The Journey to Interplanetary Innovation with Relativity Space CFO Mo Shahzad

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another exciting episode of the Modern CFO Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Seske. I'd like to welcome today Mo Jasad, CFO of Relativity Space, to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here, Mo. Thanks for having me, Andrew. Excited to be chatting with you. I'd like to jump right into this episode by asking a broad question about what you feel is underestimated in the world today.

given your unique vantage point. Yeah. Thanks for asking that question. It feels like one of those heavyweighted, what's the meaning of life questions, but let me give it my best shot here. I think from a professional standpoint, I'd say I'm an accidental space.

enthusiast at this point i'm sort of four years near the space world and as i think about how the first 36 years of my life went by without thinking much about space and the last four i've dealt really deep into it i do think the the world spends too little time thinking about space and there's of course a deep enthusiast community around this that want to make life interplanetary and follow to the mars missions and moon and all the deep space stuff we've been doing in this

country and in the world for the last 50, 60 years. But I really do think we're at the cusp of this next privatization. 2.0 or 3.0, however you want to think about that in space and with what's happening and basic things like compute power and advancements in software, which are sort of the enabling foundational technologies to make advancement.

AI in space in this generation, not like two or three generations away, we'll see things happen on moon and on Mars. And it's going to be just a wildly different experience. And for us, we're chasing. All of this and our mission at Relativity Space is to make life interplanetary.

is not because we think we'll destroy resources on earth but it's simply with this curiosity that we want to explore mars it's like we've got ships and we're not going to just stay on the lakes and rivers we're going to get them onto the oceans and explore what's on the other

And I think that's going to be just such a wild, different experience. And I think 99 plus percent of the world does not think about anything that's deeply understated. So that's how I answer professionally. At a personal level, I would say. on this sort of post-COVID Zoom digital world.

And maybe it's too cliche, but I think the very basics of human to human interaction and one to one conversation and the depth of relationships, which I've got not many friends in my life, but I've got very, very deep friends in my life. And I think that. personal relationship is just so understated today and we've become this community again super cliche to say but i really deeply value

I tell my wife this, I'm not in the market for new friends. I just want to spend more time with my old friends. And I think doing that with co-workers and getting to know people at that human level.

is so, so, so important and something I have to keep reminding myself of. One of the relationships I think must be the most sensitive in this space is probably with shareholders, investors, new employees. in terms of the longevity of the goals that you're reaching. And I'm curious as to how you balance short-term and long-term goals. And I think it's really relevant for CFOs who are trying to figure out their R&D spends in AI.

I'm curious as to how you think personally and professionally about how to measure short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals, especially because of the stakeholders that you have, how difficult it is to raise capital, keep investors excited in a space that... will develop over decades as opposed to the lifecycle of their funds.

Yeah, it's a great question. So first thing I say to you, Andrew, is in my seat from a quote-unquote resource allocation perspective, this is a really, really, really hard job. And it's really hard because... In most businesses, you have a ton of signal that you get back and you put a product out and it's a little bit better than you thought, a little bit worse. You can understand and look at your assumptions and figure out where you were right, where you were wrong, help push teams on.

what we need to do better to get there. Like this is a program that will take hundreds to thousands of people and certainly hundreds and thousands of labor hours, an incredibly complex product that is very circuitous in development and manufacturing. capturing, how you then scale from one rocket to many rockets.

just an incredible amount of challenges. Millions of things need to go right. Any one thing can make it complicated. So you really have to get in there and walk the floors and understand.

from every frontline person, how things are going and keep a real pulse. And it's an overlay of of some data some experience but a lot of gut and have to rely on your technical my technical peers and and our technical teams to really understand and in partnership make the best decisions for the enterprise it isn't like a finance versus engineering type mentality because it'll just come

to a screeching halt, right? The other piece here that is very unique is thinking about how much planning is really possible when you're trying to innovate and do things that are wildly different. I think this is true of most businesses where you're innovating and pushing the edges of, in our case, physics.

where if we tried to build the perfect company with the perfect plans and the perfect budgets, we will likely never launch a rocket. On the flip side, if we have it be Wild West and anybody can spend and do whatever they want, maybe we'll get to launch.

