Mission Possible - Laura Crabtree, Epsilon3 Apr 2025

Welcome to Space Insiders. My name is Tony Suhl.

And this is Rob Ruryak.

And this is our very first podcast, Rob. Numero uno.

Numero uno. Very excited, Tony. It's exciting. Know you for a long time. We've talked about this for a while. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's give people a voice in what they're doing in space.

Super Yeah, awesome. So Rob and I, we've been colleagues and friends for quite a few years now. We've been talking about something that we thought was really missing in podcasting in the space industry. And what we really wanted to do was interview a range of really interesting people from the space industry, founders, VCs, marketing experts, all sorts of people from different functions. Learn about what makes them tick.

Yeah. And and and, you know, we have the discussion on how could space apply to solving a whole myriad of problems. You know, it's not just the rockets. It's not just, exploring space, all of which is really interesting and important. But how could space now be used for other types of use cases, other problems to solve?

Yeah. And we've got some amazing guests lined up. We're going be doing this every two weeks. Our first guest today is Laura Crabtree. She's CEO and founder of Epsilon3.

Absolutely.

What we're going do though, we do that, so one thing we want to do as we kick off each of these shows is have a little bit of a talk about what's been catching our eye in the news. We've Space Symposium coming up next week. But Rob, one of the things I wanted to touch on, which is kind of incredible, in the last couple of weeks, we've just been following what's been going on in the SATCOM space in Europe. EUTELSAT shares have gone up 265% in the last month. A lot of it is a result of this new, I guess, changing geopolitical situation around sovereignty, sovereign SATCOM capabilities.

Yeah. I mean, you know, while while all that's happening in The US, you look at the large defense contractor, big cap stocks, they're all down.

Right?

So I think a lot of it is, you know, a lot of what we're hearing in the news. There's a lot of the the geopolitical dynamics that are occurring. I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty around, what does the of the new world look like for defense contractors, a defense industrial base, which frankly includes space, right? It includes a lot of commercial space companies too, because that is where they sell a lot of their capability and solutions. So I think part of it is just the uncertainty and the unknowns and the investors just trying to understand where the value is in this uncertainty.

Yeah. Well, it'd be great to get Laura's perspective on some of this. Came from SpaceX, but she also started a career in Northrop Grumman. I watched an interview with her from a couple of weeks ago where she was talking about how fifteen years ago, the only companies in space were these big guys were Atheon and Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The whole environment has really changed. I think she's a great guest for us to have as we launch this. What do reckon we bring her in?

Let's get it started. Awesome.

Hey, Rob. Hey, Laura. Great to see Yeah,

likewise.

Laura, it's so great to see you. I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago we were talking.

How could I feel?

To you? Yes.

You are one of the people that I really wanted to work with, Rob.

And you're the one that got away, Laura. So really happy that you could join us today. Are super excited to talk to you and learn a little bit about your journey in space, specifically in, I think your background at SpaceX and other experiences you've had. Then most importantly, a couple of years ago, you started your own company, right?

I did,

It's Epsilon-three. Four

years ago, actually four years and two months officially, but more than that unofficially. Yeah.

And I will tell you, Tony and I, we attended that Payload Investor Day conference. When was that? Was that October? Last year.

That was last year.

Late last year. And I don't know about you guys, but I was very impressed with the way that they ran that whole event. It was really good. It was very intimate. I think those guys do a really good job over payload. One of the things that Tony and I, we were standing next to each other, we were listening to you on that panel. I'm trying to remember the topic. Was it specifically on entrepreneurship? I'm trying to remember.

I think it was an everything topic because we had Will Rui, we had Alex from LOFT on the panel, so the three of us. And there was just a focus on entrepreneurial space startups, etcetera, on that Yeah,

and it was great because I think that may have been the first time I actually met you in person, which was great.

It was, yeah.

Tony and I were talking about, as we think through this podcast and the value of it, I think both of us were, Tony mentioned you and it was like perfect, I think, to kick this off with because of all your experience. So thanks for joining us. Let's start off with this first question. So try to tell us what really inspired you about starting Epsilon-three. What helped you make the jump from where you were before?

Yeah, so I guess going back to 2020, when my life changed now for the better, left SpaceX after almost eleven years, and I really didn't know what I wanted to do next. If you've ever talked to somebody that worked at SpaceX, you'll know that it's sort of like a divorce. And not that I've ever been divorced. I don't have that experience. But I've been through a lot of hardships and friendships and relationships, and it feels like something is being ripped out of you a little bit.

Eleven years at SpaceX have got to be like dog years too, I would It

is. Everybody says that one year at SpaceX is like three years in the real world. And so let's just say it was almost thirty three years at SpaceX. And I thought about what I wanted to do, and really, the big picture of what I wanted to do was continue making an impact in the industry that I loved and still love to this day. And I thought that that might be at a bunch of startups.

