career is like sticking to your thing. And then making sure that you understand what those underlying trends are.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  I started working on aerospace semi-full time in some ways in like 2017. At the time, to me, it felt super obvious that there's going to be this massive wave that was coming. If you just looked at how often SpaceX was launching, it was basically a perfect exponential curve. The likelihood that like something was going to knock them off that track felt very, very low. If you look at it today, in 2020 2023, they're launching a rocket on average largely from Florida on every four hours, four days in six hours, which is like, I mean, it's incomprehensible. We've launched more rockets in 2023 than like in the Apollo era, peak rocketry that we would do over the course of like a full year. And that's just in the first basically like two and a half months of the year. And so now it's just like a phenomenal time we work in aerospace. And so I think the AI stuff is like very interesting, but like, dear God, if you're in this room and you're thinking about pivoting your career to AI, do not do it.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  You're too late.

• 43:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Delian.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Thank you for coming.