Peter Platzer Transcript
Clint Betts
Peter, thank you so much for coming on. Man, just looking at your resume and everything you've done leading up to leading and being the CEO of Spire is incredible. You have done a number of incredible things. I wonder, maybe we start this interview with, how did you get to become the CEO of Spire? And you even co-founded the company, so how did your career leading up to, prior to Spire, lead to this?
Peter Platzer
That's a great question, and thanks for having me on and having this conversation with me. I have been enamored and inspired by space and how we could leverage space to improve life on Earth, improve the human condition, and what life is about, ever since being a teenager. But it was an industry and an area that really did not have room for someone dynamic. I've been building stuff ever since being a teenager, be that software, be that hardware, be that business. It just was not this type of place.
And so I kept on looking at it, I would say every 10, 15 years. And at one point, I went through a process; I read a book by Laurie Beth Jones called The Path, where she takes you through a process of writing a mission statement for your life. Now, that's a mission statement for your life, not for your career or for your personal... No, it's for your life. And that mission statement came out to lead, inspire, and create the business of space for the benefit of all. And it was a fascinating process because I read it, and it resonated with me, and I said like, "Okay, I did not expect this when I started the process. And clearly, that's not what I'm doing at this point in time." And I looked again like, okay, how can I do something with space to improve the human condition, life on Earth? And it was still not a good place.
And it took another decade, 11 years of the world changing and certain pieces falling into place in the macroeconomic environment, the technologies that drive the industry, certain benefits that humanity can derive from space, like climate change, really coming to the forefront of the collective psyche, of the zeitgeist, that allowed me to say, "Okay, let me quit my well-paying job, go back being a student, living in a dorm, living hand to mouth, as you do as a student, and study everything there is about space, and then apply myself on leveraging space to improve life on Earth."
Clint Betts
So, can you talk more about writing your own mission statement for your life? That sounds fascinating. You said the book is called The Path, so listeners and people who are watching this should check that out. But what was that process? How long did it take you to write your mission statement?
Peter Platzer
I would say it's about a six to eight-week process because it is built upon a lot of self-reflection. One of the first exercises is, there are four big elements. In some traditions, it's five, but four; you have fire, you have water, you have Earth, you have wind, or air. Who are you? And you start off by saying, okay, take Earth, and then write down 20 features of Earth, characteristics. And then write down 20 activities that really exemplify for you the element earth. And you do this for Earth; you do it for all four elements. And then it's asked, who are you? What kind of mixture are you? Are you really one element? And so you spend this time feeling, am I more Earth, am I more fire? Where am I?
And there are a lot of exercises like this. Another exercise is, what are some gifts that you have been given from the people you grew up with, from your siblings, your parents, your grandparents, your teachers, your neighbors? What have they given you as a gift? Which gifts have you accepted, and which gifts did you not accept? What kind of expectations did they place on top of you, and which one did you make your own? Which one did you accept and put it in your backpack, but you fulfill them, but they're not really yours? And which one did you ignore?
And so you really go through this period of self-reflection, and different from a maths problem, which you can cram and you can just like, okay, I'm just going to get it done, when you do this self-reflection of who you are, you need to give it time to breathe. You need to give it space to expand and come to the surface. And so that's why the process takes a little bit of time, as you spend time with yourself, and what makes you you and really drives you. And then you identify your values, and you really hone, and you start with this massive list of activities, and you really hone into what resonates with me. And so it just takes time and space that you need to allow for this. You can't just do it... I just do it five minutes over lunch, in between my two big phone calls. It needs space. But it's a wonderful process. It's one that I absolutely love.
I have augmented the process since then with other kind of things and put it together in a nice little program for people because I think it's a very powerful exercise to have a sentence as simple as to lead, inspire, and create the business of space for the benefit of all, to help you just check-in. How much of my life is following this sentence right now? And it's going to be okay. Sometimes, it's going to be zero, and as long as you can understand why you're choosing to only have 0% of your life being in tune with that mission statement, that's okay. That was a long time coming for me. The time was simply not right to be in the space industry. You have this thing called bills to pay, and the time just wasn't right.
And I was always though ready, and on the lookout, and willing to sacrifice. I went from a nice job in finance to being a student, having no money. I actually had to sell some of my... I have an old calculator collection. I had to sell some pieces of my calculator collection to pay for food and rent. So, I think it was totally worthwhile, and it's certainly something that I can highly recommend for people.
Clint Betts
What drove your decision to go back to school? That's interesting.
