Matt Gialich [00:00:01]:

What went through my mind first was, oh shit, I'm CEO. Like, I am someone who really enjoys the technical aspects of things and trying to figure out, you know, there's really something special about engineering deeply technical projects and trying to get them to a solution point that makes sense. And I always thought that was extremely interesting. And all of a sudden now I'm CEO. And what, what is the definition of a CEO? Right. The definition of CEO is pretty simple to me. It's to increase the enterprise value of a company. That's it.

Matt Gialich [00:00:29]:

It's a really simple framing of how to think about what a CEO's job does. I'll translate it differently. Especially at a small startup, do everything that nobody else actually wants to do. That is a job of a CEO.

Matt Gjertsen [00:00:58]:

When I am talking with new leaders, I always tell them that as a leader you only have three basic responsibilities. Get people to work together, get them working on the right things, and improve their work over time. Though it sounds simple, I actually think getting people to work on the right thing is the hardest of those. That's why books like the One Thing by Gary Keller or Measure what Matters by John Doerr even exist. And in the hard tech world, I think this is especially difficult because there are so many interdependencies between teams and the pace of change of that work is so high. If you're not constantly focusing people on a priority, it can be easy for them to lose track. In order to go more in depth into this challenge, I wanted to bring on someone who struggles with this daily. Leading a startup that is trying to do something that has never been done before.

Matt Gjertsen [00:01:52]:

Mine asteroids. Matt Galich is the co founder and CEO of astroforge, an incredibly ambitious company with the goal of successfully landing and on an asteroid in deep space. Mining platinum group metals from that asteroid and then bringing them back to Earth. And oh, by the way, he's trying to do all of this in a way that could one day be profitable for their company. The company has already sent one mission to deep space. Their spacecraft, Odin, which launched in February of 2025. They are currently working on their next mission, Deep Space 2, which is scheduled to launch later this year with the goal of actually landing on an asteroid. This was a fantastic discussion which touched on what it actually means to be a CEO.

Matt Gjertsen [00:02:36]:

How to make sure you are spending your time on what matters and what it actually takes to keep people working on the right problems. Before we get into the discussion, I do want to remind you that this is your first time listening to the show and you find it valuable, I humbly ask that you share it with at least one other person. Because that, after all, is how we grow. I can't tell you how much it means to me. And so with that, let's get into the discussion with Matt Galich. Matt, welcome to the leadership launchpad. I am, I'm really excited for this conversation today. Thank you so much.

Matt Gjertsen [00:03:11]:

How are you doing?

Matt Gialich [00:03:12]:

Of course. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Matt Gjertsen [00:03:14]:

Yeah, I love the models you got in the background already. You like, got the setup perfectly. So this is such a perfect conversation. There's a lot I want to talk about today. I think a lot of our con is going to focus on focus, actually, and how to stay focused and the difficulty of that. But I wanted to start because I've heard different stories about kind of how astroforge started and how you became CEO. Astroforge didn't start as a space mining company, is that right? It started as a submarine company.

Matt Gialich [00:03:46]:

That is 100% correct. Look, the company journey is always different for everybody else. And I wish mine was this linear path of exactly knowing what was going to happen and how it was going to happen. That's not it at all. In fact. Yeah, I started as the chief technology offer of what would become a submarine company, attempting to build what would be small submersibles to go scan the twilight zone of the ocean and really listen for. This phenomenon happens where you have sound waves that bounce in a corridor and you can essentially pick up any ships or any other things underwater across the world. It's very well known things we use hydrophones to do this.

Matt Gialich [00:04:22]:

And that was what the company was actually started as.

Matt Gjertsen [00:04:26]:

Okay. And then it started. And then I think if I know the mythology correctly, something happened. Your co founders left and you were suddenly the CEO. I'd love to know kind of like what went through your mind when you realized you were the CEO?

Matt Gialich [00:04:43]:

Well, what through my mind first was, oh shit, I'm CEO. I am someone who really enjoys the technical aspects of things and trying to figure out, you know, there's really something special about engineering deeply technical projects and trying to get them to a solution point that makes sen. And I always thought that was extremely interesting. And all of a sudden now I'm CEO. And what is the definition of a CEO, Right? The definition of CEO is pretty simple to me. It's to increase the enterprise value of a company. That's it. It's a really simple framing of how to think about what a CEO's job does.

