Off-Nominal - 139 - Sourdough Software Starter

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by John Conafay to talk about what he’s been up to since founding Integrate, and we’ll probably dish out some hot takes, too.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 139 - Sourdough Software Starter (with John Conafay) - YouTubeIntegrateCosma Schema • The New Space design & branding agency.Ingenuity Mars helicopter mission ends after 72 flights - SpaceNewsAwkward Cousins – A List ApartFollow JohnJohn Conafay (@JConafay) / XFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

CLS and go for main engine start. Hello, everybody. I have to say, you guys missed a pretty fun pre-show. If you weren't in the pre-show today, maybe the best one. We went places. We went places today in the pre-show. Let's do a lightning round for John.

John Coniface is here of Integrate. We're going to do a lightning round and see what of these topics you have an opinion on, okay? Oh, okay. The Greenland shark. Ever heard of it? Is that the oldest shark in the world, like, ever discovered? No, pretty much. Nailed it.

Name one music piracy app. Which one did you use? Napster, LimeWire. NAPSERLR old. Okay, LimeWire. Did you ever download LimeWire Pro by using LimeWire? Absolutely not. That was the best moment of music piracy.

All right. Have you ever heard of the toy Rockenbach? Still as... Lego? You're there for Lego. Of course. As well as when dirt was invented. but,

ingenuity. We're pouring one out for ingenuity today. Yeah, that's, that, that's fair. Yeah. Did they fully lose contact? Oh, yeah. No, they have, they have contact with it. But they don't have rotors.

The rotors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, pour one out. You got that picture, Anthony? It's a great picture. Pull his picture up. Yeah. So this is, that's the shadow.

Oh, man. And we think that there's some parts floating around here on the surface. they always just leave behind like the most heartbreaking, heart-wrenching, like, desolate. I mean, first of all, it's Mars, so it's going to be desolate and heart-wrenching, but like, what is it,

op-y, I think, that was, like, singing happy birthday to itself for curiosity or one of those? It's like, come on. Yeah, exactly. It's a sad. They're all the end of Wally. Like, all the scenes are there, like two-thirds away to Wally.

Powering down now. I'll see you. Never. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we got rolling in the pre show. Yeah. That's what you get for popping in our Discord.

You get to have browsing unscripted conversations. We never know where they're going to go. Literally never. Offnom.com slash Discord. Yeah. Yeah, offnom.com slash Discord. So yeah, we're going to have some fun today. We're talking with John about his company and stuff.

Should we hit up some drinks? Oh, you got something right? I guess I'm good. Maybe John should start then. What do we got there? That looks pretty fast. So I actually stopped drinking like a year and a half ago. I don't know.

Something really intense happened in my life, like starting a company and it's, you know, knocked it out. And so I got these phony and groin. Some people go the other direction on that. So that's good. I know. I know. That was like, that was like, the COVID bifurcation was like,

I either started drinking more than anybody in the world or just completely cut it out. I was, I was the latter. because I was just like, okay, if I'm going to be stuck in a house alone, maybe, maybe to lighten it up a little bit. But yeah, phony to groaning from across the street. And then we had, we have these little glasses that are the Cascade Mountains in them in the office. Because, yeah, we had like a white elephant-ish party. Stephen is behind me gave it to Paul, so he brought him into the office.

Oh, didn't like him enough to keep him at home. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like, hey, co-worker, screw your taste and screw what you think of me. Yeah, pretty much. I think you should drink classily, but I think you could drink this much less. Exactly. Exactly. It takes this much out of your drink every night.

A mountain range less, maybe. There's second or third or just round range of the country. I forget where it's at. Exactly. We're up in Seattle. I can see it. Well, I can see the Olympics that way, but yeah. Lovely, lovely.

Cool. What you got, Jake? Pretty good. I am rocking a new beer from my craft brewery around here, Petito. This is very, very Yucate. This is the Yucatech, and flag on here. So it made like a, nice. Like a patriotic state beer, I guess.

I don't know what. Wow. I was about to say. The olive green with the stripes looks very militaristic, I've got to say. You say like, it is a state nationalist beer. of, you know. Well, you know, if there's one thing you could dance good at, it's having police. I think we have like nine police forces in this state.

So, yeah, I wouldn't know. It's not even that weird to say that. Fair, fair, fair. Yeah, all the other people look like cartels, but yours looks like police. They freaking love police around you, right? It's just police everywhere. It's that or cruise ships. Those are your two options.

There's, yeah. Spear guns for those Greenland sharks as well. I don't know. That sounds bad. I don't know I have a high lie I have no idea there was a six pack of highlight

that showed up my fridge and I do not know how it got there I really don't I don't know if someone's trolling me after the Eagles lost to the Tampa Bay bucks I don't know if my wife needed to skip the checkout line at Whole Foods

and went through the alcohol section I don't really have no idea how it ended up in my fridge some high line marketing reps broke into your house and you're sponsored this is our second beer sponsorship I don't know

Secret sponsor So that's what I got to... I don't even know what High Lai is. High Lai is. The beer or the sport? What are you concerned about? Do you know about the sport of High Lye? I of course know about the sport of...

I have no clue with the sport of... Is that like the lacrosse sort of close... You're about as far from High Lye as you can get, so that makes sense. Yeah, they're clutch to the other corner. Yeah, go to a land of no mountains, South Florida. And want to launder money or sports bet heavily, you would go to a Highline location.

