SpaceX

“He puts in every fund founders fund, I think puts up to 25%. Somebody could correct me, but up to 25%, a single position, they've done that with SpaceX, Airbnb, all these, you know, iconic companies.”

“Mattershund being the largest, you know, sort of investor You know, in SpaceX, Coastal Ventures being the largest investor in Rocket Lab, and then in some ways more recently, you know, the only equity owner in OpenAI other than Microsoft.”

“And we are never going to be like fully, fully automated. Cause like Tesla tried to do this. SpaceX tried to do this. It's just like a bad idea. Cause you build this inflexible system. It's just super brittle.”

“But I also worked on Hyperloop and on the boring company, kind of ideas that came from that while I was there and on Mars systems, which is how I started to look at nuclear.”

“Yeah, I spent 12 years at SpaceX had joined when they had failed two rockets in a row but I thought it was just a big and beautiful mission to lower the cost of launch, to make life multi-planetary and that's why I did that for 12 years, but I worked on all so…”

“So you look recently at Anduril, probably the most important company In the private markets behind SpaceX.”

“They are not well run. They are not hiring the best people, really, really sharp people. They go to work at SpaceX and Meta. They are not going to big tobacco anymore. And so the quality of the companies has really, really degraded.”

“Most of these companies I mentioned that we invested in are started by people who were actually at one of these successful companies, Endural, Palantir, or SpaceX before, or who were in military service themselves, and they know sort of the landscape. It's ver…”

“The space X network, like those people aren't just leaving Los Angeles and moving to the barrier to start the next company. Same with Andrew roller.”

“His whole thing is they want to be the NNSA, the National Nuclear Safety Administration's I think that's the right acronym. They want to be the NNSA's SpaceX essentially, like you know, like SpaceX was to NASA, they want to be to the NNSA.”

“I think they're like 50% dilution over the past 20 years, even though they've raised ten billion dollars of, you know, of equity aside from secondaries.”

“They run tenors every six months. They're it's interesting. So actually they're the company the company employees actually have single trigger RSUs, not double trigger RSUs.”

“SpaceX has been cashflow positive most of the life cycle of the business. The core business, the launch business for years had negative working capital”

“The company has only raised ten billion dollars in its life cycle as a 23 year old business.”

“Matt Grimm from Anderle is one of the best COOs. If not, I would say the best COO in our industry. Gwen Shotwell, one of the best operators, if not the best operator in industry, president of SpaceX.”

“The entire structure of the contract is kind of insane in that they literally just, you know, gave SpaceX the same workload, but said the price for you doing it is going to be half of Boeing.”

“The Biden administration clearly turned that down because they didn't want to give SpaceX a political, an Elon, a political win against Boeing in the midst of the, you know, campaign was campaigning for Trump.”

“Other than those three, there isn't really, like, a, like, unicorn VC-backed company that, like, has actually delivered things at scale for the Warfighter that doesn't really exist.”

“The next generation space defense prime is SpaceX. They're the largest space defense prime. They have the largest contracts in that field. They are the long tail winner.”

“I think the energy industry is actually in a pretty similar spot That the aerospace industry or the defense industry was in, in, in the last decade. The difference is that the energy industry doesn't have a SpaceX and it doesn't have an Android role. And we st…”

“These companies that could be worth trillions of dollars someday. The SpaceX's, the Anduril's, the OpenAI's, the Anthropics.”

“I mean, these companies are compounding it over a hundred percent year over year in the billions of run rate. We have never seen that before, right?”

“Obviously our investment, you know, in SpaceX helped inform our investment in K-II.”

“I think it will for sure be above one 50, but given those options, above one 60, maybe even one 70.”

“As we've seen with SpaceX you know, they do biannual tenders where if you're an early stage investor or an employee there's opportunities for liquidity, and they've done that very successfully, and you're gonna continue to see that. Now you're seeing that more…”

“One of the things that's made nominal possible now, or say three years ago, is that there is this crunch happening across all of these disparate industries in terms of the data types that they are using. Where, 20 years ago, if we were going in and trying to i…”

“Meeting the initial folks at Nominal, it was evident from those conversations that this team was above and beyond even those groups I had worked with at Andrel and at SpaceX, so that was extremely exciting.”

