SPEAKER_01: and none of this would have been possible if spacex hadn't figured out how to do what they do

SPEAKER_00: absolutely not let's be honest about this elon led the way here he showed that you know if he got the money for building falcon one through falcon nine and dragon that there was a huge

SPEAKER_04: kind of pot of gold at the end of that rainbow and this really allowed vc to open up to say uh

SPEAKER_05: holy these companies can actually exist and they're possible this week in startups is brought

SPEAKER_07: to you by squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain pilot grow your business sustainably and operate more effectively pilot provides the most reliable accounting cfo and tax services for startups and small businesses head to pilot.com twist and get 20 off the first six months and crowdbotics great ideas can change the world and crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com twist hey everybody welcome back to this week in

SPEAKER_09: startups today got a really interesting interview lined up for you today's guest is matt gulich and he is

SPEAKER_13: with a company called astroforge what does astroforge do well they're using spacex's ride sharing program to get into space and uh launch devices that will be able to mine asteroids and just two weeks ago astroforge sent its first vehicle into space the broker one vehicle here's what it looks like for those of you watching looks like two solar arrays with a box in the middle and we'll get into what

SPEAKER_16: it does uh in a moment but first let's welcome matt to the program hey matt hey jason thanks for having

SPEAKER_13: me on all right why should we be trying to mine asteroids what are on asteroids that's not here on

SPEAKER_04: planet earth what's the point specifically we are starting out first with what are called the platinum group metals so you've probably heard of some of these right there's jewelry that's made out of

SPEAKER_24: platinum but there's six of these elements that are used in all of our industrial applications i mean your cell phone has every single one of these metals in it and we're running out of them both as a nation but also as a planet uh they're a limited resource that we're mining and we're destroying our planet as we mine it well we have a ton of evidence to suggest that there is very very high

SPEAKER_26: concentrations of these pgms off world and that's what they're called yeah pgm short for platinum

SPEAKER_27: group metals got it iridium osmium palladium platinum rhodium and ruthenium if i'm pronouncing

SPEAKER_30: any of those correctly you got them all correct these all come from uh asteroids or these are found on asteroids but also found on planet earth yes in fact one of the leading theories is the only

SPEAKER_31: reason we see them on the crust of the earth is due to asteroid impacts that have happened you know

SPEAKER_27: millions of years ago ah fascinating uh and these are extremely valuable metals correct they're extremely

SPEAKER_04: valuable and you can look at the spot prices these are traded commodities that that that are you know

SPEAKER_24: trade on the london spot market um they range anywhere from about 400 an ounce all the way up to

SPEAKER_27: about 20 000 an ounce got it so we see some pictures there uh of your satellite or vehicle uh what would

SPEAKER_40: be the proper vehicle internally right it's something that's traveling out there but yeah it is a satellite

SPEAKER_41: bus or a vehicle that will go out to the asteroid so i guess the question is uh how far out into space are these asteroids uh how much does it cost to go find one and has anybody in history ever successfully

SPEAKER_44: docked with an asteroid and brought materials back to earth on an unmanned mission is that something

SPEAKER_40: we do now so all great questions uh to answer them yes we've done it right we have sent as a human

SPEAKER_31: species both nasa and the japanese space agency have sent craft out to asteroids docked with them

SPEAKER_04: taken samples and brought them back to earth right the japanese space agency the famous vehicle there was called hayabusa 2 uh it went out to an asteroid and took a sample and then from nasa we sent out a mission called osiris rex this mission went out to an asteroid called benu took a sample of it and i believe it's dropping it off this september so this september we'll have re-entry from a benu sample and we'll be studying it on earth to see what it's made out of so yes space agencies have private companies have not and we are definitely forging a path here into the future that that hasn't been done before um these are very very low cost launches for us we are taking a lot more risk than a large space agency would take and that's the only way that the business case

SPEAKER_24: really closes here right you have to think differently you have to think cheap and you have to think non-scientific and that's exactly what we're doing all right so let's talk about that a little more

SPEAKER_27: specifically it's really affordable to get to space because of the engineers uh and the progress made

SPEAKER_04: at spacex correct i mean space has been on the up for a while we've seen spacex which was backed off of you know the government programs as we've gone forward but yeah spacex has revolutionized the the price to get to space more specifically recently they've revolutionized the price to get to the moon i mean think about it we're launching from the moon if i was going to tell you 10 years ago we were going to fly to the moon you could have laughed me out of the room the rocket at that time would have been a delta 4 and that would have been you know around 400 million dollars we could do it for a

SPEAKER_31: fraction of that cost now which then allows us to send these very cheap vehicles into space and take