But then we'll have to pause and be like, oh, shoot, let's put a company around it and all the mechanisms that one needs. Right. And I'm not even sure we'll get to launch because things like how to orchestrate 1200 people that we have today and how to.

drive all hands, how to focus on just some basic things that you would need at a company of our size and scale. Oak are also critical because you can't get up and tell 20 people to stop working on what they're working on and change and pivot and the cost of change is too high.

Anyway, that's the sort of framing. To answer your question specifically, I think the key here is... being nimble yet finding mechanisms to hold people accountable and so you want to have a long-range vision that you're communicating to people that isn't necessarily just making life interplanetary but is even more bite-sized than that

And then you take that you're rolling 12 months for you and then that fits into that long range plan. And then how do you think about the short term goals? And I will say to you that in my four years here are.

plans are wildly different but the how we fill them and how we get there and the milestones we want to hit stay pretty consistent because we aren't funded by somebody with unlimited amounts of money or government backers so we really run this public company style in any journey like this hopefully the partners the employees the stakeholders customers investors government partners

understand that value creation here is not going to be a linear journey. You may take two steps forward and a step sideways and a step backward, but hopefully ultimately keep driving the machine forward. And that requires

trust and transparency that you build over time. We're super clear and direct with everybody. We've got the same plan internally that we have with customers, that we have with our investors. And that's ultimately, I think. one of the other understated things in life like the basic basic things around integrity and commitments that you're making and sticking to those commitments those are the values we try to instill at the company you're talking in a very entrepreneurial

way. Sometimes the CFO is brought on way later in the entrepreneurial journey. But I'm curious as to where these influences came from, because you're speaking with this ownership mindset, I think is really powerful. Was there a time in your life where you felt that that was uniquely instilled? Yeah, it's a good observation. In other words, I really don't know where my box has started and stopped. I'd say the place where it was mostly instilled, my parents are both medical.

doctors neither practices my dad's always been a entrepreneur small time all kinds of projects in his life where he found arbitrage opportunities he chased them i think some of those lessons around dinner tables were some of the most important things that I learned everything from how to operate a cash register, how to think about a factory operation,

how to do import exports. At the end of the day, none of his businesses, he ever raised tons of outside money, if any at all. And so this was always about, if you can save a buck, it'll go right down to the bottom line. Real ownership mentality, which of course has a flip side. because you're maybe not scaling things as fast as you could. And so you've got to balance it at the end of the day.

That was instilled in me very early on. Also tried my hand at founding a company that I ended up selling to a couple of people up in the Bay Area. Clearly not enough to retire. So I'm still at it 20 years after that. I think that's super important to any executive.

level role where you can't just think about the function you know this job is not just about selling budgets getting your audits done and critiquing your peers for something they could have done better right like you really got to put yourself in their shoes and this is something i'm learning and it's a journey as a

classically trained capitalist and a finance guy, I have tried to learn and try every day to develop more and more empathy for where my peers come from, how to think from their perspective and absorb and try to make one plus one and our thinking better. It's always about moving the company forward. got to be the lens that any executive takes and certainly i think at the cfo level yeah i really appreciate you mentioning that people should just hit that back 30 second button i mean the

lens of what's going to bring us forward to any meeting. It's just such a healthy mindset for any sort of group setting. So I think that's super valuable.

One of the things I'm really interested in is the competitive nature of your industry in terms of talent acquisition. One of the things that stands out to me in terms of your career is how multifaceted it is. You've been on transaction desks at Goldman, CFO, the honest company. You've been through a different cycle of technology and waves of financial crises. And I'm really interested in how you think about.

bringing on the absolute best talent to your organization because i think it's a big thing that cfos don't talk enough about but falls into their wheelhouse every once in a while

Yep, yep. No, I appreciate that question. These days, I do have formal responsibilities for our people teams, including talent acquisition. I think... for all companies no matter what you're doing like really complicated things like rockets or something much simpler than that all things really start with people right this is a

