Jamie Gull: From SpaceX to Backing Founders Who Can Execute
“Your job is chief storyteller.” — Jamie Gull
Jamie Gull is the founder of Wave Function, an early-stage hardware fund investing in aerospace, defense, energy, robotics, and industrials.
An aerospace engineer turned founder and investor, Jamie brings firsthand experience building technology, leading teams, and navigating the realities of starting companies. In this episode of Tech Scenes Los Angeles, Jamie joins Jeff Martin to explore how those experiences shape the founders he backs—and why compelling technology is only part of building a successful business.
Jamie shares lessons from his years at SpaceX, where removing barriers, resolving problems directly, and taking responsibility for outcomes were central to how teams worked. He and Jeff discuss the relationship between ownership and authority, why fast communication matters, and the challenge of creating that culture inside a startup.
The conversation follows Jamie’s transition from engineer to CEO, including why storytelling becomes a founder’s core responsibility when recruiting employees, raising capital, and winning customers. Jamie also reflects on his development as an investor and the risk of falling in love with technology while overlooking concerns about the founding team.
Looking ahead, Jamie explains why he sees opportunity in overlooked industrial processes, energy infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and the evolving space economy. His ambition includes technologies that make everyday life more reliable—often without people ever noticing the infrastructure behind them.
This is a candid conversation about hardware investing, founder leadership, accountability, organizational execution, and what it takes to build companies that deliver.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Episode preview
01:13 Welcome to Tech Scenes Los Angeles
01:17 Wave Function and why now is the time for hardware
03:25 The story behind the Wave Function name
04:00 Airplanes, childhood experiments, and becoming a builder
05:57 From aircraft prototyping to SpaceX
09:19 Cross-functional decisions and engineering tradeoffs
10:37 Ownership, accountability, and the responsible engineer
12:00 Leaving SpaceX to become a founder
13:18 Building Tendeg and Talyn
14:36 From engineer to CEO—and chief storyteller
16:13 Communication loops, learning speed, and execution
17:44 Why high-performance cultures are difficult to replicate
18:30 Empowering teams while maintaining accountability
21:19 Attracting high-performing talent with limited capital
23:57 Family, flexibility, and founder leadership
24:42 Evaluating founders and their ability to execute
26:57 The risk of falling in love with the technology
28:29 Overlooked opportunities in industrial innovation
29:14 Supply chains, energy, and rethinking production
32:26 Why energy interconnection matters
32:55 SpaceX’s evolution and opportunities for entrepreneurs
35:18 The future Jamie hopes his founders will build
36:53 Jamie’s desert-island album
LEARN MORE ABOUT JAMIE GULL
Connect with Jamie Gull on LinkedIn
About the Author
Jeff James Martin is the Founder and CEO of Collective Genius, creator of the Peak Operating System™, author of Peak Teams, and host of Tech Scenes. He helps founders and leadership teams improve alignment, accountability, and execution.
About Peak OS™
Peak OS™ helps organizations connect priorities, decisions, accountability, and operating rhythm so teams can execute together.
About Collective Genius
Collective Genius works with growth-stage and mission-critical organizations to strengthen leadership, team alignment, and organizational execution.
Learn more about Collective Genius
About Peak Teams
Peak Teams – Mastering the Habits of Unstoppable Venture-Backed Companies explores the habits and practices behind teams that execute consistently.
Learn More
Take the Peak Teams Assessment to identify opportunities to strengthen your team.
Episode Transcript
Jeff Martin in conversation with Jamie Gull
This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability from the supplied automated transcript. Repetition, filler, and obvious transcription errors have been cleaned up while preserving the conversation’s substance and tone. Unclear passages are marked in brackets. Timestamps follow the supplied transcript. It contains occasional explicit language.
Cold Open — 00:00
Jamie Gull: If this was a problem for more than two hours at SpaceX, you’d have your head ripped off.
If inventory is not giving you what you need, you would walk back there, take it from them, write down the number, and basically say, “Figure it out. I don’t care. I need my shit.”
One of my best-performing investments right now, I think I did two equations, and that was my technical diligence.
