Why Every Satellite Needs Earth | Northwood CEO on a16z

Key Takeaway

Space missions are bottlenecked by ground infrastructure, not launch capability. Every satellite is a depreciating asset that only generates ROI through data transmission—which requires ground connectivity. Northwood Space solved this by vertically integrating the entire ground segment (antenna hardware, site development, networking, software) to deploy systems in 3 months instead of 3 years. The key insight: you can build and launch satellites faster than you can connect to them from Earth, creating a critical infrastructure gap that's holding back the entire space economy.

Episode Overview

Bridget Mendler, CEO of Northwood Space, discusses how her company is modernizing ground infrastructure for satellites—the critical but overlooked third pillar of the space economy alongside launch and spacecraft manufacturing. The conversation covers Northwood's vertical integration strategy, the company's $50M Space Force contract, and how ground infrastructure bottlenecks are limiting both commercial and government space missions. Mendler explains why space is analogous to the early internet era and how better ground connectivity will unlock entirely new categories of space-based applications.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Every Satellite Needs Earth | Northwood CEO on a16z from A16Z. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Every satellite requires a connection point back to Earth. If you don't have it, you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a rock in space. You just want a $50 million contract with Space Force to help modernize. At Northwood, we want to take space missions further faster. We're looking for a categorical outcome, not just an incremental outcome. incremental outcome. incremental outcome. Starlink is working on direct optical inner satellite links. How much of that is a threat? I view it as like a 0% threat.

SpaceX was able to bring launch cost down by an order of magnitude what came before. Why hasn't the same thing happened at ground? ground? ground? Oh man. Um Bridget, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So we're here to talk about Northwood. We're here to talk about space. But first want to talk about how you got here. uh when uh you know unconventional career paths some may say when you look at the arc of your career what are the threads that tie it together how do you make sense of your path you know following curiosity I think curiosity becomes the most organic motivator yeah for for people and that's definitely the case for me I think you know my my home environment growing up was really uh cultivating that curiosity and my parents also really encouraged excellence which I think is great so you know if you're curious ious about something, you know, it's not just something you dabble in.

It's something you try to take to like the nth degree and and really like try to understand what excellence looks like in that domain. domain. domain. And so that kind of is, you know, led me to a lot of different places. I' I've said this some other places before. My mom is also an incredibly determined person. Yeah. person. Yeah. person. Yeah. And so that's something that I think I was influenced by. And so like, you know, follow what you're curious about. do it to the greatest capacity you can and don't take no for an answer and then you kind of wind up like doing a bunch of different things um in in some really interesting experiences.

So I feel very grateful for that. It's fascinating because sometimes people frame it as either or either like you got to get you know just especially for kids like just straight A pluses uh or it's you know just do whatever you're curious about but the combination like do what you're curious about but also just absolutely crush it in it. It's a interesting combination. interesting combination. interesting combination. Yeah. Yeah. sort of in your early career, did you think it would be forever or like at one point were you like, I'm bored of this.

I want to go into academia like how did how did you make your career decisions? You know, it's interesting because like I I would analogize to how a lot of people that we bring into our company think about their career path. Like a lot of the incredible people that we bring in, people who are like totally rock stars in their career, they're not thinking on like a 20-year time scale about their career. they're thinking more incrementally than that am, you know, maybe there's not a definite timeline attached to it.

It's like as far out as you can see on the horizon and just like worrying about that far cuz otherwise you constrain yourself too much. much. much. Um, and so that has really been how I've approached my career. I I would have definitely not expected I would be running a space company. Yeah. Um, so like so like so like but like also why not? Because all I could see in the future as an actress, you know, back then was maybe like five years in the future, right?

right? right? So you were like actress until it no longer became fun anymore or until academia or something became more interesting and then in academia you were like or at some point you were like and then you were just chasing your curiosity and then you're like, oh maybe when did the company idea come into play? M play? M play? M yeah I think being in entertainment I got to be a spokesperson for a lot of different things and I and I tried to align what I felt to be impactful with what I was speaking up for.

So you know as an actor you wind up being able to have a platform to contribute to a lot of different causes and that was something that I prioritized but I think I wanted my impact to go deeper than that. And so I I always kind of knew in the back of my mind I wanted to create my own thing although you know I didn't have like a concrete idea of what that was and as a child of you know millennial era I got to see the internet coming to life and I got to see cellular networks coming to life and like what a profound shift that was on um the world before versus the world after.

