走进押注太空未来的1亿美元赌局 | Northwood CEO 对谈 a16z

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 won 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.

Starlink is working on direct optical inter-satellite links. How much of that is a threat?

I view it as a 0% threat.

SpaceX was able to bring launch costs down by an order of magnitude from what they were before. Why hasn't the same thing happened in ground infrastructure?

Oh, man. Bridgit, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

We're here to talk about Northwood. We're here to talk about space. But first, I want to talk about how you got here. We have 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?

Following curiosity. I think curiosity becomes the most organic motivator for people, and that's definitely the case for me. My home environment growing up was really cultivating that curiosity, and my parents also really encouraged excellence, which I think is great.

If you're curious about something, it's not just something you dabble in. It's something you try to take to the nth degree and really try to understand what excellence looks like in that domain. That led me to a lot of different places.

I've said this in other places before: My mom is also an incredibly determined person, and that's something that I think I was influenced by. Follow what you're curious about, do it to the greatest capacity you can, and don't take no for an answer. Then you wind up doing a bunch of different things and having some really interesting experiences. I feel very grateful for that.

Sometimes people frame it as either-or. Either you have to get straight A-pluses, especially for kids, or you just do whatever you're curious about. But the combination is, do whatever you're curious about, but also absolutely crush it in that.

Yeah, it is.

Sort of in your early career, did you think it would be forever? At one point, were you like, "I'm bored of this. I want to go into academia"? How did you make your career decisions?

It's interesting because I would analogize it to how a lot of people we bring into our company think about their career paths. A lot of the incredible people we bring in—people who are total rock stars in their careers—they're not thinking on a 20-year time scale about their careers. They're thinking more incrementally than that, about what they're interested in and what's the next thing they're going to tackle in their lives.

Maybe there's not a definite timeline attached to it. It's as far out as you can see on the horizon, and you just worry about that far because otherwise you constrain yourself too much. That has really been how I've approached my career. I definitely would not have expected that I would be running a space company.

Yeah. But also, why not? All I could see in the future as an actress back then was maybe 5 years in the future.

So, you were an actress until it no longer became fun, or until academia or something else became more interesting. Then you were just chasing your curiosity. When did the company idea come into play?

Being in entertainment, I got to be a spokesperson for a lot of different things, and I tried to align what I felt to be impactful with what I was speaking up for. As an actor, you wind up being able to have a platform to contribute to a lot of different causes, and that was something I prioritized.

But I think I wanted my impact to go deeper than that. I always knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to create my own thing, although I didn't have a concrete idea of what that was.

As a child of the millennial era, I got to see the internet coming to life, and I got to see cellular networks coming to life, and what a profound shift that was on the world before versus the world after. When the problems around space networking came up, and when that was something I started digging into, it connected on that deeper level.

It was like, "Wow, this is an opportunity to make an impact on an industry that could be as fundamental as the internet and cellular." That felt like such a unique opportunity to get in at an industry when it was in its early stages. It just seemed like the perfect thing.

And you started it with your husband? Was he always on board from the beginning, or how did that emerge? I should say, my parents also started a company together and ran it for 15 years. I'm definitely inspired by the model.

That's super cool.

For both of us, we're ambitious and curious about how the world works. We were both passionate about building businesses, so it was like, "All right, let's align our efforts toward something."

There's a certain utilitarian aspect to it, where we have a certain amount of energy and time, and we want the most net outcome from that. That was definitely part of my thought process, too, but it's been awesome. It's been a really great experience.

Let's get into Northwood: what you're trying to achieve and what's the why now for it?

What we do is ground infrastructure, end to end, for space companies. That's all the way from the time when they're first coming up with a satellite mission and what the space operators want to do, all the way to when they're actually streaming data and delivering that data to the end customers.

The problem we're solving is that every satellite requires a connection point back to Earth so that you can control the spacecraft. It's kind of like a remote-control car: It needs some mechanism to make sure 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.

That point of contact on Earth is called ground infrastructure. Basically, if you don't have it, you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a rock in space that you're doing nothing with.

Ground infrastructure is completely fundamental. We were observing the space industry as launch cadence was increasing. You could put a satellite up into space way faster, and you could build satellites way faster because there was this whole boom around spacecraft manufacturing.

Interestingly, what started becoming the longest pole in the tent was just getting the point of contact on the ground to connect with. You could build a satellite and launch it faster than you could actually connect with it from the ground, which just seemed absurd.

We thought, "Why is that?" This critical third component was not modernizing, even though you had seen all this modernization happening elsewhere. When we started pulling it back, it was a classic value-chain problem, where the incentives were not aligned with each stakeholder in the value chain to modernize and innovate.

