Bridget: Every satellite requires a connection point back to Earth. If you don't have it, you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a rock in space.

Host: You just want a $50 million contract with Space Force to help modernize.

Bridget: At Northwood, we want to take space missions further faster. We're looking for a categorical outcome, not just an incremental outcome.

Host: Starlink is working on direct optical inner satellite links. How much of that is a threat?

Bridget: I view it as like a 0% threat. SpaceX was able to bring launch cost down by an order of magnitude what came before. Why hasn't the same thing happened at ground?

Host: Bridget, welcome to the podcast. So we're here to talk about Northwood. We're here to talk about space. But first want to talk about how you got here. Uh, when, uh, you know unconventional career paths some may say, when you look at the arc of your career what are the threads that tie it together how do you make sense of your path?

Bridget: You know, following curiosity, I think curiosity becomes the most organic motivator for people and that's definitely the case for me. I think you know my my home environment growing up was really uh cultivating that curiosity and my parents also really encouraged excellence which I think is great so you know if you're curious about something, it's not just something you dabble in. It's something you try to take to like the nth degree and and really like try to understand what excellence looks like in that domain. And so that kind of is, you know, led me to a lot of different places. My mom is also an incredibly determined person. And so that's something that I think I was influenced by. And so like, you know, follow what you're curious about, do it to the greatest capacity you can and don't take no for an answer and then you kind of wind up like doing a bunch of different things in some really interesting experiences.

Host: It's fascinating because sometimes people frame it as either or, either like you got to get you know just especially for kids like just straight A pluses uh or it's you know just do whatever you're curious about but the combination like do what you're curious about but also just absolutely crush it in it. It's a interesting combination. Yeah. sort of in your early career, did you think it would be forever or like at one point were you like, I'm bored of this. I want to go into academia like how did how did you make your career decisions?

Bridget: You know, it's interesting because like I I would analogize to how a lot of people that we bring into our company think about their career path. Like a lot of the incredible people that we bring in, people who are like totally rock stars in their career, they're not thinking on like a 20-year time scale about their career. they're thinking more incrementally than that. am, you know, maybe there's not a definite timeline attached to it. It's like as far out as you can see on the horizon and just like worrying about that far cuz otherwise you constrain yourself too much. Um, and so that has really been how I've approached my career. I I would have definitely not expected I would be running a space company.

Host: So you were like actress until it no longer became fun anymore or until academia or something became more interesting and then in academia you were like or at some point you were like and then you were just chasing your curiosity and then you're like, oh maybe when did the company idea come into play?

Bridget: Yeah I think being in entertainment I got to be a spokesperson for a lot of different things and I and I tried to align what I felt to be impactful with what I was speaking up for. So you know as an actor you wind up being able to have a platform to contribute to a lot of different causes and that was something that I prioritized but I think I wanted my impact to go deeper than that. And so I I always kind of knew in the back of my mind I wanted to create my own thing although you know I didn't have like a concrete idea of what that was and as a child of you know millennial era I got to see the internet coming to life and I got to see cellular networks coming to life and like what a profound shift that was on um the world before versus the world after. And so I think uh when the problem set around space networking came up and when that was something that I started digging into it connected on that deeper level where it's like wow this is um something like an opportunity to make an impact on an industry that could be as fundamental at that kind of level of of internet and cellular that felt like such a unique opportunity to get in at an industry when it was at that early stages.

Host: And you started it with your husband. Was he always uh on board from the beginning or how did that emerge? And I should say my parents also started a a company together and ran it for 15 years. Definitely inspired by the mom.

Bridget: That's super cool. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny how people are now like, "Oh, you start a company with your husband." But like people have been doing family businesses like since the dawn of time. Um Yeah. And and I think for both of us, we're just both ambitious. um and kind of curious about how the world works and we we were both passionate about you know building businesses and so it was like all right let's align our efforts towards something like there's a certain utilitarian aspect to it where it's like we have a certain amount of energy and time and we want the most like net outcome from this.

Host: talk about let's get into Northwood um what you're trying to achieve um and and what's the why now for it?