And so I think uh when the problem set around space networking came up and when that was something that I started digging into it connected on that deeper level where it's like wow this is um something like an opportunity to make an impact on an industry that could be as fundamental at that kind of level of of internet and cellular that felt like such a unique opportunity to get in at an industry when it was at that early stages. Yeah. Um, just seemed kind of like the perfect thing.

thing. thing. And you started it with your husband. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Was he always uh on board from the beginning or how did that emerge? And I should say my parents also started a a company together and ran it for 15 years. Definitely inspired by the mom. That's super cool. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny how people are now like, "Oh, you start a company with your with your husband." But like people have been doing family businesses like since the dawn of time. Um Yeah. And and I think for both of us, we're just both ambitious.

um and kind of curious about how the world works and we we were both passionate about you know building businesses and so it was like all right let's align our efforts towards something like there's a certain utilitarian aspect to it where it's like we have a certain amount of energy and time and we want the most like net outcome from this um so that was definitely like a part of my thought process too but um it's been awesome yeah I think you know it's been a really great experience great experience great experience talk about let's get into Northwood um what you're trying to achieve um and and what's the why now for it?

Yeah. So, what we do, we're ground infrastructure kind of end to end for space companies. So, all the way from the time when they're first coming up with, you know, satellite mission, what the space operators want to do all the way to when they're actually streaming data, delivering that data to the end customers. customers. customers. Yeah. You know, the problem that we're solving is for every satellite, it requires a connection point back to Earth so that they can uh control the spacecraft. You know, it is kind of like a remote control car where it needs some mechanism to make sure that it's going where it's supposed to go and a way to actually bring that data back to the users on Earth because that's where the users are.

Um, so that point of contact on Earth is called the ground infrastructure and you know super basically if you don't have it you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a a rock in space you're doing nothing with. So ground in infrastructure it's it's completely fundamental. Um and for us uh you know we we were observing the space industry how launch cadence was increasing. you could you could put a satellite up into space way faster and you could build satellites way faster because there was this whole um boom around space space space spacecraft manufacturing and interestingly what started becoming the longest pole in the tent was just getting the point of contact on the ground to connect with.

So you know you could build a satellite and launch it faster than you could actually connect with it from the ground which just seemed absurd. And so we're like, why is that? This kind of, you know, critical third component was not modernizing because you'd seen all this modernization happening elsewhere. And when we started pulling it back, it was kind of like a classic value chain problem where there was just not like the incentives aligned with each stakeholder in the value chain to to modernize and innovate.

So you had, you know, antenna manufacturers that were, you know, responding to a call from a customer and delivering them uh a point solution. They weren't thinking like holistically about how you you build better uh ground infrastructure. You were having like a a software integrator layer where they were basically just dependent on whatever infrastructure was being laid by somebody else. And so we realized like this is really holding back innovation and like a complete thought on on what this should look like on the ground side.

And so really the only way to address fixing the ground segment was to do the whole thing. Um and when we say the whole thing like it includes a lot of disperate disciplines and activities. So uh it includes things like like like R&D of antenna hardware. So that the uh antenna on Earth that is physically receiving RF signals from space, interpreting them into ones and zeros, sending them back to the users and and uh popping them back up to the spacecraft. That includes uh actually, you know, procuring land and doing development at a site to be able to put that antenna hardware somewhere in the world because satellites orbit the earth.

You need to connect with them as they orbit the earth. uh that includes the networking layer that includes the actual you know software API that you have to connect with to give commands at that ground site. And so it was it was kind of a daunting task. It's like, you know, realizing you have to do this really massive undertaking, this this big risk in order to experience the big reward on the other side, which is, you know, unlocking this critical third pillar of infrastructure for the space economy and really enabling it to go to new heights.

And so that was kind of like our our venture scale problem. or like this is going to require a lot of money, uh, a killer team across many different disciplines, and it's going to require a ton of orchestration of all of those different pieces converging together to deliver something that is really better end to end as well as like something you can you can turn around quickly. Yeah. quickly. Yeah. quickly. Yeah. Um, and so that's kind of the undertaking that we've been on. And when did you realize and how did you realize that space infrastructure was broken?

like what was the idea maze that you guys went? Was this your first idea um that you guys decided to pursue or Yeah. How did they come to be? Yeah, man. We've been doing antennas ever since that that Home Depot run during the pandemic. Yeah. Uh that made us ground nerds. Um yeah, so we were uh we started working on the antenna uh designs during the pandemic. Uh, you know, that was our our summer project and yeah, we just describe ourselves as ground nerds. It was just cool.

