Why Every Satellite Needs Earth | Northwood CEO on a16z

Bridgit Mendler, Co-founder and CEO of Northwood, joins a16z’s Erik Torenberg to discuss the critical but overlooked bottleneck in space: ground infrastructure. Northwood is building the systems that connect satellites back to Earth, enabling faster, more scalable space missions. They cover Bridgit’s unconventional path to founding a space company, why vertical integration matters in hard tech, and how modern ground networks could unlock the next wave of innovation in the space economy, from national security to new commercial applications.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Every satellite requires a connection point back to Earth. If you don't have it, you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a rock in space.

• 0:09Erik Torenberg?

  You just won a $50 million contract with Space Force to help modernize.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  At Northwood, you want to take space missions further, faster. We're looking for a categorical outcome, not just an incremental outcome.

• 0:22Erik Torenberg?

  Today, we're talking about one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in the space economy: ground infrastructure. My guest is Bridget Mempler, co-founder and CEO of Northwood, a company building the systems that connect satellites back to Earth. If launch gets things into space, ground is what actually makes those missions useful. In this episode, we cover Bridget's unconventional path into space, why ground has lagged behind the rest of the industry, and how a more modern vertically-integrated approach could unlock the next wave of innovation in space.

• 0:58Erik Torenberg?

  Bridget, welcome to the podcast.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:00Erik Torenberg?

  So we're here to talk about Northwood. We're here to talk about space. But first, I want to talk about how you got here. Unconventional career path, some may say. When you look at the arc of your career, what are the threads that tie it together? How do you make sense of your path?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Following curiosity. I think curiosity becomes the most organic motivator for people. And that's definitely the case for me. I think my home environment growing up was really cultivating that curiosity. And my parents also really encouraged excellence, which I think is great. So if you're curious about something, it's not just something you dabble in. It's something you try to take to like the nth degree and really try to understand what excellence looks like in that domain.

• 1:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  And so that kind of has led me to a lot of different places. I've said this some other places before. My mom is also an incredibly determined person.

• 1:49Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  And so that's something that I think I was influenced by. And so follow what you're curious about. Do it to the greatest capacity you can. And don't take no for an answer. And then you kind of wind up like doing a bunch of different things and some really interesting experiences. So I feel very grateful for that.

• 2:03Erik Torenberg?

  It's fascinating because sometimes people frame it as either or. Either like you got to get just, especially for kids, like just straight A pluses, or it's just do whatever you're curious about, but the combination.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:14Erik Torenberg?

  Do what you're curious about, but also just absolutely crush it in it.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17Erik Torenberg?

  It's an interesting combination.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:19Erik Torenberg?

  Sort of in your early career, did you think it would be forever? Or like at one point where you're like, I'm bored of this. I want to go attack academia.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:25Erik Torenberg?

  How did you make your career decisions?

• 2:27Speaker 00

  It's interesting because like I would analogize to how a lot of people that we bring into our company think about their career path. Like a lot of the incredible people that we bring in, people who are like totally rock stars in their career. They're not thinking on like a 20 year time scale about their career. They're thinking like more incrementally than that about what am I interested in? What's that next thing that I'm going to tackle?

• 2:50Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Next in my life and kind of maybe there's not a definite timeline attached to it. It's like as far out as you can see on the horizon and just like worrying about that far. Cause otherwise you constrain yourself too much.

• 3:01Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  And so that has really been how I've approached my career. I would have definitely not expected I would be running a space company.

• 3:10Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  But like also, why not? Cause all I could see in the future as an actress back then was maybe like five years in the future.

• 3:16Erik Torenberg?

  Right.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  So.

• 3:17Erik Torenberg?

  So you're like actress until it no longer became fun anymore or until academia or something became more interesting. And then you're just chasing your curiosity. When did the company idea come into play?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think being in entertainment, I got to be a spokesperson for a lot of different things. And I tried to align what I felt to be impactful with what I was speaking up for. So as an actor, you wind up being able to have a platform to contribute to a lot of different causes. And that was something that I prioritized. But I think I wanted my impact to go deeper than that. And so I always kind of knew in the back of my mind, I wanted to create my own thing. Although I didn't have a concrete idea of what that was. And as a child of millennial era, I got to see the internet coming to life. And I got to see cellular networks coming to life and like what a profound shift that was on the world before versus the world after.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  And so I think when the problem set around space networking came up and when that was something that I started digging into, it connected on that April level where it's like, wow, this is like an opportunity to make an impact on an industry that could be as fundamental at that kind of level of internet and cellular. That felt like such a unique opportunity to get in at an industry when it was at that early stages.