I kind of fell in love more with the tech. I looked at it in the sense of, “Man, if I was doing this, I could just kill it.”
We built a lot of boats that sank, RC aircraft that crashed. We built a ton of stuff.
Wave Function and Why Now Is the Time for Hardware — 01:13
Jeff Martin: Jamie, thanks for joining me.
Jamie Gull: Thanks, Jeff. Nice to be here.
Jeff Martin: Let’s start from the top. Tell me about Wave Function. What are you betting on, and why now?
Jamie Gull: Wave Function is an early-stage hardware fund investing in aerospace, defense, energy, robotics, industrials—sectors like that.
I’ve invested in all of those, mostly at the pre-seed stage, but some seed. A bunch of investments are as early as the first check, or just an idea, where I help the founders shape the pitch, the story, and the plan.
Sometimes I see a team that’s executing, and I want to jump in now.
We can get back into my background at some point, but I’ve been in this sector for [number of years unclear].
Jeff Martin: It’s crazy how it just flies by. I do the same thing. I have to count, and then recount and double-check, because it never sounds right.
Jamie Gull: Almost 20, which I guess is a little scary.
When I went to college, I went to Stanford and studied aerospace engineering. All of my friends studied computer science because that was the thing. It wasn’t cool to study aerospace, mechanical engineering, or electrical engineering anymore.
Everybody I went to school with who did software stayed in the Bay Area. I ended up as the bastard-child engineer down in Los Angeles working on hardware.
Now that narrative has somewhat flipped. There’s a ton of talent pouring into hardware companies. There are a lot of venture dollars pouring into hardware that weren’t there before. A lot of things have changed that make that possible.
For me, that confluence of things made it the right time to start a fund, become an investor, and support the ecosystem. It also makes it easier because I’m riding a wave—which was not the intention of the name of the fund.
The Story Behind the Wave Function Name — 03:25
Jeff Martin: Wave Function has something to do with—what is it?
Jamie Gull: It’s quantum physics. It’s the underlying governing equation for particle interactions, energy, and stuff like that. It’s a super nerdy name.
I certainly am not a quantum physicist, but I like how it underlies all of that for a deep-tech fund. I also sail a lot, so it’s a play on words. That’s how it came to be.
Airplanes, Childhood Experiments, and Becoming a Builder — 04:00
Jeff Martin: Before rockets, startups, and investing—way back—what got you building? What first got you hooked and sent you in this direction?
Jamie Gull: I dug up these pictures when I started the fund because I was talking with my advisor about the origin story.
I started taking airplane rides with my granddad when I was about two years old. We have pictures of me sitting in his lap in a little two-seat airplane. I guess the seed was planted quite early.
My dad was an electrical engineer and a software engineer, so I grew up in that environment.
My brother and I spent a lot of time as kids building stuff. Our parents really encouraged that: “Let’s go make something together.” As we got older, it became, “Go make something on your own this weekend.”
We built a lot of boats that sank, RC aircraft that crashed, and shit like that. We built a ton of stuff.
When I went to school, I knew I wanted to be an engineer. Aerospace was something I explored first, and I just stuck with it.
Jeff Martin: It doesn’t get too much cooler than aerospace.
Jamie Gull: I agree, but like I said, it wasn’t that hot at the time.
Jeff Martin: You made me start thinking about the stuff I would build when I was younger with my brother.
I was always really entrepreneurial, too. I couldn’t help coming up with, “Oh, this could be a business.” Even back then: “We could do this or do that.”
Moving into your SpaceX years, what happened that made you think differently about what teams could actually accomplish?
From Aircraft Prototyping to SpaceX — 05:57
Jamie Gull: I went to Scaled Composites before SpaceX. It’s the prototype aircraft company in the Mojave Desert, famous for SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo, which turned into the Virgin Galactic work with Richard Branson.
It was known—and still is, though to a lesser extent—for very fast prototyping of airplanes.
I was on a program there where, at 24 years old, I designed about a third of an airframe. We designed, built, and flew that thing in under a year.
It was for a military-testing aircraft program, so it was a real thing. [Aircraft configuration unclear in the supplied transcript.]