I think we played on this show once, the ad for Dania Highly. Didn't we play that when Brendan Byrne was on the show one time? I think Brendan Byrne was on. Highlight came up. It's like going to Highline yelling. But yeah, it's like a, it's something between like, you know the, you know the little like things that used to play in the backyard that were like banana shaped? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're like that, but industrial scale. And then they throw this ball at like 180 miles an hour or something. at the wall. It's sort of squash-like in that way. It's sort of an amalgamation of a lot of sports, plus sports betting and organized crime. I think that's... You're saying all the right words. I mean, and Rice said that right after the last word was organized crime. That's great. spectacular. It's something in that realm. And it's like strictly South Florida. It's a little bit of central Florida. And you get the ads if you're in the Orlando market, but that's about it. So, yeah. If you land at Miami International Airport,

like right when you leave, uh, if you're heading, I think if you're heading, well, if you're going out, like, the main place that you're ushered out, if you look off to your right, you should be able to see one of the highlight facilities. Nice. Yeah. That's great. My one regret of living in Florida that I didn't go, but I think I was too young to go. So maybe it's fine. How old were you when you were living in Florida?

I'm just going to flip this grip now. Let's go into your life story. 17 to 19. Oh. Yeah. Oh, because of the betting and organized crime. Yeah. They probably would be a little sketchy about an Italian guy from New Jersey.

coming into the Highline Arena at age 17, you know? Not the best mix. Got it, got it, okay. I was very tan because it was Florida, so yeah, it was like, I didn't have the beard yet or anything, so that would have been fine. I went to Miami for the first time in my life, like, through seven months ago, I know because it was like right before got her term sheet for the seed round, which is the easiest thing I've ever done in my life, which is, I'm lying about that.

It was horrifically painful. Anyway, but we went to Miami for the first time for this launch pad event, startup thing, and fell head over heels in love with it. It was during the winter, so it wasn't, you know, 110 and just sweaty constantly, which I, there's a reason to live in Seattle. We fell in love with it, and I know I shouldn't say this out loud, but it was kind of like everything that I expected L.A. to be. And, yeah, I don't do that way you will. Let's unpack it. Let's unpack it. Yeah. Like a little bit more colorful, vibrant. Just the beaches were, you know,

packed with people that were just having a blast. But yeah. Did you rent a Ferrari and drive Ocean Drive as well? Or did you not do that? Maserati, but, you know, close. He got a sit on the mud and just like on the on that on that the, that, that, that beefy founder salary that made. Yeah. Yeah, Miami's wild. Yeah. I, yeah. I, definitely would live there 100%. That was high up the list when we were looking at where my wife was going to do medical residency.

That was like, you know, let's go check out Miami Miller. It seems like a great life. That's cool. A lot of cool investors moving there. Anyway. I had not like done Miami properly. Like I know I've gone there like flown in and then gone on a cruise ship and left. Like I've done things like that before.

But this in April I was there. Well, I was getting off of a cruise ship. But the point being is I stayed a little bit longer and, like, spent a little bit of time there and went into, like, the city, like, away from the tourist stuff and everything. And I don't know what if all the neighborhoods like this, but we picked a neighborhood that was just very, very Spanish. Like, like, you know, like, you go to the store and everyone's talking Spanish and you had to, like, ask for someone who spoke English, like, one of those kind of stores. And it was really trippy for me because I, like, just come from Mexico and I was used to speaking Spanish. So I was, like, speaking Spanish everyone. And they were like, who's this gringo that's in here?

Like trying to speak Spanish and I was like and they're so they're switching to English. I'm like no no no no like I'm not that you don't have to do that for me. You know it was just like it was really weirded me out because I was like this is not what I expected when I came to the United States right now and it's just nice to see like yeah yeah just my brain was all twisted around I didn't know where I was or what was happening but it was fun yeah yeah yeah I got a cold booster there and the nurse was like the highlight of Miami a gooooster that is such a sentence for like 2022 only.

Like that had a very short shelf life. That's how it goes. Yeah. God. What, you've been in Mexico for like four years now? No, no. About two and a half now. Oh, okay.

Gotcha. Yeah. That's awesome. That's really, really awesome. Yeah. It's all good. Love it. Cool.

Well, should we talk about space stuff for once today? We should probably at some point. Yeah. I mean, this honestly, probably one of the, the best 12-minute segments we've done on the show. So I don't know why you're cutting it off at this point. Well, I assume that John has more important things to do than talk about COVID boosters and sharks.

Totally. Yeah. What I said to him, Jake, that you, right before you got on this streaming setup, was that I think we've hung out with John a bunch in proximity and never talked to each other. Like, we were at the same party or at the same event, and we're like back-to-back with each other a couple of times, but never.

and like talk to the same mutual people but at different moments of the night and so I do feel like we just have to unpack the John Connave experience a little bit. Was it was it in a great party specifically or I don't think so. I think it was just random conference stuff no like just

conference stuff randomly yeah yeah like IAC stands out yeah I think we're on we said this last week I think you might have been on that rooftop bar situation where we awkwardly rode an elevator with Robert Lightfoot and then hung out

with like most of Rocket Lab next to Robert Lightfoot but we're too embarrassed to talk to him because we just like shit on him and his policy is before in the show Oh God I'm doing God I worked at Office of Chief Financial Officer While Lightfoot was the

interim and he was just so sleepy He was just so sleepy that's our thing with him He was just so tired like all the time So I'm just in the elevator specifically constantly.

No, always. It was like a running bit on the show. It was like, dude, he might have had a long day. Come on. He's like six bucks. And we were like, I think we were calling him sleepy Lightfoot. And then the first guy that we got in an elevator with at IAC was Robert Lightfoot. And we were like, well, shit.

Screwed that one up. Damn it. Is this 27? No, 2017 was in Adelaide. 2019. This was. D.C. COVID, yeah. Yeah, in DC.

It was the end of the unprecedented times. Then they had that crazy like Meso-Cresso party afterward I want to remember. I'm trying to think what? Esar. Esar party, maybe. I couldn't remember. I literally couldn't remember.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Or Hogan levels. Maybe Hogan levels. Anyway, cool. I don't know. Anyway, what's up? What's going on? What are you doing? What are you doing over there? Yeah, yeah. What's this happening? You got the shirt? Show us this sweatshirt.