Matt Gialich [00:05:15]:

I'll translate it differently, especially at a small startup, do everything that nobody else actually wants to do. That is the job of a CEO.

Matt Gjertsen [00:05:22]:

Okay?

Matt Gialich [00:05:23]:

And so, you know, we had a really small team at the time where a handful of people. And I became CEO and it really became great. How. What is a CEO and what do I do? Well, the first thing we had to go do is figure out what are the sales pipelines, what can we go attack, what avenues do we have to sell this product that we think is the right fit for the market? This classic startup trope of product market fit, it still applies to hard tech. Sometimes the cycles are slower there, but it still applies. So I just went into doing what I think I know how to do best, which is being extremely hardcore about trying to solve one problem. So I wrote down, you know, a list of. I mean, I had a list of about 3,000 different companies or individuals I thought maybe interested in purchasing one of these submarines or using them to some extent.

Matt Gialich [00:06:07]:

I talked to hundreds of companies to be very clear about this. A lot of them were short phone calls saying, we're not interested. I got one company that seemed to show some real interest in deploying these for aqua farming. This is where they put these big nets in the ocean and wanted to go have some sensors on and go through their. Great. But what I realized, I took a step back and then realized, okay, I've talked to hundreds of companies, I've penetrated a lot of the market, and I found one company that may be interested in a small contract that we could potentially get to seven figures in a couple years. Well, it's not a venture backable company in. In my opinion.

Matt Gialich [00:06:39]:

So like any CEO, what did I do? I applied to Y Combinator. To be fair, I actually had no idea what Y Combinator was. Again, cto, I'm not following this kind of stuff, right? Like, I had one of our investors said, have you thought about applying to Y Combinator? And I said, what? What's that? I don't even know what this is. And so I applied. Actually, I applied the night the applications were due. I got a call the next morning. I had my interview at like lunchtime that day. And they called me that night and said, you're in.

Matt Gialich [00:07:04]:

And I said, I'll let you know. Like, I was very confused by it because it all happened so quick and I didn't. I didn't know what it was, right? So I'm thinking, like, does this make sense? Should I do this? I realized very quickly, like, yeah, idiot, you should go do it. So I Get into Y Combinator. We start off Y Combinator. I have a new co founder. At this point, we're kind of off to the races. And right after Christmas, me and my co founder, you know, Y Combinator, when you get in, they put you in the Slack channel, like about a month or two early.

Matt Gialich [00:07:31]:

And you start talking with a partner, start brainstorming a little bit. And we actually started pointing out there was a Falcon Heavy launch. And we were talking about the Falcon Heavy launch. And Michael Seibold, one of the. I mean, really, who is greatly responsible for this company existing as a whole, called me right after Christmas and just said, what are you doing? I was like, I'm building a submarine company. What do you mean, what am I doing? He's like, no, you're building somebody else's company. Number one, you. You don't care about submarines.

Matt Gialich [00:08:00]:

Number two, you don't care about the ocean. And don't get me wrong, like, the ocean is cool. I love going scuba diving and looking at tropical fish. And what we all envision is like the desktop screen server of the ocean. What we're operating in is the Twilight Zone. It's essentially super dark, almost borderline, just black, pitch black. And you go to the middle of, like, the desert ocean, right? It's just flat waves, and you throw a submarine. It's really boring.

Matt Gialich [00:08:21]:

It's not entertaining from that perspective. And he said, you got to either do something you want to do or solve a problem you have. I don't think he expected me to come back with asteroid mining.

Matt Gjertsen [00:08:31]:

That's a bit far afield.

Matt Gialich [00:08:33]:

That is what happened. Right. And so the day we started Y Combinator, we pivoted to asteroid mining, and the rest is history.

Matt Gjertsen [00:08:40]:

That's incredible. One of the questions I was going to have was, what are some of the takeaways that you had from Y Combinator? Sounds like the whole vision and purpose of the company is certainly one of those things. I guess as you were talking about, one of the things that I find interesting, especially once you pivoted to something that was much more interesting to you. Did you ever think about trying to go back to the CTO role? Did you ever think about, oh, I just really like trying to go after these hard technical challenges changes versus staying in, as you say, you know, kind of doing whatever anybody else doesn't want to do.