• 4:37Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Just seemed kind of like the perfect thing.

• 4:39Erik Torenberg?

  And you started it with your husband?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:41Erik Torenberg?

  Was he always on board from the beginning? Or how did that emerge? And I should say, my parents also started a company together and ran it for 15 years.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:48Erik Torenberg?

  I'm definitely inspired by them.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  That's super cool. Yeah, I mean, it's so funny how people are now like, oh, you started a company with your husband? But people have been doing family businesses like since the dawn of time. And I think for both of us, we're just both ambitious and kind of curious about how the world works. And we were both passionate about building businesses. And so like, all right, let's align our efforts towards something. Like, there's a certain utilitarian aspect to it where it's like, we have a certain amount of energy and time, and we want the most like net outcome from this. So that was definitely like a part of my thought process, too. But it's been awesome. Yeah, I think it's been a really great experience.

• 5:26Erik Torenberg?

  Let's get into Northwood, what you're trying to achieve, and what's the why now for it?

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what we do, we're ground infrastructure, kind of end to end for space companies. So all the way from the time when they're first coming up with satellite mission, what the space operators want to do, all the way to when they're actually streaming data, delivering that data to the end customers.

• 5:45Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  The problem that we're solving is for every satellite, it requires a connection point back to Earth so that they can control the spacecraft. It is kind of like a remote control car where it needs some mechanism to make sure that it's going where it's supposed to go, and a way to actually bring that data back to the users on Earth. Because that's where the users are. So that point of contact on Earth is called the ground infrastructure. And super basically, if you don't have it, you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a rock in space you're doing nothing with. So ground infrastructure, it's completely fundamental. And for us, we were observing the space industry, how launch cadence was increasing.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  You could put a satellite up into space way faster. And you could build satellites way faster because there was this whole boom around spacecraft manufacturing. And interestingly, what started becoming the longest pole in the tent was just getting the point of contact on the ground to connect with. So, you know, you could build a satellite and launch it faster than you could actually connect with it from the ground. Which just seemed absurd. And so we're like, why is that? This kind of critical third component was not modernizing because you'd seen all this modernization happening elsewhere. And when we started pulling it back, it was kind of like a classic value chain problem where there was just not like the incentives aligned with each stakeholder in the value chain to modernize and innovate. So you had antenna manufacturers

• 7:14Speaker 00

  that were responding to a call from a customer and delivering them a point solution. They weren't thinking holistically about how you build better ground infrastructure. You were having like a software integrator layer where they were basically just dependent on whatever infrastructure was being laid by somebody else. And so we realized like, this is really holding back innovation and like a complete thought on what this should look like on the ground side. And so really, the only way to address fixing the ground segment was to do the whole thing. And when we say the whole thing, like it includes a lot of disparate disciplines and activities. So it includes things like R and D of antenna hardware. So the antenna on Earth that is physically receiving RF signals from space,

• 7:59Speaker 00

  interpreting them into ones and zeros, sending them back to the users, popping them back up to the spacecraft. That includes actually procuring land and doing development at a site to be able to put that antenna hardware somewhere in the world because satellites orbit the Earth. You need to connect with them as they orbit the Earth. That includes the networking layer. That includes the actual software API that you have to connect with to give commands at that ground site. And so it was kind of a daunting task. It's like realizing you have to do this really massive undertaking, this big risk in order to experience the big reward on the other side, which is unlocking this critical third pillar of infrastructure for

• 8:42Speaker 00

  the space economy and really enabling it to go to new heights. And so that was kind of like our venture scale problem where we're like, this is going to require a lot of money. A killer team across many different disciplines. And it's going to require a ton of orchestration of all of those different pieces converging together to deliver something that is really better end to end, as well as something that you can turn around quickly.

• 9:09Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  And so that's kind of the undertaking that we've been on.

• 9:12Erik Torenberg?

  When did you realize and how did you realize that space infrastructure was broken? Like, what was the idea maze? Was this your first idea that you guys decided to pursue? Or how did they come to be?

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we've been doing antennas ever since that Home Depot run during the pandemic.