A lesson I learned from a great CEO in my last gig who sort of really instilled that in me and having a strong head of people, having a strong culture, making sure that that talent bar is super high. uh and and i guess what that's what i'd say there andrew is talent is um certainly not a not a right it's it's uh it's a privilege and it's one that you've gotta

maintain. And so this takes everything from the basics of what our people in our talent acquisition team does and how they're telling the story and what the experiences are, the people certainly that we hire, but for the 99 plus. percent of people that we don't hire and what they walk away and tell their friends about us. It's certainly true of the things that we do with our brand and comms team that focus on employer branding. It's certainly comes from.

actually winning right like wants to go work for a company that you say it's a great culture and people are wonderful but they are always losing right and so you want to make forward progress certainly on the space side that's true it's a small community and people understand who's winning who's not who's making progress we do everything from the hand-to-hand combat the more scaled stuff that you would imagine a 1200 person company doing.

and are super proud of the talent flows that we're able to to drive and that you know we're not trying to create an anti any company and we're not trying to replicate the culture of any other company in our magic is to bring folks that understand the launch industry understand space i've worked in a variety of different settings and map them to a bunch of other

backgrounds that haven't worked in space and make the magic happen by bringing those folks together and expand their thinking. Still, there's a ton of such roles that we need, whether it's material scientists or software or corporate functions. Talent is absolutely critical. It's a dogfight for that talent. And unlike anything I've experienced, including finance, this industry still works very much in an apprenticeship style mentality. And so we go after.

leaders that others want to work for and be inspired by because of their work as well as the cultural reputations they carry you can build around those core set of folks or develop those types of people internally and that's been a pretty effective strategy. It's one of the things I spend, personally spend time doing with candidates every week. And if I'm not doing a candidate call or two or three or interviewing in a given week, I'll still empty about my week. I think it's that critical.

what we all do. And this is for not even my functions. This is trying to add talent across the organization. I'd love to hear kind of the origin story of how you met co-founders and got into Relativity in general. I mean, this is a really interesting opportunity to kind of rewind time, go back to what you said in undergrad and some of those early career decisions that you made that you feel are impactful. One of the questions that I often get is.

We highlight some of these incredible CFOs who have these amazing careers, but maybe I don't highlight the ebbs and flows and the messy middle along the journey to get there. But we'd love to hear kind of early decisions that you made that you felt were most impactful. Maybe you had mentors along the way that you'd suggest for folks. Maybe you're mentoring certain individuals right now in the industry.

I would love to rewind time and go back to those early days post-undergrad. Yeah, that's great. And I'm happy to share the story. And I think it's as messy as they come. It's fun to always sort of tell the narrative and the end.

as life goes it's a series of bizarre decisions that have ended me here right and it was a lunch here or a conversation there that i did or didn't do that then has brought me to this point i'm a big believer that we you know no one should live in the woulda coulda shut us and you are where you are as you're meant to be and you've got to make the most of it so on my journey i actually started off as a bioengineering major and it was

was the introductory bioengineering 100 class that was as boring as they come, even though it was math and physics and science guy growing up. And I just called it quits on engineering. I said, okay, well, what can I do that's sort of relevant a little bit to the math, but not the esoteric, like, you know, Calc 3 or what have you that I was taking that year, but will allow me to interact with people and someone.

Probably said to me, hey, finance is a thing to try out. And it was a great program at Penn. And so I ended up transferring into the Wharton undergrad program and studied finance. Never really with the view to... kind of going into banking or some of the traditional tracks that people do. I couldn't even have told you what investment banking was, even after graduating with a finance degree, like things just come so fast.

in a hodgepodge. So I tried everything from getting involved in some of our family stuff and wanted to go out and prove myself and moved to Wall Street in 2002, which was a very interesting time.

be working on wall street um they wouldn't hire me in banking but deutsche bank was kind enough to offer me an internal consulting role i happened to speak kindy fluently and so they said hey we're doing this project in india we'll ship you around met a bunch of people there Accenture was the consulting firm they were working with to do a bunch of work on outsourcing stuff I said hey let me go do this these

You know, quote unquote, kids at the time, like, look like they're having fun flying around the world doing a bunch of different projects. Did that. Wasn't as fulfilling as I maybe thought. I'd end up starting a company in the mobile advertising space right before the iPhone came out.