Tell us about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a little AI generated but designed by Andrew Sloan himself, of course. We like to, we all come, a lot of us come from music backgrounds. So all of our merch has to be at least to that bar of like the hardcore punk metal scenes. Of some type of stylistic impact there. Yeah. Building software for the world's most ambitious machines.

we have strong opinions on how software is currently serving the hardware industry or softers currently serving the software industry and yeah we've been at it since about March April June of 2022 I left ABL space systems in March largely because I just sold out of rockets, frankly. And that was my main job while it was there. And we, I went and started integrate because I had previously interned at Spire Global when they were like 20 to 40 people, worked at Astronis. It was an employee, you know, sub-10 employees at Astronis, Space Flight, ABL, and just saw this massive frustration or had this massive frustration of not actually being able to communicate with customers, vendors,

whoever, you know, program offices or anything like this external to the organization, um, uh, on these very, very granular like taskings and milestones and all that crap, uh, with, with while building hardware. Um, and so left to build integrate and, uh, you know, we've, uh, we've built some software, signed some customers. And it's super easy, smooth sailing. The economy was great last year. No complaints. And, you know, it's a... I sleep, you know, eight to nine hours a night.

No travel. Kind of easy. I don't know what everybody was talking about. You only drink the negative space of the Cascade Mountains and the rest of the glass. Exactly. Exactly. No, it's been a hell of a ride so far. But we've had some pretty cool.

successes. Signing the Space Force was huge for us. Fireflies on board. Nanaracts is on board, so we got some good names getting some solid utility out of the app and just got to keep going. You've stumbled into a show of

space nerds run by two guys who write software most of the time. We're not thinking about space. Pardon our software podcast for the next 10 minutes, but I would love to hear about what I'm here for it. What were you using previously? What were the pain points?

Are there things that you could teach the companies that are out there struggling through this today? What's the first slide in your funding deck that you had to present? Like, what is the point? First of all, right? We don't say the F word right now, okay? I'm still recovering. We don't say the F word. The deck's a little dusty right now.

But the way I put it to the majority of our customers is, or investors is, I worked in BD and some launch companies and some satellite companies and you codify all of the statement of work and deliverables and all these complex, you know, a list of 180 to 800 items that need to be done for this very, very complex machine to go on top of another very complex machine. You put all of that into a PDF, pass it to the technical program managers or mission managers. They would extract all of that into a CSV, upload it to smart sheet, task people out in Jira while linking it. and then handle the requirements. It's a stupid MacOS feature is the worst thing that they've ever shipped ever. I know, seriously. That's the problem.

Oh, there it is. That's the stupidest feature. And it's on by default. I can't handle it. I don't know how to get the balloons. I got the balloons. That's the first one I've ever done it on command. It's the worst feature.

I want to get the balloons. I'm so excited. I'm going to ship me. They're like, $3,500 headset next week, and they also produce this software. Is this the back equivalent of Clippy? This might be the Mac equivalent of Clippy. Because you're having a very serious conversation with somebody, and they're like, okay,

that's good, cool, and then fireworks go off, or that happens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. That's the worst feature. Anyway, they mutilate this PDF, and then they make it, do it in their own system again, and everyone just do it in the six different. systems and you keep regurgitating the exact same, you know, broken process with this like Franken feature of a conglomeration of software that was never built for hardware.

It was either built for everybody, in the case of the spreadsheet apps or for software engineers, in the case of Jira and things like this. And so you don't really get any context along with your hardware. And if you want to share any of the details of your programs, you have to invite people into your systems and then like very, very carefully extricate, like, or, you know, pull out all of the important stuff for them while not showing them your entire production schedule and all these things. And so as integrate, you can parse out the most granular level of detail to external

companies. It's multi-tenant, which I figured it was probably time to get enterprise multi-tenant so that we could actually share and collaborate in a real way. So like what is the, what about hardware makes it so difficult? Like, you know, like you said, you have stuff for software, but like it's all just project management and change tracking and, you know, user stories and stuff like that, right? Like there's still engineering. So like what is different about the hardware that makes the existing solutions?

Like why can't I just use Trello to make my rocket engine? Like what's going on here? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people have and they've had a spectacular time on. So it's not, it's not, it's not, it's definitely not out of the, out of the room possibility. But you're actually dealing with physical time and space constraints where something breaks in software. You don't have an 18 month lead time before you can get that item before because you're not dependent on this full chain of collaborators. From, you know, the people digging up the silicon to, to producing it, damn it, Sonoma.

to then bring all these components together to deliver your piece. And so, you know, if you're funding constrained, trying to build deep tech and you don't essentially order 18 of these $350,000 items up front, they can be the long pole. So if you order one and it breaks or it's a dud or anything like this, you then have to push your entire time scale out. But the insight into that entire supply chain, the ability to collaborate on, you know, when things are going to deliver, when they're going to production, when they're being tested and all that, there's just a lot of complexity across all parts. So you can't just, you know, fix a bug in a vacuum with two or three engineers.

It's this massive external world that's fundamentally collaborative across organizations. So we wanted to fix that collaborative across organizations portion of it. So you're saying that when my rocket engine blows up on the test end, I can't just get revert and get back on track. Unfortunately not. Yeah. I mean, time machines would be spectacular. But yeah. Undo. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

We're literally working on an undo feature. where we can just branch time in the application. And of course, I was like, just do that thing that you did while we're, you know, QAing this feature and everything and just put it on a button. And they're like, John, we don't build software. Shut up. Like, well, it was worth a shot, maybe.

We'll see it in, you know, two weeks. It's funny how different the worlds are. Like the software is allowed to be so janky because we have the capability for it to be janky and like Jake's saying recover from it in a not horribly time efficient manner. Which is crazy. And then there's the other factor there that like all software is built on a staggeringly complex pile of other software that's older than most of us on this podcast. And then hardware, it's like, you. Yeah, I said most.