• 9:25Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  That made us ground nerds. Yeah, so we started working on the antenna designs during the pandemic. That was our summer project. And yeah, we just describe ourselves as ground nerds. It was just cool. At first, it was just really cool to be able to receive signals from hundreds of miles away. Like I said, that's the RF waves. They're like fainter than the power on a flashlight that you're getting from space. And you get to interpret that into, for us, it was an image. But for other folks that use satellite data, that's our missile warning system. That's how we find out like about any missile going off around the world. That is our GPS infrastructure. You know, for a lot of people, that's their one source of internet. And it all comes through a ground infrastructure

• 10:10Speaker 00

  that is able to interpret those faint signals and make it work. So it was just kind of like, you know, one of those magic moments where you just become really fascinated with the technology. And then we started peeling it back further. And we did this market study where we looked at all the commercial operators. We looked at, you know, US government use cases as well for how that they were resolving their ground. And it was at that point, really from the point of first just being curious about the space, that we realized that a big bottleneck was coming.

• 10:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. And is this an idea that couldn't have existed five years ago? Because there was just not enough of an economy around or like, yeah, talk about the timing of it.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it really does influence the timing because

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Previously, if you're not as concerned about a three-year timeline between, you know, concept of a spacecraft and launching it, then it's not a big deal if the ground segment can't keep pace. I also think like the ideas for how to use space have changed a lot, both so, you know, pace as well as the ideas around it. So the mission sets that we're talking to folks about now are a greater level of proliferation. They're talking about way more spacecraft being in communication at the same time than they used to. They're also talking about mission sets where satellites are moving in new ways. They're moving really dynamically in and out of different orbits.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  You know, previously, you could think about space missions. It was a pretty static world, like think about old school space where it's it's kind of like science missions, one satellite parked over a certain location, not moving anywhere, sending very small amounts of data. To now, it's this whole circus of a bunch of different missions needing to coexist, transmitting way more data and having like constantly changing parameters. So I think that has really, you know, flipped the switch for for some of the, you know, government customers that we talk about, like their their missions just would not be able to be resolved without a new ground architecture. And same on the commercial side, frankly.

• 12:17Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Your system is able to deploy in three months, whereas a traditional ground station deploys in three years. What enables you guys to have that level of speed up?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  It really comes down to the vertical integration. And what we mean by that is kind of like what I what I mentioned of being able to stitch together all of the different pieces in the end-to-end system so that they inform each other. So for example, when we say three years before, what did that timeline look like? It looked like an antenna vendor who, you know, gets a phone call. After they get the phone call, they press the order on the supply chain. They got to wait X number of months to actually get the parts to arrive. Then they assemble them all. It's a bespoke manufacturing line because it's, you know, it's a bespoke system. They're just, you know, they're doing it one off. And then they ship it and they're shipping a giant piece of equipment.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  So it probably has to go over, you know, ocean shipping methods. And then it arrives at site and you have to put together a giant construction project because the size of many of these antennas, they're like multi-story buildings. So you have to do permitting. You have to lay a concrete foundation. You have to have whole construction teams in order to put them together. That adds up into a three-year timeline. Whereas for us, because we're thinking of all of those things at the same time as we're doing that development, we get to say, we need our antennas to fit in a standard shipping container that can go on a commercial United Airlines flight. And so it gets there the same day.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  We need our system to be able to fork off of that shipping container and land on a patch of dirt with no concrete and, and just plug into a standard 240 power bolt. We need to be able to have that telemetry run across our entire system so that we know how to fire it up in a matter of minutes. So being able to coordinate all of those things is really what's translated to that, that outcome of shaving off the time.

• 14:21Erik Torenberg?

  And when did you realize that vertical integration was just where you had to go? Do you know from the beginning or is it something you, you learned over time? And what have you learned about hard tech in the process of, of doing that?

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think it was a bit of, of a peeling back the problem space where initially you think, okay, great, we, we want to, we want to put more capacity, we want to make more capacity available. How can we optimize the ground system to do that? But then there's so many dependencies in, you know, what the site actually looks like, in what the software integration looks like. And we just realized that the way to deliver the best solution that actually aligns our incentives with the customer was to do the whole thing. So. Our incentives are aligned when our

• 15:15Speaker 00

  our measure of success is their mission success. And you don't have that if you're just solving part of the equation.

• 15:22Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, yeah. SpaceX was able to bring launch costs down by an order of magnitude from what came before. Why hasn't the same thing happened in ground?