Bridget: Yeah. So, what we do, we're ground infrastructure kind of end to end for space companies. So, all the way from the time when they're first coming up with, you know, satellite mission, what the space operators want to do all the way to when they're actually streaming data, delivering that data to the end customers. Yeah. You know, the problem that we're solving is for every satellite, it requires a connection point back to Earth so that they can uh control the spacecraft. You know, it is kind of like a remote control car where it needs some mechanism to make sure that it's going where it's supposed to go and a way to actually bring that data back to the users on Earth because that's where the users are. Um, so that point of contact on Earth is called the ground infrastructure and you know super basically if you don't have it you don't have a space mission. It literally is just like a a rock in space you're doing nothing with. So ground in infrastructure it's it's completely fundamental. Um and for us uh you know we we were observing the space industry how launch cadence was increasing. you could you could put a satellite up into space way faster and you could build satellites way faster because there was this whole um boom around spacecraft manufacturing and interestingly what started becoming the longest pole in the tent was just getting the point of contact on the ground to connect with. So you know you could build a satellite and launch it faster than you could actually connect with it from the ground which just seemed absurd. And so we're like, why is that? This kind of, you know, critical third component was not modernizing because you'd seen all this modernization happening elsewhere. And when we started pulling it back, it was kind of like a classic value chain problem where there was just not like the incentives aligned with each stakeholder in the value chain to to modernize and innovate. So you had, you know, antenna manufacturers that were, you know, responding to a call from a customer and delivering them uh a point solution. They weren't thinking like holistically about how you you build better uh ground infrastructure. You were having like a a software integrator layer where they were basically just dependent on whatever infrastructure was being laid by somebody else. And so we realized like this is really holding back innovation and like a complete thought on on what this should look like on the ground side. And so really the only way to address fixing the ground segment was to do the whole thing.

Host: And when did you realize and how did you realize that space infrastructure was broken? like what was the idea maze that you guys went? Was this your first idea um that you guys decided to pursue or Yeah. How did they come to be?

Bridget: Yeah, man. We've been doing antennas ever since that that Home Depot run during the pandemic. Yeah. Uh that made us ground nerds. Um yeah, so we were uh we started working on the antenna uh designs during the pandemic. Uh, you know, that was our our summer project and yeah, we just describe ourselves as ground nerds. It was just cool. At first, it was just really cool to be able to receive signals from hundreds of miles away. Like I said, that's the RF waves. They're like fainter than um, you know, the power on a flashlight that you're getting from space. and you get to interpret that into, you know, for us it was an image, but for other other folks that use satellite data. That's, you know, that's our missile warning system. That's how we find out like about any missile going off around the world. That is our GPS infrastructure. That is our uh, you know, for a lot of people that's their one source of internet and it all all comes through a ground infrastructure that is able to interpret those faint signals and make it work. So it was just kind of like you know one of those magic moments where you just become really fascinated with the technology and then we started peeling it back further and we uh we did this market study where we looked at all the commercial operators. Um we looked at you know US government use cases as well for how that they were resolving their ground and it was at that point really from the point of first just being curious about the space that we realized that a big bottleneck was coming.

Host: Yeah. And is this an idea that couldn't have existed five years ago because there was just not enough of an economy around or um in like Yeah, talk about the timing of it.

Bridget: Yeah, I I think um it really does influence the timing because previously if you're not as easy concerned about a three-year timeline between, you know, concept of a spacecraft and and launching it, then um it's not a big deal if the ground segment can't keep pace. I also think like the ideas for how to use space have changed a lot both so you know pace as well as the the ideas around it. So the mission sets that we're talking to folks about now um are a greater level of proliferation. They're talking about way more spacecraft being in communication at the same time than they used to. They're talking about mission sets where satellites are moving in new ways. They're moving really dynamically uh in and out of different orbits. Um, you know, previously you could think about uh space missions. It was a pretty static world. Like think about old school space where it's it's kind of like science missions, one satellite parked over a certain location, not moving anywhere, sending very small amounts of data to now it's this whole circus of uh a bunch of different missions needing to coexist, transmitting way more data and uh having like constantly changing parameters.

Host: Yeah your system is able to deploy in 3 months whereas a traditional ground station deploys in three years. What enables you guys to have that level of speed up?