SPEAKER_41: a lot more risk the ride is just that much cheaper got it uh so you've uh sent the blocker one up what are the chances it finds an asteroid and then i guess subsequently what's the chances that it comes

SPEAKER_40: back so broker one went up to show that we could mine an asteroid in space it is just in low earth

SPEAKER_04: orbit it is not going outside of earth's gravity well it is orbiting the earth right now and we'll start experimentation with it shortly to show that we can refine what we expect to be one of these asteroids right this ball of iron with very high concentrations of pgms on it okay so there's a low

SPEAKER_40: earth orbit asteroid um we brought up our own asteroid oh i got it right we're just proving that this can work in space bring your own that we can mine in space yep nobody has been able to really

SPEAKER_04: refine in space right and that's a big process of what we need to do so we want to prove that in a very cheap easy to use 6u cubesat which to be fair spacex still has the transporter missions that's what we went on and those are a fraction of the cost that we could have even got to space 10 years ago

SPEAKER_02: so what does that cost ballpark to send something up these days um obviously we're under nda's a lot

SPEAKER_04: of companies we can't talk about but you can go look on spacex's website right a ride share slot is

SPEAKER_31: about 1.1 million dollars to send i believe those are 200 kilogram slots got it okay so their standard

SPEAKER_27: ticket price is a million bucks it's very affordable we're not talking about tens or hundreds of millions

SPEAKER_18: of dollars but the key to your innovation is you're going to do the mining in space so does that

SPEAKER_41: mean this i mean i'm sorry to be a neophyte here but does that mean there's like a drill bit on this thing and it's going to drill in take a sample and then process it and say hey this is dust oh this is platinum let the dust flake off and just only bring platinum back so the way we do it is we go out

SPEAKER_04: to the asteroid we dock with the asteroid use the right word there right these are very small bodies they're about 30 meters in diameter uh so we're talking very very small rocks that we're docking

SPEAKER_31: with we use a process of directly heating the surface till it vaporizes so there is no actual

SPEAKER_04: mechanical parts here this is all done with with a laser we vaporize the surface we collect that vapor and then we sort it and and this is essentially the experiment we're testing out in low earth orbit we've proven it to work in our thermal vacuum chambers on earth uh that allows us to sort out platinum from stuff we don't care about right iron cobalt other trace minerals in these asteroids and then we bring back only the platinum group metals now the reason for that is bringing back is still expensive and weight in space means a lot we only want to bring back the stuff that's worth a lot of money we are kind of limited on what we can bring back so that's how we do it so the lasers

SPEAKER_18: pick out the good stuff you sort it out then how does it get back because every time i see something

SPEAKER_41: come back it burns up these asteroids burn up before they hit so how is your vehicle uh designed so that it can bring back the payload and how many ounces is it going to bring back yeah so i mean our

SPEAKER_70: vehicle has a heat shield on it and the nice thing about our heat shield is we're not bringing back

SPEAKER_04: humans we're not bringing back really experiments we're bringing back raw commodities right this is a block of metal which means we can come in a lot hot and heavier than really any other spacecraft there's a lot of uh presidents for doing this before nasa has done deep space return multiple times so we really understand the physics behind deep space return it all comes down to sizing the

SPEAKER_40: heat shields correctly got it on average with our projections right now and our trajectories we can

SPEAKER_04: bring back right around a thousand kilograms of platinum group metals per mission so that's what

SPEAKER_76: we're aiming to bring back uh what is a thousand kilograms um it's about a ton symmetric ton wow pgm's permission you're gonna be able to bring a ton back okay so how big is your vehicle is it like

SPEAKER_26: the size of the vehicle a car it's not that big the vehicles that we will mine with are about 200

SPEAKER_27: kilograms what's the size of them she said the the the asteroids were about 100 feet wide or something

SPEAKER_04: so the vehicle itself is 10 feet the size of a mini fridge it is not a big vehicle when you look at it yeah platinum is very very dense right it's atomic weight is very very high so we store this metal right behind the heat shield it's volumetrically actually not that much material that we bring back

SPEAKER_83: if you can tell from the podcast lately we've been doubling and tripling down on founder university

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SPEAKER_41: and uh so when it comes back okay you got the heat shield i got that um but then how do you catch it is it going to have a parachute on it does it hit the water if it hits the earth i mean it's just going to be turned to dust so you got to have some sort of plan for landing what's the what's the landing

