From SpaceX to Reinventing GPS: Solving the ‘Solved Problem’ with Brian Manning

Pulse R0 at this point, as far as we know, is the highest accuracy, highest power, highest security, highest data rate. But by most measure metrics, it's the most high-performing navigation satellite ever launched. And it's commercial, which is a little zone of here entering a market that historically has never had any commercial players. It's been purely governments and on top of that, it's not just governments, it's super power government. I was overdoing an MBA in London at the time, like, well, I've got some free time, let's dig into this and actually take a look. And started kind of peeling back the layers on it, like, okay, I didn't realize that there's, you know, seven billion GPS devices on the planet. Like, there's soon going to be more GPS devices on the planet than people. So, like, okay, there's no shortage in the market size here. But do those devices actually need or want anything better? And so, okay, let's start to look at where they're used. From an automotive standpoint, GPS is good enough to tell a human driver what road they're on to an acceptable level of reliability. And most people experience that, okay, well, I'm on the on ramp, but I'm not on the on ramp, but I can tell I'm not on the off ramp or like it's, you know, it snaps back eventually, and you can handle it because you're a human. When you're moving into machine control, the tolerance for being wrong and the consequences of being wrong are massively larger. And so, from an navigation standpoint, you need a location system that goes from, I kind of know what road I'm on to. I have extremely high confidence in what lane I'm in and even if I'm in the center of that lane. It's very rare when I see a company that it hits me like, I have a man, this is such an obvious value creation opportunity. So, there was absolutely no doubt in me or a team that if you could execute on this, this is massive. We're not talking about billions, we're talking about trillions, right? Welcome to DeepTech Unleashed, a global conversation about building the next generation of iconic technology companies. I'm your host, Tupal Basu, partner at the NGP capitals, Palo Alto, California offices. If you're excited about DeepTech entrepreneurs and some other transformation innovation they're doing, this podcast is for you. Every episode we bring in leading thought leaders and DeepTech entrepreneurs to discuss their journey, their challenges, the lessons they've learned, and especially some of the moments of their magic. Today, we're excited to have an exceptional entrepreneur whose insight was that GPS, that ubiquitous technology which powers our daily life was broken and needed radical improvement and they needed something about it. Brian Manning, my guest today is the co-founder and CEO of Zona Space Systems. Zona is building a GPS replacement that is 100 times more powerful, fully secure and unlocks a multi trillion dollar market opportunity, both for commercial, government and defense. Brian and his team in the last two years have raised over 300 million dollars and we at NGP Capital are proud to be one of their largest shareholders. Today, we are going to explore the personal story of Brian's journey to become this amazing entrepreneur, some of the lessons he's learned and some of the insights which he would share with other entrepreneurs as well. Brian, welcome. Thank you. Awesome to be here. Brian, just perhaps starting right at the formative stage. Space has always been exciting, but when you look back way back in time traveling, what are the incidents, moments, events, people which made you think of space not just as an interesting topic, but something you wanted to pursue as a profession? I've always been a tinker, I guess. If you go as far back as you can here, remember when we had my high school graduation and we've dug off something from kindergarten and it's when you're filling kindergarten, what do you want to be when you grow up and I had engineer on it? I think that was when I was five. I was already playing with duplos and Legos and putting things together and building things and taking it apart. I think every time I get a Legos set, you follow the instructions the first time, it's like, well, I think I can make this better. My feedback put the wheels here and the wings here and like, look at the school thing I made. That naturally evolves to my folks on a plumbing business. I went from playing with Legos to sorting plumbing fittings to just putting together things and helping out in the plumbing shop and that gradually evolves into migrating my way into the garages I got older and building cars and race cars and motorcycles and I got to the point where I've kind of described myself as a mechanic that figured out how to use a computer. I have an engineering degree now that memorializes that I actually know what I'm doing I guess but I think in the modern world a mechanic that knows how to use a computer is effectively an engineer. I was growing around more of the automotive side of things which is like racing cars and motorcycles for quite a while, things go fast but as I started to get into college also, I guess throughout my entire life I was just kind of like building bigger and cooler things and to me there's like there's nothing bigger and cooler than space tech and like planes, you know on the ground you have two degrees of freedom you know four or back would left right when you're in a plane you start to get multiple degrees of freedom and then when you get into space it's just there's so many cool things. So if you've ever been out to you know see any of the space shuttles, you know even working a space like seeing rockets and seeing dragon capsule and everything and starship is cool but like a spaceship is so cool and so I think if I was just wanted to keep building bigger and cooler things and so that like I said to me there's nothing more exciting than inspiring than space and if you look back at the Apollo era and like the technology and the things that were built are just so inspiring to see what like wow people did this you know it's the model version of pyramids kind of and so yeah I found my way went to work in automotive manufacturing for a while I actually went to school for aerospace kind of step back into automotive like okay I'm on auto you know auto person is this the right path but it's never you