At first, it was just really cool to be able to receive signals from hundreds of miles away. Like I said, that's the RF waves. They're like fainter than um, you know, the power on a flashlight that you're getting from space. and you get to interpret that into, you know, for us it was an image, but for other other folks that use satellite data. That's, you know, that's our missile warning system. That's how we find out like about any missile going off around the world. That is our GPS infrastructure.

That is our uh, you know, for a lot of people that's their one source of internet and it all comes through a ground infrastructure that is able to interpret those faint signals and make it work. So it was just kind of like you know one of those magic moments where you just become really fascinated with the technology and then we started peeling it back further and we uh we did this market study where we looked at all the commercial operators. Um we looked at you know US government use cases as well for how that they were resolving their ground and it was at that point really from the point of first just being curious about the space that we realized that a big bottleneck was coming.

coming. coming. Yeah. And is this an idea that couldn't have existed five years ago because there was just not enough of an economy around or um in like Yeah, talk about the timing of it. Yeah, I I think um it really does influence the timing because previously if you're not as concerned about a three-year timeline between, you know, concept of a spacecraft and and launching it, then um it's not a big deal if the ground segment can't keep pace. I also think like the ideas for how to use space have changed a lot both so you know pace as well as the the ideas around it.

So the mission sets that we're talking to folks about now um are a greater level of proliferation. They're talking about way more spacecraft being in communication at the same time than they used to. They're also talking about mission sets where satellites are moving in new ways. They're moving really dynamically uh in and out of different orbits. Um, you know, previously you could think about uh space missions. It was a pretty static world. Like think about old school space where it's it's kind of like science missions, one satellite parked over a certain location, not moving anywhere, sending very small amounts of data to now it's this whole circus of uh a bunch of different missions needing to coexist, transmitting way more data and uh having like constantly changing parameters.

So I think that has really you know flipped the switch for for some of the you know government customers that we talk about like their their missions just would not be able to be resolved without a new ground architecture and same on the commercial side frankly. Yeah your system is able to deploy in 3 months whereas a traditional ground station deploys in three years. What enables you guys to have that level of speed up? It really comes down to the vertical integration. And what we mean by that is kind of like what I what I mentioned of being able to stitch together all of the different pieces in the endto-end system so that they inform each other.

So for example, when we say 3 years before, what did that timeline look like? It looked like an antenna vendor who, you know, gets a phone call. After they get the phone call, they press the order on the supply chain. they got to wait x number of months to actually get the parts to arrive. Then they assemble them all. It's a bespoke manufacturing line because it's, you know, it's a bespoke system. They're just, you know, they're doing it uh one off and then they ship it and they're shipping a giant piece of equipment.

So, it probably has to go over, you know, uh, ocean, uh, shipping methods. And then it arrives at site and you have to put together a giant construction project because the size of many of these antennas, they're like multi-story buildings. So, you have to do permitting, you have to lay a concrete foundation, you have to have whole construction teams in order to put them together. That adds up into a three-year timeline. Whereas for us, because we're thinking of all of those things at the same time as we're doing that development, we get to say we need our antennas to fit in a standard shipping container that can go on a commercial United Airlines flight and so it gets there the same day.

We need our system to be able to fork off of that shipping container and land on a patch of dirt with no concrete and and just plug into a standard 240 power bolt. Um, we need to be able to have that telemetry run across our entire system so that we know how to fire it up in a matter of minutes. So being able to coordinate all of those things is really what's translated to that um that outcome of shaving off the time. And when did you realize that vertical integration was just where you at to go?

Do you know from the beginning or is it something you you you learned over time? And what have you learned about hard tech in the process of of doing that? Yeah, I think I think it it was a bit of of a peeling back the problem space where initially you think okay great we we want to um we want to put more capacity we want to make more capacity available how can we optimize the ground system to do that. Um but then there's so many dependencies in um you know what the site actually looks like uh in what the software integration looks like and uh we just realized that the way to deliver the best solution that actually inign aligns our incentives with the customer was to do the whole thing.