I was just listening to the panel you did, Monty twenty five, a couple of weeks And it was super interesting how you sort of the backdrop of like when you started at Northrop Grumman back in the 2000s, and at that stage there was five companies in space, and it was just the cusp of new space. Then SpaceX was the leader in commercialising space. You comment about how everyone's building their software. No one was addressing the software problem or the infrastructure problem. And it kind of made me think about another friend of ours in the industry.

It depends on how long they've been around, really. Anybody who entered the industry in the last ten years does not want to manage on prem services. They do not want a containerized software that they have to redeploy. For us, it would be if you wanted to keep up with the progress, you'd have to redeploy every week, which is untenable. So most of the people that are on prem with us will deploy once a month, once every three months.

Lauren, do you see any difference in how people discuss and adopt different technologies, whether it's on prem or whether it's in the cloud or whatever that end architecture might be based on whether or not they're a government customer versus commercial? Are you still seeing that be very different and where in particular, if there's a particular area?

I think that Let's see, I'm thinking about our on prem customers. It's in the higher security spaces. So if you're working with the government in a more high security way, more compartmentalized way, you're probably going to only be able to do on prem, and that's okay. But I think in the end, all roads sort of lead back to the government. So even if you have a commercial company, they probably have a government contract of some sort.

I

think most people should probably just embrace the cloud at this point in time, but not all will.

Yeah, think that's one of the things that Tony and I would We're gonna continue to explore with this podcast here and see not only where people actually all align on that end goal, but what is the journey to actually get there? What are the roadblocks to get there? Because the other thing that's I think quite interesting is there's the legacy thinking around on prem and being very focused on being comfortable with that. Maybe it is ITAR, maybe it's other things, but the other aspect is hoping that there's going to be another forcing function and potentially with a new administration, maybe there is some of that where the large legacy defense contractors need to figure out how to be more efficient, effective and mostly cost effective, especially as we start to see a lot less of this cost plus type contracting exist. And the awards change a bit more towards incentive based.

us, efficiency and time savings is the biggest reason either to use the cloud or to use a commercially available SaaS product. And you can't find, in my opinion, obviously, I'm supervised, but you can't find a better team that responds to their customers than the team that we've built here because we genuinely just love this industry and want it to be able to move as fast as we know it can. And then going back to the cost plus, that was the big shift for me from Northrop Grumman to SpaceX. Northrop Grumman sort of had large I won't say blank check, but they had large contracts where if they overrun, it's okay. You just go into government and say, We overran our contracts.

Yeah, that's interesting. So Epsilon-three has been a bit over four years now. You've been through Series A.

Yep.

What would have been harder to do than you expected? What were the things that kind of surprised you about the journey you've been on?

So I'm an engineer. So building the product, knowing what the product should do, listening to the customers is literally my favorite thing to do. The hardest thing to do was to learn how to build a business. I think for me, was, I'm going to go to Google, and somebody said to me, Rob, someone we know, Mike Marino, he said, Oh, you have to build a pitch deck. And I said, A what?

And

it was part of my journey at SpaceX, which I tried to encourage people to not use acronyms following what happened, but

Oh, I've got look this up.

There's a whole Reddit.

Look at them now, Tony.

There's a subreddit thread somewhere on the internet about the acronyms email, but there were a ton of acronyms. There's finance acronyms forever and a day. And so even now, investors, I still sometimes Google, and maybe this is a bad secret, but I still sometimes have to Google, what does that acronym mean?

My favorite are the nested acronyms, without an acronym within an acronym. Was something when I was in my early army days, one of my first commanding officers, he took great delight in And it taught me to do it. When people were using acronyms in briefings, he would tell me what that means. And so many times people just didn't know what the acronyms meant.

There was a really great embedded acronym that we had at SpaceX for a communication box. And it was a bunch of NASA acronyms embedded into the SpaceX acronyms. So it was called CUCU, C U C U, and it was the COTS UHF Communications Unit. And COTS is a NASA coined kind of term. And then UHF is just a mode of communication.

So we just went down to totally nerd acronym spiral. Do we break out two?

It's not sure I would end up with nerd stuff.

It's common. It's a rite of passage.

Well, one of the things I wanted to bring up, and I the book is right on my shelf, right next to me, Laura, is I remember you and I had a follow on conversation to stay in touch. And I was asking you a similar question that Tony just asked around, you know, what are some of the things that you're, you know, really trying to learn quickly? And one of them was the challenger sale. Do you remember that book? Yeah. I've got it.

I've got that.

It's right behind me.

I've got it over there

too. Yes. Yeah. This is not a paid ad for a challenge But yeah, I went and bought that. I read about it, it was really useful.

Let's see. So for us, it's really about solving the team problem. It's as your team gets bigger, how do you communicate best practices? How do you record data? And everybody has a solution in place, whether it's a Word doc that you email back and forth to a Confluence page to some in house built tool.