with no good reason other than thought that maybe mobile advertising was going to be this big thing. And it was still... sort of creepy and geo targeting which wasn't a phrase back then but like finding a way to sms you coupons as you walked through cell towers and things and things happen fast and whatnot so i i was at the right page of 22 trying to start this company with three four years of work experience

wasn't ready for it honestly wasn't ready to like drive a mandate forward turns out i'm not that good at like the zero to one stuff i think i'm much better at the one to ten or maybe even the ten to a hundred or a hundred to a thousand people or dollars, however you want to think about it. I can't work in the chaos of very early stage stuff, but I also don't like the very large stuff. So that's kind of what I did, you know, hit business school as a reset.

And ultimately thought I was going to do my JD MBA and started at UCLA because it was the only program, my combination that would allow me to start in the business school because I wanted the option out of law school, thought I'd come up with another idea. build a network. And that never happened in a linear way. So investment banking was a backup option. I ended up at Goldman. Thought I'd do it for two years. I'd do it in San Francisco. I'd learn the Valley.

That ended up being a five, six year journey and an amazing journey and felt like three or four jobs in one. So got a ton.

experience doing some really cool stuff but ultimately came back around when we had our first child to say you know life is too short don't want to miss my own kid and now three of them their life and i'm a tinkerer fart want to go be an operator didn't really fully know what that meant and ended up in a number two role finance role at the honest company and um it was here in la and

Very interesting things happened there over the subsequent six years. I took the CFO role 12 or 18 months into that gig and a big sort of transformation and ultimately turnaround of that business. It was fun and then came to Relativity because an old mentor of mine called me and said, hey, you should meet this guy, Tim. It's always a great mentor in every one of these. Yeah, yeah. It was actually a guy who was trying to recruit me for a few years.

And I never took the job, but he and I just ended up becoming close and we stayed in touch. And he's a mentor of mine to this day, having never worked for him still. But he connected me to Tim. And I honestly had lunch with Tim, our CEO, co-founder at this little sushi joint by LAX.

was like, let me go practice how to interview because it's been a minute. But I'm obviously not going to work in space. I don't even know why people take things up to space or how the business works. I've heard of the SpaceX thing, but like, I have no clue. This is not for me. I think as he and I got to spend time

The first lunch was all about values, family, upbringing, nothing about work. And I walked away being like, I kind of like this guy. Like, this is interesting. And then I started reading about space and the early history of aviation. I'm not a sci-fi guy, but picked up some of the Asimov, some of the classics that people read and just got fascinated, maybe like 10 or 12 books over the four or five month interview process.

felt where i started this conversation of that man like we are very very early innings of what could happen in space and and then ultimately had no way of telling who's who and the emerging space landscape and i saw that a bunch of incredible talent from primarily spacex and senior folks from there were moving

to relativity and they must know something that I didn't and made the plunge and it's been an epic journey in that four years. That is an incredible story. I doubt there are that many folks who probably get a Jules Verne quote in their interviews.

about sci-fi and family values all at the same time. But what do you think are some of the more unique cultural influences that you've received and tried to bring over to relativity? As you mentioned, this wasn't your initial... field out of undergrad, all the exposure during your TMT days at Goldman, Honest Company. I don't know that there's a ton of.

very visible overlap in terms of what you could expect, but maybe you learned not only from mentors, but from the organizational standards that were set at those firms. Have you brought anything over that's been really productive? I think...

Certainly from a professional standpoint, maybe the most defining experience for me is that the part I skipped over, my parents moved to the United States. I grew up, was born and raised in Pakistan until the middle of high school. Until sophomore year, I decided to move here. And I think I carry that, call it immigrant mindset, DNA, sort of work ethic.

Never have approached anything feeling like it was mine and someone took away from it. Like you've got to just earn it and fight for it. And so I'd like to believe what I... carry almost every day my job is this imposter syndrome of being like man somebody put me in this spot and they believe that I can do this but I don't know if I can and that stomach churning feeling of like gosh can i do this do i have confidence and i think that

drives me to learn as much as i can and be open and talk to people and not approach anything with having the answers because i actually really don't i think that's super super important as you grow in your career and i think beyond that honestly difference between me and the next guy or gal is that I'm more willing to stick my neck out and make a decision.