Peter Platzer
So, part of it is, I really like university. I like studying; I like learning new stuff. So that, I think, is part of me. You don't accumulate three graduate degrees if you don't like university. So, part of it is just simply; I just like it.
I really wanted to have a strong foundation. I had a business education, and I had a physics education, and that's probably a reasonable start, but I've never worked in the space industry. And so I looked for a highly compressed master's program that allowed me to learn everything from space engineering to the census, to the applications to the law to the policies to the big players. I wanted to have a 360-degree view of what is happening in the space industry, and I knew that there were programs which could give me that.
And so I looked at all of the programs across the world, and then there is one in France, in Strasbourg, which could give me that. And I learned everything from the Outer Space Treaty of 1968, and there's space policies differences between India and the United States and China and Russia to quaternions and space engineering and how SAR works and how optics works and how everything else in between works in that program. And on top of that, got to spend time at NASA as an intern as well. So, it was a 100% worthwhile experience that gave me what I was looking for a 360-degree view of the state of the space industry at that point in time.
Clint Betts
And then, when you get to Spire, you've written your personal mission statement, and now you get to a point where you got to write your company's mission statement and come up with your company's values. What was the difference between that process from personal and company, and how long did that take, and how did you come up with your company's values and mission statement?
Peter Platzer
So, I think the easiest thing is, when you start a company, you get to overlap the mission statement of your own and the company pretty closely. And so, for Spire, it is to leverage space to improve life on Earth. So, there is an almost 100% overlap. You have to spend a lot of time on, how do I then do this as a business? So you do have to spend a lot of time on where is the market opportunity. Why is there a business? Will there be an opportunity to spend X dollars to create X plus Y dollars of value so that you can get a small percentage of the value that you create from your customers? So, that's where you spend a lot of time.
But what we wanted to do, what I wanted to do, that was very easy. I wanted to leverage space to improve life on Earth, and clearly, it had to be around data. I've been around data and loved data since I was a little kid. And so, I think that was pretty straightforward. I think where we spend more time on that is like, okay, so that's the mission: improve life on Earth through space, leverage space to do that as a data company. Okay. How do we want this place to feel like? I was fortunate that I had been part of a lot of very high performing organizations, CERN, the Boston Consulting Group, Harvard, hedge funds on Wall Street. So, I've been around, fortunately, a lot of high-performing organizations. And then you say, okay, what is the stuff again that makes really me me? Because those are going to be the easiest people for me to attract.
And there are certain things where data tells you what makes great performing organizations. So one of them is, the greater the variety of backgrounds, the higher performing the team. They did this famous experiment in the military where they said, "You need to find a submarine," or something like that. And they stuck... One group was ten submarine engineers or something like that, and the other one was ten random people. And the ten random people from their background... I mean, they were all really, really smart and really, really good, but you had historians and other people in the random group. They outperformed nine out of ten times the specialists. So diversity of experience, different approaches, education, mindsets, preferences, all of that, and that MIT study measured it, they outperformed.
So, very quickly, we said, okay, we want to be... It was a little bit too difficult, formulated the world's largest heterogeneous group of superstars. I think the marketing people of the US later called it, you want to have diverse people, it's much easier to remember. So, there are certain things that you have just data for why you want to do it. You want to have growth mindset. Growth mindset people, they deal well with changing circumstances. If the environment in which you operate is dynamic, that is much preferred.
There were a couple of pieces in my thesis work in France. One of them was that I discovered or described the equivalent of Moore's law from the computer industry operating in the space industry. But the other one was a juxtaposition of a static description of the business environment, according to Porter's Five Forces, where everyone has a role. Like, you are my vendor, I am Mary's competitor, so it's very static. Versus Richter's dynamic business ecosystem approach, which looks more of how actually biology flora and fauna are organized, where... Let's take a pack of wolves, which is an example that is often used. They are fierce competitors for ranking inside the pack, but when they hunt, they are fierce and loyal collaborators. And so, roles are very dynamic in the ecosystem around the world.
And the same thing happened when your business environment is rapidly changing as, for example, it was in the space industry that, companies were sometimes vendors, sometimes they were prime, sometimes they were collaborators, sometimes they were competitors. And it's just a different view on the world, and having a more dynamic view is very, very beneficial. So there are certain things which you have data for, but then there are certain things which are preference. So we built our six values alongside things which we believed are either preference or there's data for it.