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it does come down. Like, I hate to be a broken record on the vertical integration, but the reason why that matters is that what SpaceX has done is they've really streamlined their product. Right? Like, they're not trying to build a ton of different bespoke products. They build one thing and they make it super efficient and effective. They get the economies of scale and everything. And so for us, if we were, you know, just being an antenna vendor, then we would probably need to build a bunch of different types of products. But because we get to see across so many different solutions, we can think and we invest our R and D in building a solution that works commonly across the industry.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  So that means that, you know, we're accounting for commercial missions, government missions, allied missions, all within the same system. And that makes our costs lower and more efficient. And when we're able to do it as a shared service, that's really the difference for us. Like, we view ourselves more so as a platform. Right? So it's not like a one-to-one sale where you're trying, you know, get all of your value off of that single sale. Our platform is such that many missions can benefit from the same infrastructure. So we make our investment and then many customers get to benefit off of that single investment that we make.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  And then what's great for customers on their end with that is that they're able to take advantage of all the learnings and all the investment that we've made across a bunch of different a bunch of different concepts. And so, you know, it winds up being more beneficial for them. They don't have to do like a big one-off capital expenditure on the system. They get to, you know, smooth out their costs and everybody's happy.

• 17:19Erik Torenberg?

  Starlink is working on direct optical inter-satellite links. How much of that is a threat to the ground station business model?

• 17:26Speaker 00

  I view it as like a 0% threat. And the reason why is if you are banking on, you know, any of the space infrastructure, it is about the direction of data volume. And so for us, anything that supports growing the trend of data volume through space is, is great. Like, we're all on board with the same objective there. And so for inter-satellite links, what's, what's great about that solution is that it's reducing the latency. It reduces the friction of how you can actually transmit data through space. And so think about like all the use cases that that opens up when, I mean, I think Starlink is a great example of this, you know, talking about matching or in, and at

• 18:11Speaker 00

  certain times beating internet latency speeds, like that would be unheard of in space before. And look at the value of that business. And so I think technologies that align with that trend are really positive.

• 18:23Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, that makes sense. In a potential Taiwan scenario, there's a version where, you know, ground stations can become targets. How do you think about resilience?

• 18:33Speaker 00

  I think that's, it's a great question. And it actually is both a commercial question and a government question, like both commercial and government care about resilience. And I think like you can look at a lot of different companies that have tried to address this. We take the similar path of proliferation. So making things like cheaper, faster to deploy, more volume manufacturing is kind of the solution to that. So that when a single site or location goes down, that's, you know, it's not a catastrophe. It's actually interesting for some of our teammates that did come from Starlink, that was their similar model. So they, they consider resiliency in the same way, where they have multiple ground sites in a region so that if one goes down, it doesn't totally take their service off

• 19:18Speaker 00

  of, offline. So I think a similar concept applies here.

• 19:23Erik Torenberg?

  A lot of people analogize the space economy to the early internet. They say, you know, a lot of infrastructure being built, you know, lots of companies will fail and lots of applications, very successful applications will be built on top. Do you, does this analogy hold for you?

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. I get really inspired by the analogy, especially thinking about, you know, for folks that were early with the internet, like, there's no way they would have foreseen what the internet is today. But they were betting on a direction and they were setting up a model that would, that would basically like unlock a lot of innovation. And they were like, they were developing principles and building aligned with certain principles that would support that innovation and look what we have today. Yeah, I mean, I think like things as simple as like TCP IP protocols, for example, like trying to make different layers as easy in supporting for innovation as possible.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  So I think we're in a similar moment with the space industry where we don't know what is going to be built. Like, a year ago today, would we think that everybody would be talking about orbital data centers? No way. But it's captivated the public imagination and who knows what's going to come next? And so for us, we're directionally aligned with that movement and we are building to principles that will support innovation. Like, the whole thing that we're about is taking companies further faster, taking space missions further faster. And we do that, you know, by our model, which I've described. So if I were to like, look forward into the space industry, I think, you know, if you

• 21:03Speaker 00

  analogize to the internet, like, you have a couple of kind of platform infrastructure plays that really wind up becoming enmeshed across the internet. And, you know, it's not like you have A thousand different companies that stand to benefit from them, but there are a few that wind up becoming really influential and fundamental. You know, cloud is one that we analogize to a lot and we're inspired by. And we want to be one of those companies.