You had antenna manufacturers responding to a call from a customer and delivering them a point solution. They weren't thinking holistically about how you build better ground infrastructure. You had a software-integrator layer where they were basically just dependent on whatever infrastructure was being laid by somebody else.

We realized that this was really holding back innovation and a complete vision for what this should look like on the ground side. The only way to address fixing the ground segment was to do the whole thing.

When we say the whole thing, it includes a lot of disparate disciplines and activities. It includes R&D of antenna hardware, so that the antenna on Earth is physically receiving RF signals from space, interpreting them into ones and zeros, sending them back to the users, and sending commands back up to the spacecraft.

It includes 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.

It includes the networking layer. It includes the actual software API that you have to connect with to give commands at that ground site.

It was a daunting task. It's realizing that you have to do this really massive undertaking, this big risk, in order to experience the big reward on the other side, which is unlocking this critical third pillar of infrastructure for the space economy and really enabling it to go to new heights.

That was our venture-scale problem: This is going to require a lot of money, a killer team across many different disciplines, and a ton of orchestration of all those different pieces converging together to deliver something that's better end to end, as well as something that you can turn around quickly.

Yeah. 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? What was the idea maze that you guys went through? Was this your first idea that you decided to pursue, or how did that come to be?

Yeah, and we've been doing antennas ever since that Home Depot run during the pandemic. That made us ground nerds. We started working on the antenna designs during the pandemic. That was our summer project, and we describe ourselves as ground nerds.

It was just cool. At first, it was really cool to be able to receive signals from hundreds of miles away. As I said, they're RF waves. They're fainter than the power of a flashlight that you're getting from space. You get to interpret that into—for us, it was an image, but for other folks that use satellite data, that's their missile warning system.

That's how we find out about any missile going off around the world. That is our GPS infrastructure. For a lot of people, that's their one source of internet. It all comes through ground infrastructure that is able to interpret those faint signals and make it work. It was one of those magic moments where you just become really fascinated with the technology.

We started peeling it back further, and we did this market study where we looked at all the commercial operators. We looked at US government use cases as well, to see how they were addressing their ground systems. It was at that point, from first being curious about the space, that we realized a big bottleneck was coming.

Is this an idea that couldn't have existed 5 years ago because there just wasn't enough of an economy around it? Talk about the timing of it.

I think it really does influence the timing, because previously, if you're not as concerned about a 3-year timeline between the concept of a spacecraft and launching it, then it's not a big deal if the ground segment can't keep pace.

I also think the ideas for how to use space have changed a lot, both in terms of the pace as well as the ideas around it. The mission sets that we're talking to folks about now are at 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 dynamically in and out of different orbits.

Previously, you could think about space missions—it was a pretty static world. Think about old-school space: science missions, one satellite parked over a certain location, not moving anywhere, sending very small amounts of data. Now it's this whole circus of a bunch of different missions needing to coexist, transmitting way more data, and having constantly changing parameters.

I think that has really flipped the switch for some of the government customers that we talk about. Their missions just would not be able to be resolved without a new ground architecture. The same is true on the commercial side, frankly.

Your system is able to deploy in 3 months, whereas a traditional ground station deploys in 3 years. What enables you guys to have that level of speedup?

It really comes down to vertical integration. What we mean by that is being able to stitch together all of the different pieces in the end-to-end system so that they inform each other.

For example, when we say 3 years, what did that timeline look like? It looked like an antenna vendor who gets a phone call. After they get the phone call, they place the order on the supply chain. They have 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 a bespoke system. They're doing it one-off.

Then they ship it, and they're shipping a giant piece of equipment, so it probably has to go over ocean shipping methods. Then it arrives at the site, and you have to put together a giant construction project because many of these antennas are the size of multistory buildings. You have to do permitting, lay a concrete foundation, and have whole construction teams in order to put them together. That adds up to a 3-year timeline.

Whereas for us, because we're thinking of all 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 just plug into a standard 240-volt power outlet. 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." Being able to coordinate all of those things is what's translated to that outcome of shaving off the time.

When did you realize that vertical integration was the way to go? Did you know that from the beginning, or is it something you learned over time? What have you learned about hard tech in the process of doing that?

I think it was a bit of peeling back the problem space. Initially, you think, "Okay, great. We want to put more capacity. We want to make more capacity available. How can we optimize the ground system to do that?"

But then there are so many dependencies in what the site actually looks like and what the software integration looks like. We just realized that the way to deliver the best solution, one that actually aligns our incentives with the customer, was to do the whole thing.

Our incentives are aligned when our measure of success is their mission success. You don't have that if you're just solving part of the equation.