So, for example, one of our six values is collaborative. Now, we all are aware of organizations that are extremely high achieving, but it's not very collaborative. It's like you eat what you kill, including your colleague. And it works. I worked in an organization where it's kind of like if you don't get promoted in 18 months, we fire you. And it's not there's unlimited amounts of promotion available, and they say, oh, we can't limit you, but at the end of the day, they're not going to promote everyone to be the boss. So, different organizations are successful based on different premises, and we just made a choice based on preference to be collaborative, to say winning in Spire is a team sport. What matters is that we win, and winning is that you deliver or over-deliver to the customer, and it doesn't really matter who individually was; we're all going to share this, and we consider it a collaborative effort. And so that's one of our values.
And we enshrined them. We sat down, we did a seminar, we had someone guide us, and it was a three-day process where, again, you went through the words and the feelings and the pictures, and then we came out with our six values. And to this day, they guide us. We interview by them, we call it out in individuals' performances. When we give kudos to people, it is for one of those values. So they really are something lived inside the company and not something just on the webpage.
Clint Betts
I'm sure those listening or watching want to know the other five values. If you don't mind, could you walk through those and how they have benefited your company? I mean, the same way you went through being collaborative. I think that would be really useful to understand how... Because you are coming up with six values, putting that much time into it is very interesting.
Peter Platzer
So, the first one, in some instances we called it the primus inter pares, is global. Now, global has many, many layers. The first layer is like, well, we have satellites, and they circle around the Earth, and so by definition, that is global. The beauty of leveraging space to improve life on Earth is that the data that you collect is immediately globally relevant. So, our sales from day one were quite international. We have today, 65 out of the 192 countries has customers of Spire, even though we are still a pretty small company at just 100 plus million of revenue.
So, that's kind of like from our operations: the satellites are everywhere. And very early on, I hired someone to be in charge of satellite operations, and he said, "Peter, I want you to promise me that you're not going to do shift work for satellite operations." Most other companies at that point in time, and still today, they have one big satellite operation center in one country, and then they do eight-hour shift work. And that means there's some group of people that always has to work the graveyard shift, from like 10:00 to 6:00. 66% or something like that was the number that [inaudible 00:18:12] accorded me of errors happen in the graveyard shift. I mean, who wants to work their whole life from 10:00 PM at night to 6:00 AM in the morning?
And so that was one of the reasons why we said, okay, we're going to set ourselves up globally with offices eight hours time zone apart so that we have natural coverage. Once in a while, people still have to do shift work, but generally, we don't because we have this eight-hour setup. So, that's [inaudible 00:18:38] global.
Then we wanted to reach global customers, so you want to be local there; as another element of global, our customers are global. We wanted to tap into the global labor market so that having different locations allowed us to hire people from across the world. We have, I think, a larger number of countries represented by our people than we have customers in. So, all of that is an element of global, but global is also the way we think about it in the representation of thoughts and cultures and, backgrounds and experiences and ages in our teams. I don't know what the age range today is, but I know that at some point, it was literally from like 14 to 90 in our population. We have had teams of like ten people that represented nine different countries and cultures. So, this global nature of the team, the heterogeneity of superstars, or diversity, as they say, is another layer of global for us.
So, global really has a number of those layers, and that's why we sometimes call it the primus inter pares because it talks about the setup and the relevance. We didn't want to build a product that helps rich, I don't know, Californians. We wanted to build something that is relevant for 8 billion people in 192 countries. And that was the aspiration and continues today to be the aspiration, that what we do is relevant all across the world and not just in a small segment. So, that's global.
Then there is a pretty easy one. Reliable. Reliable pretty much means that [inaudible 00:20:37] I'm going to do what I say that I'm going to do. And if I don't, I'm not just going to say, "Oh well," but be very, very beaten down and apologetic about it and really work hard to relinquish this. And reliable is not just to our customers, it's to all stakeholders, which means that's customers, there are investors, there are colleagues, there are our suppliers, our vendors. It's the people that internally of the company we deliver something to. So, it's just generally, if you say you're going to do something, you really feel morally bound to doing what you said that you're going to do.
Give you an example. Being European, I think that companies should make money, and so over two years ago, we [inaudible 00:21:37] okay, we're going to be profitable by a certain point in time, which was... It's a few quarters from now. And guess what? Next month, after we said this, there was a war in Europe; Russia invaded Ukraine. And then we had interest rates going through the roof, and then we had inflation exploding, and then we had the big resignation of people, and then we had recession warnings. And we kind of like, for the last two years, all these things have happened. So we've gone from a world up and to the right, money is free, and everything is perfect, to a really, really difficult period.