• 21:30Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. What is the right way of mental model for thinking about the relationship between the public sector and the private sector in terms of growing the space economy and industry and sort of technological capabilities? Is it kind of like the internet where a lot of the early work was either done by or funded by government and then the private sector is sort of, you know, took the ball, so to speak, or is it more in parallel? How should we think about that?

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's very analogous. I think it's interesting how the venture ecosystem fits in now in a deeper way than it did back then. Yeah, I think a lot of technology innovation does tend to take place at those fringes that the government use cases are solving for. And I think that's happening now. And I think the benefit that we have, which hopefully will lead to like a shorter cycle in reaching the kind of infrastructure scale with the space industry is with venture absorbing some of that risk. When we talk to government, you know, they're looking for partners to absorb that risk.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  And frankly, when we talk to, you know, some of the commercial companies as well, they're really excited about ventures role in absorbing some amount of risk so that they can pursue bigger ideas faster.

• 22:48Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. So help us outline a little bit of the space economy right now. Is it? How should we think about the, if we were to do the market map, like the different, you know, types of players? Is it? And then maybe the attributes to market is like very fragmented? Are there, you know, a couple of big winners to kind of aggregate? Like, what is the right way of thinking about?

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I think the infrastructure plays are really important for space. Like, there's a couple or there's a number of fundamental things that can be those underlying components that make a big difference. So for space, things that matters, obviously, launch, like, you need to have a way to actually get mass into orbit. Power is another big thing to solve for space. You need to have propulsion. That's another critical thing for space, being able to actually maneuver once you're up there. And then that connectivity back to Earth is really critical and being able to kind of orchestrate and network all of that connectivity is really important.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  And so I think we are in an interesting moment where that infrastructure is being built out to enable a different set of capabilities. Like, if you look a few years back, you had the small satellite boom, where there were a whole generation of companies that were built off of, you know, doing a smaller level of infrastructure to unlock different capabilities. It feels like we've evolved into a higher threshold of infrastructure that's going to unlock a whole other layer of capability.

• 24:20Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, same way. Here's what you think are the biggest bottlenecks to, you know, sort of unleashing a wave of innovations. Like, if in a few years, the economy, you sort of, you know, accelerates significantly or there's a whole wave of startups that emerge or accelerate in their growth, what would have needed to happen? Why could that be?

• 24:41Speaker 00

  I mean, like, our biased answer is that ground is really critical for that. Obviously, it's not the only thing. Like, I think, you know, to unlock the innovation, like, you know, power is a huge constraint for space. And so, you know, being able to do more in space is influenced by that, but also the amount of data throughput you can get from space. So, like, power improves, you know, how much data you could generate in space, but then ground impacts how much data throughput you can have through space, which is critical for being able to actually deliver those missions to users.

• 25:22Erik Torenberg?

  I was just listening to the Elon John Collison, Dorcas podcast on data center space, which is, you know.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  I haven't listened to it yet, so apologies if I don't know.

• 25:32Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, right. I just say this, as a first I've heard of it. What is your?

• 25:38Erik Torenberg?

  Thinking on the feasibility of it, will compute move to orbit? Yeah, what do you think about?

• 25:42Speaker 00

  So our mentality at Northwood is we want to take space missions further faster. Like, we want to enable the most ambitious missions and translate them from dream to reality as fast as possible. And so, like, that is the exact kind of juicy problem that gets the nerds at Northwood excited, is, you know, here's this super ambitious concept for space. I think what's captivated a lot of people is thinking about, you know, how it pushes society, how thinking about kind of limitless power from space pushes society, like, it gets a lot of people excited and inspired.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  And so, we want to be supporters of willing that into existence through taking that further faster. So I think a lot of people raise a lot of really valid concerns about it, things that require, or things that mean there's going to be long timelines to bring it into existence, whatever it is. Are we talking training? Are we talking inference, et cetera? Like, you know, there's a lot of different, there's a lot of different details. But I think our, our interest in it is, how can we understand the space so that we can enable it to go faster towards that outcome?

• 27:00Erik Torenberg?

  What are some examples of companies or use cases that don't exist today that you could envision, like, dream for us?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:10Erik Torenberg?

  What could some examples look like?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's like, what are, what are the vertices that you're tracking? So like, one vertice might be altitude. Right now, when we talk about space missions, you're thinking of like, low Earth orbit through to geostationary orbit. You know, it's a certain distance away from Earth. What if you could stretch that? What if you could have missions that go even deeper into space and have new exploratory capabilities? Or, you know, different planets and the like. I think being able to stretch the tether further and further away from Earth, I think is really interesting for what that could unlock. Another, another vertice is, is data throughput.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  So, right now, like, the concept of matching the volume of data from the internet to what's being done in space feels pretty...