“Going to SpaceX, they've invested millions in their tool chain, everything from ERP to fleet management. To data analysis, obviously.”

“The world is moving from this like type one hardware development where you will work really hard. You'll iterate on a prototype or a design of something, a widget, a machine, and then you will sort of set that design. You'll lock it and you will print manufact…”

“Where you got this acceleration, if you're a SpaceX or an Andrel, is how fast can I identify an improvement I want to make and then convince my customers That that is a safe improvement, and that I can deploy that into the field, whether it's new software or a…”

“SpaceX is always going to look and see first if they can go and buy something before they go and build it themselves.”

“I don't think there's going to be more SpaceX's. I don't think there's going to be more Andrews, you know, of like new defense primes or neo primes, and I don't think there's going to be more than a handful of large industrials companies.”

“Obviously I'm still going to be extremely bullish for just the opportunity within aerospace and defense for, you know some of our largest positions like SpaceX and Andrew.”

“It was really a combination of two things. One was people from the industry, aerospace industry, who knew All the tricks, knew the science, knew the engineering but had a way of doing things that was more the incumbent way. And that was combined probably in a …”

“The difference between SpaceX and something like Blue Origin that started about the same time you know, I think Blue Origin's, like, coming on now, but they've had 20 years where SpaceX has just been lapping them, it's, like, taken over the entire rocket busin…”

“It seems like all the really good, the biggest things I've ever covered, they all take 10 to 12 years. I think Silicon Valley, sometimes you have this overnight sensation kind of thing where you see Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg turn up when they're 26 and the…”

“There may be a subset of companies that are forever private, because they can afford to be. That may be Stripe, that may be SpaceX, that may be some other companies.”

“Mesh is a pair of founders from SpaceX named Travis and Cameron, who I actually knew back from college and then went to work on the Starlink photonics team. So the team that uses lasers in space to pass data from one satellite to another to give us internet. A…”

“I was looking at the revenue curves actually of and roll and SpaceX and Tesla the other day, and they are some of the only companies that have actually accelerated growth at scale, which is to say they are growing at a faster rate at multi-billion dollar scale…”

“Created the opportunity for them to build a Starlink, which is now one of the most powerful internet constellations in the world. And it's actually driving a very, very large majority Of overall free cashflow and revenue for the business.”

“Everyone talks about Android and Palantir and SpaceX. Those are the three companies that in the last 10 years have broken into The defense sector to challenge Lockheed Martin, Arthur Grumman, and sort of the old, older primes.”

“I think like broadly across the defense industry this is a pattern that you saw happen with both Palantir and SpaceX as well, is that the big players, the primes, they don't really pay attention at all until their lunch is being eaten. And then the moment they…”

“I am very grateful that SpaceX is an American company. I feel like it's an unfair advantage that we have with now Star Shield with, you know, that available to, The DOW.”

“This is actually a debate that we have in terms of how soon it's going to happen, but it's definitely going to happen. Data centers in space is coming, and it makes sense, right? If you think about and you know, a lot of this is public, but what SpaceX is talk…”

“And then I think in roughly twenty-twenty-eight, it's gonna be the year of direct to sell, and SpaceX talked about this publicly, but it's gonna take time, you know, they just acquired a bunch of spectrum, it takes time to get, you know, Antennas and phones op…”

“Look, I personally believe SpaceX is the greatest company of all time. I think the company is just getting started. I, and I have many other great portfolio companies, but I'm willing to say SpaceX is on a different level of every company.”

“And when we go like five years from now, all of my underwriting is, I think direct to sell will be probably even bigger than the original consumer internet business.”

“The public doesn't yet Like, the public hasn't yet gotten to see the full argument, like, hasn't gotten to see the math, but I'll just say, like, I think the math is really compelling, and I think data centers in space are, and I was on TBPN maybe six months a…”

“I think the SpaceX IPO will actually help all private companies this year, including the AI companies, just because it creates a lot of liquidity, and it draws a lot of capital, you know, into tech, and, you know, people are gonna, like, it's, it will just cre…”

“Like, I think it's probably, probably the most vertically integrated American manufacturing company. And like, when you're vertically integrated, it just lets you move with like a speed and flexibility that No one else has outside of China.”