I don't know. What are you implying? Honestly, this one that I'm thinking of is older than all of us. But it's just like, you know, the software we're running. It's just the hesitation that hurts, okay? But it's quite literally true that the software you're running today is like at some point reaching down to a stack that was the first software. Like, it's sort of like the sourdough of software.

It's in there somewhere. And in hardware, it's like the laws of physics plus everything I've built. And so it's more complex because you are in the world of physics. But the stack between you and the root of your universe is less, if that makes any sense. And luckily we... We will never understand each other, right? Yeah, yeah. We both are like, no, my thing's, like, really the most complex, because, like...

Yeah, that's the funniest thing. That is by far the funniest thing that we've learned since we've, like, expanded outside of the space industry, because we essentially sat down with... And we're having beers with some Google and Apple technical program managers, and we showed them the space product that we built early on. with the ones that were making this feature, the ones that did the synonymous reactions. Yeah, exactly.

They were on the hardware side. They're like, no, they need more, more thumbs up. If I'm in a Zoom call, it's not enough to just get the thumbs up from the Zoom. I need it like in my soul. Yeah, exactly. But we were sitting on something. And they were like, what you just showed us is just a spectacular, like the technical program management software,

really exciting, that we've always wanted for our, hardware. And so we open it up. And what we're learning back to your point about software and hardware never understanding each other, every single hardware vertical thinks they're the absolute hardest kind you could possibly build, period. It's like whether it's medical devices, because you have to deal with regulations prior to actually building anything, it's space because you can't get the computer, the beautiful computer that you just build back. And you've got to put it on a very explosive machine. consumer electronics because, well, do you do drop testing on satellites?

I didn't think so. Do you make eight million of the things that you're making or not? Yeah, that, exactly. Everyone's a special snowflake in their own story for sure. And it's like, it's amazing. And our, you know, our thesis is that like it's all the same. You're all dealing with the same physical, thermal and other types of constraints. There's about 10% that's different.

and so if we can service all of those, that 90% of the overlap, hopefully would be. Yeah, I always had this thing, this phenomenon that I branded Awkward Cousins. I wrote this article way back when I was writing for a place called A List Apart. This was September 8th, 2014. I was doing a lot of writing for, this was web nerds back in the day. If there's any web nerds out there, you'll dig a list apart reference. but this was a thesis I had that the web design of development communities and then the native app design and development communities were awkward cousins where we think we're like super different. We're never going to get along and then anyone else comes along and they're like, you guys are doing the same shit.

Like you're building the same thing. You do the exact same work. I can't tell the difference in an app and a website. But I do feel like that's even a higher level between software and hardware where when we go to any normie out there that does any other job in the world and we tell them our problems. They're like, that sounds a lot like what John told me about when he was working at the other place. and we're going to fight about it forever, that our thing is a special snowflake. Exactly. 100%.

100%. But honestly, that is, though, the value in the tactic that you're taking is, like, my expertise plus the software people behind you is expertise, right? But they don't have to build this thing, but I know what I actually need to see from my angle. And they are different enough when you're at that level of expertise and specificity that, you know, there are controls that you need that we would never think of on the software side. Exactly.

And so that balance of both of those expertise coming together or building like this is kind of my favorite project, honestly, like building a really well-considered application for a specific industry or type of work. You can just do so much there to help people out and actually make improvements in workflows that I just am super nerdy about. That's what like it equally kills me and lights me up when somebody is just like, oh my God, we've had customers put their hands in their face or their face in their hands and just be like, how did I ever do this without the software? Like fundamentally, those light me up. But then when we have a workflow that just isn't that is off nominal, if you will, we do. It just like, it causes me physical pain and I just want to fix it immediately. And then you're dealing with

the constraints of, you know, resource allocation and software. And it doesn't feel much different from hardware at all once you get there. And it's, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a hell of a drug. I'm glad we went, speaking of the fact that you can just fix software, I'm glad we really went into a low stakes, vertical, like, space, you know, where, you know, something messes up on the software or our planning of it. Yeah.

What could go wrong, right? Yeah. It was just a unit's conversion issue, you know? Yeah. Exactly. When has that ever crashed something into Mars? Yeah, yeah. Nothing. Never happened before. Was that Mars? It was Mars. You got it right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mars climate orbiter. Yeah. Climate impactor. You know, I think about like, this is such an interesting topic right now because like we're, you know, this whole like new space phenomenon that we've been living through for the last 10, 15 years or whatever time for you want to put on it. Like a lot of it has been like that.

It's been like taking the good stuff from software development, like what we've learned from the tech, from, you know, where do we learn from eBay and Facebook and all these like, you know, early tech companies that like came out and pioneered Web 2.0? And like, how can we put that into hardware and do space that way? How can we do rockets agile? And it's like, it's like kind of an interesting,

Because in some ways, it doesn't work at all. Like, if you think about the way Agile works, I would not want a rocket developed with Agile. Like, the first one would be shit. If I'm honest, if I'm honest, Jake, though, I barely want software that was developed Agile, to be honest. I barely want software developing with Agile. Am I allowed to complain about that too,

even though I'm not actually writing the code? That's because I hate it. You can rail on Agile as much as you want on Atenominal. Yeah. It's apparently our podcast policy. I don't know. We've outed ourselves. We, uh, the, uh, the whole, we don't deal with time.

We deal with complexity. And it was just like, I understand that. But literally everybody else, we deal with deals with time. So can I please just get an idea of when it's not, and our devs are absolutely spectacular. Don't get me wrong. But like this concept to me. has been murderous because I've come from hardware organizations where it's like get this done by this time we don't ship literally and then we don't ship customers

and then we don't ship everything and it's very like very very hardcore so getting my like head wrapped around this dealing complex things at a time I say it like I have well I've got I've got my cards in front of me here and I've pulled out a queen and what that means if that was just This is more complex than the last thing you asked me to do. Exactly, exactly. And that's helped it. But the devs have had to train me so hardcore on how to speak about these things because it's just like, okay, how long is it going to take to make this pot?