Matt Gialich [00:09:18]:

If I thought there was somebody that could do the CEO job better than myself, I would gladly go back to being CTO or being anything, you know, being a different role at the company in A heartbeat. And there is plenty of people out there that could probably be a better CEO than I can. And if they're available, I'm happy to consider that, like, I'm not in this for the egotistical mind of, like, oh, can I be the leader of the company? Or any of this. I actually want to go explore the universe, um, and I want to see if that's possible. And so far, nobody's come along that I thought could do a better job or actually wanted the job to go do. But I want to be very clear, if Elon walks in the door tomorrow, like, here's my desk. I'll. I'll go work on this project.

Matt Gialich [00:09:57]:

Right. Kind of thing. And I think that's. That's always the attitude I've had towards it.

Matt Gjertsen [00:10:00]:

That's great. Yeah. Because it's not just, can they be a better CEO, it's can they be a better CEO for this company? Like, are they going to be as driven, as passionate, as focused as you can? That's. That's a big part of it. And I think a big part of what the CEO is meant to do is to be able to set that vision. And it requires so much passion on the side of the. Of. Of the CEO in order to be able to set that.

Matt Gjertsen [00:10:22]:

Set that vision.

Matt Gialich [00:10:23]:

It also just requires you to do the work. And, you know, passion and vision are all one thing. That's all great. You still have to do the work. And there's a lot of work at these type of companies to. To understand how you get these teams to interact with each other and how you start. You really are the connective tissue of the company. And you have to have kind of your philosophies and axioms that you can talk with each member of the team about and keep repeating.

Matt Gialich [00:10:47]:

And the reality is, like, I could go on speaking tours all day long, and you see a lot of CEOs. To be fair, there's a lot of CEOs that do this, that go on speaking tours all day long. The company will suffer because of that. On a technical basis, the question, though, is, does that matter? At the end of the day, a CEO's job is to increase the enterprise value of the company. And Some of these CEOs are exceptional at this and actually can increase their enterprise value from afar. I don't think I'm exceptional enough at it to do that. So I have to really focus on, can we build this product? Can we actually get a spacecraft of the size we want it to be for the price we Want it to be to a body outside the Earth moon system. That's the only question I got to go answer.

Matt Gialich [00:11:23]:

And so that's where all the energy goes.

Matt Gjertsen [00:11:25]:

Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. I'd be interested to know if you kind of knew that going in you, you have a lot of leadership experience from past companies before this one. Did you already have a sense that, like that being, that bridge, that connective tissue was, was a really strong thing that you need to focus on?

Matt Gialich [00:11:43]:

I think that your past experiences can be both a benefit and a curse as you go into the future. And I really try to understand that and I do a lot of tricks to try to figure out myself of am I doing the right thing that needs to be done. It's very easy to say, oh, the approaches I used at Bird or the approach I used at Virgin will fit here and will not fit here. But the reality is these are completely different companies with different goals, with different timelines, with different philosophies behind them, with a different group of people. And at the end of the day, when you're CEO, you have to convince a group of people to work exceptionally hard on a product that can share your same vision. And the way you go do that is very different at different places. So did it help? I think it absolutely helped, but it also hurt. And there's things that I got to remember that I can't do here or that I shouldn't do here, that I should think about differently here than I had to at my time at Virgin or my time at Bird.

Matt Gialich [00:12:34]:

So I don't know if that's a non answer, but it's honestly, the truth is like you have to be very reflective on a weekly basis when you're CEO because the company changes at that level. At that time frame, it's just much faster.

Matt Gjertsen [00:12:49]:

Yeah, no, I think that's a really honest answer. I mean, I know I've talked with a number of companies that kind of as, especially in hard tech, as you scale, one of the big things you have to scale is your supply chain and logistics. And I know a lot of those companies that then, well, when they're going to do that, who do they bring in? They bring in former Amazon people. And those former Amazon people often try to take the whole meeting memo and this all the Amazon isms that worked there and applied in these new companies and it. And it often doesn't work because as you said, they really are just different. Since you said you do a lot of reflection, is there anything in particular that you ask yourself particular questions that you focus on to see, is this experience going to help me or hurt me? Do you have a method for doing that or is it just kind of. You're just always asking yourself questions.