“SpaceX just announced that at the end of last year they had 9.2 million subscribers on the core charlene consumer side and six million direct to sell subscribers.”

“And then after Starlink got to about a billion of revenue, which was very fast, it was about 12 months after they got their first dollar of revenue, they were at about a billion of run rate,”

“I think this is, I really do think this is, I think this is the healthiest wealth creation event in history.”

“I don't, I think that in most companies, it's kind of destroyed the culture. I don't think that's going to be the case at SpaceX because SpaceX is such a mission-oriented company, and as I was saying before, the next five years and then five years after that h…”

“I think Elon and the company have gained a lot of confidence that Starship is going to be flying like reliably and reusable this year in 20, 26. Like that's my strong sense.”

“I first invested in, you know, and in cumulative invested probably 1.2 billion dollars, and across all the different funds, that position's worth, like, About twelve billion dollars today.”

“And very quickly, like within two years or so, I think the company is basically going to have an excess Capacity. Like, they could launch all the just Starlink data satellites. They wanted all the direct-to-sell satellites they wanted, and they'd probably stil…”

“I'm about to have tens of thousands of lines of code execute, one character wrong in one of these lines of code. Is the difference between, like, total success and then, like, maybe no more launch site.”

“At SpaceX, we ended up actually having to build all the infrastructure from scratch to actually have something that was modern and that and that also really helped us be more successful.”

“You know, some of them will probably go public in the next 12 to 24 months, so that'll be kind of one impact of it”

“I do think if you're going to want to outperform you know, the index over a long period of time, you're going to need exposure to these companies.”

“Would probably put my money today on Larry Page quarter trillion. Google, Google, or should say Alphabet has like woken up. They own, you know, close to a hundred percent of search. They own a hundred percent of deep mind. They own like mid teens percentage of…”

“I talked to Sean McGuire of Sequoia, who they've invested billions into SpaceX and Elon companies.”

“Part of their strategy should be to diversify, but part of it should be to hold on to that stock long term and think about how to maybe even monetize the volatility. So we've built some options programs and things like that for people here to monetize. These s…”

“I think SpaceX.”

“I don't think that there's this concern in my mind of, oh, that means you got to sell mag seven or this and that, because, you know, the S and P is 60 or 70 trillion dollars of market cap. We're talking about one trillion dollar, three one trillion dollar comp…”

“SpaceX is most recent, you know, when they did the transaction with XAI was 1.25 trillion dollars.”

“China now has consistent access to space, and has a massive program to essentially duplicate our launch capacity. They've got, you know, five different companies trying to be SpaceX over there that they're throwing lots and lots of money at.”

“That's a real big endorsement coming from somebody who runs more than one percent of SpaceX.”

“When you look at, like, the difference between a Falcon nine and a Falcon Heavy, it's like 70, eighty million dollars, something like that historically.”

“If you want to move quickly, you absolutely must insource a lot of the development. You must build your own components. You must take as much internally as you can”

“Tom, Tom was officially in the payroll system the first. Employee zero zero one.”

“My, probably my proudest development was the Merlin engine, which is currently flying on Falcon nine, the most reliable rocket engine ever developed, and also the highest thrust of weight of any rocket engine ever developed.”

“And I always said it took three versions of Merlin to get it to be really tight. And it took three versions also of Raptor. I always say it takes really three, three iterations to get to a really, really tight product and Raptor's there.”

“This can take a large satellite, like a four ton satellite from low earth orbit at a couple hundred miles up to geosynchronous orbit at 22,000 miles. That's so basically escaping most of the gravity well over very high energy transfer. It can take, you know, f…”

“In fact, that's how I met Elon was through the amateur rocket stuff that I was doing.”