know I learned a lot there but it wasn't I think it's fulfilling as I was hoping and was able and you're lucky enough to find my way out to SpaceX to work there for a couple of years before starting Zona. So just a question on that you know now space is in 2026 is obviously an extremely hot category but when you started it felt a bit of a tinkering type of a space and was there some person who inspired you in your college or to say have you considered this I mean zero gravity is very different from automotive. I think there's a lot of the like my grad school buddies were actually working at space like before I was and just seeing the fun things I remember talking to some of them at a party once also and I don't know what the country was but when I was like oh yeah like I'm negotiating with like Argentina or something like you're what like you're like a 20 something year old kid like we're negotiating with countries and just seeing how many cool things were happening out there. The group of folks that I went to school with a Stanford was just amazing group of people and that was largely the you know the founding team of Zona came from that same there's eight people that all came out of the Stanford aerospace group together so I don't know there was a singular person necessarily I think there was a group of people that all were I think very inspiring and informative for me was was the the people that I met going to school out there in the Stanford days. Excellent so then maybe digging a little bit into SpaceX you have mentioned that SpaceX felt like the Apollo Apollo days of NASA in the 60s everything was felt new and exciting tell us about what your role was there and what kind of projects were you working on. Sure so what I went out there the team that I got brought on to be a part of was the team building the thruster structure for the Falcon rockets and that's the the thruster structure is the giant piece of metal that connects all of the engines to the rest of the rocket. So if you got these you know billions of pounds of force all going up through this thing and it all has to make it into the rocket without crushing it and crumpling and what I joined it was right around the time that they were upgrading the Falcon rocket to be able to fly people on it and so it's externally it didn't change a whole lot but internally like the whole rocket changed because there's just so many things and certifications and safety levels that you have to go through to prove that the thing is safe to go fly people on and the other part of that is building there's a huge difference in building one thing and building multiple things repeatedly and designing something that is not just safe when you build one but you can actually proofably build multiple of them back to back to back to back. And so the team was basically replacing a welded design because welds are just very process sensitive and so it's very difficult to say that this weld is exactly the same as this weld is exactly the same as this weld and we're replacing it with a bolted design because bolts are just much more straightforward and I learned a massive amount very, very, very quickly there. And how there's a lot of things that were, so coming out of the automotive world, there was a lot of things that are the same. And it's just metal is metal. As metal bolts turn, left and right, every wire has two ends. And I think there's always been a perception around space that like it is just, it's different. And if you think of the Apollo era that I've discussed this thing before, that you think of these Apollo engineers as like they were different. Like they were smarter than these normal humans. In many ways, like the people that built stuff during the Apollo era are crazy smart. And I've seen some of the blueprints from then and like, I don't understand how they did this without computers. But I don't think people should be intimidated about getting into the space world, that just take the plunge in and go for it. Yeah, it was exciting to learn so much to have so quickly when I was out there. Yeah. So people say, you know, people talk about trying to get on a rocket ship. You were actually on a rocket ship building the rocket ship. Or swinging sledgehammers at rockets and all sorts of things. Yeah, so literally rocket ship squared. Then so why get off that ship and try to be an entrepreneur? What was the sort of, which led you to that conclusion? And just for the record, SpaceX is going public this week while we're recording this. So like I will absolutely never regret going to SpaceX and like meeting the people there and learning from everybody there. And it's a company doing a lot of great things. And it is an inspiring thing to be a part of. I think from my own personal journey, I grew up in the family plumbing business. And just seeing kind of being around family businesses, we actually sold the plumbing business when I was, I think 13 or so and bought a bowling alley. So I grew up in a family that just I was been doing kind of this small town entrepreneurial things. So I think that's how it's how it's been ingrained into me that it's something that I wanted to do and believe that of, you know, I guess the slightly crazy self belief that like, hey, this is something that I can actually go do. And growing a SpaceX, I could see the career trajectory there and could continue to be an engineer and do something inspiring. But I was felt that I had, I think a little bit more that I could actually do in the world both from a, how does this impact and what do I want my own journey to look like? - Let's talk about GPS for a second. - Correct. - Many people consider GPS a solve problem. It's ubiquitous. Most of us don't think about it. It's used across our civil lives on our devices and defense. What inside did you have which made you say, well, no, this is not a perfect solution. There's gaps in this product. And this is the problem you want to solve. - For sure. So where this came from for me was talking to our CTO Tyler. The first time we got brought up was like, well, Tyler's doing this thing, they're looking at building a new GPS and I had the kind of the same response like, why? Like GPS is fine. Like that doesn't really need it anything. And I was overdoing an MBA and London at the time. I was like, well, I've got some free time. Let's dig into this and actually take a look. And started kind of peeling back the layers on