Now, Spire has not changed its timeline for when we say we got to be profitable. It's just like the commitment to, if we say something, we got to move literally heaven and Earth to be reliable. Which then brings us to the next value is, okay, what kind of things can you lean on to be reliable? One of them is our value of being relentless. And the picture for relentless is a deep gorge with water, and the image behind it is water is relentless. It just keeps on grinding. And if you do it for long enough, water will cut through rock and granite a deep gorge, because it is relentless.
Relentless lives also in one of our sayings of everything is an iteration. This concept of kaizen or continuous improvement which is like you do something, and you assess it, and you get data, and then you improve it. You are just relentless in getting better. You don't get bogged down by waiting until it's perfect, and then you do something. No, you do something, and then you iterate from it, but you just stick with it relentlessly. You just build upon it. There's this great book, Atomic Habits, which talked about stacking of habits, where you do something, you do a little bit, and then you do it on top of it, and you have this compounding effect of just doing things on top of each other on a regular basis. So, that's relentless.
Then, there is a recognition that there's only one irrecoverable resource in the universe, and that is time. Once you have spent time, it is irrecoverable. You can make money again if you spend it on something. You can get your leg in a cast and do physical therapy if you broke a leg. You can apologize to your friend if you pissed her off and mend the relationship. But once you have spent time, it is irrecoverable. As a physicist, it's the only thing which has a clear direction.
And unfortunately, the world is getting faster. Rate of change is increasing. It is already a rate of change, which means it's exponential, but even the rate of the rate of change is increasing. And so, one of our values is faster, which just recognizes the value of time and a preference for action and for driving things. And if it can be done today, then let's do it today, and start in the morning, and maybe not wait until the evening. So that faster is a recognition, as uncomfortable as it is, of our values.
So we have global, reliable, relentless, faster, and collaborative.
Clint Betts
Now, I want to get to your mission statement, and that is to leverage space to improve life on Earth. I wonder, how can space be leveraged to improve life on Earth using data? Which would go... That's another way of saying, what does Spire do?
Peter Platzer
Actually two questions, to be honest, because space... I mean, there's a large number of satellites that every one of our listeners is using today to do their lives. If you paid with a credit card, you use space. If you looked up where a restaurant is, you use space. So, we use space, every single one of us, every single day, in many, many ways.
For Spire, in particular, there are two elements that really drive us that are what we want to impact, and one of them is climate change, and the other one is global security. We had this hypothesis, this prediction, not just what satellite capabilities will be by 2015, 2020, 2025, but also that climate change is going to become a theme, a threat, a challenge, an opportunity for humanity, that is more and more top of mind as years go by. And the other one being global security is going to be more and more important in a lot of ways, some of which are intertwined with climate change. And there's just a recognition that you cannot tackle either one of those two without space. Or let's put it this way: you can tackle them orders of magnitude more effectively by leveraging space.
So, if we talk about climate change, couple simple examples. One of them is weather prediction. Spire collects data that allows more accurate weather prediction of where a hurricane will land, and how much it's going to rain, and how much wind is going to blow there. And thanks to our efforts and selling this data and making it available to other organizations, there's about a billion people today that have more accurate weather prediction because of our effort. We'd like to make it eight billion, and we'd like to make an even more big impact. But for a young company, I would say it's a solid start. We help companies reduce their carbon emissions by using less fuel, which then means they have a better bottom line because they make more money because they spent less money on fuel. So, those are just some high-level examples on the climate change side.
And then, on the global security side, where is my ship? Is it close to pirates? Is someone smuggling something? Is someone making flying impossible or dangerous because the GPS doesn't work anymore? Is someone maybe up to some nefarious activities? Then, I can identify where they are trying to do it from, even in the darkest of night and under deep cloud and foliage coverage. That's some of the products that we offer to the world to try to make it a more fair, a more balanced place. They say transparency is the best disinfectant. When you shine a light into dark corners, all sorts of scary animals start to run away. And if you have a live satellite constellation, we cover the Earth over 100 times a day; there's a lot of light that we try to shine in all places of the Earth, hoping to bring more transparency and openness to it.
Clint Betts
Speaking of nefarious acts, I mean, this could be screwed up. Space could also be used for bad. And there was a recent story just a few days ago about Russia wanting to launch nukes into space. I don't necessarily want you to comment on that specific story, but how do you prevent space from being used for bad?