Matt Gialich [00:13:42]:

One of the methods that I do is once a month I'll do a simple calendar audit where I will record every single thing I do at the company into a calendar. And then I'll go back through and say, did this increase enterprise value? Yes or no? And it's funny how that's never. It's never really a gray area. A lot of times it's pretty cut and dry. This didn't matter. This didn't matter. This didn't matter. This did matter.

Matt Gialich [00:14:03]:

This didn't matter. And when you go do that, you can kind of understand how you got to get rid of all the things that just don't matter. And there's a big delineation between things that don't matter to people and things that don't matter to the company sometimes are two different things. And so you hear about this described a whole bunch of different ways. It's pretty simple, though, and there's not a huge secret here. A lot of what you do in every job you have is noise. And the more you can remove it, the better you can do. And people just don't want to remove the noise because it's not always a good feeling.

Matt Gialich [00:14:36]:

But the reality is, if that's all your objective is, is to increase the enterprise value of your company, there's a lot of things that you can cut out that you don't need to go do.

Matt Gjertsen [00:14:45]:

Yeah, I really like that. And yeah, speaking as someone who's, you know, I've worked in the largest organization on the planet, the dod. And yeah, there's, there's a lot of people in large organizations where it's like they think they're.

Matt Gialich [00:14:58]:

And they.

Matt Gjertsen [00:14:59]:

Now, granted, there are people whose job is being in meetings and keeping up with email kind of, but there's a lot of people who. That shouldn't be their job, but it's. The corporate world today can easily create this sense of, if I go to all my meetings, if I answer all my emails, I'm doing my job. And it is really important to question that. And it can lead to uncomfortable answers sometimes. Well,

Matt Gialich [00:15:26]:

I also get to cheat. I'm not as big as the dod, I'm not as big as Boeing. I'm not as big as Raytheon. In fact, I'm not even as big as SpaceX. And like a lot of These things have started to creep into every organization.

Matt Gjertsen [00:15:37]:

Yeah.

Matt Gialich [00:15:38]:

The honest truth of the matter is when you have a company that's a hundred people, you can spend the time to be involved with every single one of them. You can keep the team small. You can keep a standard at the company. You can really understand who's cutting their weight and who's not and remove the ones that aren't. You can be this kind of like in the weeds person that is there to accelerate the company. If this company was a hundred thousand people, I can't do that at all. And so what you start to do is you start to devise different techniques to try to hold the company together. And this is what you see.

Matt Gialich [00:16:07]:

But you also, we need to be very open about one thing. I get to be extremely selective with who I hire. I get to make sure they're who I think are the best in the world. And you're going to hear this from startup founders all the time. We all like to say this stupid thing of like, hire A players, not B players, you know, because anybody tries to hire a B player, like it never has made sense to me. Of course we want to hire the best we can do that. You actually don't get that luxury once your company becomes 10,000 people. In a lot of cases, you need to hire 100 people to go do X.

Matt Gialich [00:16:34]:

And if you don't have an individual who can hold that standard, you have to put in process that can hold that standard. And what does that process? Weekly reviews, yearly reviews, take up meetings, whatever that goes into. You start to develop these processes for it. And then those processes don't really get reset until the company folds. And this is like a story as old as time, right? Company starts. I mean, Boeing, Boeing at one point was a startup, right? Building one of these little tiny airplane, going out there, progressing, progressing, progressing. And now we have the giant bureaucracy that is Boeing today. And once we had the 737 accidents, we've probably seen a little bit of contracting or resetting of Boeing, which was very well needed, I think, in that kind of corporation.

Matt Gialich [00:17:17]:

And look, I hope to God at astroforge we have this problem. I hope we have too many meetings because it means we've been so successful that we've earned those problems. The reality is we haven't even earned that problem yet.

Matt Gjertsen [00:17:29]:

Yeah, and it's interesting, I think. I love the way you're thinking about it because I do think things like bureaucracy, it's almost like a law of physics. It just naturally happens. But I always say that the companies that most despise bureaucracy are often the ones that are most likely to succumb to it because you have to treat it as a law where it's. It's going to happen, and I'm going to focus on it and make sure to minimize it as we grow or filter it as we grow. And if you just say like, oh, this is dumb, then it, like, sneaks up on you and. And takes over your. Your whole company.