it. Like, okay, I didn't realize that there's seven billion GPS devices on the planet. Like there's soon gonna be more GPS devices on the planet than people. So like, okay, there's no shortage in the market size here. And the original core area where Tyler had identified, he was working at Ford and there were Tano's vehicle group. And if you look at what's happening in the automotive world, which is as a proxy, what's happening in a lot of just the, I guess the physical AI world is the term for these days. Things are transitioning from a, I guess a hands-on model to a hands-off model. And so from an automotive standpoint, GPS is good enough to tell a human driver what road they're on to an acceptable level of reliability. And most people experience that, okay, well, I'm on the on-ramp, but I'm not on the on-ramp, but I can tell I'm not on the off-ramp or like it's, you know, it snaps back eventually and you can handle it 'cause you're a human. And so from an navigation standpoint, when you're the location system that goes from, I kind of know what road I'm on to, I have extremely high confidence, you know, what lane I'm in and even if I'm in the center of that lane. And this is just, that's kind of where I started to see the gap here of technologies like autonomous vehicles have so much potential to do so many exciting things. But for them to actually go from being a luxury good, you know, the luxury thing that can get you around downtown San Francisco, which is cool, to actually being the default mode of transportation in the world and if you look at back home where I'm from in Michigan where the roads are covered in snow and salt and the cars are covered in dirt, you know, what I get more excited about is, okay, how do we get to the point where the autonomous ambulance can get through the snow storm that a human driver couldn't get through or wouldn't be safe to get through? And to do that, we just need a lot better capabilities than, you know, adding more cameras and adding more things. You need very trusted location. Right. And that really translates out into the rest of the world, too, that it's not just automotive, that you start realizing agriculture as the same challenges and how can you get autonomous operation of robots and things like that out in the field. But to do that, they need to know where they're at. And whether this is drones or aerial mobility or agriculture or even IoT devices, let's say the foundation of it is the thing needs to know where it's at. And more and more, they're ending up inside, you know, the back of a truck or inside of a warehouse or inside of a house where GPS can't get to. So we start to look across the world and as you move from a disconnected world to an everything is connected world and from a hands-on world to a hands-off world, the foundation layer of all of this is these devices need to know where they're at. And GPS is just not built to support that. Did you, I know you're working with defense and security type problems, too. Did you consider that as a problem statement or is that something you fell into later? Yeah, it's, we had a lot of talks with the founding team early on. Actually, we knew that what we were building, that if we're going to go build the highest accuracy, highest security, most jam-resistant, highest power, and you know, just by any measure, we'll metric the highest performance navigation system on the planet. There's obviously going to be defense use cases for it. And had the discussions like, well, this isn't really why we founded the companies, necessarily. But at the same time, we understand the use cases and the needs to keep the warfighter safe and how this can actually fill in big gaps in the national security world. And so we've always taken a position of the design and the requirements that guide the system design for the system are built around the commercial world and what the commercial customers need and frankly, where we see the really big markets at. And again, to put numbers to it, there are maybe several million defense devices that use GPS. There are several billion commercial devices that use GPS. So it's a massively outsized market. So we've always had the commercial as really the North Star and the guiding light. And what we've also found is that if you look at the level of an accuracy, reliability, even jam-resistance, that the commercial world needs and wants to keep a car safely in its lane, it umbrella is most of the needs that we even see in the defense world. So a lot of the technology is really transfer over pretty well. We certainly saw the opportunity when we met you, but there were also many initially skeptical investors who now seem to be calling you constantly. You didn't get it. What was it they missed initially about this opportunity that it seems so obvious to you? I think there's a couple of things that are counterintuitive with the GPS rental or working on it. And the first one that is probably the most obvious and high level is like, well, GPS is free. And everyone's like, how do you-- Cool, you're going to build something in an already free market, like how do you actually build a business on a free market? And where I think just the GPS world is one of the most-- you're just misunderstood about where the market is actually at. And that they're-- sure, there are 7 billion devices out there that aren't necessarily paying for the GPS service. But every single one of them has a chipset or a GPS receiver, or something that is receiving the signal. And those aren't free. And so there is about 2 billion new GPS devices being sold every single year. And there is an immense market for those receivers. And as GPS, the signals have gotten slowly, gradually better over the years, the willingness to pay that when GPS went from like single frequency to dual frequency, for example, the performance went up by maybe 30%. So notice, maybe noticeable, maybe not, depending on the use case. And the cost of the chipsets all jumped pretty significantly. That being said, every phone car-- everything's dual frequency now. And so there's this addiction to accuracy that everyone's had in a willingness to pay for the accuracy, which nobody's ever really made really high accuracy, really easily accessible. And that's what we're building and filling that gap is designing something that our system can bring. You're the really high performance that you typically take kind of all this additional