As it turns out in life, you've got to just be marginally more right than wrong. And if that's the case, people are like, wow, you're amazing. You walk on water. And so I think the combination of those things has just allowed me to... try to approach anything that i do with this learning mindset and at the end of the day maybe going full circle back to the entrepreneurial bit and having this like ownership mentality the way i want to show up with my peers the way i show up

in the front of the whole company people should recognize the same mo with the same values with the same integrity and if you can do that then whether you're criticizing or critiquing championing and celebrating wins everybody will have respect for you because they understand that all you're trying to do is create value and drive the company forward this isn't about your

kingdom. This isn't about you trying to make a point or be smart. All you want to do is drive this company forward. At the end of the day, you've got to just do it nicely. There's ways to do it. I often say to folks, there's no reason to be yelling. We're not in an operating room. You didn't hand me a scalpel when I asked for something else and someone died. That could all be fine mistakes.

happen and we sort of just figure it out, but we're not going to like yell at each other and we're going to hold each other accountable. We're going to be super clear. We're going to have high-performing conversations and the way we go about things, right? I don't know. old boss that used to say it's not just a what it's the how and so we focus on both those things and there's a lot of parallels in

What a turnaround story looks like with what a growth, high growth, out of control scaling type operation looks like. It's quite remarkable. Or what a diaper business looks like with the complexity of what a rocket program does. Those dots start to connect much easier. as long as you've got your values and your motivations in line. Yeah, I mean, the kind of parallels for me in athletics was always the way that you do one thing is the way you can do everything.

So why not hold yourself to the higher standard? One of the things that I think that we've talked about is mitigating conflict and solidarity and vision. How do you feel personally or professionally about the... need for competition in your industry. It feels relatively consolidated. The public may view it as either governmental or a billionaire class of next venture. And I'm curious as to how you see your role in

filling a competitive stature in what may be seen as a very niche part of the investment community and also what we're building to be maybe inter-multi-planetary in the future. Yeah, look, I think... First thing I'd say is I have Incredible respect for what SpaceX has built and what Elon's done. I mean, I've never worked there. I do know many folks. I've actually known Brett, the CFO at SpaceX for many years. Just an incredible amount of regard for...

how they've created value and done unprecedented things. Certainly 10, 15 years ago, nobody would have imagined it, but even from what they've done in the last three or five years, just absolutely remarkable. So I think that's awesome. Sort of classically trained capitalists, as I said, competition is key in any industry doing anything. We're going to really like push humanity.

forward, we're going to do what's right for us as human beings, whether it's space or anything else, not monopolistic behaviors. I also am a big free market guy and think that as long as people are playing by the rules.

and doing the right thing to each their own. And we've got to come around and we've got a story to tell and capital to raise. Got to do the things that we're saying we're going to do and get people to unlock more capital for us and then use that capital to... hopefully create more competition and there's others in the industry trying similar things with varying amounts of success that's on us like that you know i have no one to sort of point to and say um

they need to slow down and they should continue to do what they're doing and drive shareholder value. keep pushing humanity forward as long as people are playing by the rules right i think that's where things get messier if you're starting to show monopolistic tendencies so

Yeah, I think competition is super important, but it's on us to go make it happen more than anybody to sort of give to us. I want to spend a few minutes on the more revolutionary and breakthrough aspects of relativity in terms of 3D printing.

In terms of Taren 1, I want to go through a few of the big milestones that you've already achieved and what that looked like in terms of that messy middle, what you see as those large milestones. Maybe we could end on what you think is most exciting in that next three to five year time span as we all try to ingest what's newly available in AI or other technologies that are going to make.

all of these very arduous processes, at least somewhat more streamlined and easier to accomplish with smaller teams.