Matt Gjertsen [00:18:06]:

You kind of had a bridge there to really where I wanted to focus today, because you talked about how, you know, you're always trying to add enterprise value or always trying to focus the company. I've heard you. I think it was prior to your first launch. I heard you talk about something. I can't remember the exact story, but it was like there was a system that you put on the spacecraft and you were planning to have, say, like, three sensors, but it had room for five sensors. And so the engineers put in five sensors. And like, you seem laser focused on moving as quickly as possible and always. And the difficulty that that is, that that takes.

Matt Gjertsen [00:18:48]:

First off, why do you think it's so difficult to get even small teams to stay, like, focused on a clear objective?

Matt Gialich [00:18:56]:

Well, there's probably two reasons why it's hard to get small teams to focus on a clear objective. First, it is that small teams as a whole, when they're focused on an objective, sometimes think that exceeding the objective is the better goal than just meeting the objective. And everybody wants to, in a way, outshine or show that they can be awesome on a team, which is a really good trait to have. But what does it lead to? Sometimes it always comes at a cost, and usually that cost is the ability to execute quickly or to get into testing as fast as possible. Right. So keeping a small team focused at that level is actually maybe a little bit counterintuitive that we think about. They may be focused on the right thing, but they may not be focused on what is the right thing for the end goal. And this is what I was a little bit talking about, probably in one of that is we've had multiple times where an engineer will come to us and say, like, oh, this part needed to be able to handle holding 1 kg.

Matt Gialich [00:19:51]:

It can hold 20.

Matt Gjertsen [00:19:53]:

Cool.

Matt Gialich [00:19:55]:

But that means it's too heavy and took too long to build and took too much engineering. So can you undo it? Actually, I think in a way it is. What is the problem that I've always had with NASA? NASA launched these rovers in 1997 that were supposed to stay on the moon or I'm sorry, on Mars for 90 days and they lasted for 20 fucking years. And you hear NASCAR really great point

Matt Gjertsen [00:20:15]:

that I have never.

Matt Gialich [00:20:16]:

Yes, they celebrate it all the time. And I like to take a step back and say that is a failure. They were meant to be cheaper than they were and only last 90 days. You instead all over engineered them to last 20 years. And they're great missions, awesome teams. I don't ever mean this as a slight team, but I think as a whole, as you look at product development, there should have been an upper requirement, not only a lower requirement, they should have been able to last for 90 days, but no more than one year. Could you hit that? And how would that have changed that project? You know, it's always, it's always a B testing or, you know, this term hindsight is 20 20. Like maybe that wouldn't have mattered.

Matt Gialich [00:20:50]:

Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. But it's just how I've always thought about these things with, with our team is I'm not interested in my spacecraft lasting for 100 years. I'm interested in it making to an asteroid, and that's it. And so that is a big part of focus. The, the second part of that equation, though, is just purely fear. People are scared. They are scared that what they are doing is not correct or they want to go do something else that they think is correct to go do it, so they make sure what they're doing is correct. Or everybody constantly needs to do more research.

Matt Gialich [00:21:22]:

And you can view that as not focus. I don't think it's hard for a team to be focused on building a spacecraft. Sometimes it is hard for them to focus on the individual job they need to do. And most of that, I think, comes down to their own fear of not understanding it. They want to provide a whole bunch of different options or techniques that they think will make this better or not be the reason they broke. And it's always important to remind the company that we live or die by the success of the spacecraft. We've had a lot of conversations with the structures team recently, and one thing I'll constantly tell them is the objective of the company is not to design the best structure, it's to design the best spacecraft. Because if you want to draw the limit as designing the best structure, then just select the block of aluminum.

Matt Gialich [00:22:03]:

Done. But that's not a viable spacecraft. So we have to make sure that we're thinking at the system level of how we take these things on. And sometimes that's really difficult for people to wrap their head around because they're not. And it's, it's not because they're not trying. It's a lot of times because they don't have the information necessary to go do that. You know, if you're working on the structure, you're probably not super clued into what avionics is doing, and you're probably not super clued into what, you know, the GNC team is doing or the software team, but actually all those parts need to play together.