SPEAKER_04: plan here yeah our current plan right now and we're in discussions right now is with uh there is a giant range in utah and by the air force that you can do deep space re-entry from in fact i believe this is where osiris rex is landing when they come multiple people use this as a range to return from space on that's where we'll land we use very very small shoots to slow down the vehicle right now uh our mass shows us hitting the earth at about 30 kilometers an hour so we're not going super slow but we're not going super fast but keep in mind this is just a block of metal we can take risks with bringing it back that are very different from a human or scientific space flight got it yeah if

SPEAKER_27: the refrigerator gets dented or cracked in half it's no big deal you're just going to pick up the pieces and you're all good and so when you do a startup like this how long does it take in your estimation you guys have raised um you know over 10 million bucks you got 15 employees uh last we checked or maybe you've raised 23 million i've seen two different numbers pitch book and cnbc so you raised low tens of millions how wide of a runway do you need to build a company like this this seems quite ambitious how long will it take for you to prove this out and then start generating actual

SPEAKER_40: revenue yeah for sure it's a very ambitious company and these things are very very high risk right i will say this that with our current funding we've been able to fund our first two missions that

SPEAKER_04: includes going to the asteroid and that's what we need to do we need to be able to prove out each one of

SPEAKER_24: these milestones so that we can raise additional money and get to our end goal right we have a lot to prove as a new company um i think any deep tech company does you got to be able to prove you can hit your milestones to raise the next launch of capital for us we have a very clear plan to do our

SPEAKER_04: first to actually bring back our first amount of metal by the end of this decade um and that's what

SPEAKER_41: we're holding to on a very kind of crystal clear schedule for us and if this works uh what does the future look like you know are you going to be just sending out dozens of these every day to collect these i mean how does it scale i guess becomes the next question so if you can pull off this insane mission and actually get a refrigerator full of platinum back to earth or or whatever other one

SPEAKER_105: is the most expensive how do you scale it uh and what does that look like yeah i mean look we can

SPEAKER_04: start to talk about buying entire falcon 9 instead of doing rideshare anymore and sending out multiple missions per rocket or even going i mean i'm sure everybody watched the starship launch right you can see what the future holds for us when we go about this and we talk about sending up hundreds of these vehicles to go out into space and mine one other thing i like to touch on here is while we are starting out with mining the platinum group metals our refinery can mine really any elemental metal so as we go out there we can start to mine other materials bring them back to earth as long as the cost reward you know benefits us permission it's got to be a profitable endeavor we're going after and that's how we look at the future we hope long term to bring all mining off earth mining is a very destructive process it accounts for a huge amount of the co2 emissions on earth i don't think we hear about all the time because we don't have open pit mines in our backyard right they're not

SPEAKER_24: outside of la or san francisco but they're damaging to the earth and we want to stop that

SPEAKER_41: and i think this is the only way to do that going forward and yeah so when uh you find that uh like alien goo or stuff like that and biological stuff that will obviously cause like an alien invasion you just don't we recognize that don't bring that back that gets we just we just leave our our ship

SPEAKER_53: there and we never return it home good okay good i think that's really the big lesson of sigourney story arc is don't come back to earth with any of that assume it's contaminated and do not come home no matter what in all seriousness as we think about this what are the chances uh we find something

SPEAKER_41: out there that we are not aware of when's the last time a space mission found something in space that was a material or an element that was new to us uh us being human yeah it's always interesting here

SPEAKER_04: like when it comes to new elements we don't find them in space we do find some new molecules right in fact lindy who is running the psyche mission for nasa just had a new material named after her because we find these things as we go out into space none of them are going to be organic matter or aliens that can really take us over some of them may be hazardous they may be radioactive in small amounts right but that'll be cleared out with our refining process we won't be bringing that back um and those are all things that we'll have to kind of account for as we get there but right now we have pretty good idea of the asteroid what we're going after what it's made out of what its concentrations are and while we can always be surprised to some extent i think this process will be pretty clean and safe and there's not really a world a worry to humanity about us bringing it back keep in mind we're going to very small bodies that are blasted by the solar winds and radiation all day long we're not going to another planet that has an atmosphere that could harbor life

SPEAKER_41: yeah and uh you've got some experience in crazy hardware-based startups you worked at bird scooters

SPEAKER_27: which had a really rough go of it they couldn't figure out the unit economics there and then you worked at virgin orbit and virgin galactic virgin orbit couldn't make it work and virgin galactic still in the game so tell me when you look at those three experiences what have you learned that you know that we as founders may be making software or you know apps and things that are less ambitious about uh you know this hardware production cycle the capitalization cycle and just in general how to run these companies to get the best chance of success yeah i mean i think look deep tech companies