Yeah, I think the company was founded eight or so years ago on really the premise of 3D printing and what that's going to do in terms of an automation technology. Now, at the end of the day, especially when you think about rockets and reusable rockets when you spread that over 20 or more than 20 to the reuses over time it's not really like your bill of materials and your costs you're optimizing for what it really allows

is a speed of innovation and an iteration speed, right? The faster you can build hardware, the faster you can test it, launch it, the more you can learn and put back into your product. And so if you're not beholden to... fixed tooling as much as some of the traditional aerospace manufacturers would be, then the better off you would be and better off humanity would be over time on any sort of large scale manufacturing, whether it be rockets or many other metal products over time.

i think that's that still remains absolutely true and core to what we do today and think about Of course, the flip side of this is the landscape in space with what Starlink is doing and how quickly it's growing. Some of the other constellations have been publicly announced, how we're starting to, as humanity, augment the terrestrial. telco networks with space has also just moved at a pace much faster than I think, honestly, even we had the thesis on, i.e.

the world needs more large rockets and there's this huge supply demand imbalance of what the world needs in terms of larger vehicles and larger rockets. And so I think for us, Getting turn one up and running that was an 85 plus percent by mass 3D printed vehicle was awesome. It was a world's first, world's largest 3D printed object. We got it to space much further than.

Our original goal and what we had thought by many standards was arguably the most successful launch for a venture-backed company in history. Super proud of what we got done there. And I think a lot of the foundational technologies there are a running start.

to the Terranaut program, our larger reusable rocket. And the reason we have been able to make such fast progress is in large part to The science risk we bought down with Terra Landa, the world's first liquid oxygen methane engines in the West, certainly, and China was the only other one that was trying to lock methane engine and got it to space three months before we did.

So there's just a number of different firsts that got done there. I think where we are morphing through now is to say, okay, we've got this incredible demand. We've got several billion dollars worth of customer backlog at this point. in order to hit and execute that and ramp at the pace at which we think the world needs rockets and believe the world needs rockets. No manufacturing technique or nothing is sort of dogmatic about the way we're going about this.

our customers here how we build the rockets like ultimately they want their satellites delivered to orbit and that's what we're focused on and that's the lens in terms of creating shareholder value

So that's sort of the first part of your question, maybe in terms of the next two to five years and what we think is most exciting. This business, from a customer perspective and from a... financial return perspective certainly is not interesting if we launch once and then we double it and then we double it again the following year and over time we can get to a dozen or 20 launches like it just doesn't return well enough

We have to build not just for first launch right from the outset, because it is very, very difficult to ramp a rocket program to rate if you haven't built some of that. you know, cultural elements right in your programs on the outside. So we're super focused on.

doing that without getting too far ahead of ourselves too because that can be an equally difficult problem to handle and reusability is key to that and we're you know proud of the team that we've built to help us deliver on this mission but

There is certainly a ton of humility I want to portray here because building what we want to build and doing dozens to 100 plus launches a year in the medium term is a non-trivial thing from where we are. But if we can do that... our belief is it'll be great for humanity it'll be great for competition

It'll push us forward. It'll be another massive stepping stone in making life interplanetary. And ultimately, the long, long-term vision that we have is making life interplanetary, but also building this industrial base on Mars and 3D printing will be core. to being able to do that with in-situ materials and the like. And so this is all sort of chapters in our long journey, and we're in the very early stages of it, but I'm excited.

for the progress that we've made and super pumped for what's to come in the next couple of years as well well i just have one more question on this i interviewed the cfo of mclaren and formerly aston martin And he had attracted in a really unique way some of these amazing engineers who could put together plans for engines that would be the fastest in the world. And they had budgetary constraints.

There were all of these trade-offs constantly. So do you have any advice for CFOs who are thinking about a playbook to try to communicate really effectively between a broad, diverse group of stakeholders?

whether they're the engineers internally and you're trying to set a budget, they're shareholders, investors, your C-suite or board. Do you have any kind of... overlapping advice on how to be transparent across the whole universe or how you could bring in some unique talent to help you speak the language of the engineers to maybe somebody who may not understand the intricacies of the work that you're doing?

