The Exchanges

Q Yeah, exactly. Who's paying for this? Totally unclear. Maybe those ones aren't paid for. Uh, are there, are there other lessons or processes at Palantir that you kind of took with you to Apex? Or like, what are the positive things to take away from there?

A So many. So, the biggest problem with that company Synapse was at the end of the day, we were building AI and computer vision algorithms. But we were applying them almost more as a kind of a consultancy, where we'd see a problem space, we'd modify an algorithm, we'd go apply it to something, and it would, we'd get paid for it, it would work well, but it was something that really never took off, right? We were able to make money and pay the bills and grow the team a little bit, but it wasn't really that hyper growth. And when I got to Palantir, the most impressive thing that I saw was you had this underlying platform or set of platforms, right? You had Uh, you had Foundry, you had Gotham, you had others. And these platforms were, sure, you build them, you have to configure them to each customer, but the scalability of them was absolutely incredible. And you could take the same thing you built once and apply it to a completely different type of customer, but they end up having this very similar kind of problem. And it was a, it was almost like a light bulb moment in my head where I was like, wait a minute, like, this is the key to building a technology product that actually can scale. And is really repeatable. And that was, for me, one of the things that I really took away from it. The other aspect, frankly, was just how to work with the government, right? Government is not an ea…

AI assessment note: “this is the key to building a technology product that actually can scale.”

Q It's just, I guess, just north of LAX and north of El Segundo. Um, unfortunately, you mentioned buying the home. You bought a home, I guess it was in, you know, the fires. Can you tell us about this briefly, what happened with this?

A Yes. So, um, My, uh, wife and I, uh, bought our, what we thought was, uh, you know, a beautiful kind of starter home, first home, uh, and we lived there about one year. We had, uh, our twins, which is amazing, and then a few months into that in January, I, uh, get a phone call from her saying, I see smoke, and I said, no worries, there's fires in LA all the time, that's why we pay our taxes, like, the fire department will take care of it, and, uh, about an hour later, I get a call saying, I'm in the car with the kids and the dog, and, like, I can't get out of the, like, House, because there's, like, a line of cars, and it's gridlocked. Like, help me. Um, and I ended up driving from our office home, it's about a 30 minute drive, saw the planes, like, dumping water, and literally, my wife is, uh, like, FaceTiming me from the car, and it's surrounded by flames, the car next door is catching on fire, and I, like, drop my car off at the bottom of the hill, and run, like, two miles, like, straight uphill. Felt like I was in an action movie, so honestly, fun in the moment. Very traumatic for her, and obviously in retrospect, though. And, ah, the entire neighborhood burned down. And, ah, I think the most devastating part of it was the firefighters who, as we were trapped in this gridlock, we'd roll down the window and say, where do we go? And they say, we don't know. We don't even have…

AI assessment note: “My, uh, wife and I, uh, bought our... first home... the entire neighborhood burned down.”

Q So you're talking about low earth orbit. Let's educate our listeners a little bit too. We have, we have LEO, MEO, I think GEO. What, what, what do these mean? And, and, And, and what are the different advantages of each?

A So the simplest way to think about it is how far away from earth are they? So low earth orbit, Leo, you're, uh, somewhere between call it 412 hundred kilometers away from earth, which is actually pretty close, right? Like you think about that distance just going straight up, that's not that far away. And what that means is because you're close to earth for things where they want to look down at earth, or you want to intercept a missile, it's really well located because you're going to be really near the thing that you're looking for. Um, then you could go into MEO, Mio is a huge range, right? Mio is anything from call it, uh, 12, 1400 kilometers away up to tens of thousands of kilometers away.

AI assessment note: “low earth orbit, Leo, you're, uh, somewhere between call it 412 hundred kilometers”

Q states, if someone's bad running Russia, doing crazy things, stopping them. But really, China's, like, the adversary that, unfortunately, we have to be most concerned about in trying to do this as well. Is China trying to steal your IP at all? Have you caught them doing this at all? Like, like, like, what's What's your view on what they're doing with our, with our sector and companies like you?

A Yes. So, um, let's put it this way. Um, we've had some very interesting job applicants come by, uh, that we haven't interviewed. We, um, due to the nature of our work, we can only hire US persons, but that doesn't mean people still don't try to sneak in, or we, we catch some things that are not quite adding up. And then we've had, uh, suppliers reach out about, oh, I'm a great machine shop, I do this, and we dig in a little bit, and we're like, you are not who you say you are. And I can't go into too many details, because we actually, we report all those things. We actually work very closely Um, both with, uh, the State Department, FBI, and others, um, on all of this. But, uh, yes, it's, uh, let's just say constantly, like every day there's something interesting.

AI assessment note: “Yes. So, um, let's put it this way. Um, we've had some very”

Q I like recruits. So we'll talk about something other than that though. Let's jump into Apex. And so, so you're at Palantir, you guys are crushing with Maven, all sorts of things. What gap in the market led you to wanting to build Apex? What'd you see?

A So Palantir, uh, bought Synapse in 2020. And that was actually a very pivotal year in the space industry. So what happened was if you rewind a few years before that, say like, you know, 2019, 2018, 2017, et cetera, getting from Earth up into space was actually pretty difficult. And it was difficult because there was not really that many reliable and robust ways to get up there. SpaceX was starting to do pretty well. They had reliable launches maybe once a month. There were other vendors too, but it was still this thing that you didn't take for granted. Today, I think about getting to space, and I'm like, ah, easy, right? Like, SpaceX is launching at this point multiple times a day.

AI assessment note: “Today, I think about getting to space, and I'm like, ah, easy”

Q What can you say about the pipeline? It sounds like you have a lot of interested customers right now.

A Yes. So, um, one of the things that I really value, and it's actually a lesson that I think I took from how Palantir it operated, was you don't want to kind of work in a vacuum and then hope that one day somebody wants what you're selling. So my philosophy was from the very first day of the company, I wanted to actually be producing revenue and have money coming in and selling these products, um, and not just hoping that one day people would buy it. So really getting that product market fit early. So we've been really lucky to be selling these Now, our company is not even three years old, and we've, ah, we don't give out our bookings and revenues numbers publicly, but it's, it's been very, very good.

AI assessment note: “we don't give out our bookings and revenues numbers publicly, but it's, it's been very, very good”