Peter Platzer
So, I once said, you can use a knife to slice tomatoes, or you can slice something else. And indeed, it is very, very hard to prevent that some people will use just about anything to do harm to others and the world. I do think that that space has a bit of a special place because, yes, we love the ocean, and we love clean water, but I don't think there's anything that has inspired humans for thousands of years as much as space. All of us, at some point, have looked up in the dark of night and seen the stars and wondered about the universe. There is something truly magical about space that inspires us all, that I think increases our willingness to... No, no, we got to protect that. It's a special place. So, I think that's a big benefit there.
I think another benefit is that, I think people have done pretty mean things on the oceans, and do we really get that big of an article about it? It has to be something [inaudible 00:31:46] not potentially happening, but it is happening. But if someone potentially does something bad in space, everyone reads about it because it's so emotionally connected to people. It's like, hey, this is my space. And the governments of the world, they want to use space. They want to use space for observing the land. They want to use space for their spy satellites. So, I think space really has a special place, I would say.
I always think from an inspirational perspective on how the foundational law that still today drives how space operation happens on an international level was done. It's the Outer Space Treaty from 1968. Now, if we think back to what happened in 1968, it was a tight period. I mean, I think there were drills for kids in the US in schools for nuclear war. It was a very, very tense period. But despite that tension and that tenseness, the United States and the USSR came together and wrote and ratified together the foundational law that governs how we use space. I mean, we have to think about that. They were in the Cold War, and still, they came together to protect space, which starts off with a statement: space is for everyone, and everyone has an equal right to use space. I mean, that's one of the first foundational statements there.
When you think about the International Space Station, where the United States and Russia have been [inaudible 00:33:35] for many, many decades, there is something very special about space. And I think there are more people in more countries overall working together, even in the most difficult circumstances, to protect it for future generation, and to protect it for today's generations.
Now, in all fairness, caveat emptor, I'm the guy who left a good job at 42, live in a dorm, and start a space company, so I have to be a little bit crazy, and I definitely have to be an optimist. So, that definitely shines through. But still, just think the last time you walked outside and looked at the stars, and you felt more special because there is something unique about space.
Clint Betts
So, I'm guessing you don't think we faked the Moon landing?
Peter Platzer
No, I do not.
Clint Betts
So, how often do you orbit the Earth every day?
Peter Platzer
So, we have actually over 100 spacecraft, and they cover every spot on Earth every 15 minutes. So, in the time since you and I have been talking, both you and I have been covered by one of our spacecraft about three, four times.
Clint Betts
And have you had any interesting encounters? I'm not necessarily talking about UFOs or anything, but is it crowded up there? How do these satellites not crash into each other?
Peter Platzer
Okay. So, I want you to follow me along on a visualization that tries, at least I try, to share how vast space really is. So, we track all of the world's ships, and particularly all of the massive ships, and we've all seen... I once was on vacation on the Thompson River in the Thousand Islands in the north of New York State, on the border to Canada, and on the Thompson River, they have these massive ships come by. And it's just like, you stand there, and you just look up like this. They're absolutely massive. And we track about 500,000 of them on the oceans. Right now, the oceans are about; call it 70% of the Earth. So roughly speaking, you have almost half the space; if you wanted to have all of the Earth, let's imagine all of the Earth being oceans, so instead of 500,000, we could do, I don't know, 750,000, I'll call it 700,000.
And then the neat thing about space is that you don't just have one shell. You can make a shell every 10 miles or so. So, let's say space goes from like 500... The low Earth orbit space goes from, let's say, 500 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers, so we could make, I don't know, another 50 shelves. So you can take 700,000 times 50, so you're talking about a few million massive ships. Now, the spacecraft that Spire has they're not a massive ship. They are the size of a bottle of wine. As a matter of fact, there is no spacecraft in orbit the size of a massive ship. They're all much, much smaller. The really big ones are the size of a bus. A small bus, not like a big bus, a small bus. So, millions of things are the size of massive, massive ships, and in reality, we have a few thousand operating. So, that's like three, four orders of magnitude difference.
There is some simplification in that picture, but still, space is absolutely massive. Even on Earth, 95% of the world's population lives on 5% of the world's surface area. So, when we think about Earth, we basically think, you know what? I visited your house, and you showed me the guest bathroom on the entrance, and that's all that I saw, and I want to talk about your house by describing that guest bathroom of the house. He has a fantastic... It's white there, there's some water, and like, oh my god, the richness... I'm just describing the guest bathroom. Even Earth is massive. Space is massive squared.