So our incentives are aligned when our uh our measure of success is their mission success. And you don't have that if you're just solving part of the equation. equation. equation. Yeah. Yeah. SpaceX was able to bring launch cost down by an order of magnitude from what came before. Why hasn't the same thing happened in ground? ground? ground? Yeah. I think it it does come down like I hate to be a broken record on the vertical integration, but um the reason why that matters is that uh what SpaceX has done is they've really streamlined their product, right?

Like they're not trying to build a ton of different bespoke products. They build one thing and they make it super efficient and effective. They get the economies of scale and everything. And so for us, if we were, you know, just being an antenna vendor, then we would probably need to build a bunch of different types of products. But because we get to um see across so many different solutions, we can think and we invest our R&D in building a solution that works commonly across the industry.

So that means that uh you know we're accounting for commercial missions, government missions, allied missions all within the same system. Uh and that makes our costs lower and more efficient. Um and when we're able to do it as a shared service, uh that's really the difference for us. Like we we view ourselves more so as a platform, right? So it's it's not like a onetoone sale where you're trying, you know, get all of your uh value off of that single sale. Our platform is such that many missions can benefit from the same infrastructure.

So we make our investment and then many customers get to benefit off of that single investment that we make. And then what's great for customers on on their end with that is that they're able to take advantage of all of the learnings and all the investment that we've made across a bunch of different um a bunch of different concepts. And so uh you know winds up being more beneficial for them. They don't have to do like a big one-off capital expenditure on the system. They get to you know smooth out their costs and everybody's happy.

Starlink is working on direct optical inner satellite links. H how much of that is a threat to the ground station business model? business model? business model? I view it as like a 0% threat. And the reason why is if you are banking on um you know any of the space uh infrastructure, it is about the direction of data volume. And so for us, anything that supports growing the trend of data volume through space is is great. Like we're all on board with the same objective there.

And so for inner inner satellite links, what's what's great about that solution is that um it's reducing the latency. It reduces the friction of how you can actually transmit data through space. And so think about like all the use cases that that opens up when I I mean I think Starlink is a great example of this. You know, talking about matching or in and at certain times beating internet latency speeds like that would be unheard of in space before and look at the value of that business.

And so I think uh technologies that align with that trend uh are really positive. Yeah, that makes sense. In a potential Taiwan scenario, there's a version where you know ground stations can become targets. How do you think about resilience? resilience? resilience? I think that's a it's a great question and uh it actually is both a commercial question and a government question. like both commercial and and government care about resilience and I think like you can look at a lot of different companies that have tried to address this.

We take the similar path of proliferation. So making things like cheaper, faster to deploy, more uh volume manufacturing is kind of the solution to that. So that when a single site or location goes down that's you know it's not a catastrophe. um is actually interesting for some of our teammates that did come from Starlink that was their similar model. So they they consider resiliency in the same way where they have multiple ground sites in a region so that if one goes down it doesn't totally take their service off of offline.

Um so I think a similar concept applies here. Yeah. A lot of people analogize the space economy to the early internet. they say you know a lot of infrastructure being built you know lots of companies will fail uh and lots of applications you very successful applications will be built on top do you does this analogy hold for you yeah for sure um I get really inspired by the analogy um especially thinking about you know for folks that were early with the internet like they there's no way they would have foreseen what the internet is today um but they were betting on a direction and they were setting up a model that would uh that would basically like unlock a lot of innovation and they they were like uh they were developing principles and building aligned with certain principles that would support that innovation and and look what we have today.

Um yeah I mean I think like things as simple as like TCP IP protocols for example like trying to make different layers as as easy and supporting for innovation as possible. So, I think we're in a similar moment with the space industry where we don't know what is going to be built. Like a year ago today, would we think that everybody would be talking about orbital data centers? No way. Um, but it's captivated the public imagination and who knows what's going to come next. And so, um, for us, we are directionally aligned with that movement and we are building to principles that will support innovation.

like the whole thing that we're about is taking companies further faster, taking space missions further faster and we do that you know by our model which I've described. Um so if I were to like look forward into the space industry I think uh you know if you analogize to the internet like you have a couple of kind of platform infrastructure plays that really wind up becoming inshed across the internet and you know it's not like you have a thousand different companies that stand to benefit from them but there are a few that wind up becoming really uh influential and fundamental.