complexity, but providing it through something that is the simplicity of just a GPS chip effectively. And even just an software update to an existing GPS chip. >> From an intuition and an insight to validating this with your customers, and I'm a form entrepreneur, often we jump straight into the middle and start building, did you follow some methodology to validate this first? Or did you say, let me build it and then I'm gonna validate this and explain kind of how you made that trade off. >> Yeah, so from a technology validation and a commercial validation, like we've had to be doing both in parallel. And I think for any company, validating technology that works with no customers isn't that helpful probably. And so we were doing the two in parallel and we took on the technology validation standpoint, we took a very staged approach of saying, okay, let's demonstrate one of the biggest enabling pieces and a lot of the patents and that the Core IP to companies built around is, okay, if we're gonna do this, GPS satellite today is this multi-hundred million dollar satellite, we need to shrink that down to something that is several hundred thousand dollars, not several hundred million dollars. And the technology that we developed was, okay, how do we provide extremely high performance using commercial off-the-shelf electronics? And so we built up a little test rig and showed that we could do it on the lab bench and then took it outside and did it between a truck and a transmit tower and said, okay, we can do it here and then packaged it up into a proof of concept satellites. And so we're proving it out on stage milestones and showing and it's kind of followed the investment side too, saying, okay, we've proved that it works here, we expect it'll work here, we've proved it works there, we expect it'll work there and then chipped off pieces one by one. Similarly on the commercial side, we're talking to customers and it's very tough to get a customer signed up for a service that doesn't exist that you need a bunch of satellites to go launch and millions of dollars to do it. For that being said, what we're selling and talking about is, okay, if we can get this to work, does this solve a problem for you? And okay, if we can get this to this point that's ready to go, is this something you would be willing to pay for? And so that's what we're spending a lot of time making sure that we had real industry feedback and commercial feedback and customer feedback that says, okay, yes, this works, no, this doesn't work. And similarly on the technology integration that we made some adjustments along the way that we found out, for example, was one of the biggest challenges was the antenna. And so if a customer has to add a new antenna to pick up and use your service, they're probably never going to do it. And so we took the feedback to heart and said, okay, we need to be in a frequency band that existing antennas can use. We need to have a signal structure that an existing GPS chip can use. And that is a lot of what drove the design is, you're back to the point of, the demand is virtually unlimited. If you can make it accessible to be accessible, it has to be really a software firmware update. - Right. - And so feeding the customer feedback of like, yes, I want this, but no, I can't really go change my hardware. If you can give me this, I'm interested. - Right, so if I to summarize, and for the benefit of other entrepreneurs listening to this is, you followed a parallel, you kept on building the technology while you were buying, sort of not buying, but validating this with your customers. But it was kind of a parallel process and an iterative process. It wasn't like you were following some sequential methodology. You felt that you had to do this in parallel because you cannot build it completely because you need something in the sky. So you need to provide some proxy signals, it seems to prove that this will work once it's in the sky. - Yeah, for anyone building a software company, versus building a space company, the MVP level is just a different order of magnitude and capital that it requires to get there. And so to get there on the, you know, space side of things, it takes a pretty strong market signal to be able to show that like, if we build it, they will come. And that you have to have some proof points that like, yes, they will come and look, they've actually said they're going to come. And that's based on the designs that we have laid out. And now we need to go execute on that. And that is a wall for us over time from, you know, letters of support, letters of interest into, you know, contracts as we've gotten bigger that have more, I guess, teeth in them from a, hey, we like the idea to, yes, this is how much we'll pay to actually use the service once you get it up and operational. So then maybe it's changing gears a little bit on just the journey of being an entrepreneur, building your team fundraising. Can you tell us a little about how you got, how did you persuade a lot of other founders and you have a reasonable team here to also join you in this mission? Did they get it instantly? And how did you decide that this was the right set of people you'd like to work with as co-founders? So the founding team is a, I think, exceptional group of people. And that they were, that's part of what drew me into this group also was it is just a very special group of people and even tire, I originally started talking to one of the other co-founders and what she had mentioned is like, yeah, like, tires like the world expert in this. Like really? The Canadian guy that we hung out with at school was like, come on, there's no way. And I started looking it up and started realizing that if you go on Google Scholar and look at research papers that have been published in the last five to 10 years, every single one of them that talks about next gen navigation from lower orbit, either is written by or is referencing somebody on our team. And you kind of start to realize, oh, this isn't just kind of the group of kids that we went to school with. These people are the best in the world at what they do. And I think that's been something that has really helped attract others. The other part of it is just a wholesome group of people that believes in what they're doing. And it's really passionate about, I don't think anybody on the founding team started it because they were excited about a big exit in a