SpaceX was able to bring launch costs down by an order of magnitude from what came before. Why hasn't the same thing happened in ground?

I think it does come down—I hate to be a broken record on vertical integration—but the reason why that matters is that what SpaceX has done is really streamlined its product. 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.

For us, if we were just an antenna vendor, then we'd probably need to build a bunch of different types of products. But because we get to see across so many different solutions, we can think about and invest our R&D in building a solution that works commonly across the industry.

That means we're accounting for commercial missions, government missions, and allied missions all within the same system. That makes our costs lower and more efficient. When we're able to do it as a shared service, that's really the difference for us.

We view ourselves more as a platform. It's not a one-to-one sale where you're trying to get all of your value off that single sale. Our platform is such that many missions can benefit from the same infrastructure. We make our investment, and then many customers get to benefit from that single investment that we make.

What's great for customers on their end is that they're able to take advantage of all the learnings and all the investment that we've made across a bunch of different concepts. It winds up being more beneficial for them. They don't have to do a big one-off capital expenditure on the system. They get to smooth out their costs, and everybody's happy.

Starlink is working on direct optical intersatellite links. How much of that is a threat to the ground station business model?

I view it as a 0% threat. The reason why is, if you're banking on any of the space infrastructure, it's about the direction of data volume. For us, anything that supports growing the trend of data volume through space is great. We're all on board with the same objective there.

For intersatellite links, what's great about that solution is that it's reducing latency. It reduces the friction of how you can actually transmit data through space. Think about all the use cases that opens up. I think Starlink is a great example of this, talking about matching or, at certain times, beating internet latency speeds.

That would be unheard of in space before. Look at the value of that business. Technologies that align with that trend are really positive.

In a potential Taiwan scenario, there's a version where ground stations can become targets. How do you think about resilience?

That's a great question, and it actually is both a commercial question and a government question. Both commercial and government customers care about resilience. You can look at a lot of different companies that have tried to address this.

We take a similar path of proliferation. Making things cheaper and faster to deploy, with more volume manufacturing, is the solution to that, so that when a single site location goes down, it's not a catastrophe.

It’s actually interesting for some of our teammates who came from Starlink. That was a similar model for them. They consider resiliency in the same way: They have multiple ground sites in a region, so that if one goes down, it doesn’t totally take their service offline. I think a similar concept applies here.

A lot of people analogize the space economy to the early internet. They say a lot of infrastructure is being built, lots of companies will fail, and lots of applications—even very successful applications—will be built on top. Does this analogy hold for you?

Yeah, for sure. I get really inspired by the analogy, especially thinking about folks who were early with the internet. There’s no way they would have foreseen what the internet is today, but they were betting on a direction and setting up a model that would basically unlock a lot of innovation. They were developing principles and building in alignment with certain principles that would support that innovation—and look what we have today.

I think things as simple as the TCP/IP protocols, for example, trying to make different layers as easy and supportive for innovation as possible, are part of that. So I think we’re in a similar moment with the space industry where we don’t know what it’s going to be. A year ago today, would we have thought that everybody would be talking about orbital data centers? No way. But it’s captivated the public imagination, and who knows what’s going to come next.

For us, we are directionally aligned with that movement and building to principles that will support innovation. The whole thing we’re about is taking companies further faster, taking space missions further faster. We do that through our model, which I’ve described.

What is the right mental model for thinking about the relationship between the public sector and the private sector in terms of growing the space economy and industry and technological capabilities? Is it kind of like the internet, where a lot of the early work was either done by or funded by government, and then the private sector took the ball, so to speak? Or is it more in parallel? How should we think about that?

I think it’s very analogous. It’s interesting how the venture ecosystem fits in now in a deeper way than it did back then. A lot of technology innovation does tend to take place at those fringes that government use cases are solving for. I think that’s happening now.

The benefit that we have, which hopefully will lead to a shorter cycle in reaching the kind of infrastructure scale with the space industry, is venture absorbing some of that risk. When we talk to government, they’re looking for partners to absorb that risk. Frankly, when we talk to some of the commercial companies as well, they’re really excited about venture’s role in absorbing some amount of risk so that they can pursue bigger ideas faster.

Help us outline a little bit of the space economy right now. How should we think about it? If we were to do a market map, what are the different types of players? And then maybe the attributes of the market: Is it very fragmented? Are there a couple of big winners that kind of aggregate? What is the right way of thinking about it?