Yeah. I'd love to hear a bit about how you approach the demand generation process. So we've got Space Symposium coming up next week. I think I saw you might be speaking or in a panel or something. It's amazing how that conference has really sort of become so prominent over the last few years.

I look at it as a way to meet people and talk to them about what they're doing. I don't necessarily look at it as a, you know, I'm going to go and tell you everything.

Ex dollars in pipeline.

Yeah, I don't think about it like that. I think about it as, you know, these people are my tribe, if you will. I don't know how else to describe it, but this is the industry that I live and work in. These are the people that I like. I want to learn about what's going on in the industry, and I want to figure out if we're doing the right things.

Is there anything in particular you're looking out for? Are we interested to see what comes out of next week? Obviously, I think there's a bit of concern about how many government customers are going to be there for

a start. Hardly talking about that. Whether the government is actually going to travel, I think they will limit. I haven't had a lot of government meetings at Space Symposium ever. And so I probably won't be meeting with anyone from the government.

Yeah, I will say, of all the industries I've worked in in my career, and I've worked in a bunch of different ones, this to me seems to be the most collegial, collaborative, friendly industry that I've ever witnessed actually. And I don't know if it's because the problems that we're trying to solve are so large or the visions that people have are so big also that it kind of creates more of that natural behavior to be more collaborative. I'm not really sure, that's something that I'm always been very attracted to. And I think the space symposium is really unique that way because I almost feel like it is a taking a breather moment where people in industry can come together and meet at the bar and have a conversation and catch And maybe they talk about their career, maybe they talk about what their companies are doing, or maybe they talk about business ideas or opportunities, but it kind of spans the whole spectrum of conversation. And that's why I always enjoy it because it's a way to really connect with a lot of people that I've met over the years that I like to work with, I'm inspired by.

Need to tell our.

So I'll have to look for you, Laura, when we're out there next I'll

be there.

Yeah. Awesome.

All right. So Laura, this has been awesome. One last question. This is sort of outside of work. So if you could instantly master a skill outside of your working professional life, what would it be and why?

Oh, that is a great question. I might use this for an interview question. I always ask in an interview some question about the person, something that they do, something that they love. I think it might be around language, being able to speak another language. I grew up speaking Spanish, but I have let that slip. And I live in a household where I live with French speakers and my kids are learning Mandarin, and I feel woefully left behind.

French is a great one for the space industry.

I think language would be a good one. I have worked with a number of Japanese customers, French customers, Spanish customers, and German customers, and I think it would be great to be able to easily converse with all of them. And outside of work, I love to travel and I fostered a love for travel when I was working in Northrop and I lived in England. And I traveled to I don't know how many countries. I should have probably written that down, but a lot more.

cool. It's kind of sad that they don't stamp passports anymore.

Yeah, you have to ask. You can ask.

They do. I get stamps. Not if you're European.

Yeah, or when I go to Australia, they don't stamp them.

Well, they say welcome home.

Yeah, they do.

It was kind of a nice way to learn about the world, and I always tried to learn a few phrases, a few sentences, and it depends what country you're in, but some countries, people really love that you try. And some countries, they say, Oh my gosh, you speak English? I want to practice my English with you. But I think that would be a really cool skill to miss.

I love it. That's a great one.

Yeah, me too.

About you guys? You a good thing you wanna master?

Well, I've always tried to master this, playing the guitar.

It's a good one.

So that's Yeah.

And I'm playing the bass. So Rob and I are gonna start a band.

Gonna start a band. I've got a piano player for you. My 10 year old's really good. And the eight year old will sing for you.

All right. Nice. Looks like we got a band figured out. That's great.

Laura, thanks so much for joining us. This was great. Our first podcast in the books helping to raise a trial with us. If people want to learn more about Epsilon-three, where can people find you and the company?

So we have Twitter. It's just Epsilon3 Inc on Twitter. And you can find me. I'm l l crabby, c r a b b I e, on We also have LinkedIn, and we have a website, which is just epsilon3.io. And you can chat with us there. You can find out more about product or just ask us whatever questions you

have. Awesome.

We're always open to feedback, ideas, whatever you want to tell us. We want to learn.

Great. I'll post those in the show notes. Thanks everyone for joining us too for our first podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, we'd love to see you write a review or write us. You can also reach out to us at infospaceinsiders. Show. We also have a LinkedIn page, Space Insider Show and a YouTube channel. So really keen as we get rolling on this. If you've got questions or the topics you want to talk to us about, please reach out to us. But this is good, Rob. Thanks, Laura.

This was fun. This was a blast. Laura, you're the best. Thank you so much for doing this with us. This was great. Alright. We'll see you soon. Best of And

we'll see you on the next episode, which will be in two weeks time. So thanks for joining us.