paycheck. They started it because we believe this is something that the world needs and that we actually are the group that can do it. And that I think is what is, that has thankfully led to better paychecks. But that has really attracted a lot of other people that when you have that just genuine kind of undeniable belief in what you're doing, it really permeates throughout the rest of the company. And just a good, like I said, the wholesome group of people that believes in what they're doing in our fund to work with. - Right. So just remind us which was with, when did you incorporate Zona? - We technically incorporated it in 2019. - 2019. - Yeah, the first fund to grow in 2020 and then started growing from there. - Right. - So it's fair to say that this was not an easy, the first few years of evaluating this, getting funding going through COVID in the middle. - Yep. - It was not the easiest journey. Things have obviously changed recently. But could you just take us through like 2019 to 2023 those first four years? How, how was it to fundraise? How did you keep your faith? And then COVID hits you, you can't even meet your colleagues and co-founders. Just take us through that period of time. And what did you learn from that? - Fundraising, so this was all of us for first time entrepreneurs and first time founders. And so we didn't have a network of VCs and people to reach out to. We went through a Sarah from Accelerator early on, which is helpful in making some connections and kind of learning like what is a pitch deck and all of these different things that I've never seen one before. And when you're talking about building something on the scale of a new GPS, it's not, there's kind of almost a binary result here. Like it's a multi-billion dollar thing or it's nothing. It's just so big. And this is one of the things that your other question of like what did people that they passed on at? GPS gets a lot of, you know, the satellites get a lot of the fame in the glory, but the satellites are cool. It's based at school. But GPS is a three-legged stool where you need to build the space segment. You need to build the mission ops and the control segment. And perhaps most importantly, that a lot gets overlooked is you need to build out the user equipment. And you need to, you know, you can build the satellites all day long, but if users can't actually pick it up and use it, what could it say? And so we had to actually tackle all three of these sectors and all three of these problems. And talking to early investors, just the scale of what we're doing is it's like, this is a lot guys. Like this is gonna be tough. I think that we had convictions from some of the early folks. I mean, I remember one of the, like we got really close to having a group invest from the very first investors in 2019. And all the way down to like the final, like reference calls. And they made a reference call back to like one of my previous bosses. And I think he shared something up like, yeah, you know, Brian's a smart guy, but you know what, worried, not sure. you can do it. And that lit a fire under me too. And they ended up passing. And so we didn't get that investment. And that one just lit a fire under me too. And it's something I think I was kind of had a little bit of a chip in my shoulder of like, you're telling me I can't do it. I'm just going to dig in 10 times harder. And I'll prove that we can actually get it done. And so it was, it was a lot of work and struggling to get the first investment across. But then it, once we got the first investment, it turned more into execution. And say, okay, we said we're going to go do it. Let's go do it. And prove that we can actually it can happen. COVID was an interesting time. So our first funding around closed like kind of right about at the same time as COVID is like March or April of 2020. And the our first office was actually also my apartment. It's over. It wasn't that different. I was still in the office every day, but it went from, you know, everyone being in the same spot to distributed. And so in the early stages, we were hiring people. There's no difference in hiring a remote person versus hiring somebody on site. And that did okay for us for a while. But as we grew, it got more challenging building a hardware company with a lot of remote people. It's not possible, but it's more challenging. So as we got bigger that the inefficiencies and some of the challenges started to show up. And I think we learned a lot of lessons early on too on balancing the vision of what we're building is so big that there's a lot of, you know, okay, we want to go do this and do this and do this and get four steps down the road. And I think we we got a little bit too far out front of our skis a couple times and had to take a step back. It's okay, we're we're we focused too much on growth and the second third and fourth milestone down the road as opposed to okay, we need to step back and focus on we need to execute to you know, these exact milestones like get us to the next, to the next funding round or to the next customer milestone or whatever it is. And not you can't completely ignore growth and you can't completely ignore the big vision in what you're doing. Like that has to be the notice that you're driving to. But as an early company and even the stage right now, sure, we have more capital, but I think the most dangerous spot a company can be in is when you think money is not a problem. Like we still need to be very vigorous about and disciplined about how we spend and focusing on what is next milestone? What do we need to get to and balancing that with let's go try and grow out to the next ones as fast as possible? Do you do you recall any moments during that time and you generally worried that you guys might not make it any any any memories on that? Oh yeah, we had a we had a couple of those and it was it was caused by exactly that that you know, we torched more of our own way than than we should have pushing on the growth side of things. Yeah. And I think we had spent more on things that were we're making progress on you know, a step or two ahead of us instead of putting it on where we're at and that forced us to I mean, we had to do layoffs and and back things off and it was a lesson that I guess I learned personally on how to be managing things. It's probably one that's you know, in fairness better to have learned at a smaller scale. I mean, one that probably would