I think the infrastructure plays are really important for space. There are a number of fundamental things that can be underlying components that make a big difference. For space, the things that matter obviously include launch: You need to have a way to actually get mass into orbit. Power is another big thing to solve for space. You need to have propulsion; that’s another critical thing for being able to actually maneuver once you’re up there. And that connectivity back to Earth is really critical for being able to orchestrate and network all of that. Connectivity is really important.

We’re in an interesting moment where that infrastructure is being built out to enable a different set of capabilities. If you look a few years back, you had the small-satellite boom, where there was a whole generation of companies built off doing a smaller level of infrastructure to unlock different capabilities. It feels like we’ve evolved into a higher threshold of infrastructure that’s going to unlock a whole other layer of capability.

Same question: What do you think are the biggest bottlenecks to unleashing a wave of innovation? If, in a few years, the economy accelerates significantly, or there’s a whole wave of startups that emerge or accelerate in their growth, what would have needed to happen? Why could that be?

Our biased answer is that ground is really critical for that. Obviously, it’s not the only thing. To unlock innovation, power is a huge constraint for space, and being able to do more in space is influenced by that, but also by the amount of data throughput you can get from space. Power improves how much data you can generate in space, but ground impacts how much data throughput you can have through space, which is critical for being able to actually deliver those missions to users.

I was just listening to the Elon John Collison Durcast podcast on data in inner space, which, you know, I haven’t listened to it yet, so apologies if I don’t know.

Yeah, I just—I just say it’s the first time I’ve heard of it.

What is your thinking on it—the feasibility of it? Will we move toward it? What do you think about it?

Our mentality at Northwood is that we want to take space missions further faster. We want to enable the most ambitious missions and translate them from dream to reality as fast as possible. That is the exact kind of juicy problem that gets the nerds at Northwood excited: Here’s this superambitious concept for space.

I think what’s captivated a lot of people is thinking about how it pushes society. Thinking about limitless power from space pushes society; it gets a lot of people excited and inspired. We want to be supporters of willing that into existence through taking that further faster.

I think a lot of people raise a lot of really valid concerns about it—things that mean there’s going to be long timelines to bring it into existence. Whatever it is, are we talking about training? Are we talking about inference? There are a lot of different details. But our interest in it is: How can we understand the space so that we can enable it to go faster toward that outcome?

What are some examples of companies or use cases that don’t exist today that you could envision? Dream for us. What could some examples look like?

I think it’s like, what are the vectors that you’re tracking? One vector might be altitude. Right now, when we talk about space missions, thinking of low Earth orbit through to geostationary orbit, it’s a certain distance away from Earth. What if you could stretch that? What if you could have missions that go even deeper into space and have new exploratory capabilities, or go to different planets and the like? I think being able to stretch the tether farther and farther away from Earth is really interesting for what that could unlock.

Another vector is data throughput. Right now, the concept of matching the volume of data from the internet to what’s being done in space feels pretty preposterous. But what if it wasn’t? What if you could actually surpass the throughput of data on the internet in space? What kind of applications could you unlock with that? The whole interest in compute in space is attached to that concept.

I think there’s a massive treasure trove of data about our planet that has not really been capitalized on. That’s a huge amount of latent potential in my mind. I’m excited to see where some of the other advancements in technology, such as AI, will lead to really unlocking the benefits of that.

You just won a $50 million contract with the Space Force to help modernize. What does it mean to say that the Pentagon would rather buy commercially than build it themselves?

I think it’s a pretty fundamental switch that represents the timeline urgency and the change in the ground paradigm that we’re confronting. You can’t have the same models of procurement if you’re talking about proliferated systems, where you need to have such a huge increase in ground infrastructure in such a short period of time. You need to look at different models.

We were fortunate to be aligned with some of the great thinkers over on the Space Force side who 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 lifetime.

And to the whole “taking missions further, faster” point, being involved in missions of national significance is something that we’re all about. I think it’s very aligned with that. The Satellite Control Network is a common resource for the U.S. government. Every launch runs through the Satellite Control Network. It tracks missions across a really wide set of U.S. government use cases, ranging from GPS to NASA missions, our missile-tracking systems, and the like. So, it’s a great opportunity for us to demonstrate the cross-cutting capabilities that we’re working on.

There are 13,000 active satellites right now. Is that accurate?

Sounds about right.

And you said that they’re collecting millions of data points that can’t be captured because there’s not enough ground capacity. How bad is the bottleneck?

You can think of a satellite as a depreciating asset: as soon as it launches into space, it’s just a really expensive depreciating asset, and you’re trying to maximize the value you can get from it. The way you do that is by sending data, because the economic value of the spacecraft is the data that it can produce. The data it can produce is directly proportional to the amount of ground connectivity that you have. Ground is quite literally how you increase the ROI of your spacecraft.