Um you know cloud is one that we analogize to a lot and we were inspired by um and we want to be one of those companies. Yeah. What is the right way of mental model for thinking about the relationship between the public sector and the private sector in terms of growing the space economy and or industry and sort of technological capabilities? Is it kind of like the internet where a lot of the early work was either done by or funded by um government and then the private sector sort of you know took the ball so to speak or is it more in parallel?

How should we think about that? Yeah, I think it's it's very analogous. I think it's interesting how the venture ecosystem fits in now in uh a deeper way than it it did back then. Um yeah, I think a lot of uh technology innovation does tend to take place at those fringes that the government use cases are solving for. And I think that's happening now. And I think the the benefit that we have which hopefully will lead to like a shorter cycle in reaching the kind of infrastructure scale with the space industry is with venture absorbing some of that risk.

When we talk to um government you know they're looking for partners to absorb that risk. Um and frankly when we talk to you know some of the commercial companies as well they're really excited about ventures role in uh absorbing some amount of risk so that they can pursue bigger ideas faster. Yeah. Um so so help us uh outline a little bit of the the space economy right now. Is it how should we think about the if we were to do the market map like the different you know types of players is it and then maybe the attributes to the market.

Is it like very fragmented? are there, you know, a couple big winners the kind of aggregate like what is the right way of thinking about? about? about? Yeah, I think I think the infrastructure plays are really important for space. Like there's a couple of or there's a number of fundamental things that uh can be those underlying components that make a big difference. So um for space things that matter is obviously launch like you need to have a way to actually get mass into orbit. Um power is another big thing to solve for space.

uh you need to have propulsion. That's another critical thing for space. Being able to actually maneuver once you're up there and then that connectivity back to Earth is really critical and being able to kind of orchestrate and network all of that connectivity is really important. Um and so I think we are in an interesting moment where that infrastructure is being built out to enable a different set of capabilities. Like if you look a few years back, you had the small satellite boom where there were a whole generation of companies that were built off of um you know doing a smaller level of infrastructure to um unlock different capabilities.

It feels like we've evolved into a a higher threshold of infrastructure that's going to unlock a whole other layer of capability. same curious what you think are the biggest bottlenecks to you know sort of unleashing a wave of innovation like if in a few years um you the economy you sort of you know accelerate significantly or there's a whole wave of um startups that emerge or or accelerate in their growth what would have needed to happen why could that be I mean like our biased answer is that ground is is really critical for that um obviously it's not the only thing like I think um you to unlock the innovation like you know power is a huge constraint uh for space and and so you know being able to do more in space is influenced by that uh but also uh the amount of data throughput you can get from space so like so like so like power improves you know how much data you could generate in space um but then ground impacts how much data throughput you can have through space which uh is critical for being able to um actually deliver those missions to end users.

I was just listening to uh the Elon uh John Collison Door Cash podcast on on uh data center space which is you know I haven't listened to it yet so apologies if I don't know you I just say this is the first I've heard of it what is your um thinking on it the feasibility of it will compute move to orbit yeah what do you think about about about so our mentality at Northwood is we want to take space missions further faster like we want to enable the most ambitious mission ambitious mission ambitious mission and translate them from dream to reality as fast as possible.

And so like the exact kind of juicy problem that gets the nerds at Northwood excited is uh you know here's this super ambitious concept for space. Um I think what's captivated a lot of people is thinking about you know how it pushes society. How thinking about uh kind of limitless power from space pushes society. like it gets a lot of people excited and inspired. Uh and so we want to be supporters of willing that into existence through taking that further faster. So I think a lot of people raise a lot of really valid concerns about it.

Um things that require or things that um mean there's going to be long timelines to bring it into existing whatever it is. Are we talking training? Are we talking inference etc. Like you know there's a lot of different um uh there's a lot of different details. Um but I think uh our our interest in it is uh how can we understand the space so that we can enable it to go um faster towards that outcome. that outcome. that outcome. What are some examples of companies or use cases that don't exist today um that you could envision um like dream for us?

What could some examples look like? Yeah, I think it's like what are what are the vertices that you're tracking? So like one verticy might be altitude. Right now when we talk about space missions um you're thinking of like low earth orbit through to geostationary orbit um you know it's a certain distance away from earth uh what if you could stretch that? What if you could have uh missions that go even deeper into space uh and have new exploratory capabilities um or you know different planets and the like.