have been better to not have to learn at all, I guess that should have known coming in, but there are a lot of things I think I guess I personally learned and the whole team has learned as we've gone through the founder journey that didn't necessarily I guess expect to appreciate when we when we started. Yeah. Yeah. So as you know, we came in a little over two years ago and you know, things really inflicted at that point. Yep. And and clearly the the last two, three years have been fundamentally transformationally different for you from a business growth, capital raising perspective. So maybe talking about now some of the magical moments in your sort of in this journey, tell us a little about this Pulsar Zero launch and how it literally changed perceptions about all the naysayers, many of those initial investors who were skeptical just describe what Pulsar Zero did and how it impacted people's perception of what Zona could eventually become. For sure. Yeah. So Pulsar Zero was our first his production class satellite that we built and launched last year. It was actually just about a year ago. We're about a one year anniversary and it's still chugging along checking off more records. Pulsar Zero at this point as far as we know is the highest accuracy, highest power, highest security, highest data rate, but like by most measure metrics, it's the most high performing navigation satellite ever launched and it's commercial, which is you know, little Zona here entering a market that historically has never had any commercial players. It's been purely governments and on top of that, it's not just government, it's it's like super power governments that if you look at who operates satellite navigation systems around the world, it's the US government, the European government, the Russian government, and China. Yep. And there's a couple regional ones in India and Japan, but it's it's a huge thing. And so for us to be able to build a satellite at a tiny fraction of the cost of what historical navigation satellites have been able to do and demonstrate, you know, we're down in like we're starting to measure accuracy in millimeters at this point because we're just putting decimal points in the centimeters and demonstrate that not only can we do that, but we can deliver this service. We've got over a dozen commercial receivers that have done the software, the firmware update to be able to actually pick up and use the service. And so, you know, the people that all thought, okay, maybe you could build this satellite, but it's going to be impossible to actually get into the user equipment. We've proved that that works. Even showing that's, okay, you can transmit a high power navigation signal next to GPS without jamming GPS. There was a ton of people both within the government and in private industry that you know, we could show them the math and the simulations all day long. Yeah, but I don't believe it. And so until we actually had the satellite up in space, like look, high power signal, no degradation whatsoever, like this works, that people just didn't really believe it. And that being said, it's very tough to argue with real data in front of you when you have the satellite on and you're looking at the GPS receiver next to it and it's working completely fine with no degradation and it's picking up our signals. Yeah, yeah, no, awesome. And so just for the benefit of the listeners, Pulsar Zero proves something which you're planning to build at scale. Can you just explain some of the key milestones you're planning to hit in the next 24 months? Sure. And how does Pulsar Zero inform you on what that looks like? So the company right now is transitioning from a kind of a technology developer to a service provider, effectively a telecom. And so with that transition, we've demonstrated the technology, the capability works. We have demonstrated and with the amount of customer base we have behind us on both the government and the commercial side, we've shown that the demand is there. We need to now execute and get the capability up. And so we just recently opened a couple of months ago, our satellite factory just down the street here in Berlin game where we're starting to ramp up. We've brought in house a lot of the satellite production to be able to move at the rate that we need to. We have another batch of satellites. The first batch of the production ones are launching this October. So we're transitioning from Pulsar Zero as a production class satellite, but it is still ultimately a test satellite. In October, we will have the first production ones up starting to provide a production service. And so starting to move into that, we have several different customers that are starting to deploy Pulsar capable chipsets this year. And so we're actually getting the user equipment out in the market. So that once we have satellites up, you can start to turn the capability on with our early our early movies and early customers. And so things are are building up pretty rapidly. Within the next 24 months, we're aiming to have the initial services starting to turn on across US, Europe, Japan, Korea, and then starting to expand globally out from there. And how many satellites do we expect to have launched by the end of 27? So we're still working to sign the launch contracts. And that's actually one of the challenges right now in the space industry is launch. And there's a, I guess there's a SpaceX going public has brought a lot of attention to them. And I think there's a narrative that SpaceX has solved the launch problem. But I think the demand for launches is massively outstripping the supply right now. And that's made it, we can build satellites 10 times faster than we can launch them. And just because of the challenges on launch. So we haven't given any exact numbers on the dates just yet until we get the launch contracts set in place. And so exciting to see new launchers coming on board. And they can't come online fast enough. So at scale and my understanding is scale is 256 eventually. Yeah, through 250, 358. What kind of new use cases in say mid 2030s can we expect to deliver to the customers who are open to disclose the use cases? Sure. Yeah, so give too many specific customer names. But what we've seen, I guess when we started out, we had the GPS isn't so many things that we were just kind of chasing all over the place and figuring out where Poo actually Who needs this now? Who wants it later? Who