That really matters for both commercial and U.S. government missions. For U.S. government missions, there have literally been a bunch of missions launched with no ground plan. So, you might just lose your spacecraft, which could be a very consequential loss of an investment, or you just miss out on being able to make good use of those taxpayer dollars. The same is true for commercial missions. We’ve heard from a number of different commercial companies, “We’re throughput-limited. We’re limited in how many customers we can serve because we don’t have a big enough ground footprint.”

We just talked about the contract. What’s the next big milestone as you think about your guys’ development?

Building upon the use cases that we have, we’ve been fortunate to find a lot of aligned customers with the product that we’re currently putting out. There are other products that we also have in the works. I think people know us as a phased-array company, but with announcements we’ll have coming out before too long, we’ll show that we’re more than that. We’re thinkers across the whole ground-solution space.

So, I think it’s both product maturation and product development that we’ll continue to be doing. Like I said, it’s orchestrating a ton of stuff. We’re also building a global ground network. We have 5 international entities now across the world. We’ll be the United Nations of Northwood. We’re currently on 2 continents, and we’ll be on a number of others before the end of the year. So, we’ve got to do it all at once.

I’m sure there are a lot of space nerds listening to this. Say more about the company itself—the size and the transition from a 1-product to a multiproduct company.

There are a lot of disciplines that need to come together to make Northwood successful, so we’ve really tried to pull from the best of the best in each of those disciplines—the folks who have done it before, and a lot of folks who have experience building out sites globally. As I mentioned, that’s the Starlink team, but it’s also about how we can be creative about other industries we can source from. Think about AT&T cell towers: how are they doing that with such a global presence? What about Tesla Supercharger stations? We’re looking at diverse talent bases for things like that.

We have a really robust supply-chain team because you have to be able to source all of the components, make it timely, and make it resilient, especially because our customers rely upon that. The engineering team has a huge amount of software, actually. We’re known, again, for the hardware of our system, but the software is extensive across networking, embedded systems, and the actual front end of what we’re building. So, it’s an extremely multidisciplinary company.

What’s important for us is that we really value the different disciplines. I think that’s something that I philosophically contribute to the company, as well as just making sure that we’re coordinated and operating effectively as a team. We’ve done a lot of scaling. We’ve doubled in size a number of times already, and we’ll hopefully double in size again this year, if not more.

And the size right now is?

Around 75 employees.

Cool. Talk a little bit about how you think about culture at Northwood, what types of people you’re trying to bring on, and how you think about team building.

Yes. I’ll give a little window into the expectations I share with people when they interview at Northwood. The first one is that we accomplish unreasonable things on unreasonable timelines. On the surface, that’s, “Sure, okay.” Everybody can get on board with that. But it’s not just a matter of applying more force to the problem. It’s about taking smart risks.

So, it’s not just force; it’s also cleverness. It’s about understanding the problem deeply enough to know what trade-offs you can afford to make. People who are able to do that kind of mental calculation, to take big leaps, are really how you can move quickly.

The second one is end-to-end ownership of your work. For me, what that translates to is 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 been reflecting on where that comes from for me—why that’s something that matters to me. I think it traces back to when I was pursuing my first passion growing up as a kid.

My mom was a huge supporter of me in a way that went beyond just demonstrating that she supported what I cared about. She actually enabled me to do it in a way that went beyond reasonableness. I wanted to be an actress. She’s a full-time working mom, sometimes the main breadwinner, and literally could not step away from her job.

A lot of parents would have probably put me in an acting camp and just been like, “Good luck. Cool.” Then maybe thrown up their hands. But she was on the phone coordinating travel and caretakers, booking me plane tickets, and figuring out how to get me the resources to accomplish my dream in a way that was pretty ridiculous at times.

I think that’s really stuck with me: the amount of care and investment that she had in my dream and where I wanted to go is something that I get inspired by from a mission perspective. It’s the amount of care that people on our team have invested in the outcome that goes so far beyond their job description. That means that, on our North Dakota trip, where we were deploying our first antenna, people stayed up more than 24 hours on multiple occasions over the span of a week because we needed to get the system running.

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

If you want to function effectively as a team, you need a lot of trust. What’s really critical to me in having teams that trust each other is basically a low-ego environment. When people come in the door, they need to be able to admit their faults in a way that is purely about pursuing an understanding of what the problem is and what the goal is. They also need to be bold enough to raise flags when there are issues in a problem set.

So, I think teamwork, the amount of care, and the ability to be clever and take smart risks are the foundational pieces of our culture.

That’s a great note to wrap on. This story about your mother is particularly inspiring. Thanks for sharing it, Bridgit. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me.