SPEAKER_04: are very different than sas companies in some ways and very not different it's still very important to be very capital efficient think about how you grow the company not spend money on dumb that you don't need to i mean we have to really really count our pennies here because they're so critical to us the difference is the the time that it takes to get to profitability and really these capital purchases we have to make instead of buying a sap subscription for 20 bucks to increase my you know or a subscription to open ai like i'm buying a falcon 9 rocket that costs a lot more than 20 bucks a month and so planning for that understanding the the unit economics and the financing of that are very very important to think of at virgin orbit we learned a lot um you know we got a lot of money very early at that company we were able to grow but you know virgin tried really really hard there

SPEAKER_42: was a lot of great people there explain what virgin orbit did because there's some confusion between

SPEAKER_41: orbit and galactic i know galactic is the one shamoth uh took by spac and that was space tourism

SPEAKER_27: on that galactic uh you know glider or whatever it is that goes up on top of a plane what was virgin

SPEAKER_04: orbit because it was a different company yeah virgin orbit we were launching a uh rocket off the wing of a 747 so from an engineering perspective like this is amazing right you get to work on a rocket that's going to be dropped off a gigantic aircraft lightest engines and try to go to space it was a ton of fun to develop to think about to understand how to do it to go through it but at the end of the day it pointed out one really big thing you still have to have a business that makes sense and at the end of the day putting a rocket on a pad and pointing it towards space is a lot better space to start with than off the wing of an aircraft and i think we saw that in their performance as a business that was

SPEAKER_31: what virgin missed kind of the same thing that bird missed right like you mentioned the unit economics

SPEAKER_04: could never get there with the bird vehicle when we went to bird when i when i went to bird and that's where i met my co-founder jose there was explosive growth at that company we were doing some

SPEAKER_24: crazy unheard of timelines and it really showed me how fast the company could work when everybody was in sync and really going for it it was kind of an eye-opener but it still didn't you know it still

SPEAKER_127: needed it doesn't matter how fast you go or how successful you are you have to still have a business

SPEAKER_24: at the end of the day that makes money and bird didn't have that the unit economics didn't work out

SPEAKER_00: that's been a big focus of us here it's if this works out and if we can show that technically we can do everything we better be able to make a load of money and that's what we're going to do

SPEAKER_132: yeah you better be able to find i don't know some rare metals that are incredibly precious

SPEAKER_41: exactly exactly i mean if you look at the the bird scooter phenomenon um it was loved and remains loved by a certain group of people in certain geographies uh but let's be honest these things cost 100 to maybe 200 bucks those scooters were costing they got the heck beat out of them and

SPEAKER_27: paying more than five or ten bucks you're better off jumping in a lyft or an uber x so there were better financial solutions out there with virgin orbit it seemed like a clever idea but does it just turn out that it's uh too expensive or it's just actually not a good idea because it doesn't scale

SPEAKER_30: because it does seem like 747s can get up to 40 000 feet and is that just not enough enough of an

SPEAKER_04: advantage it's not enough of an advantage you have to overbuild that rocket a lot to handle different aero forces on it has to turn 90 degrees to go towards space which is really really difficult to do and introduces a lot of new forces and at the end of the day what do people care about in

SPEAKER_24: the space world they care about price per kilogram that's all that really matters how cheap can you get me to space when we're evaluating missions that's what we look at how cheap can it be to get to space

SPEAKER_139: and um virgin was it wasn't competitive there got it um and then virgin galactic that's actually working they've done some missions correct virgin galactic has had a couple flights that have gone

SPEAKER_04: up you know a couple one-offs here i think they're still having a challenge scaling that and getting it to really production for space tourism so they have you know they have some they have some challenging times ahead of them i think like all space companies do right you have to be able to perform and hit those milestones and they've they've taken a lot longer than i think they would have

SPEAKER_141: hoped to get there okay in the early days of a startup you need to be focused on your product and

SPEAKER_44: your customers right you build a team you build a product and then you embrace a customer base and try to delight them but we can't forget about getting your accounting dialed in i see so many accounting horror stories people are doing cash-based accounting versus accrual-based accounting they're forgetting to do their tax returns maybe they're like taking a draw and not paying proper payroll taxes gosh you can make so many mistakes and these mistakes can be really damaging when you go to raise money down the road or you get hit with penalties because you didn't do things properly well there's good news pilot is an amazing service that provides you all the accounting cfo and tax services you need and they're focused on startups like you any problems you're going to have pilots seen it a hundred times so they're going to get your books tight from the start and some big news pilots annual virtual founder conference is happening on june 8th and they'd love to have you join them the vibe is a hundred percent about actionable concrete advice from seasoned operators and investors and this stuff is really designed to help you run your startup perfectly and they have an amazing speaker lineup folks from stripe mercury and sequoia are all coming so go to pilot.com summit you want to get 20 off your first six months at pilot yeah very easy go to pilot.com twist so pilot.com summit for their summit pilot.com to get 20 off the first six months