“Launch mostly being solved or is being solved. It's like the next big opportunity is to move all that payload, all that cargo around in space. So I started impulse space to do in space transportation as opposed to from earth to space transportation, which was …”

“If SpaceX didn't work, Founders Fund would not exist. Like, we bet our careers, essentially, on SpaceX”

“When I did get to meet Elon and learn more about SpaceX, it was extremely clear That there was nobody else like him on the planet who could actually pull something like SpaceX off”

“Launch is like, you know, I'm bullish on launch going forward, but like, the applications of launch are where the, where everything is at, right? And like, telecom and global telecom, I mean, it's pretty huge.”

“That was the one where the second stage had hit the first stage, and so, you know, it wasn't fully successful, and I remember, I think I was standing next to Gwen or something, and she, you know, I was like, oh, you know, what, so how are you guys gonna fix th…”

“They've really shared equity across the entire company, which is incredible. And to your point, they have lots of people on the shop floor who literally make all of the stuff that matters. So the fact that this is life changing for so many people, I really thi…”

“Well, I mean, they were, I mean, they were profitable for a very long time, and the launch business was, I mean, they were doing things that no one in the industry had accomplished, right?”

“They flipped the business model in the industry because historically it had been cost plus and they had transitioned to a firm Fixed price model. And so a combination of a business model shift and then making, you know, the Falcon nine partially usable fundame…”

“When we started OneThirtySet Ventures, we continued to invest really many times over the last 16 years. So, I don't actually know what the total count is, but we're, we've probably made two dozen investments in the company since we started the firm.”

“They're going to launch, I don't know what to me this year, but like something close to 200 times. Like no one else in the world is launching even 15, 20 times, right?”

“Gwen really just doesn't, like, there's like no problem that you just can't work, right? It's just like, no matter how stressed everyone is, it's like, if you can be the calm person in the middle who can just help people Get to the right answer. That's incredi…”

“We looked at probably every SpaceX, or every space investment for, I don't know, 1520 years, and the good investment was SpaceX, and I think a lot of people thought, well, we should go invest in all these other things, and the answer is, you should invest in S…”

“SpaceX is the big one to kind of start this, but, I mean, as you mentioned, like, OpenAI and Anthropic are both valid. They're S-one's confidentially, so it's gonna be a pretty interesting, you know, few quarters in the public markets.”

“Back at Founders Fund, we did the deal in, in, in, in that was sort of the beginning because at that point, Elon had mostly funded it himself. And we were really the first outside institutional capital.”

“SpaceX always sort of allowed liquidity for their employees and they were running tenders, you know, once a year probably back then. And then that kind of sped up to twice a year. And so like these were always company organized programs.”

“And I think SpaceX has done it incredibly well where it's like you launch and you learn, and then that, that ethos has kind of gone out to a large part of the ecosystem.”

“And it was probably 2019 or so when, you know, they launched probably a couple of Starlink satellites, and it was, I think, pretty clear for people who had known them for a long time that, like, they'd figured it out so this was gonna work, and therefore you c…”

“Recapture is always taxed at ordinary income rates. So if you buy an airplane, And try to offset capital gains, right? Which is like, well, let's say your SpaceX shares, and then you sell it five years later and you recapture at ordinary income, you're essenti…”

“Unless you have an operating business to run it through, you're There aren't really any tax benefits. If you're like a SpaceX employee and you have a lot of stock, right? You're not, you don't have a business to run this airplane through. So not only are you p…”

“So we launched with SpaceX, A few weeks ago before they went public, and we saw quite a lot of volume on there.”

“So my first investment when I was at Kleiner Perkins was SpaceX. And it was at an over a hundred billion dollar valuation.”

“And so Elon reserving 30% of the SpaceX IPO for retail investors, I think is a really great thing.”

“And so Luke and Scott convinced me to put everything that I made in Ironport when we sold the Cisco into SpaceX.”