It's like, I don't know, probably a day or something, you know, three days. And then blindfold me, smash the pot in front of me and be like, okay, now how long is it going to take to fix it. I'm like, oh, I get, you don't have any insight. Got, okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Our team's been super patient with me as I figure out, you know, why all of these things are so complex, but, but it's also been a hell of a, hell of a curve. Not going to lie. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's my small, small. It's funny, like, how sometimes these, like, the dads can just run away with it and, like, take complete control sometimes. You're like, get me really careful with that, right?

Like, I've been in some environments where it's just like, like, the product owners are like, I need to get this done. And we're just like, nah. And they're like, oh, they can't make you back. And they leave, right? They're like, you're not actually my manager, and I don't have a manager,

so I'm just going to go and do some fun stuff, and it's going to be fine. This is a flat organization, actually. If any of our devs actually watch this, they're like, shh, shh. Yeah. We're getting, we're going to be a bit. We'll go to back for him.

Yeah. Take your head and putt out for a second. Can we talk about your brand as well? I was just mentioning that I would like to bring this up. I was chatting. So I run a like a weird little agency-like organization called Pine Works with a couple others. And we were chatting this week about this particular topic and I recorded a little

thing that I need to post. which is me running through roughly, I think, 30 websites from space companies, and they're all the same exact website. The literal same website. And to bring this one more time back to my Alistaparte related callouts, I used to work at an agency related to Alistaparte called Happy Cog. I worked there with a designer named Jason Santa Maria, who had this theorem, whenever we were working on a website,

that you should be able to hide the logo everywhere and still know what brands you were interacting. acting with. Like, that was his gate for, was this a good and successful design yet? The entire space industry fails this. Every single website, I'll just pull up one as an example, because it was probably the route, but you can tell me the SpaceX website is probably where everyone went. I'll just roll through a couple other ones, like, let's just go through launch companies, ULA launch, same exact website. Let's do Firefly. It's the same exact website. Eventually, once these load, it's the same website. They're all the same website. Like literally the same website every time. It is a headline,

a full screen image, a call to action every time. I'm not kidding. Like, Jake, name a space company. Who did I pull up yet? Uh, do, do spaceflight. Spaceflight. What are they? Spaceflight.com. It's going to pull up spaceflight now. Spaceflight. I wrote spaceflight. That's not the thing. Spaceflight.com? Loaded firefly. What's going on with my, with my internet? Why does it do that? They were bought by Firefly. Spaceflight. Spaceflight was bought by Firefly.

Now I have to Google, spaceflight.com. What happens? Why is my internet doing this? Firefly.com slash spaceflight. Hello. Spaceflight.com. We can hear you still. Yeah.

Are you there? Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Oh, okay. Spaceflight was bought by Firefly. Oh, they were. I totally forgot about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, Jake, name another space company. Planet. X-O-Long. There you go A little different A little different That had a thing Exo launch

They got some nice cards there Let's see Same website This one's center aligned Now So wow But it's literally always this website It's the same website across everyone

And you have a lovable brand That has nice colors And very like I'm resonating with this It's modern, it's fresh We've got an incredible amount of shit for this We've got an unbelievable A whole amount of shit like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because everybody's just like, you are a B2B enterprise company, act like one. And I'm just like, we're so a C. B2B stands for B2B. Be too boring. Exactly. And we've gotten that from, I mean, we've gotten that from not really customers, a lot, well, some customers, but a lot of customers have come through and just been like,

oh, my God, it's a lot of customers have come through and it's been like, oh my God, this is like a point of joy in my day every day that I get to go to this. And that's amazing. That's what we're going for. We built the app to be enjoyable as opposed to just like dying inside as you're using it and everything. Soul second Jira. Yeah. Like that light blue, light blue, white and gray being a color scheme for literally everything. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, it's been wildly polarizing. We've gotten so much shit about it. And I'm like, we're also a seed stage company. When, if not now, are we ever going to have the opportunity to be really, really loud about who we are,

the brand we're building and all that. And then to your point about every space company looking the same, our VP of product and co-founder is Andrew Sloan. Have you ever heard of him? Yeah, he's Cosmoschema. And he literally had, he made a logo generator for space companies. Yes, I remember this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's like the swoosh, right? It was like The arc to space. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like a star and like, you know, Argos core labs or like art star fire runner or whatever

the hell it is. Yeah, it's just like this random aerospace logo generator. So it's hilarious that you say that because that his entire schick when he was doing Cosmoschema was that everything looks the same and we need to change that. So, yeah, I've been a huge fan of his work for a long time. I'm super stoked to actually found the company. That is so funny, man. That's, yeah.

I pulled up their website again. It's just, yeah. It's like enough with the blue swooshes. Yeah, exactly, that part. Blue rocket swooshes. Let me see, I want to see if I can link to the logo generator. That's too funny. I love him actually has the logos in the background.

Yeah, right? Yeah, yeah. All the little Boeing's and SpaceX is. No. Planetary Society is in there. I see Planetary Society. God help me if I can figure out what this other X is. What is this?

What is this? Swo-M-Wish-M-A-G-W-Soo-Y-G-E-Mor-Soo-E. More swooshy. More swooshy. This one right here in the middle. X-C-Corps? Oh, maybe. Maybe X-Corps.

Is that the Atlas swoosh right next to it on the left? This one is the... Yeah. No. Or the Locky Man. Man, what is that? What is this one with the X and the Space plane. That's X-core. That might be X-core. What is this one then?