SPEAKER_27: is venture the right modality funding source for these companies like yours or should this be government

SPEAKER_41: partnership or you know governments making these investments alongside because elon's made it work but

SPEAKER_27: most of these other space companies have not i don't know if the mortality rate of space companies is actually lower than regular startups or not i don't have a collection of the you know the the the list of all of them and how many have actually not worked out but uh what are your thoughts there and it would seem our government would have a very big interest in what you're doing for national security reasons so why don't they just give you a quarter billion dollars and and and do some contract with you to make sure this works because if it does work my lord this is important for national security if we don't have

SPEAKER_41: these rare earth metals in our competition with other parties on the planet it would seem that you're a pretty important project i think we could talk about governments and how they work all day

SPEAKER_00: long and where the money gets allocated to at the end of the day i need to show that i'm a profitable

SPEAKER_24: company with or without the government's help i want to be a commercial space company and um in my opinion that's what venture is built on right venture is built on taking big risks for big payoffs and that's what that's what astroforge is that's what spacex was right spacex just hit and had that big payoff we hope to do the same thing i actually think this was venture was founded on i think what we see in venture now where we have a lot of people investing in these kind of you know monthly gross sas models you can make quite a bit of money there but they're not going to change the world let's be honest about it these kind of companies that that i'm trying to start will change the world if they're successful yeah and i think that's a different level for us to go after and what we're

SPEAKER_04: trying to do and um venture has been great to work with so far we have a lot of support from obviously

SPEAKER_00: a lot of vc firms that have been huge for us including you know we came out of yc um and then

SPEAKER_27: around and alexis ohhanian so you got you got two amazing uh yc previous founders posterous was gary tan's company and reddit was alexis's uh company so you got some really great support there from them and then now you've just got to get you got to level up to the next level of scale vc i guess

SPEAKER_00: yeah exactly and we've had great support from our investors and as we continue to go forward but we'll see what happens but again in in these kind of deep tech things it's all on us right now we got to hit our milestones and show we can perform and uh make it to the damn asteroid and uh that's

SPEAKER_01: what we hope to do the end of this year and none of this would have been possible if spacex hadn't

SPEAKER_00: figured out how to do what they do absolutely not let's be honest about this elon led the way here he showed that you know if he got the money for building falcon 1 through falcon 9 and dragon

SPEAKER_04: that there was a huge kind of pot of gold at the end of that rainbow and this really allowed vc to open up to say uh holy these companies can actually exist and they're possible and i mean again 20 years ago i think we would have been laughed out of every room because it just wasn't feasible to do in fact you saw this right planetary resources and deep space industries the two asteroid mining companies that came before us their cost models were just so much higher than ours are now to go try to do the same thing i mean both of those founders have been awesome and been very helpful to us and i think their timing was just off i think the timing is now for this to happen

SPEAKER_41: due to ride share and the decrease in launch cost i mean planetary resources started in 2009 so they

SPEAKER_27: basically started not long after spacex and you're starting 12 years later more than a decade later that's actually a huge opportunity for you because it would be like starting if you look at youtube you look at dropbox those services they only worked because of amazon's cloud computing offering lowering the

SPEAKER_01: cost of storage s1 or s3 whatever it was called back in the day i think it's still called s3 you

SPEAKER_27: know those kind of enabling technologies made new services available and that's what you're doing you're you are a service that's made available because of the cloud platform that is spacex spacex's

SPEAKER_04: cloud and it's not just spacex it is the whole space economy that has really matured to the fact that we can buy satellites we can buy pretty much everything we want on the vehicle explain that

SPEAKER_159: do this the components yeah so how much of the components are you making and how much of the

SPEAKER_27: components are off the shelf or oems as they say yeah so uh for this the the broker 2 mission that

SPEAKER_04: we are sending out we have bought the spacecraft so we are not building the spacecraft the spacecraft is

SPEAKER_00: being built for us now that being said we work very very closely with the people building the spacecraft because we still have to program it we have to teach it where to go we build the images on it that are going of the asteroid we obviously do a lot of the software that's on these vehicles so it's not like we just set it and forget it right there's a lot of work that goes into it with the spacecraft

SPEAKER_04: but the fact that i don't have to build solar panels or figure out how reaction wheels work or buy you know an attitude system or even our propulsion system that is a huge time saver for me that's the