Uh I think being able to stretch the tether further and further away from Earth I think is really interesting for what that could unlock. Another another verticy is is data throughput. So um right now like the concept of matching the volume of data uh from uh the internet to what's being done in space feels pretty preposterous. But what if it wasn't? like what if what if you could actually uh surpass the throughput of data on the internet in space? What kind of uh what kind of applications could you unlock with that?

I think you know the the whole interest with compute in space is kind of like attached to that concept. Um so yeah, I I think there's a lot that you can do. Um I think we have like a massive treasure trove of data about our planet that has not really been capitalized. So I think that is like huge amount of latent potential in my mind. So I'm I'm excited to see where you know some of the other advancements going on with technologies such as AI um will lead to really uh unlocking the the benefits of that.

You just won a $50 million contract uh with Space Force to help modernize. Um what does it mean to to say that the Pentagon would rather, you know, buy commercially than build themselves? Yeah, I think it's a pretty fundamental switch that represents the the timeline urgency uh and you know the the the change in uh a ground paradigm that we're confronting. Like you can't have the same models of procurement if you're talking about uh proliferated systems where you need to just have such a huge increase in ground infrastructure in such a short period of time.

you need to look at different models. Um, and so yeah, we were we were fortunate to be aligned with some of the um, great thinkers over on the Space Force side that are are really developing what that model would look like and really fortunate to be entrusted with such a significant program so early in our company's um, lifetime. And to the whole, you know, taking missions further faster point, like being involved in in missions of national significance is is something that um you know, that's what we're all about.

So I think it's very aligned with that satellite control network. Uh that is a common resource for US government where um you know, every launch runs through a satellite control network. uh it it tracks missions across a really wide set of uh US government use cases ranging from you know GPS to NASA missions um you know our missile track systems and the like. So it is a great opportunity for us to kind of demonstrate the the cross cutting capabilities that we are working on. on. on.

Yeah, there are 13,000 active satellites right now. Is that is that accurate? Sounds about right. And um I think you said that they're collecting millions of data um that can't be captured because there's not enough ground capacity. How bad is the bottleneck? Yeah, I So, you know, you can think of a satellite as basically like as soon as it launches into space, it's just a depreciating asset. It's just a really expensive depreciating asset and you're trying to maximize the value that you can get off of that asset.

Um and the way that you do that is by sending data because that is that is like the economic value of the spacecraft is the data that it can produce and the data that it can produce is directly proportional to the amount of ground connectivity that you have. So ground is quite literally how you increase the ROI of your spacecraft really matters for both commercial and US government missions. you know, for US government missions to launch a spacecraft. And like literally there have been a bunch of missions that have been launched with no ground plan.

And so that's like a you might just lose your spacecraft, which could be a very consequential um loss of an investment, or you just miss out on being able to make good use of those taxpayer dollars. Um and and same for commercial missions. Uh you know, we've heard from a number of different commercial companies like we are throughput limited. We're limited in how many customers we can serve because we don't have a big enough ground footprint. ground footprint. ground footprint. Yeah. We just talked about the the contract.

What's the next big milestone uh as you think about your your guys development? development? development? Yeah, I think building upon the use cases that we have. Uh I think we've been fortunate to find a lot of aligned customers with the the product that we are currently putting out. There's other products that we also have in the works. I think people know us as a phased array company but um with announcements we'll we'll have coming out before too long we we are more than that. Um we uh are kind of thinkers across the whole ground solution space.

So I think it it's both that you know product maturation as well as product development that we'll continue to be doing. Um while like I said it's orchestrating a ton of stuff we're also building a global ground network. We have five international entities now across the world. Uh we're like we'll be the United Nations of Northwood. Um and so yeah, we're we're doing uh we're currently on two continents. We'll be on uh number of others before the end of the year. And so got to got to do it all at once.

