Stanford physics student drops everything to revolutionize fintech, makes billions, pivots to building constellation of spacecraft. Baiju, are you and Elon Musk working from the same career book? What is it about Stanford physics that makes people want to democratize finance and then shoot lasers from space?
Yeah, so my love of physics and math started from a really early age in childhood. I grew up around it my whole life. My dad was a scientist and kind of drilled into me the love of the scientific world. I read this book pretty early on in life called The Case for Mars, which I think both of us, me and Mr. Elon Musk, have read, which left a pretty big impression on me and kind of made the idea of space and building space commercially something that seemed real or something that seemed like I could do. I think for both of us and all the people in our generation, my take growing up was seeing these fantastical machines that are used to build space stuff, but it felt very much like the space race was fought and won before we were born.
And it felt like our generation lost because it was just not a thing when we were.
Yeah. And so this idea that space could be something that you could do as an entrepreneur was like an idea. It was like a glimmer in the corner of my eye where I was like, if I ever make a fortune in finance, I'm going to translate that to a smaller fortune in aerospace.
Smaller or probably bigger? Seems like a big TAM. Okay. So, your father worked at NASA's Langley Research Center, and you said you grew up reading Black Hole and Time Warps and talking physics with him on long drives. Now, you're building for space. What is your dad most excited about what you're building?
My dad loves the fact that I'm working really hard. I think that's the one thing that kind of has been a constant is like whatever you do. To all the Indian people in the audience, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, I think he's actually quite excited about it. He loves the science and the technology behind it. And coincidentally, when he was doing science work throughout his entire career, including the time at NASA Langley Research Center where I was a kid and watched him do this stuff, was in satellite imaging. And so it's like the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree.
Does he like critique any of the things you're working on?
Oh, absolutely. You know, he's like, well, let me tell you about this one thing that I figured out. And I think it's very relevant for what you're doing. I'm like, 'All right, Dad.' And the thing is I kind of roll my eyes every now and again and then I think about it a day later and I'm like, 'Damn it, he was right.' It's like everything I was like, 'Yeah, it's actually the right thing to think about.' So, I feel the same way about my mom.
Okay. So, at Robinhood, after Robinhood, you could have pursued almost anything. What was the most tempting thing you turned down and why did you feel like Aether was more urgent than that?
Probably the most tempting thing I turned down was just going full automotive mechanic. Like there was a period of time.
Yeah. Pandemic, but it was the pandemic. I think.
It was. Yeah. So over the pandemic, and we talked about this a bunch, I got really into building physical things because I think the, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, but after working on software and building software stuff for over a decade at that point, there was kind of the curiosity of like could I translate this into the physical world, could I build physical things? So I got really into building cars during COVID and so there was a little moment in time where I was like maybe I'll go build a car company.
Yeah. Go full. That's not a cliche at all.
But not electric cars, like gas burning cars.
Okay. Okay, good to know. Um, okay. So, Robinhood, you scaled an idea from, you know, it was born from Occupy Wall Street and it scaled to over 20 million users and an IPO. What lessons from navigating that regulatory complex industry and explosive growth are you applying to a sector as heavily regulated as aerospace and energy?
I guess I do have a love of sort of new takes on traditional industries, right? From finance to energy.
I was going to say you love regulations.
I mean, I think if you're doing interesting stuff, the regulation kind of goes hand in hand, right? If you do interesting stuff, you have to work with regulators. You have to navigate regulatory complexities. And like you said, through Robinhood, I navigated a lot of that stuff front and center and it was very, very challenging. But the lessons learned from it is actually if you're doing things that are going to be regulated, do it very proactively, sort of lean into proactive engagement with regulators and bring on board staff that knows how to do this and can scale with the company.
Yeah. Yeah, I feel like when Robinhood started, regulation efforts came later and with AetherFlux, I feel like regulation conversations happened before you even started AetherFlux.
Yeah, in many ways they did because if you're building things in space, so a little bit about AetherFlux, we're building an orbital power grid and what that means is the goal is to build a constellation of satellites that can generate power in space and then apply it to various different applications, one of which is going to be power beaming from space to Earth, which we're on target to do sometime this summer. And orbital data centers. Both of these things are super complicated and you can't actually do it without working pretty closely with regulators, whether it's the FAA, the FCC or various other regulators. And so, I mean, you know, this is again not my first rodeo, done this before. You kind of realize that the right approach is to be very proactive about this stuff from the very beginning.
It's a good lesson learned. Um, so why space now? Is it the launch costs that have dropped? Is it like what is it about the economics or the technology or maybe both that make like now a good time for space tech?
I think it's a variety of things. I think it's both the economics and the sort of maturity of the components. On the majority of the components and looking at it through the lens of what we're doing later on this year with beaming power from space to Earth. What that concept is is actually collecting power in space using actually fairly, you know, long-term it's going to be relatively low-cost solar panels that have been mature terrestrially. Not for the first mission, but in the future that's what we're contemplating. All the way to the power transmission system which is built on top of decades and decades of maturation of underlying fiber laser technology from industries like fiber optic communications all the way to metal cutting, directed energy and stuff like that. And so we kind of live in this era where a lot of the component technologies to build space stuff have gotten way more mature. And in some ways that kind of reminds me of when creating Robinhood, the component technologies, if you think about it from iOS to the programming languages to all the packages and stuff that were built for that, there were a lot of building blocks that we had at our disposal to bring that technology to life. So I think that's one of the big parts, also the access to space, the reusable launch vehicles.
Talk a little bit about the access to space.
Yeah, I mean there's a variety of companies that are doing it right now. SpaceX being obviously the most prominent one, but like we live in the era where over the next handful of years, I think we're going to see a proliferation of reusable rocketry and fundamentally thinking about space as an environment that's less mass constrained because I think that's been kind of the primary trait in designing most things space related. It's like how much mass can you put up because the physics of rocket engineering are not terribly forgiving.
Yeah. There's no like launch fast and break things, right?
I mean, from a certain point of view, that's kind of what SpaceX did, right? They iterated through a lot of failures and I think that there are applications where that's actually the right approach.
It's very expensive. Yeah. Very expensive.
So you have satellites that are launching this year to demonstrate power beaming. Tell me about the significance of that and what it unlocks.
So what we're doing later on this year, and just kind of an explanation to people that don't know what I'm talking about, is we're launching a first satellite that's going to collect electrical power in orbit. So, solar panels that generate electrical power, convert that back into energy carried in light through a fiber laser system that then points that energy down to a specific location on the ground where we convert that light energy back into electricity. And the idea for this is to build an orbital power grid that can deliver power places where there's no existing power grid or contested environments for things directly on the Earth. I think longer term the application of this technology will also be things like space to atmosphere power beaming. So think like persistent objects that are sort of like persistent drones in the sky or space to space power beaming. And that will be something that has been written about and kind of talked about since the 1970s and we're bringing it to life this year.