What is that? Here, let me, I'm just going to message him. Well, he's probably good. And so this one's the Planetary Society that looks like a P in the top left. But then what's this other one? Yeah. Oh, that's that's XPRIZ. The middle one there. X-Rise. Yeah, that makes sense. Deng. Proving our point once again that, yeah. We do have a bit of a swoosh in our logo. This is our old logo, but we do have a bit of a foosh on our logo. It's like the little... It's not really.

I'm not awarding you any points for a swoosh on that one. Good. Good. Yeah. Really good. Thanks. If that's a swoosh, then yeah. Then you're really screwing up. You're not making orbit like the rest of these logos. That's the key. We'll just...

No, man. I can't. I can't put myself to say it. We'll just fling ourselves to space. I thought. If you go in a circle fast enough and then let go, I hear you can get to space too. Yeah. I hope that. Yep.

God. I wonder about their website. Wow. Hmm. Are they? I haven't heard anything from them in a long time. I mean, you could look them up, but it's the same freaking website. Oh, that's just John.

This is their website. It's the same one. This is a full, full video. And that's a headline every once in a while. I got to say, I do want to see that, that facility at some point. That is, like, the fact that. they actually built it is one of the coolest things in the world. Like that, that's a, that's a hell of a facility.

The fact that it was only, like, one-tenth scale kind of raised a lot of questions for me or whatever it was. And then it flung out at a completely wild angle. Like, it went somewhere, but, you know. You know, it worked, worked to some degree. So, you know, cool. Cool. Yeah, it's hard.

It's hard. You can't just change the environment variable to times 10 and then re-reclose that. But, you know, if you could think of an environment where the, where one-tenth scale with no atmosphere would work, then hypothetically, this is a really good moon system. It's a great moon system. True, true, true. So not going to hate on it for that. A lot of. Yeah.

I'm genuinely excited for the, like, moon infrastructure. companies and that they're getting funded and that that's actually happening. It's like it's wild to me, like absolutely wild to me. I'm more of like a do Leo, you know, maybe go like look at the moon and be like, cool. I love Amazon Prime and Netflix and all this. So I'd like to go like to go back to my internet and audible and walks in air. But I'm still very, very excited for everybody else's lunar infrastructure. or genuinely no sarcasm here.

I'm glad that we like settled on the moon. Not settled, not settled to moon, but like settled on, like decided on the moon as our path to Mars because I feel like that. For now, for now. Yeah, well, that's actually funny. Do you think we'll ever get tack back the other way, Jake? Do you think we're going to like... Of course we will.

Yeah, I think we finally found like a middle ground that everybody's like, yeah, okay, cool. Because what was it, 20 years? of like constellation program, then Mars, then the moon, and now it's like moon, but also on our way to Mars. Apollo was moon to Mars. I'm just saying. Man, you just, I just.

With a little stop at Venus, Jake, don't completely throw the Apollo applications out in the wild here. Wait, what? There was literally a plan to put an Apollo capsule on the surface of Mars. Like, that's how much true. But you had to fly by Venus first, right? Wasn't there like the Venus flyby in situation? That was a different thing.

That was just like a possible way to like trial the software or the software. The software. Trial the hardware. They barely had software then, Jake. All the software was hardware at that point. Yeah. So you're literally talking about the software that everything else was built on. That's it.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yes. That was the sourdough starter of all the software. It's 100% true. Yeah. That's so funny. There's definitely an opportunity in there to call that orbital maneuver of the venus flytrap. there has to be

oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah I mean if Andy Weir wrote like a Venus book that would be in there it would be the

who is the Donald Glover character Richard Perlman Perman oh god I haven't read it or watched it and so long Richard I think Pearlman I want to say Ron Perlman

not Perlman that's just because I love the guy who does funds a lot of stuff in Philadelphia yeah what Perlman Ron

so many Perlman funds like all the arts and medical stuff in Philly. So it's not that. Richard Perr, who? Who is it? Richard Pernell. Rich Pernell.

Oh, wait, Rich Pernell? There was a dude that worked in Nantorax named Rich Pernell. That's funny. Anyway, sorry. This is like how, if you're up on the latest version of, or the latest season of For All Mankind, the asteroid spacecraft was a rip-off of, was it? I saw that.

Who was it? Deep Space. D-Space? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I saw some tweet about somebody getting frustrated with that.

I think it was Grant. I think it was great. Yeah, it was definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah.

Can you tell us any stories from places you've been in the past? Absolutely not. Okay, great. This is good. No, I'm just sure. Well, you said you sold all the rockets at ABL. No, I didn't sell all the rockets at ABL. I didn't sell all the rockets.

I didn't sell all the rocket. You sold all the rockets. And I just, I'm like, what's going on over there? You know? The founder sold like 58 rockets to Lockheed. So I was like, well, my job is done here. Yeah, that's a lot of rockets. And so, no.

List of companies who launched 58 or more rockets. Not that long. Yeah, yeah, true. I think it's like Soyuz and. Yeah, and SpaceX and you will like, freak it. I think. I think technically bowling and Lockhe you get both done it. Well, you'll like, technically that's...

Are you mentioning like a sale or something, Jake? What's going on here? Yeah, who's going to buy... Yeah, who's going to buy... You will have a 100% success rate. I don't know if you've heard that, Ed. Except for that one time, if you consider it, you know? Why don't even mention that?

I've never heard of mention it once in any of their copy. Interesting. Who is going to buy it? Where are we at on that storyline? I think Blue, It sort of has to be origin, but then I think there's some type of monopoly play here, because

if NSL National Security Space Launch Phase 3 opened up for three heavy launch providers. One of them shaped like a large 7 meter rocket. Yeah, exactly. And it was just like there are, are we

including Arianspast in this? Or like, what's the potential here? Because I don't know where the where the competition is, but yeah. That would be a wild version of this story. That would probably be the craziest of the storylines. Yeah. I mean, you're the one sitting in Seattle, so, you know,

basically trusting you at this point. See them from my back area. Yeah. But I don't know. It just, it makes a lot of sense. The one with me, though, is the then what? Like. I mean,

orbital capability. I still have this long. I was dead wrong in 2023 when I was like, this is the year that we're going to see consolidation. of rocket launchers or small launchers. Because I thought, you know, having a heavy, a medium and a small class makes a lot of sense to me. You know, they each have their different purposes and that all this. So, you know, New Glenn right next to a Vulcan, I can see a lot of capability for national security, for civil space, for some commercial space.