SPEAKER_00: only reason why we can do this so quickly i mean one of the claims you know one of the things we did recently is we came out of we came out of starting the company and 16 months later we were in space that's actually not like a good sign on astroforge i mean yeah we were able to move quick that's actually a really good sign on the space economy and where it's at the fact that we could do that that fast right from inception to being in space in in less than a year and a half that would that's

SPEAKER_163: unheard of um and it's all because of that in space or the space economy well and if um yeah i don't

SPEAKER_53: have you ever seen how big starship is like have you seen it in person yet i have not obviously

SPEAKER_166: seen a lot of falcon nines in person but not starship it it's wild i've been inside of one

SPEAKER_168: um like the cone portion of it like where the payloads go and it's like looking into the belly of

SPEAKER_41: like a giant you know the largest jet you've ever seen and i think you can fit 300 people inside of it if you have like seating so we can fit what uh you know whatever a luxury without luxury like an international and one of those multi-deck you know airplanes are that you see going you know to asia from sfo it can fit a lot of people and or cargo and it seems to think he can get two or three

SPEAKER_53: more of those out this year perhaps more uh i think it's going to be pretty crazy how uh cheaper

SPEAKER_165: this is going to get and you might be never been against elon i think we've all seen that when it

SPEAKER_04: comes to space like he has shown so much progress with spacex and obviously i mean my co-founder came

SPEAKER_00: from spacex we know a lot of people at spacex like it is great to see what that company has done and what they continue to do and the fact that they continue to iterate this far into the

SPEAKER_24: game i think really goes to show how awesome of a company it is and we're really just building a

SPEAKER_27: company off the backs of spacex and it's amazing they can get the satellite and then you only have to build the software the drill bits whatever it is the lasers that's also amazing it's like

SPEAKER_41: being able to buy like i don't know an ice engine and the transmission and a bunch of other pieces to put into your car and then man you just narrows your focus to what really matters

SPEAKER_04: how many people do you have uh at the company we have 17 as of today we have 17 which would be crazy

SPEAKER_00: if i told you we're going to go mine ashwood with 17 people but i think hopefully with understanding that most of this can be purchased we don't have to reinvent the wheel we can do this with a very very slimmed down workforce and keep it small and that's the goal of the company i'm not going to grow

SPEAKER_05: my company via headcount right it's important to be very capital efficient and that's the way we do it

SPEAKER_53: incredible i mean if this was 10 years ago you probably need 17 people just for the solar uh arrays on this right you probably need 200 people to do this company but a decade ago correct now we

SPEAKER_00: can buy it all and that's just it's a game changer for us jason it's totally different than it was a

SPEAKER_04: decade ago and you know i i can't wait to see what happens in another decade but hopefully we're on the forefront of showing people this is possible in a totally different regime all right listen matt

SPEAKER_01: continued success uh and you got the 17 people any open positions now for these lunatics who want to

SPEAKER_153: join you on this insane mission to mind space it's a noble and insane mission do you have any open

SPEAKER_00: positions or you're full up we got a couple open positions that we're always looking for right when it comes to physicists and top engineers so if you're interested uh hit me up on linkedin okay hit

SPEAKER_181: you up on linkedin and then the website is astroforge.io you can find out more about it there in our news articles all right listen continued success thank you for doing this hard work for humanity and i wish you

SPEAKER_01: great success on it and it sounds like you're gonna get it done so congratulations on this incredibly impressive effort i really mean that sincerely awesome thank you jason thanks for having me on

SPEAKER_85: all right we'll see you next time then we'll see all of you next time on this week in startups bye-bye probably the most common challenge i hear from founders is related to building either they aren't technical and are searching for a technical co-founder or they can code but they're just spread to then this is one of the first major obstacles you're going to face and i know how discouraging it can be but there is a solution do you have a great idea but you don't have a technical co-founder well crowdbotics can be your cto as a service boom just like that this means you can focus on building an awesome product and delighting your customers rather than wasting your time on infrastructure planning architecture compliance and all that boring stuff crowdbotics also offers professional scoping to help you flesh out your project at the mvp stage and beyond so cut out the hassle and get back to building that perfect product for your delighted customers when you think crowdbotics i want you to think getting your time back to focus on product product drives everything in a startup so let the folks at crowdbotics show you how it works schedule a free scoping session and get your detailed build plan at crowdbotics.com twist that's crowd b-o-t-i-c-s dot com slash twist