I got to cut my teeth. It was a shock going from school, where it’s all theory—I took some courses where we did projects—to actually building something that’s going to fly and has to work. That was awesome.
When I got to SpaceX, which was known for being a high-performance environment, there was a whole other leap. It was a little shocking and very satisfying.
Some of the things that happened super early on: I’d run into a problem, couldn’t figure something out, and talk to my lead.
Instead of, “Let’s write an email. We’re going to ask these questions. We’ll get the information we need,” he’d say, “All right, get up.”
We’d walk over somewhere else and sit down with the other team.
You don’t waste hours sending an email and days waiting for a response. You go figure it out right now. You do it live. Any barrier you run into, immediately: How do you knock this down?
I was joking with the co-founder of my second company last night. We had dinner and were talking about where he’s doing some contracting work now.
He wanted something tested. He’s remote, and the team couldn’t get the part out of inventory because it wasn’t in their system properly. It had been sitting there for three weeks.
We were laughing: if this was a problem for more than two hours at SpaceX, you’d have your head ripped off.
As an engineer, you had a lot of power there. If inventory wasn’t giving you what you needed, you would walk back there, take it, write down the number, and basically say, “Figure it out. I don’t care. I need my shit.”
While that could be frustrating for certain parties involved, it was that bias for action, always.
Rapid action. Rip out barriers. Rapid escalation of conflict—even, usually, healthy conflict.
You don’t go back and forth on it. You go up to the decision-makers to determine which direction to take. [Final wording unclear in the supplied transcript.]
Cross-Functional Decisions and Engineering Tradeoffs — 09:16
Jeff Martin: Say that again. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Jamie Gull: One thing SpaceX is known for is a lack of what they call interface control documents.
At most aerospace companies, somebody early in the design cycle—a system architecture engineer or a high-level engineer—creates the basic system-level design. They work with teams to create documents that dictate how each system interfaces and interacts. Then you go design within that box.
We didn’t do that.
You work with various folks to generate the information you need, like loads, [technical term unclear], and what it has to do. Then you can go work with that.
You might say that’s the same thing. But what happens is you quickly realize, “It would be a lot better if I could push on this thing 50% harder,” or, “I don’t really care if this thing gets that hot.”
You go back to those other teams and say, “Hey, look, I need this. But also, if you guys want to get hotter, I don’t care.”
Jeff Martin: How do you make a system of record for that? Because that’s very cross-functional.
Ownership, Accountability, and the Responsible Engineer — 10:37
Jamie Gull: Super cross-functional.
The core piece of the whole culture is the term “responsible engineer.”
It comes down to the individuals responsible for a certain system or outcome. They own that, and they own that outcome no matter what.
Things certainly slipped through the cracks when this would happen. In a lower-performing environment, it would be an absolute disaster. Everything would get screwed up. Nobody would know who owned what or the status of certain things.
But when you have extreme levels of ownership, where people are super bought in—they’re motivated by the mission, but they also know they’ll get fired if they screw it up—you have a super-high level of accountability that can drive that type of flexible system.
Jeff Martin: It also sounds like it empowered team members to do what they needed to do, even to break rules.
Jamie Gull: Absolutely. You break rules. Definitely broke some rules back in the day.
But it’s a judgment call. At the end of the day, they’re giving you the responsibility and the power to make that judgment call. You will get judged by that, so you want to make the right call.
Leaving SpaceX to Become a Founder — 12:00
Jeff Martin: What made you want to leave SpaceX to build companies on your own?
Jamie Gull: I just had that itch to do something on my own.
At the time, I worked a lot on Falcon 9 reentry and then Falcon Heavy. We had reentered and landed a rocket. We’d launched Heavy successfully and reentered various stages.
Starship was pretty far out on the horizon. Dragon was fairly established. For me, it was a good time. I wasn’t super stoked about the upcoming stuff there, and I had this itch I wanted to scratch.
Jeff Martin: What was that itch?
Jamie Gull: The primary itch was to go do something on my own—not by myself, but as a founder.
That was why I left. I did six years, so it wasn’t a ton, but it wasn’t a short stint.