Matt Gjertsen [00:22:34]:

Do you find that some of that fear can even come back to just like a basic fear of your job? And, you know, I'll speak, you know, as somebody who's usually on the support side of things, you know, who's in training development. It's really. Or, you know, or say you're, you know, somebody writing technical documentation. It's really easy to just want to. In order to prove your worth. It's just like, oh, we training can solve everything. We always need another course. We always need a new thing or we always need a more document.

Matt Gjertsen [00:22:58]:

And. And the fear is like, well, if I don't deliver on my particular role maximally, it can call into question kind of like my even reason for being here.

Matt Gialich [00:23:09]:

Of course, that's human nature to worry about your job or I think as humans, we all love to worry about the downside risk. What happens? I mean, for me, what happens if this company doesn't work out? What happens? My family, if we go bankrupt tomorrow, would I be okay? Would I be able to find another job? I'm CEO now, right? So what does CEO mean? It means increase the enterprise value of this corporation. Is that job actually transferable to any other corporation? Like, I have no idea. And what I've tried to realize personally is you can spend a lot of time thinking about the what ifs and the downsides. But when I do my time at it, guess how much when I put on my calendar, like, oh, I was being a little whiny bitch today, I was being a little whiny bitch. How much of that increases the enterprise value of the company? None of it. So stop doing it right. My job is actually to not think about the downside because it doesn't help the company.

Matt Gialich [00:23:52]:

But it's really hard to teach that framework to everybody. And I understand it. I can resonate with it a lot. We all think about what happens if this goes belly up, what happens if it goes south. There's no solution here. We all try to show our worth in different ways and that we're correct in different ways. And I think the magic of running small teams is you have to be able to understand the incentives of the team. And sometimes that is the incentive.

Matt Gialich [00:24:13]:

And as long as you can harness that and give that person at least the feedback, that that's correct and that's the way we want to think, and that actually accelerates the company, that's exceptional. It is really important to remind everybody that every single person here is a single string of failure. And if you fail at your job, we fail as a company, and then we all have to think about the downside risk. So let's just not fail.

Matt Gjertsen [00:24:39]:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think especially in today's world, with how quickly things are changing, I think one of the unique things now that we're actually getting a really amazing view of with kind of what's happening with Artemis and what's happening with Starliner right now, is the desire to continue to, you know, the fear of moving quickly, the desire to do one more look, take one more anal, do one more analysis, make it just a little bit beefier because it can slow down everything that creates its own type of risk, like speed of iteration, like learning cycles are really, really important, especially with how quickly everything's changing. And it just seems like that's like, at least. And I could be wrong with it. But this idea that keeps going on around in my head with some of the recent news of space programs is just like. Just speed is a way. Speed is a real way to decrease risk over the long term.

Matt Gialich [00:25:44]:

I think when you're in a highly technical field like this, like. Like working in space, we like to think that we're all special. And the reality is we're not. This is something that has been understood since the beginning of time, but we forget that this has been understood since the beginning of time. You have a picture of an airplane behind you based on the DC10. Yeah, the first DC10 that was built. How long was that in operation For a long time.

Matt Gjertsen [00:26:13]:

I flew aircraft.

Matt Gialich [00:26:14]:

No, it wasn't in operation. What I'm getting at is like, the first one that rolled off the line wasn't an operation at all.

Matt Gjertsen [00:26:20]:

Yes.

Matt Gialich [00:26:20]:

And in fact, all of these will build multiple test aircraft before they ever then even go to trials. And then they put humans on it. And what are they doing? They're taking advantage of iterative building and exactly what you're talking about. Volume. I call it volume. And I really.

Matt Gjertsen [00:26:34]:

Yeah.

Matt Gialich [00:26:35]:

Point this out. It's another thing that I think probably also in the Space industry. My favorite word that everybody brings up when they say we're going to fully vertical integrate. Okay, can you please explain to me what the fuck that means other than Elon keeps saying this? What does that mean? Yeah, are you like starting an aluminum mine? Are you smelting the aluminum? Are you. You're not fully vertically integrating anything you're thinking about. And so I would, I always define this as a different construct of volume. If you can buy a part in volume, then you should buy it. And if you cannot, you should build it.