SPEAKER_189: hey everybody today on founder university the podcast we're setting up a fundraising process and learning how to prepare for your first investor calls as someone who's pitched my own startup for funding and now having taken hundreds of founder calls as an investor these are my best tips for success let's go today we'll cover setting up a fundraising process we'll review the funnel and how to stay organized then we'll prepare for your first investor meeting and we'll wrap up with how to prepare for your post meeting follow-up now we need to understand the fundraising funnel this is the first step towards success in creating a fundraising process just like sales fundraising is a hundred percent a numbers game think of this as a funnel here is what it should look like as you can see in order to get a term sheet or potentially multiple term sheets in a hot fundraising market you need to work backwards and ensure you have enough folks in the top of the funnel to get folks downstream at the bottom so how do we fill the top of this funnel first you need to start a target list here are a few places to start looking for investors as you're searching please be mindful that you are targeting the right investors for your business for example if you were pre-seed it's probably too early to pitch investors who participate at series beyond words if you have a d2c company you want to focus on investors who invest in d2c companies seems simple but we see this all the time also note that firms have a thesis it's not always public and transparent but you can usually tell by their previous investments and while you're doing this research please triple check that the investors are still at the firm that you found them for and that they still have a focus on the type of businesses that you think this can be as simple as checking the firm's website but since folks move around and jobs change even in vc this step will save you a lot of time and energy in the long run okay a couple to point out here that are a little less obvious you may see funding announcements that list investors and you can pull leads from here for the top of the funnel also founders are a great resource if they have a connection they may even be willing to give you a warm intro now while we're talking about warm intros each investor and firm have different expectations here some will require a warm intro others have a complete open door policy send the cold email we love to get them and others will require companies to reach out through their site or some other standardized form don't read too far into this but do reach out in the way that they ask it's going to help you get there faster and now for twitter twitter is such a powerful tool you can search for things like active vcs active investors and then take that search a step further you can add stage for example so search for active early stage investors or active seed stage investors you can see on the examples here that these are really recent threads and they also have a ton of replies in addition to finding lists by stage you can keep searching even deeper on twitter folks will often do lists and threads like this with specifics for technology business model industry the example here is specifically calling out investors in ai who also do seed stage deals if this is the type of investor you're looking for this list is going to literally be a cheat sheet for you so please take a look at twitter and see how it might help great now you have your list of investors and you'll need to track the outreach of these results again very similar to a sales pipeline you'll want to have one place not only to keep the contact details for everyone you're reaching out to but also track the stage of the process you're at with each of these different folks so this doesn't have to be fancy and you don't need to use an expensive crm you can use tools like google sheets or excel i prefer streak which is an in email crm that's lightweight and has a freemium version you can also use whatever crm your team is currently using but again you don't necessarily have to buy something expensive to run this process all right let's talk about a few of the basic fields you'll want to track in your pipeline first name the best practice here is for any crm that you want to include the first name and the last name in separate columns or fields and this is so that you can mail merge and use tags to personalize emails without having a lot of manual work later on you'll want to track email the firm or company name check size do they lead and how do they prefer to be contacted again those twitter lists probably will tell you all of these details and give you that cheat sheet to fill this in quickly then you'll want to track where in the funnel or the pipeline each of these folks are here are a few stages to get you started on creating your own pipeline and please customize this make it your own this isn't the end-all be-all it's just a few that we've seen work well all right first up not yet contacted pretty self-explanatory this is when you've just found them but not actually reached out then email or application sent you know that you actually did your first step and you're waiting to hear back next we have conversations started often there is some back and forth before the actual call is scheduled so we like to have that broken out and have a specific stage for first call scheduled next up we have post meeting one and two there will be downtime in between meetings and conversations so having a stage where they can kind of sit and you know exactly where they're at is gonna again help you stay organized great now we're into the outcomes you'll want to keep clear notes here so when it's time to raise again you can go back and know exactly where you left off with each one of these without having to dig into old emails or remember all right first up we've got committed this can also include companies you're in diligence with or you can break those out if you prefer next is send monthly updates this should be a pretty big list anyone who passed that may come in at a later date you'll want to send updates again remember investors like to invest in lines not dots and then these last two categories are probably going to be used sparingly not a good fit we passed is one that i like to use almost as a no-fly list so this is for folks that you had a bad experience with if that happens unfortunately or firms that maybe you're too early for or you know that you're not a great fit for their investment thesis which again sometimes changes so use this sparingly and our last stage is they passed don't add to updates again this is going to be very infrequent when you want to use this but a couple reasons you may want to not include investor on updates are things like they've invested in a very close competitor which makes you feel uncomfortable or you don't feel strongly that there's a chance for a relationship later on otherwise go ahead and include them on your monthly updates and again when it's time to raise you can circle back around with them and before we leave here the last step to creating your fundraising process is to hold yourself accountable you should set some targets for outreach investor calls and even getting to a decision like sales getting to a no is often hard but it's better to know that early and redirect the energy and a huge punch up here is whether you're using a spreadsheet or a crm you can actually have it auto calculate how many days since your last interaction and then this way you don't get busy and leave a conversation to go cold on accident investors have lots of shiny objects so responding quickly and staying top of mind is going to help you not get lost in the mix okay i have to pause here also like sales you have to take the emotion out of the process i see very often on twitter threads of founders adamant about burning a bridge and never taking money from an investor who passed early on but i suggest you take a step back remember investors have several factors that they're considering when looking at your business they have things like does this fit into their thesis how much of their fund has been deployed and how much is still available how many investments are they aiming to make per quarter or per year and where are they at with those targets and also how well does your business fit into all of this so you'll never know all the factors for why an investor may have passed and assuming they weren't rude or a really bad fit i encourage you to reframe your expectations don't burn the bridge and instead remember that investors invest in lines not dots add them to the updates and start building that relationship you never know what might come of it great on to our second agenda item today we are figuring out what to do once you get a reply you've got that interest they're in your inbox what do you do to prepare for that meeting first of all don't freeze it may sound simple but if you've never done this before it can be super intimidating so reply to the email answer any questions that they asked use very plain english and just be normal also you don't want to wait too long again when you have their attention you don't want to lose it vcs expect founders to move fast and if you take weeks to reply you failed and next up we want to do our research on who you're speaking with so this is going to help take the edge off if you're nervous and also help you prepare so we've replied to the investor's email we're getting the conversation scheduled now it's time to really prepare for that meeting first step you want to research the firm you're meeting with you want to check things like their website and look them up on twitter linkedin crunchbase here you're looking for a few different pieces of information things like what type of businesses have they invested in previously what business models what stage and can you get an idea of their check size then you'll also want to research the person you're speaking to it'll one make small talk a lot more comfortable and two it'll help you gauge how well they understand your business so you know how deep to go so a couple examples here i think are really helpful if you're an ecommerce marketplace and they were a founder of a marketplace you can assume they're going to understand your business very well in contrast if you're building a highly technical product or building it in an industry that they don't have deep experience in you'll want to be mindful of the language you use and how deep you go so for example if you are pitching a security startup to an investor who doesn't have experience specifically working in security you'll want to be mindful of how technical you are as well as what acronyms you're using our next pre-meeting prep step is to send materials for them to review not all investors will have time to read through everything you send but if they do you'll be able to start the conversation on second base make sure that these materials are easy to access and quick to consume if it's anything dense it will probably be ignored some of the materials that you may want to send are things like a loom which is great a deck also really helpful you can also consider sending materials that overcome key objections you anticipate the investor will have so for example you might include a timely article that helps explain your why now if that's a question you've received several times