Jeff Martin: It was a real stint.
Jamie Gull: It was time to start a couple of companies.
Building Tendeg and Talyn — 13:18
Jeff Martin: What are those two companies?
Jamie Gull: The first one is called Tendeg. It’s still around in Denver, Colorado. It’s deployable space systems—mostly fold-out [component wording unclear] for high-performance communications and synthetic aperture radar.
Jeff Martin: Simple stuff.
Jamie Gull: Yeah, simple stuff.
It’s not venture-backed. I was there for three years, and we grew it very organically, mostly from NASA contracts.
Jeff Martin: I was going to say government contracts.
Jamie Gull: Yep. As time went on, they got larger and larger commercial contracts.
After three years, I left to start an electric aircraft company called Talyn with a friend from SpaceX—the guy I had dinner with last night.
That was in 2019. We did that for four years, went through Y Combinator, got eight Air Force government contracts, and built an airframe. Then we got acquired in 2023.
Jeff Martin: By a Techstars company?
Jamie Gull: Ampaire.
Jeff Martin: I know Kevin. He’s a good guy. That’s a great company.
Jamie Gull: Agreed.
Jeff Martin: That’s really cool.
Jamie Gull: Our airframe, I think, is still there.
From Engineer to CEO—and Chief Storyteller — 14:36
Jeff Martin: You mentioned when we talked before that you went from engineer to CEO. What was that transition like?
Jamie Gull: At the first company I co-founded, I was more on the engineering side. The CEO did much more on the business side.
I was a co-founder. I think my title was principal engineer or something like that. I was involved in business decisions, but I didn’t have to do that much of it.
At my second company, as CEO, it was a huge transition.
My co-founder and I spent the first six months or so on our own. It was just the two of us, so it was mostly engineering. We were doing the high-level systems design.
As soon as we started hiring and raising money, I basically stopped completely, outside of reviewing the team’s work and giving feedback.
Looking back, I don’t think I knew this, but it’s what I tell my current founders now: your job is chief storyteller.
You’re storytelling to investors, current employees, potential employees, and customers. Those are really the four groups you’re storytelling to.
That’s really all you do—and make sure you don’t run out of [word unclear in the supplied transcript].
Communication Loops, Learning Speed, and Execution — 16:13
Jeff Martin: A lot of the CEOs I’ve worked with over the years—when I count back my years, unfortunately, it goes over 25, and I keep checking that because it doesn’t sound like something I want to say, but it is true.
Engineer CEOs are some of my favorites to work with because they get how to engineer an organization, or how to look at an organization from an engineering perspective. I do, too, because it’s systems and processes.
You take something you learned at SpaceX or from your previous history: those communication loops, the speed of communication, and learning loops.
I think it’s all about those loops and that connectivity.
If we’re waiting around for a part, we’re waiting. But the faster we can get something, do it, test it, learn from it, and do it again, the faster we can move and learn.
What did you take from that and bring into Talyn?
Jamie Gull: A lot of it was what you’re saying: trying to build that culture, within reason.
I don’t know if anybody has fully replicated that culture. I was talking about that last night, too. People are trying, but it’s very hard to do.
Why High-Performance Cultures Are Difficult to Replicate — 17:44
Jeff Martin: What’s the hardest part? Why do you think it’s hard to replicate?
Jamie Gull: It’s a bunch of things.
It’s finding the right people who will buy into the mission, work their asses off, and take extreme amounts of accountability.
It’s actually pretty rare, even among people who say they want that. The reality of it happening is less common.
It can be romanticized to a certain extent. The reality is, “This is really, really hard and actually really, really scary.” A lot of people just can’t handle that.
Finding that and instilling it from leadership down is quite difficult to do.
Empowering Teams While Maintaining Accountability — 18:30
Jeff Martin: That was my next question: how does leadership empower that?
One of the things I work on a lot is leadership saying, “Go get it done. Solve the problems.”
Then, from the employee base, I often hear, “Empower us to make these decisions.”
You hear them both saying the same thing at the same time. With that accountability, focus, and ability to do what you need to do, how did leadership empower that?
Jamie Gull: It’s hard.