are the early adopters? Who are the growth markets? How does it transition from from there? What we have found is that in GPS Tech there is a kind of a classic adoption curve where you see a lot of the early adopters in You know the the classic high-performance markets construction and agriculture and in areas that we actually really on thought that You know what GPS is solved they can afford to put the high-performance equipment on board The other thing you get down to the high-acres they need with all the the fancy equipment But when you actually go out and talk to the The end users and the farmers. It's like okay. Well Yeah GPS works in the middle of the field But you know when I get to the tree line I'm behind the trees and now it blocks out GPS or blocks out my corrections stream and now you know I mean I have to sit in the tractor all day because I have to steer it and turn it around when it gets to the tree line or I can't drive the tractor Underneath the poly tunnel or into an orchard or into a barn because GPS is too weak to actually get in and give reliable positioning And a lot of the operational scenarios that they're trying to actually operate in So we've seen a lot of uptake in the the high-performance markets and you know precision agriculture and I think a lot of people don't appreciate how Important precision agriculture is to you know sustainability that the amount of Fertilizer saving and water saving that precision agriculture creates that so imagine if you're planting four plants in a row One way to fertilize them is you just lay fertilizer down the entire strike But if you can go just put fertilizer on each individual plant the amount of fertilizer that you've saved is like 50 plus percent yeah and think about doing that now with water also and how much you know there's like Water savings It may not be something that stands out as much in the US, but when you get into other developing countries where it's a real challenge I mean this this starts to make massive differences in just the way that countries operate the precision agriculture has saved More water than I think the US like drinks in a year. It's just it's massive But the challenge with presenting agriculture is it works great if you can afford the equipment and so how do we actually make these things affordable and get them out there? So that's one of the applications that I'm excited about and starting to see a lot more uptake in even precision timing that I think a lot of people don't realize that You know GPS is the world's timing synchronization source and so whether that is a You know a stock market or a bank or a power grid or a cell tower or a data center the way that these things all say synchronized is through GPS and With more and more threats popping up with GPS jamming or spoofing especially in conflict zones. It's one of the first things that happens as GPS gets messed with That can create real havoc on a lot of critical infrastructure where we can provide it additional security protection layer To prevent that yeah make sense if Thinking more from a consumer hat if I to explain to my kids Yeah, the heck does one I don't why should I care what kind of changes do you think? Looking ten years ahead consumers would see yeah with this millimeter time back to see how how do you sort of give us a futuristic vision as a consumer How's on my change their lives? So I When I talk to people at a gym right now that Or somewhere like oh, was you doing GPS stuff does that mean it's gonna solve my Strava errors? And you know, I'm not gonna it's that I ran one mile, but I actually ran 1.2 or point eight or whatever else Like yes things like this where every time you went under a tree and the thing freaked out You start to to actually solve and get those replaced with an actually accurate track I do think supporting The world of you're not just cell phone applications I think but like two thirds of the apps on most people's phones use Location for something so whether it's a Strava app Or even you know right now you just people just accept that once you block Indores you completely lose navigation And it's like okay, well, I went into a building put your phone away because it's you know the blue dots is kind of somewhere But it's pretty tough to tell yeah where you know our Our signal from space is strong enough to get through a couple walls like we're not gonna drive it Ten stories deep into a building, but if you're in a low-rise building you're starting to get capability and this is really the long-term vision of where the company is going also Is you know, how do we build the space layer that can get you you know to call indoors light and then use that to start to expand on it to build something that can give you Indores everywhere and how do we transition from a world where You know, we can't even get centimeters outdoors to let's at least get the centimeter accuracy need for you know drone deliveries and autonomous cars and you're looking down the road Getting all of these different autonomous Capabilities to go from luxury toys to you the default form of transportation the default form of delivery the default form of Mobility for aerial mobility. They all need Precision and reliable location to be able to do that right and I think that's where we really start to fill the gaps And then how do you start to build on that and go into our our the next stage of the company is? How do you ensure that everything has centimeter accuracy? You know even even indoors is the ultimate vision of where we think we can go with this? Yeah, no, I mean really do we Meet our investing companies where the social Benefits and the mission is is so so great in addition to just a commercial opportunity and so We are excited about where this is going so um then now maybe perhaps jumping to something a little more like fun I'm gonna ask you a bunch of rapid fight-type questions Okay, and you have to sort of off the cuff come up with certain answers and hopefully And again think of these questions are directed towards entrepreneurs and and potentially future investors if you could travel back in time Inzona what would you have done differently? I think that probably goes back to some of the things we shared earlier that balancing Growth spend versus runway management a little bit differently in some of their early stages If you were talking to another entrepreneur, how would you guide them on this? What are