David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, I do know now SpaceX (I think) has sent more humans to space than the entire Mercury program. It was a stat that I saw thrown out yesterday, so amazing how the pace is picking up. For those of you watching this live at ASCEND, a few words about Acquired (this podcast) and what the show is. First of all, David and I are not from the aerospace industry. We are venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that invest in consumer and B2B startup technology companies, but we’re big fans and observers of space. Today, this episode will reflect an outsider’s perspective albeit we hope a fairly well-researched one. Our goal, besides our own self-indulgence in getting to geek out on the topic that we love, is to try and make space more accessible to those in adjacent fields. I know I’m not alone when I say this, but I think that the space ecosystem is poised to explode over the next decade or so, and this is one of the most exciting places in technology to be right now, though I’m sure all of you who are watching this live probably feel like it’s been this way for a while, and who is this guy who thinks he just discovered something and waltzed it in here? So, I'm really excited to tell this story with you today. As always, if you love Acquired and want to hone your craft of company-building, you should join the community of Acquired Limited Partners. Among other things, you will get access to the LP show, where we dive deeper into the fundamentals of company-building and investing. The last LP episode that we had was with Rahul Vohra. It was insanely valuable and a very enlightening conversation, where he pulled back the curtain on the unorthodox tactics that he used in raising venture capital investment for Superhuman, which is now valued at over a quarter of a billion dollars. If you are not already an LP, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquire.fm/lp, and all new listeners get a 7-day free trial. Thank you to some awesome sources in our research. Julian Guthrie’s real awesome book, How to Make a Spaceship, that covers the entire history of the XPRIZE. There’s a great documentary called Black Sky that covers the entire development of the SpaceShipOne program. We will put all the links that were a part of our research, the talks we watched by Virgin Galactic executives like George Whitesides, lots of other great bits that powered the research here into the show notes when this does come out as a podcast that you can find anywhere where fine podcasts are distributed. David, with that, shall we dive into the history and facts? Indeed, and for folks to listen to Acquired, you’ll know that we can’t start our episodes without going back at least 50 years. In this case, we’re going to go back over 100 years. It just makes us so pleased here. We’re going to go back to 1919 and the announcement of the Orteig Prize, which was a $25,000 prize—that’s backed by the Orteig family, I believe, is behind it—for anyone who could fly a plane, an air vehicle nonstop from New York City to Paris or vice-versa. Of course, famously a few years later—actually more years than I would have thought, eight years later in 1927—Charles Lindbergh won that prize in the famous Spirit of St. Louis, which I think is now in the Air and Space Museum in Washington hanging there. It has to be. That was (I believe_ the first major aviation prize to spur innovation. Of course, there would be later prizes after that as well, and that would lead directly into what we’re about to talk about here with the XPRIZE, but this whole idea of using a prize to spur innovation is pretty cool. Totally. I think this is brilliant. I’m not sure this was the intention behind it but all these prizes since then have realized you get an amazing amount of leverage on your dollar. This $25,000 prize (I think) had $400,000 poured into the research and development by all the different teams who are competing for it, so not a bad return there if you had to go to raise that $400,000 100 years ago by yourself. That would’ve been a much taller order to get a similar outcome.…

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