But I guess they get rid of an entire business line because who else is going to buy? by B.E4s necessarily. That's what it never made sense to me with the Blue Origin purchase. It's just like, what do they get out of it? They already have the sale. Like, they're already getting a ton of the DoD money through the B.E.4s. Like, you don't need the rocket. You have your own that you're developing.

And like, with all you're getting into. Yeah. Sure. Like, operations. Long sites is huge. It may buy it. Like, it's really just like you're just pillaging it for parts. Like, you're getting the launch.

the ops team in like Centaur IP I guess like is like you're doing straight up be an aquahier I need you just hire more mustache is a blue origin yeah I'm not here for it yeah exactly it's interesting

I think it's gonna be something boring it's gonna be like you know one of the well they're only three right it's like serverous I think it's serverous that's like the PE firm right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Johnson and Richard's equity firm based out of that yeah exactly Yeah. I don't know. I think, so I think it's either, yeah, the PE angle or like one of the other military, industrial complex primes that aren't really space launch focused yet, but are huge. I just feel like if it was a PE, like if it was a PE play, it would have happened by now

to a certain extent. Because it would be so fast or? I don't know. I have zero basis for this theory whatsoever. I just have a feeling that like if a PE firm saw enough value. in buying it from Boeing and Lockheed that it would have happened like five years ago or something when they were, you know, right before

right before there was the opportunity for SpaceX to overtake the launch industry entirely. There was like a lot of money then. There's a name in the chat. Says Textron, Cessna Vulcan. Oh, is that the third one? No, Cestron. I'm not saying I haven't heard that name before, but.

I don't know. The other phone one, I'm going to lay, Jake, I'm going to lay, we left out one thing from our pre-show bit, and I feel like we should lay it out here so that we can reference this in a year. We were debating who might be the NASA administrator after the next election. Oh. And I've stumbled upon my Republican candidate. No, I was like, listen, the Republicans win. it's going to be someone we've heard of, but haven't heard of in a while.

So I'm floating John Culberson as the NASA administrator if the Republicans win. And Europa is back on the menu. He's Googling very quickly. He was the representative from Texas who was super pushing the Europa Clipper mission. He was like, Mr. Europa Clipper was like, strangely from Texas funneling money to JPL to fund the Europa Clipper. The last Got voted out because all he cared about was Europa Clipper Yeah, pretty much, yeah

Europa first wasn't a big movement in Texas at the time Yeah, it was not winning over the San Antonio Suburb with Europa Clipper landing The Rio Grande Valley was not pumped about Europa They were like, no, we're out I guess he was the congressperson What was his district? Was he in Houston or? I don't even remember where the hell he was.

I think it was some part of Houston But I'm just saying this has got a similar Bridenstein shape where it's weird representative Congress who no one really cared about at the time who did some weird space stuff that wasn't parochial. That was the crazy part, right? Is that like, there was nothing in Oklahoma to care about in space

and Brinstein was doing all this like weird space legislation. Culberson's off doing lobbyist stuff. He cared a lot about this weird mission that had nothing to do with Texas. I kind of making meetings. Taking meetings at JPL. He was like flying out to California. oriented like yeah yeah

Jake name a better person to put in charge of whatever the hell's going on with the Mars sample return at the moment you know Tori Bruno after he's ousted when blue origin buys ULA we've really constructed a universe here the cinematic universe is pretty strong this is weird fanfic for all mankind hit us up you know if you need any script material for season 5 alternate timelines all day

I feel like we've lived through five in the past five years anyway so that's probably probably right for ideation in that respect yeah you've been on like all the angles too you've been on satellite companies at launch companies and oh stories yeah like what stories I mean what do you like better working at a satellite company or working at a rocket company satellite company I love I love launch I really love launch

it's uh no actually probably launch because all of the orbital because there's just so many such a combination of ways to get to where you need to or you know deploying large constellations it's like such a puzzle for you know what delta v gets you to this orbit and then what can you use to get to like disperse 36 satellites across 17 planes seven planes whatever it is um and how to do that so there was like a different challenge every day that That was pretty cool. And I think if it was interned, Inspired Global, that doesn't count for any much.

But if we were sending up, I worked at Estranos, which is sending up, you know, one in four years or three years or so, which is great. But if it was at like a satellite factory, maybe that would have been different. Or if it was like a, like a blue canyon or like something like this,

it was building a different line of satellites for, a million different use cases. I really love that like problem solving and puzzle piece to everything. It's kind of a tough. It's kind of difficult. So the customer problem solving at the rocket company was what I really, really loved, or rocket companies was what I really,

really loved. But the mission of astronomers was pretty important to me. Closing digital divide has always been near and dear to my heart. So, you know, I have a pretty, I'm bought in to the whole idea that if we can get the world connected, it'll lift a lot of people out of poverty and generally be positive for everybody. And then I go to Reddit and throw all of that out the window and try to cut the word in every possible way.

I've opened TikTok twice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep, exactly. Jake's on Starlink. so. Oh, are you?

Brought to you by the digital divide. I can't believe it's happened in our, maybe not in our lifetime, but like as fast. I can't believe it's here, you know? Yeah. Like the fact that they were like, we're going to put up 30,000 satellites. And everybody was like, yeah. Yeah, hilarious. That's amazing.