Bridget: It really comes down to the vertical integration. And what we mean by that is kind of like what I what I mentioned of being able to stitch together all of the different pieces in the endto-end system so that they inform each other. So for example, when we say 3 years before, what did that timeline look like? It looked like an antenna vendor who, you know, gets a phone call. After they get the phone call, they press the order on the supply chain. they got to wait x number of months to actually get the parts to arrive. Then they assemble them all. It's a bespoke manufacturing line because it's, you know, it's a bespoke system. They're just, you know, they're doing it uh one off and then they ship it and they're shipping a giant piece of equipment. So, it probably has to go over, you know, uh, ocean, uh, shipping methods. And then it arrives at site and you have to put together a giant construction project because the size of many of these antennas, they're like multi-story buildings. So, you have to do permitting, you have to lay a concrete foundation, you have to have whole construction teams in order to put them together. That adds up into a three-year timeline. Whereas for us, because we're thinking of all of those things at the same time as we're doing that development, we get to say we need our antennas to fit in a standard shipping container that can go on a commercial United Airlines flight and so it gets there the same day. We need our system to be able to fork off of that shipping container and land on a patch of dirt with no concrete and and just plug into a standard 240 power bolt. Um, we need to be able to have that telemetry run across our entire system so that we know how to fire it up in a matter of minutes.

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

Bridget: Yeah. I think it it does come down like I hate to be a broken record on the vertical integration, but um the reason why that matters is that uh what SpaceX has done is they've really streamlined their product, right? Like they're not trying to build a ton of different bespoke products. They build one thing and they make it super efficient and effective. They get the economies of scale and everything. And so for us, if we were, you know, just being an antenna vendor, then we would probably need to build a bunch of different types of products. But because we get to um see across so many different solutions, we can think and we invest our R&D in building a solution that works commonly across the industry. So that means that uh you know we're accounting for commercial missions, government missions, allied missions all within the same system. Uh and that makes our costs lower and more efficient. Um and when we're able to do it as a shared service, uh that's really the difference for us. Like we we view ourselves more so as a platform, right? So it's it's not like a onetoone sale where you're trying, you know, get all of your uh value off of that single sale. Our platform is such that many missions can benefit from the same infrastructure. So we make our investment and then many customers get to benefit off of that single investment that we make.

Host: A lot of people analogize the space economy to the early internet. they say you know a lot of infrastructure being built you know lots of companies will fail uh and lots of applications you very successful applications will be built on top do you does this analogy hold for you?

Bridget: yeah for sure um I get really inspired by the analogy um especially thinking about you know for folks that were early with the internet like they there's no way they would have foreseen what the internet is today um but they were betting on a direction and they were setting up a model that would uh that would basically like unlock a lot of innovation and they they were like uh they were developing principles and building aligned with certain principles that would support that innovation and and look what we have today. Um yeah I mean I think like things as simple as like TCP IP protocols for example like trying to make different layers as as easy and supporting for innovation as possible. So, I think we're in a similar moment with the space industry where we don't know what is going to be built. Like a year ago today, would we think that everybody would be talking about orbital data centers? No way. Um, but it's captivated the public imagination and who knows what's going to come next.

Host: Cool. Talk a little bit about how you think about culture at Northwood. you know, what types of people you're you're trying to bring on, how you think about demolding.

Bridget: I'll give a little window into my uh expectations that I share with people when um they interview for Northwood. The first one is that we accomplish unreasonable things on unreasonable timelines. They surface level like sure, okay, everybody, you know, everybody can kind of get on board with that. But, uh, you know, it's not just a matter of like applying more force to the problem. Um, it's about taking smart risks. So, it's not just force, it's also cleverness. It's like understanding the problem deep enough to know what the trades are that you can afford to make. Um, and so people that are able to do that kind of uh mental calculation and kind of like take take big leaps is really how you can actually move quickly. Um, the the second one is the endto-end ownership of your work. And for me really what that translates to is, you know, people who are going to be bought in in a deeper way to the outcome beyond just checking some boxes off the list. And then the third one is um uh we're looking for a categorical outcome not not just an incremental outcome.