Clint Betts
I wonder, what does a typical day look like for you? How do you decide how to spend your time, where to spend your time, where to focus?
Peter Platzer
So, you have an overarching distribution of duties in a company. And so, for me, it is a lot about engaging with investors. It is engaging with the people in the company, and communicating to them. And it is on the technology side. That's a little bit where my focus is. So again, you've got these three big areas of engagement, and then you allocate your time roughly alongside those three things. And then there's periods where you spend more time with investors, and there's periods where you spend more time with the people, but overall, you try to balance this out and make sure that overall, across the executive team, all the areas are well covered.
And then you have to add to that, then I have myself, so I dedicate a certain amount of time to sports and meditation and health. And then you have your family and friends. And so you allocate your time to that wholeness, and then it squishes here and there, but you... At least it is for myself, you do keep track. You got a mental running in the background that it sees like, okay, am I over-investing here right now? Do I need to change that over time? So that you have all of those various elements well covered. And you always look for... We have this quarterly career progression discussions, and the first couple of questions is like, what are the activities that you enjoyed the most in the last quarter, and how can we help you do more of them? And what are the activities that you enjoyed the least in the last quarter, and how can we help you do less of them?
Now, no one is having this conversation with me, so I have to do it with myself. But you think about it, okay, what are the stuff that I really enjoy? Because if you enjoy something, you're going to be better at it in the long run. You're going to have the energy to get through the difficult periods of time. And can you shift what you do a little bit to spend more time with your strengths rather than with things that are just a little bit of a drag for you?
Clint Betts
Speaking of the things that would be a drag, I wonder, has artificial intelligence helped in that area? Things that are kind of tedious and things. And how has the rise of artificial intelligence affected Spire?
Peter Platzer
So, I mean, do you have another couple hours for us to talk about this? I think the short answer is, yes, artificial intelligence has been beneficial, from a customer engagement on the writing side, from a marketing engagement, in creating impactful campaigns. So there's a whole host of areas there.
I think, overall, artificial intelligence is great for a company like Spire. So when you think about it, before artificial intelligence, there was a big premium on you having either a big brain or a very, very big computer. So, that kind of was the big value. You are hyper-smart, and you have massive computing resources. I think what artificial intelligence is, it just removes this... You know what, it's not about the compute resources that you have, it's about, do you have unique data? So, do you have unique data that I would call just stuff, for example, that we collect, that you can only collect from space? Or creative ideas, which is what humans have, as unique data.
So artificial intelligence is moving the power from large compute to large amounts of data, from supercomputers to super data providers. And that is great for a company like Spire. We have data that literally no one else in the world has, and we produce more of it every single day. So, every single day, we add to our competitive advantage. And then AI and machine learning allows us and our customers to extract more value from that unique data, requiring less compute resources. So, it democratizes the value extraction from data, which means at the end of the day, more customers.
Clint Betts
I could talk to you forever. My goodness. And we should have you back on because your knowledge and everything you're going through right now is just so fascinating. But I want to be respectful of your time, and at ceo.com, we end every interview with the exact same question because we believe the chances one gives just as important as the chances one takes. I wonder, when you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Peter Platzer
So, when we started the company, and we talked... Picture this: this is like 2012: we are in San Francisco, the sun is shining, and we talk with people about the weather. That was a tough conversation to have. It's like, why do I need weather prediction? Weather is always 72 degrees and sunny. This is just stupid. And then people are like [inaudible 00:44:18], and I talked to my friends at NASA, and they say, "What you say you're going to do is breaking the laws of physics." And this is like, yes, today, but there's exponential improvement, which is really, really hard for people to comprehend. So, it was not an easy story.
But there was an individual that took the time and that listened, and he, Will Porteous, has been a steadfast supporter of the company, of our mission, of myself now for pretty much a decade. And it certainly wasn't always easy for him because, guess what? We missed some deadlines that was in our plan that we had ten years ago because rockets sometimes are delayed, and stuff like that happens. But it has been fantastic to have his support, and so he certainly is a huge reason that you and I have a conversation because, without him, you probably wouldn't be interested in me at all.
Clint Betts
Peter, thank you so much for joining us. Seriously, come back on. We could talk for a whole nother hour about AI and all sorts of things that you're working on. So, appreciate you coming on. Thank you for taking the time.
Peter Platzer
It would be my pleasure. Thanks for having me.