“Gwen was as driven as Elon, but in a nicer Way that helped the company keep moving forward and not just burn everyone out as they went but brilliant, brilliant. Knew where to focus, what to do, kept things going when Elon would go up and focus on Tesla, the bo…”

“When I joined SpaceX, it was again about a thousand employees, Producing about one booster a year, and through the years of growing up Warp Drive, the custom platform we built there, we scaled it up to 40 boosters a year and 9000 employees across multiple loca…”

“Ken built the operating system that helped scale SpaceX from hundreds of people to thousands of people and did the same thing at Broadcom in like the eighties.”

“The whole concept of a responsible engineer is what I learned there, and that person owned that part from first requirements all the way through to post-flight. There were no handoffs. There was no finger pointing. Either you got it done, or you are no longer …”

“Similar to the software system that SpaceX had, Warp Drive, that, like, powered the entire ecosystem of manufacturing. Like, we essentially are doing the same thing of how do you build this, like, custom-made manufacturing system for a very bespoke and unscala…”

“I've got a team of six here. I don't really think it's going to scale much more than maybe one or two more people. And I think I'll be able to do exactly what I did at SpaceX with only six because AI drives most of what we're doing and AI is now starting to en…”

“I was the manager of the research and development team for electronics, so I did a little bit of everything that went into a rocket and a satellite, and wire harvesting was the bane of our existence, and we outsourced 95% of it for Falcon and Dragon back in th…”

“For the time that I was at SpaceX, they were able to sustain the culture as it grew up. So they hired, promoted, trained to keep that accountability culture in place, and that outcomes-based culture in place while we were going there.”

“I think now with the SpaceX IPO, people will have, be more liquid, and I think people are actually more scared of like, oh, people are gonna retire, this, and this, and you'll, you'll talk to Ken, but like I think it actually makes it more, Do you have an inte…”

“So, so Gwen was to Elon what Henry was to Nick at Broadcon. Like, Nick was the aggressive, make it happen, drive people to the very last ounce of juice they had, and Henry was pick up the mess that gets created, help people figure out really what they're tryin…”

“Elon was really good about keeping the mission as a forefront focus for what we were doing, and just kind of energized everyone to get it done.”

“It became one of the major differentiators for how could, how SpaceX could scale and keep all the information together and connected with each other.”

“I don't really think it's going to scale much more than maybe one or two more people, and I think I'll be able to do exactly what I did at SpaceX with only six, because AI, It drives most of what we're doing, and AI is now starting to enable things we weren't …”

“Playbook is get it defined, get it working consistently and reliably in such a way that you can now replicate it, and then go out and replicate it multiple times, and then every time look for ways to improve what you're doing. Make that improvement, and then m…”

“When I joined SpaceX, it was again about a thousand employees producing about one booster a year. And through the years of growing up Warp Drive, the custom platform we built there, we scaled it up to 40 boosters a year and 9000 employees across multiple locat…”

“The whole concept of a responsible engineer is what I learned there, and that person owned that part from first requirements all the way through to post-flight. There were no handoffs. There's no finger pointing. Either you got it done or you are no longer emp…”

“My hottest take right now is that the SpaceX IPO is the, gonna be viewed historically as the most undervalued IPO of all time. I think they will tear through 10 trillion within, you know, certainly within the next couple of years, and then have almost unlimite…”

“We are about to move into a much, much larger facility. We're building a kind of campus to set up a huge manufacturing line for what we're calling StarCloud three, which is, like, the vehicle which will fit on Starship, so we can potentially fit up to 10 megaw…”

“So physics-wise, at least from what I have read, It seems like it is, there is a non-zero chance of it succeeding, meaning it will succeed once you put enough attention, resources, focus on it, and like we saw some of the frontier labs, you saw that SpaceX sai…”

“If you can put a laser in the ocean and transmit across the Pacific, you can certainly put lasers in space and create this reality of an internet in space, right? It's going to be necessary.”

“It's the second most frequently launched rocket in the world, ah, behind the Falcon nine.”

“They are, they're monetizing bits and the customers that are buying their bits are the ones that need more reliability and flexibility than maybe like SpaceX driven architecture.”

“We're taking a bit more of the SpaceX approach where they tend towards proliferation. So we have a bunch of sites and we have that diversity of sites so that we can make sure if any one of those sites goes down, you know, not necessarily for some kind of malic…”