Yeah, I think it's a really important part of the CFO role to be able to connect these dots and to be able to translate these stories, right? What's really important there is what I said earlier, and I think you're reiterating here is like, you've got to have...

the consistency and transparency in all of those stories and how you tell that narrative in different settings and in the context of an all hands or a technician gathering versus a high fidelity rocket engineer team versus a finance group or an investor stakeholder or to a customer you're gonna tweak it, but the substance and the core of what you're saying should be the same. This role, the finance role, this mindset of driving a company forward, ultimately the job is what are we doing?

why are we doing it how do we do more of the things we're good at less of the things that we're not good at and then being able to like tell that narrative hopefully with metrics and hopefully with substance and facts and reality over time. It's not just some fictional storytelling that you're doing constantly. And that is like a real...

art and how to bring this job together. And it's not something that someone describes in a CFO job description, but I really found that finding a way to influence different stakeholders. to drive the company forward is the job. And for everything else, you've got to hire amazing talent that can do much better than I would be able to in terms of running an audit or running a budget process or what have you.

But my job is to push and pull the different pieces and different people and stakeholders and the mix to get everybody motivated to.

get to where we want to get to in the short, medium and long term, as you had highlighted. My final question is sort of selfish. I just would love to know what it's like the night before or the day of a launch. What does it feel like? Do you all get together? What does that actually look like? Just to bring some transparency into those hours leading into such a monumental event. Yeah, I think it's nerve wracking. Everyone's sort of equally anxious, but equally excited. So much could.

go right and so much could go wrong you've got this mix of feelings between well even if we didn't hit the goal we would have such massive forward progress but yet ultimately to the world maybe and to certainly unsophisticated, not launch people. You look at it in a pretty binary way, which of course isn't true for any launch or any program. So I think it's just a nerve wracking thing.

You know, you're working constantly in the run up to a launch and you're sort of digesting data for days and weeks and months after and analyzing. So the work never sort of stops at launch. At the end of the day, you want to instill some calm and some confidence. Yeah, it's a very, very unique setup, right? Than anything else that people are putting out because there is sort of a... quote unquote binary lens that people put on it did it did it work or did it not work so

yeah it's exciting and then you know in the case of our sort of terrible launch folks were stoked and there were a lot of celebrations and my old age doesn't allow me to celebrate that way anymore but i know folks had a ball celebrating and enjoying kind of years and years of work and

hard work that they put into that program. It's incredible. I mean, there are only so many teams who get to celebrate that kind of achievement. So congrats to the Roto-Many team for all the progress you've made so far.

Mo, is there any core defining characteristics that you're looking for? You've mentioned a lot of them that you embody. When you're looking to expand your team, I think this podcast gets a lot of finance folks who are looking to reach the CFO seat someday.

current CFOs who are looking to maybe borrow some of your unique playbooks in terms of communication. But for those who are just interested in the company and see the podcast because space is maybe our next frontier and really pressing societal need. How can folks get in contact with either you or the company in terms of just thinking about next steps for their career?

Yeah, absolutely. Talent is a real privilege here. And so I'm happy to take the time and talk to folks that are interested in our company. We're hiring hundreds of people. All the jobs are on the website. There are ways to get into this industry with having...

zero background in space or certainly engineering like I do and squeeze my way through here. There's definitely tons of opportunities for people that have never worked in space and to do that. And on the website, the folks can read around our values and things we care about. and how we interview. And the thing that I personally spend a lot of time in with candidates on is just like making sure that they're fast learners. If you're curious in life.

then you're likely curious, not just about domains and industries, but you're curious about yourself and you're focused on your own improvement and growth and development. And no one's going to be a perfect fit for any job. And if you are, then you're going to be bored.

quickly and want to move to the next thing. And so I'm just looking for fast learners that can adapt to a place that's actually not easy to work in, not because the culture isn't great, but because like things shift so fast and you've got to stay nimble. who can pivot and be flexible, then...

This is a place to work, but it requires a stomach to work here. And no matter what function you're in, to be able to handle what we do and the pace at which we do it and the pace at which things change. Well, thank you so much. This has been one of my favorite episodes of the Modern CFO Podcast. I hope you'll join me again when we've got the next update to share with the world.

But for now, I want to thank you for just all of your time. Thank you so much, Andrew. I really appreciate it. And thank you for everything that you're doing for the community and bringing folks together to share and compare notes and learn from each other.