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Preposterous, but what if it wasn't? Like, what if, what if you could actually surpass the throughput of data on the internet in space? What kind of, what kind of applications could you unlock with that? I think, you know, the, the whole interest with compute in space is kind of like attached to that concept. So, yeah, I, I think there's a lot that you can do. I think we have like a massive treasure trove of data about our planet that has not really been capitalized. So I think that is like a huge amount of latent potential in my mind. So I'm, I'm excited to see where, you know, some of the other advancements going on with technologies such as AI will lead to really unlocking the, the benefits of that.

• 28:45Erik Torenberg?

  You just won a $50 million contract with Space Force to help modernize. What does it mean to say that the Pentagon would rather, you know, buy commercially than build themselves?

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a pretty fundamental switch that represents the, the timeline urgency and, you know, the, the, the change in a ground paradigm that we're confronting. Like, you can't have the same models of procurement if you're talking about proliferated systems where you need to just have such a huge increase in ground infrastructure in such a short period of time. You need to look at different models. And so, yeah, we were, we were fortunate to be aligned with some of the great thinkers over on the Space Force side that are, are really developing what that model would look like and really fortunate to be entrusted with such a significant program so early in

• 29:40Speaker 00

  our company's lifetime. And to the whole, you know, taking missions further faster point, like being involved in, in missions of national significance is, is something that, you know, that's what we're all about. So I think it's very aligned with that. Satellite control network, that is a common resource for US government where, you know, every launch runs through a satellite control network. It, it tracks missions across a really wide set of US government use cases ranging from, you know, GPS to NASA missions, you know, our missile track systems and the like. So it is a great opportunity for us to kind of demonstrate the, the cross cutting capabilities that we are working on.

• 30:27Erik Torenberg?

  There are 13,000 active satellites right now. Is that accurate?

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Ton of that, right?

• 30:32Erik Torenberg?

  And I think you said that they're collecting millions of data that can't be captured because there's not enough ground capacity. How bad is the bottleneck?

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you can think of a satellite as basically like as soon as it launches into space, it's just a depreciating asset. It's just a really expensive depreciating asset. And you're trying to maximize the value that you can get off of that asset. And the way that you do that is by sending data because that is like the economic value of the spacecraft is the data that can produce. And the data that can produce is directly proportional to the amount of ground connectivity that you have. So ground is quite literally how you increase the ROI of your spacecraft. Really matters for both commercial and US government missions, you know, for US government missions to launch a spacecraft. And like

• 31:28Speaker 00

  literally, there have been a bunch of missions that have been launched with no ground plan. And so that's like, A, you might just lose your spacecraft, which could be a very consequential loss of an investment, or you just miss out on being able to make good use of those taxpayer dollars. And same for commercial missions. You know, we've heard from a number of different commercial companies, like, we are throughput limited. We're limited in how many customers we can serve because we don't have a big enough ground footprint.

• 31:56Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. We just talked about the contract. What's the next big milestone as you think about your guys' development?

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think building upon the use cases that we have, I think we've been fortunate to find a lot of aligned customers with the product that we are currently putting out. There's other products that we also have in the works. I think people know us as a phase duration company, but with announcements we'll have coming out before too long, we are more than that. We are kind of thinkers across the whole ground solution space. So I think it's both that, you know, product maturation as well as product development that we'll continue to be doing. While, like I said, it's orchestrating a ton of stuff, we're also building a global ground network. We have- Five international entities now across the world.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  We're like, we'll be the United Nations of Northwood.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, we're doing, we're currently on two continents. We'll be on a number of others before the end of the year. And so, gotta, gotta do it all at once.

• 33:01Erik Torenberg?