One thing my co-founder and I tried to work on was starting with a high level of empowerment. If it wasn’t working as intended, we’d ratchet it down. The idea was to ratchet down until you got it to work, then go back up.
If you have somebody who hasn’t been in that environment before, and you’re in a small company, you’re not inherently surrounded by it.
When I started at SpaceX, there were about 1,000 people. I walked in, and that environment existed fully formed.
At a startup, you might have some people who are good at it and some who aren’t. It isn’t just this thing you’re immersed in.
We tried to set expectations and follow through. If they weren’t being met, we’d start ratcheting down, where freedom was slowly being removed, especially around timescales: how often do you have to check in on this?
With some folks, we ended up doing very detailed check-ins twice a day.
We’d try to pull back: “Here’s what I expect. I’m going to do some of this work with you, get you moving forward so you can see what it looks like.”
Over time, you pull back if you can. If you can’t, then you have to let go. We did that, too.
There’s a very common startup adage: nobody ever fires fast enough. It’s true. Usually, you know it. We knew it a couple of times, 100%. We did it relatively quickly, but certainly not fast.
Attracting High-Performing Talent With Limited Capital — 21:19
Jeff Martin: I think high-performing talent breeds more high-performing talent. You either sink or swim in that talent.
One advantage some people have over others is the amount of capital they can raise. You can kind of buy the team.
We could use baseball as an example. Living in Los Angeles—I hate to say it; I probably just lost a whole bunch of people who like me—but it’s different than if we’re talking about the Twins.
You can buy proven talent that performs and executes under pressure. Some teams can do that earlier than others.
If you can do it early, you start attracting more people. Maybe you don’t have to pay as much because they want to work with those other people.
Jamie Gull: One hundred percent true.
For a variety of reasons, we never raised a ton of money, so we weren’t able to do that. We watched companies hoover up the talent we wanted, and they were paying another $100,000 a year.
Jeff Martin: That’s significant.
Jamie Gull: It wasn’t possible to compete from a monetary perspective. You understand why people are accepting that job, even if they aren’t as excited about the company.
If you can raise the capital and build that war chest—this is why you see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Facebook in those talent wars, paying enormous amounts for engineers.
They know that hiring takes time. It takes forever. If you can throw money at the problem and get top-notch performers, it’s much easier to attract the rest.
Jeff Martin: After selling Talyn, why did you decide to go the investor route and back others?
Jamie Gull: The big thing for me personally was that I wanted to stay in the ecosystem, be involved, and be supportive.
I didn’t think I had another founder journey in me at the time. Instead, I founded a fund, which is like 80% of it. But the 20% that it’s not is very important to me right now.
Family, Flexibility, and Founder Leadership — 23:57
Jeff Martin: What do you mean by that?
Jamie Gull: I have a little more flexibility with my own time and location.
We’ve got a young son. When you’re the founder of a company with a team, you kind of have to be one of the first people in the door and [departure wording unclear]. On-site every day. You’re building hardware.
Jeff Martin: That’s the other side of being the evangelist. You’re creating the story and selling the story, but you have to show the story. You have to be the one to execute.
Jamie Gull: You’re setting that bar of excellence, too. That’s really hard to do.
Evaluating Founders and Their Ability to Execute — 24:42
Jeff Martin: When you think about the founders you’re investing in now, I think execution is everything. How do you know a founder has it in them to build a team that can actually execute?
I would guess—you tell me—that you’re probably really good at looking at the technology.
Jamie Gull: I spend the least amount of time on the tech.
Jeff Martin: Really? Because you can probably understand it so well, so fast?
Jamie Gull: Even if it’s something I don’t understand super well, because of my background, I’m able to accelerate the process compared with somebody else.
One of my best-performing investments right now, I think I did two equations, and that was my technical diligence.
It was relatively simple tech. It was just a gut check. I called them on something, and they explained why they were correct. I was like, “Okay, we’re cool.”
Some of this stuff is not that simple, but I probably spend the least amount of time on that.
Jeff Martin: Going back to the question I originally asked—and then I asked you another question—when you look at the founder or founding team, how do you know they’ll be able to build a team that can execute?
