Northwood wants revenue growth before expanding its scope

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 23:10

   Yeah. Yeah. I think that kind of speaks to what I was saying earlier around you want to be a very ambitious business and think in the long term about, you know, really where is the space industry going and where you envision the set of problems that you can kind of uniquely address and fill. But also, what are the steps to get there? I think with investors in space today, and I think it's really the right thing, it's not just about bankrolling a vision that takes 10 years to materialize. It's how can you demonstrate a business year after year that grows and that actually hits rather compelling revenue figures along the way. And for us too, Like that's like I think the investor partners have been phenomenal and they're leaning.

2. 24:00

   and on risk, which is a great compliment to the customers that are really advocating for the demand, right? It's kind of meeting those in the middle. But we don't want to be externally funded forever. We want to make sure that we can be generating our own revenue with getting there. So I think for us in starting Northwood, we recognize that the networking component of space was going to be a huge part of delivering value for the space economy. And really that there were a lot of problems to solve there, but the most immediate one that would enable missions to get off the ground was on the ground segment. So yeah, that's where we set our focus. And I think, you know, fortunately, that's really proven to be correct. We have really resonated with the Space Force customer that we've talked about and able to meet some of their urgent needs. Like,

3. 24:55

   you know, when we're talking to them on timelines, there's a ton of urgency there to be able to support more spacecraft. And then on the prism side of our product, being able to support customers that are trying to really increase the throughput and the amount of customers that they can serve. That's been a really great product fit where we found, you know, we're addressing something that is genuinely going to be driving a good amount of revenue for us. And so Having those foundational pieces then enables us to be more ambitious. It's like once you have that product foundation that you can build on top of, that creates more compounding, both from a product development standpoint, like what do we know now from the products that we've built today that gives us the advantage on that next layer of scope that we take on?

4. 25:45

   And then also what does that kind of build the past proof points, the legitimacy, the credibility to go to those customers and say, I think we can do more to help you guys do more. So I think that's like what ambition looks like for us. We could have, you know, really lofty expectations for I think there's there's a really valuable spot if you can improve the networking for the space economy. That is how you translate bits into dollars.

5. 26:14

   And then for the more immediate term, it's how do you like gradually absorb more and more scope and solve more and more significant problems.