  Yep. With that, you know, I'm sure there are a lot of space nerds listening to this. Say more about the, the company, the, the size. You know, the transition from a one product to a multi-product company. Say more about, you know, the, the company itself.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so like I mentioned before, there's a lot of disciplines that need to come together to make Northwood successful. And so, we really tried to pull from the best of the best in each of those disciplines. The folks that have done it before. You know, a lot of folks that have experience with building out sites globally. You know, like I mentioned, that's the Starlink team, but that's also, how can we be creative about other, other industries that we can source from? Think about like, you know, AT&T cell towers. How are they doing that with such like global presence? What about Tesla, Tesla Supercharger stations? So just kind of looking at diverse talent bases for things like that.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  You know, we, we have like a really robust supply chain team because you have to be able to source in all of the components and, and make it timely and make it resilient. Especially our, our customers relying upon that.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  The engineering team, we have a huge amount of software, actually. So, you know, we're known again for like the hardware of our system, but the software is actually like very extensive. Across like, you know, networking, we have embedded, we have, you know, the actual front end of what we're building. So it's, it's an extreme multidisciplinary company. And so what's important for us is that we really, you know, value the different disciplines. I think that's something that probably I philosophically contribute to the company. As well as just, you know, making sure that we're coordinated and, and operating effectively as a team. So, yeah, we have, we've done a lot of scaling.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  We've doubled in size a number of times already and we'll hopefully double again in size this year, if not more. So, yeah.

• 35:02Erik Torenberg?

  And the size right now is?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Around 75 employees.

• 35:05Erik Torenberg?

  Talk a little about how you think about culture at Northwood. What types of people you're trying to bring on? How you think about team building?

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Yes, I'll give a little window into my expectations that I share with people when they interview for Northwood. The first one is that we accomplish unreasonable things on unreasonable timelines. They surface level like, sure, okay, everybody, you know, everybody can kind of get on board with that. But, you know, it's not just a matter of like applying more force to the problem. It's about taking smart risks. So it's not just force, it's also cleverness. It's like understanding the problem deep enough to know what the trades are that you can afford to make. And so people that are able to do that kind of mental calculation, kind of like take, take big leaps

• 35:56Speaker 00

  is really how you can actually move quickly.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  The, the second one is the end to end ownership of your work. And for me, really what that translates to is, you know, people who are going to be bought in in a deeper way to the outcome beyond just checking some boxes off the list. I've like kind of been reflecting on like, where does that come from for me? Like, why is that something that matters for me? And I think, you know, it traces back to when I was, you know, pursuing my first passion growing up as a kid. My mom was a huge supporter of me in a way that kind of went, went beyond just demonstrating

• 36:41Speaker 00

  that she supported what I cared about, but actually enabling me to do it in a way that like went beyond reasonableness. So I, you know, I wanted to be an actress. She's a full-time working mom, sometimes like the main breadwinner and like literally could not step away from her job. Like a lot of parents would have probably like put me in an acting camp and just been like, good luck, cool. And then, and then maybe just thrown up their hands. But she like, you know, Was on the phone coordinating travel and like caretakers and you know, booking me plane tickets and you know, figuring out how to get me the resources to

• 37:22Speaker 00

  accomplish my dream in a way that was, you know, pretty ridiculous at times. And I think that that's been like something that has really stuck with me is the amount of care that she had investment in, in my, my dream and where I wanted to go is something that, you know, I get inspired by from a mission perspective, like the amount of care that people on our team have invested in the outcome that goes so far beyond, um, you know, the description on, on their job description. And, you know, that means that like on our North Dakota trip where we were, you know, back deploying our first antenna, people like stayed up, you know, more than 24 hours on multiple occasions in, you know, a span

• 38:05Speaker 00

  of a week where we just needed to, to get the system running. And then the third one is, um, uh, we're looking for a categorical outcome, not, not just an incremental outcome. And I think like, what that comes back to is like, if you want to do something that moves the world forward, you need to have a team. Um, that's something that I learned back from my time in entertainment, you know, like I, I was, uh, working on a TV show and I'm just like one cog in this really big operation. Like there's no way you could get a TV show on air without a whole coordinated team of people to make that possible. Um, and then if you want to function effectively as a team, you need a lot of trust. And so

• 38:49Speaker 00

  what's really critical to me in having teams that trust each other is, uh, you know, basically like a low ego environment. Like when people come in the door, they need to, they need to be able to, um, admit their faults in a way that like is just purely pursuing, understanding what the problem is, understanding what the goal is. Um, and, and also be bold enough to raise flags when there's issues in a problem set. So, um, yeah, I think that teamwork, the amount of care and the ability to be clever and take smart risks is kind of like the foundational pieces of, of our culture.

• 39:26Erik Torenberg?

  That's a great note to, to, to wrap on. Um, the story about your mother is particularly inspiring. Thanks for sharing it. Bridget, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.