Jamie Gull: That’s one of the hardest things: building a team, and can they execute themselves?
Track record only sort of matters. It’s pretty rare to find a second-time founder in this context.
If somebody has had a successful exit—a big exit—and they’re going to start another company, the chance that they’re talking to me to do a $3 million to $5 million pre-seed is pretty low.
You’re talking to folks who don’t have that track record. Their track record might be college, in some cases, but usually it’s working at a high-performing company.
How do you figure out how much was that company versus them? It’s actually really hard. Honestly, it’s more of a feeling.
Jeff Martin: That’s the reality sometimes.
The Risk of Falling in Love With the Technology — 26:57
Jamie Gull: When I look back at some of the companies I’m a little frustrated with, it tends to be that I fell in love more with the tech.
Or I looked at it in the sense of, “Man, if I was doing this, I could just kill it,” and left a little uneasiness about the team out of the assessment.
Time will tell because I’m only two years in. But I suspect those are most likely to be the ones that aren’t as successful.
Every other piece of my diligence checked the box: big market, willingness to pay, demand is there if they can do it, the tech is doable, it’s not a science experiment.
Why is it not working? There’s only one reason left, right? It’s the founding team.
Jeff Martin: That’s the part I think is fascinating. That’s where I’m nerdy.
I think execution is everything. Once you have all those other things, it comes down to who can execute.
People say that all the time, but I think it’s one of the pieces least reviewed in due diligence—to really try to figure that out.
Jamie Gull: The best investors are pretty good at that and spend a decent amount of time on it. But I agree with you in general. There isn’t a lot of time spent.
Overlooked Opportunities in Industrial Innovation — 28:29
Jeff Martin: One of your categories is industrials. What are people missing there?
Jamie Gull: I don’t define it very well. It’s an industrial process or something at scale.
The companies I’ve invested in include a new way to make fertilizer, rare-earth refining, and—somewhere on the edge of that—a company extracting copper from deep underground.
It’s a lot of the things that underpin our economy but that people don’t really talk about. They’ve been around forever, but they’ve probably stagnated.
Jeff Martin: Is that the opportunity now?
Supply Chains, Energy, and Rethinking Production — 29:14
Jamie Gull: They’ve stagnated, but they’ve also been incredibly underaddressed. They aren’t that sexy. People assume they work well, and that’s great.
For multiple companies, the “why now” moment is more geopolitical than anything else.
Over the last 30 years, we’ve offshored and driven out our industrial base. That puts us in a pickle. Rare-earth refining is a very easy example these days.
Copper is the same. We need copper for electrification. We need it to support electricity demand for artificial intelligence and normal grid growth. We don’t mine that much of it in the U.S., or even in friendly countries.
With the fertilizer company, [reference to a shipping-strait incident unclear] created issues. We rely on a supply chain that goes through natural gas and certain shipping channels.
When that gets shut off—luckily it wasn’t as bad as predicted, but severe food shortages were predicted—it highlights those weaknesses.
What this company wants to do is use a new process that gets you away from natural gas. All you need is decently priced electricity, and then you can locate it near your customer.
Now, in the U.S., for example, they’re on the Gulf Coast because it’s near cheap natural gas. Then they put it on barges to go up the Mississippi. Your price goes up every mile farther upriver or away from the river.
That covers a lot of the fertile areas of the country, but not everywhere.
If you could locate production in different places, it divorces it from those constraints. [Closing phrase unclear.]
Jeff Martin: What are some of the categories or companies you’re most excited about?
Jamie Gull: I’ve done a bunch in energy—probably five companies. I’m definitely still excited about that and looking at more.
We’ve badly neglected our grid and offshored production.
I have a transformer company. It’s old-school transformers with some “Elonified” takes on how to manufacture them. One of the co-founders is out of Tesla.
Most of those are offshore and take 12 to 24 months. They’re expensive, but it’s not even just that they’re expensive. They take forever, they’re offshore, and they aren’t cyber-hardened.
If you can bring that back to the U.S., drive down lead times, and add cyber-hardening, you have a huge opportunity.
Everybody talks about energy generation. Interconnection is the next bottleneck.