And then two years later, it was like, oh, we have operational. I remember the wildfires were happening during the 2020 or during COVID. up in Seattle and somebody was like, how do we get internet to these communities that are now completely cut off? And somebody had an idea for Starlink. And I was like, there's absolutely no way,

and two weeks later it was deployed to those communities. It was like, what the hell? Which is just another fun fact. And I forgot that all of those satellites are manufactured up in Redmond. up here because Washington State produces more satellites than any country in the world. Yeah, that's true. Kiper's there too, right?

So like there's no one's catching up. No one's catching up to Washington any time soon. Exactly. Yeah. It's rad, man. Yeah, yeah. No, it's rad, man. I follow this girl on Instagram who's doing right now a solo sale around the world.

And she's got a Starlink content on her boat. So like you just get to like every day. I can just like check in like and look at what this random sailboat in the middle of the Southern Ocean is doing right now. Yeah. And she's like, yeah, my sail's doing this. I got the this engine thing broke. So I fixed it. Here's some video of that.

Like this is wild. Like this is like there's no land within like a thousand kilometers of this person. This reminds me of my favorite acronym that's just like so brutal. But you know, O3B the constellation, I think it's like a meo constellation. that was supposed to be other three billion people. Are you familiar with like the other three billion? Yeah, it's the other three boats

because it was used for yachts and everything like that. It's just like, oh. I'm not familiar with that. Excellent. The other three billionaires. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Excellent. The other three boats.

Very great. I'm trying to think of stories like that I can reasonably tell from any of the places. I mean, that stuck the landing, honestly. That was great. I don't know. Anyone's never, no one's ever said that to me before, you know? That's crazy. I was, I mean, I did work at a

geo-telecommunication satellite company. That's your beat. There was some room, yeah, there was some room for jokes. Oh, man. I'm trying to think, we did go to Mexico. The first time I ever went to Mexico was with Astranas for Latsat. and that's all I got. I fell head over heels in love with Mexico and Mescal.

I got to say if there's one liquor that I miss and absolutely, like just Mescal is the greatest, the greatest liquor out there, period. Whiskey fans come at me, winos come at me. I don't care. It's Mescal's great. It's great for me because whiskey,

as I age, whiskey is getting hard for me. It triggers some sort of allergic to. reaction now. I don't know what it is, but like if I have a glass of whiskey, I feel like I have a cold the next day. Messcal doesn't do that. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just slight plug for a party that may or may not happen at satellite. The venue, uh, I stayed at a certain hotel, went up to the rooftop bar like 11 p.m. when I was still working. And they just had one of the greatest mescal selections I've ever seen in the U.S. like shit that I've never actually seen. And,

uh, so may or may not have happened. But satellite man I don't know why I always Miss the planning of that But I need to figure out what I'm doing It's not far away from me and I need to do it Yeah we got a party for you I am putting in motion

I'll alert now that I'm like Actively planning for small sat which is the one It's been on my list because the space Impose this year lands on the solar eclipse week Which is the worst planning they could have ever done They needed to move that conference no one's going to that 100% If you have, unless work is forcing you to go to that, no one's going to that.

So. No, we're, our work is forcing us to go to the eclipse. Yeah, exactly. I am forcing us all to go to the eclipse. So yeah,

I'm like, all right, well, I should look at another one and small set. I've never been. I've, I've missed Utah dearly. The one in Louca?

Oh. Yeah, yeah. It's the greatest, it's the greatest space conference period. Jake, can, look at your calendar in August. We have an offer to do an off nominal. alive there.

That's also the only okay, here's a story. I got you. Well, it's a story from the last year. This is great. Oh, got you. Okay, so we protested. So we're, we had this one campaign that was like, don't. 59 minutes into the show, we protested. Don't go Jira, go integrate.

Because we're like, don't use Jira. And so we protested our own party in a Godzilla costume saying go Jira, go, go. go integrate or do gojira. And the yoga studio across the place with friend Sagi came over and was like, Conafay, is that you in there?

And it was in the costume. Do you're in the Godzilla costume? Yeah. That's amazing. Protesting our own party. And at small set. And he came over and he was like, I just left the yoga studio.

And they were like, be careful. They're protesters outside. It might get dangerous. Just like, it's me and a Godzilla suit. Space software. Yeah, great.

Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, that's the story. The weirdest, the weirdest protest in the world. This, this, picture life as a company founder. Yeah, exactly. In a Godzilla costume. There were three or four of us were swapping out doing it and then heckling the other and it was great.

It was, it was dumb and it had made a lot of people. Short end of the stick was being the third person swapping into the Godzilla in Utah in the summer. Exactly. Exactly. We didn't have a fan in there. At least it's a dry heat, you know. Not in there by the time we were done. It was more moist.

Shut her down. Everyone giving a MacOS Sonoma thumbs up. This is like maybe the best episode of this podcast that it's ever been. I don't know what happened here, Jake. Well. This is great, you know. Yeah.

Thanks so much. John, what would you like to plug? I don't know, man. Should we just shut it down? Should we send them privately? What should we do? We're hired up, but if you're building complex hardware and sick of using Giro's smart sheet and everything,

the Franken software that they have to put together to make that happen, check out integrate. Integrate. Integrate.com. You'll notice it when you get. Oh, well, your website. It says dot space. I'm looking at it.

We have a redirect, but yeah. Every great dot space works outside. You'll know that you're there when you see not a normal space website. So, yes. Yeah, if you like the website when you get there, you're in the right spot. Well, half and a half. Jake, you got anything closest out here? RIP ingenuity.

That's all I got to say. That little helicopter. Four went out. He did well. You killed it. I swear I'll do another episode of my podcast someday, Jacob. That one day, yeah. Now I'm busy on things and it'll be worth it.

I promise everybody. I hope so. So I'm excited. John, thanks so much for hanging out. This is the greatest. Thank you. I'll see you, I guess, in a Godzilla costume in Utah in a couple months. Awesome.

Talk to you all soon. Bye, everybody. See you. Bye.