SPEAKER_207: before and know that they're going to ask all right our last step of pre-meeting call prep you want

SPEAKER_189: to have questions prepared here are some basic questions you can ask if you're not sure so things like what is your investment thesis and how do we fit into it what size check do you write do you lead and how many investments do you make a year you can also ask things like how do you support founders beyond the check and here's a pointed one what would it take for you to invest in around this last one here is really interesting especially if you're talking to someone who's a little less senior understand that they can be a champion for you you can ask do you need anything from me to help you pitch this internally this could be the difference in them asking for what they need and maybe too embarrassed to ask alone or them passing because it's not handy and it's not outright clear great now our last step of our session today how do we prep our post-meeting follow-up as a general rule you'll want to follow up the same day or next so everything you want to send afterwards you should have prepared in advance so that you're avoiding the fire drill after the call these are a few of the things that we suggest having prepared in advance in your follow-up here's a few things you can send a deck a loom any requested items they had during the call and here's the really critical piece to help you stand out follow up on any concerns or questions they had on your call especially if you asked what would it take for you to invest or do you have any concerns and they outright tell you go ahead and overcome those in your follow-up email even if you talked about it on the call here's a great example if they ask about market size and seem skeptical with your response you can send a bottom up tam and any supporting links or data to help you explain how the market is actually what you think it is and not what they have made assumptions based on so let's imagine you have your call and you don't hear back it is okay to follow up and ping them in a week or two please note though every time you ping an investor you want to have something of substance to share not just hey floating this to the top you'll want to include either some update to catch their attention or some new piece of information that will get them re-excited rather than hey floating this to the top a better option would be just checking in to see if you needed any additional information since our meeting i've signed two new customers and crossed 20 000 in monthly revenue and if you don't hear back go ahead add them to your monthly updates so that you're staying top of mind and hopefully you can convert them over time all right folks that's it for today's episode of founder university of the podcast thanks for joining me as we set up a fundraising process and prepare to crush it in our first investor calls