Matt Gialich [00:27:03]:

And it's really that simple. And it comes down to the same thing with these J. Volume matters. Volume gets you shots on goal. Volume gets you an understanding. I bet you if Boeing was to build the second and third and fourth Dreamliner, they're going to be much better spacecraft because they've learned all this iteration on it. The problem is we stopped allowing people to build 2, 3, 4 and 5. And you know, Jared Isaacman just pointed this out on Artemis.

Matt Gialich [00:27:23]:

He just changed a big part of Artemis and what was happening there. And what did he say? Flight cadence matters. He's not saying anything new. He's not some genius that thought of this for the first time. He's just saying, hey, did we all forget to read a history book and see how this works? I mean, how is every. How did the car get cheaper and more reliable? We forget that Henry Ford made the car cheaper. He also made the car a lot more reliable by producing a lot of them. Like this is such a well known phenomenon.

Matt Gialich [00:27:53]:

We just have to deal with such high capex that we forget about it, but it doesn't change.

Matt Gjertsen [00:27:58]:

There's a great book you may or may not have heard of called the Perfectionists. And it's basically about the history of the world through the lens of manufacturing tolerances. And it makes exactly the point you just made. How if you compared, you know, a Ford Model T to a custom built Rolls Royce, the Ford Model T was built to tighter engineering tolerances than the custom made Rolls Royce because it had to be in order to mass manufacture it. Yep, yep.

Matt Gialich [00:28:28]:

Yeah, it's nothing. It's nothing new. And I just think that in space and we forget about it. Also, let's be very honest, the capex required to do these at volume is extremely high. I mean, that's why for us as a company perspective, we try to build a very, very small spacecraft. We want the Capex to be as low as possible so we can produce in volume. Now we just got to teach NASA that if you're going to make cheap spacecraft, you have to be willing to take some risk and allow them to fail because they're cheaper. Lunar Trailblazer report just came out.

Matt Gialich [00:28:56]:

This was a spacecraft that was going to the moon. It was a $72 million mission, which by NASA standards is essentially free. And what's really disappointing for me about that mission is sure, they made all these engineering mistakes and we can all sit there and be like, well, if they would have done A or B, this would have been great. It's actually more disappointing to me is they didn't say, great, we failed. We're going to do another one right away. And here it is us trying again. And if that one fails, we can do another one because we still think we can do four of these missions cheaper than it costs to do one in a normal way. That was actually the test.

Matt Gialich [00:29:23]:

And I do think NASA dropped the ball there a little bit by saying we're going to pause on this and just go into a failure analysis approach on it. It's a little bit of a bummer to me.

Matt Gjertsen [00:29:31]:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so then kind of in closing, I mean, for you at astroforge, then, as you say you're resource constrained. You need to move quickly. What are some of the ways that you think at astroforge, you're effectively helping people stay focused and realize the whole mission, realize what the real priorities are.

Matt Gialich [00:29:53]:

I wish I could tell you there was some management trick that I had figured out to do this where I could say like, oh, you have you talk to everybody. This, this, this. There's no way. The way that I do this is maybe a little bit more brute force. I literally just walk around and talk to every engineer all the time. And I asked them, what are you working on? What's the number one thing? Can you help me think through this? Help me understand this process? Have you thought about this? Remember, we always want to try to do X, Y or Z. That's it. There isn't really a special thing here to go do it.

Matt Gialich [00:30:20]:

And some things I think that I would. Your most effective cv, just walk around and tell people, I wonder if I just walked around and said, go faster, go faster, go faster. That probably adds 50% of what I'm talking about. Like, you just gotta be present is all I'm saying. Right. And one way to make sure you don't go fast is never be in the office, don't work hard, don't show up on weekends like that. That kind of stuff just can't happen. It's a, it's really hard to run these companies, and it's a really difficult endeavor.

Matt Gialich [00:30:47]:

And if you want to go do something that's going to change the world, you don't get that for free. It's going to come at a massive cost and a lot of pain and suffering to be able to try to see that even have a chance at being successful. And I don't think we are even at a 50% chance. I think we're at about a 5% chance of being successful. You got to be willing for that high of a chance of failure to still be willing to spend every single second working on the company.

Matt Gjertsen [00:31:11]:

Yeah, yeah, well, and I think, yeah, everybody's different. Every team is different. Every. You know, and as you say, there's so many natural human inclinations, human nature that drives you to silo, to not think about the other things, to worry about just your component. And so it makes sense that the only antidote to that is just kind of the. You're pushing back on it with more humanness. You're pushing back on human nature with more human nature. Okay, so let's stay connected.