Yeah. Uh with that there, you know, I'm sure there are a lot of space nerds listening to this. Um say more about the the the company, the the the the size. um say you know the transition from a one product to multi-product company say more about you know the the company itself. itself. itself. Yeah I mean so like I mentioned before there's a lot of disciplines that need to come together to make Northwood successful. Uh and so we've really tried to pull from uh the best of the best in each of those disciplines.

the folks that have done it before. Um, you know, a lot of folks that have experience with building out sites globally. Um, you know, like I mentioned, that's the Starlink team, but that's also, uh, how can we be creative about other other industries that we can source from? Think about like, you know, AT&T cell towers. How are they doing that with such like global uh, presence? What about uh Tesla Tesla Supercharger stations? Um, so just kind of looking at at diverse talent bases for things like that.

um you know we we have like a really robust supply chain team because you have to be able to source in all of the components and and make it timely and make it uh resilient especially our our customers relying upon that. Um the engineering team uh we have a huge amount of software actually. Um so you know we're known again for like the hardware of our system but the software is actually like very extensive across like you know networking we have embedded we have um you know the actual front end of what we're building.

So it's it's a extreme multidisiplinary company. Um and so what's comp important for us is that we really you know value the different disciplines. I think that's something that probably I um philosophically contribute to the company. Um as well as just you know making sure that we're coordinated and and operating effectively as a team. So uh yeah we have we have done a lot of scaling. We've doubled in size a number of times already and we'll hopefully double again in size this year uh if not more.

So yeah and the size right now is uh around 75 employees. Cool. Talk a little bit about how you think about culture at Northwood. you know, what types of people you're you're trying to bring on, how you think about demolding. demolding. demolding. Yes. I'll give a little window into my uh expectations that I share with people when um they interview for Northwood. The first one is that we accomplish unreasonable things on unreasonable timelines. They surface level like sure, okay, everybody, you know, everybody can kind of get on board with that.

But, uh, you know, it's not just a matter of like applying more force to the problem. Um, it's about taking smart risks. So, it's not just force, it's also cleverness. It's like understanding the problem deep enough to know what the trades are that you can afford to make. Um, and so people that are able to do that kind of uh mental calculation and kind of like take take big leaps is really how you can actually move quickly. Um, the the second one is the endto-end ownership of your work.

And for me really what that translates to is, you know, people who are going to be bought in in a deeper way to the outcome beyond just checking some boxes off the list. I've like kind of been reflecting on like where does that come from for me? Like why is that something that matters for me? And I think, you know, it traces back to when I was uh you know pursuing my first passion growing up as a kid. Uh my mom was uh a huge supporter of me in a way that kind of went went beyond just demonstrating that she supported what I cared about but actually enabling me to do it in a way that like went beyond reasonleness.

So um I uh you know I wanted to be an actress. She's a full-time working mom sometimes like the main bread winner and like literally could not step away from her job. Like a lot of parents would have probably like put me in an acting camp and just been like, "Good luck, cool." Um, and then and then maybe just thrown up their hands, but she like, you know, was on the phone coordinating travel and like caretakers and, you know, booking me plane tickets and um, you know, figuring out how to get me the resources to accomplish my dream um, in a way that was, you know, pretty ridiculous at times.

Um, and I think that that's been like something that has really stuck with me is uh the amount of care that she had investment in in my my dream and where I wanted to go is something that you know I get inspired by from a mission perspective. Like the amount of care that people on our team have invested in the outcome that goes so far beyond um you know the description on on their job description. And you know that means that like on our North Dakota trip where we were you know back deploying our first antenna, people like stayed up you know more than 24 hours on multiple occasions in you know a span of a week where uh we just needed to to get the system running.

And then the third one is um is um is um uh we're looking for a categorical outcome not not just an incremental outcome. And I think like what that comes back to is like if you want to do something that moves the world forward, you need to have a team. Um that's something that I learned back from my time in entertainment, you know, like I I was uh working on a TV show and I'm just like one cog in this really big operation. Like there's no way you could get a TV show on air without a whole coordinated team of people to make that possible.

Um, and then if you want to function effectively as a team, you need a lot of trust. And so what's really critical to me in having teams that trust each other is, uh, you know, basically like a low ego environment. Like when people come in the door, they need to be able to, um, need to they need to be able to, um, admit their faults in a way that like is just purely pursuing understanding what the problem is, understanding what the goal is. um and and also be bold enough to raise flags when there's issues in a problem set.

So um yeah, I think that teamwork, the amount of care and the ability to be clever and take smart risks is kind of like the foundational pieces of of our culture. That's a great note to to to to wrap on. Um the story about your mother is particularly inspiring. Thanks for sharing it, Bridget. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me.