the very explicit milestones you need to get to the next stage of the business and If you're spending like if you're spending time or money or anything else not on those make sure we have a Extremely good and clear reason why you're doing that That most of your energy and resources really needs to be spent on that That doesn't mean it has to be 0% on anything else, but you have to be very very disciplined on anything that you're spending outside of that. Yeah so Now that you're a CEO What are the things you can no longer do as a CEO which you love doing in your early days atzona? I mean I'm an engineer at heart and like I was like I like building things and designing things That is as I was fun for me and then I get to go do it in my garage still, but less so at work My role has Transition to you know being the one challenging the requirements on designs to really Now say with this is what a design needs to do because we have entire engineering teams that are much better than I am at Designing the actual thing my job is set into I need a thing that does this like these are the business requirements that a satellite or a system or something needs to do and You know hire smart people and let them tell us how to do it is what we've kind of a I can walk by the engineers desk and give them my random shower thoughts occasionally, but they're generally welcome to ignore those also How do you maintain conviction in a business where progress is measured in years and sometimes decades? Not months like a traditional self-economy Well, I mean going as fast as you can certainly helps and trying to compress those timelines, which is I think you can I was I was go faster, but I mean having having the team around there that also has the conviction in it, but One of the the things that we've worked to do as a company is step back and celebrate the wins and it is You know if you look at this week versus last week versus the week for it Okay, maybe it doesn't seem like much when you step back and say like what do we accomplish this month like wow This is really a lot and we say what did we accomplish in the last six months and it is worth taking a time to step back and make sure that the team is celebrating those wins also because it's It's easier for me to to glaze over them, but it's equally easy for everyone to glaze over them It just relies how much work and how quickly in many ways things are moving in there What part of your job as a CEO? Okay, which you didn't expect has surprised you most than when you initially founded the company I think how much it is actually worth it to and necessary to offload things was one of the things that like so in the early stages I was handling recruiting and I was handling Accounting and an office management to handle all these different pieces and So like well, do we really need someone like do entirely need to hire someone to go do this and I was Equally like very opposed to getting an executive assistant for a very long time because it just felt it just felt arrogant Like I don't feel like I need an assistant. I feel like I should be doing these things, but starting to realize that As the position of the company You know the same way that we kind of learned in the early stages It is genuinely what is in the company's best interest for me to be focusing on what I need to be doing and Get someone who is an expert in HR an expert in office management and accounting to handle those things on it and if if you're doing 10 things you're probably doing them all kind of half-ass and like go hold half some one thing and that's being the CEO and having a sister now has really helped that also in keeping focus on you know it is in the company's best interest for me to not be spending half my day coordinating travel and meetings and that wasn't obvious to me though. Okay make sense. What are the big problems in space which you if you were asked to advise an entrepreneur to solve what problems would you ask them to focus on right now which you are not solving. I think it's tough to ask a new entrepreneur because it to solve this one because it is a long tail on it but but launch is a serious bottleneck still. I'm excited about what companies you know some of the new launchers are doing and hopefully going to help relieve the pressure on that bottleneck but like I much I like this this we can build satellites ten times faster we can launch them I bet the satellite supply right now is a hundred X what the launch capacity in the world actually is and so anything that can help relieve and loosen that I think Starship can certainly certainly help with that but Realistki Starship is it's SpaceX's rocket space actually will probably be using a lot of Starship capacity for for themselves I would assume for some amount of time. Make sense make sense. Any question you would like to ask me as a investor former entrepreneur which you might have wanted to ask other investors never bothered asking. Yes me the question of like what what did people pass on with us like what were your biggest concerns before you invested in zone and like what what stood out as the I mean there's obviously the good things but like what's what scared you about what we're building. It's very rare when I see a company that it hits me like a hammer man this is such an obvious value creation opportunity so there was absolutely no doubt in me or our team that if you could execute on this this is massive. We're not talking about billions we talk about trillions right. Our worry was capital and whether capital was patient enough and available in at a frequency and and size which would allow you to fulfill your vision I mean when I brought this up to 56 satellites the numbers which is crazy and we're talking about two three years back so there was never a conviction problem about the opportunity to us it's hardly I mean we often see people's making incremental improvements in the real world but what you're doing is so radical and that's why we are so excited that the world is finally coming to recognize what you're doing and and starting to call you large corporations are calling you so we are we excited we are very proud we we delighted to to to be part of this journey and and trying to be helpful as we can be so thank you Brian really appreciate you taking the time on a very busy day I know you have today to spend time with us here at Deep Tech Unleashed. Thank you very much that awesome. [Music]