Matt Gjertsen [00:31:38]:

Let's talk. Let's tell me what's going on. So it makes sense that there isn't like. Like a tech solution.

Matt Gialich [00:31:45]:

Yeah. And every time we try to bring in a tech solution, like, and to be clear, we try a ton of different things. We've tried looking at, you know, it's really easy to go look at what are the founders that have been successful and study what they do. I mean, you talked about Jeff Bezos and the famous memos that are done. You can think all these ways. And the reality is, it's like, it's not all of those things have their flaws and their opinions to it. There's no shortcut here. I will say just work really hard, spend a lot of time, go do the work yourself in some cases, too.

Matt Gialich [00:32:12]:

Like, I know this is a bad word in the industry always, but auditing is a big part of this understanding. Like, okay, cool, you told me I need X. Is that true? I got to go do the math and figure that out. You know, does this make sense? Is it passing? How much can I trust this person or this team to do what we need them to do, blah, blah, blah. Everybody's going to be different. Everybody's going to have strengths and weaknesses. You got to identify them as quick as possible, play to their strengths and remove their weaknesses. I mean, it's actually pretty basic, and we try to make it really complicated.

Matt Gialich [00:32:41]:

And it's just Not.

Matt Gjertsen [00:32:43]:

Yeah, yeah. I think I always come back to. In the flying world, we use the terms procedure versus technique, where procedure are the things that you have to do. These are the rules that you have to follow. Technique are the various ways to get there. And so the procedures are usually pretty simple, pretty cut and dry. It can seem complicated because there's so many techniques, but ultimately it's just about you deciding on what your technique is for this situation. And it's, it's complicated because everybody's different.

Matt Gjertsen [00:33:11]:

Everybody's doing different things, and every situation is different. But you can boil it down to just like, no, this is. We got to enter the holding pattern and not exceed these speeds or whatever. And like, you just figure out how you're going to do it. Yep.

Matt Gialich [00:33:22]:

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's it. There's a lot. A lot of life is pretty simple. There isn't a lot of shortcuts. And some. You know, the hard part here is, though, sometimes companies just hit the timing mark so perfect that we associate them with being successful when they should have probably failed. I still think that the, the, the mantra that timing is probably the number one thing you have to get right in business is kind of very true.

Matt Gialich [00:33:43]:

And if you hit that right, you can make a lot of mistakes on how you run a company. If you hit it wrong, you got to run a company perfectly, and that's all there is to it.

Matt Gjertsen [00:33:51]:

That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. Well, what's the next big milestone? I mean, I know you. So you all have a podcast called Roid Rage where you do a great job kind of covering. This is the big test we just did. I don't know. What's the next big milestone that you're looking for forward to?

Matt Gialich [00:34:07]:

I mean, look, the next big, big milestone is to launch this thing, right? We have a spacecraft called Deep Space 2. It's 100 kilogram, or, sorry, 200 kilogram space spacecraft that we want to send into deep space. We want to have operate in deep space, and we want to show the world that at this small of a platform for this price point, you can go venture out into the universe. Like that, to me, is not a company milestone, that's a human milestone. And I think that's really, really important to, to get right. And that's what we're going to spend the next six months working as hard as we can on to get across the line.

Matt Gjertsen [00:34:37]:

And DSpace2 is kind of a more of a. Like, you have a couple of them right like or there's a couple models after that that should follow relatively quickly. Is that right?

Matt Gialich [00:34:47]:

Yeah, I mean we can make it very simple. We're building Deep Space three and four also concurrently. Right. As we go through this to, to build them up. I mean again it comes down to volume. Like we're not trying to, we're not trying to not work at volume. We're working at volume. So we'll see if you know that that's what it looks like and what launches they're going to go on and how they're going to fly but absolutely we want to see this go to high volume production of exploring the universe.

Matt Gjertsen [00:35:08]:

That's awesome. Excellent. Well I'm, I'm really excited for you. You're definitely one of the more forward leaning new space companies in my opinion so it's really excited to, to follow your progress. Thank you so much for being here today.

Matt Gialich [00:35:20]:

Awesome. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it

Matt Gjertsen [00:35:25]:

Sam.