Why Energy Interconnection Matters — 32:26
Jeff Martin: What is that?
Jamie Gull: Getting electricity from where it’s made to where it’s used.
A transformer changes the voltage so you can transition from long-range transmission to local distribution, or vice versa.
I’ve invested in multiple energy-generation companies, too, and I’m looking at more. I’ve done a few in space, of course.
SpaceX’s Evolution and Opportunities for Entrepreneurs — 32:55
Jeff Martin: How has SpaceX evolved, and how have those changes supported other entrepreneurs around the space ecosystem?
Jamie Gull: SpaceX has evolved a lot. I don’t know if you’d call it supporting other entrepreneurs.
We ran the playbook—I ran the playbook—of going in, learning everything you could from a vendor, buying the first few from them, then realizing, “Let’s do this.”
All of a sudden, their business is gone.
It wasn’t with the intention of putting them out of business and liking that. But they’ve put all this time and effort into building the relationship.
Jeff Martin: That happens in business, though.
Jamie Gull: It does. But SpaceX is especially notorious for that, and they’ve done one or two acquisitions ever.
The big question in space is often, “Is SpaceX going to do it?”
The answer has changed a lot in the last six months with the IPO, the pivot from Mars to the Moon, and the pivot to doing AI data centers in space.
The company has gotten so big that if you’re in a market without a clear path to billions of dollars in revenue in a matter of years, they don’t care. It has to have a path to being quite a bit bigger.
That opens up some spaces, which is really fun.
A lot of stuff I was looking at, if it was centered around the Moon, I’d think, “This company is going to have to rely on government funding for 10 years. There may or may not ever be a commercial marketplace.”
Now, with SpaceX going to establish a Moon presence, that stuff may be interesting right now when it wasn’t before.
Jeff Martin: It shrinks the timeline.
Jamie Gull: When you’re a small fund putting in a $500,000 first check, 10 years of government funding before you might have a commercial market is not a good plan.
But if it could be some government funding up front and then commercial in three or four years, that’s a different story.
The data-center stuff is fascinating. I think it will open up other things around the edges for smaller companies to play in. It’s changed a lot very recently.
The Future Jamie Hopes His Founders Will Build — 35:18
Jeff Martin: Ten years from now, what do you hope exists because of the founders you’re backing?
Jamie Gull: Abundant energy that’s easy to get.
My space companies providing security and new transportation infrastructure. I think a whole new space economy is possible, very different from what we’ve seen before.
Ten years might be just long enough to start seeing that come in at some scale.
A lot of what I invest in is stuff you’ll never see. I like to think of it as having super-positive effects on people’s lives, the country, and resilience—not being exposed to these geopolitical constraints.
But hopefully, you’d never know about it.
We’ve taken everything for granted for so long. People say, “The grid’s falling apart.” It’s because people take it for granted.
We’re a first-world country, and then we realize we have rolling brownouts [geographic wording unclear]. Our grid is falling apart, or our bridges are falling apart, and we’ve neglected this.
Getting back to it being something you never have to think about or concern yourself with is important.
Some of it will be the super-sexy stuff you see.
Jeff Martin: You need both.
Jamie’s Desert-Island Album — 36:53
Jeff Martin: One last question. This is the hardest question I’m going to have asked you this whole time, so I hope you’re ready. Glad you’re sitting down.
It’s more of a scenario.
You’re trapped on a desert island for the rest of your life. You have food, water, healthcare—all the things you want to have—but there’s one thing you don’t have: entertainment. There’s no entertainment on this island at all.
Luckily, an old ’80s boombox drifts ashore with unlimited batteries. But you can only bring one album to listen to for the rest of your life.
What are you bringing?
Jamie Gull: ’80s?
Jeff Martin: It doesn’t have to be ’80s. It can be any time, any genre.
Jamie Gull: I have my answer because this has happened to me, basically.
Jeff Martin: You were on a desert island?
Jamie Gull: Very close.
I’ve done a lot of sailing. My first trip as captain of my parents’ boat in Mexico, I took five friends from high school. We were in college at the time.
We did a weeklong trip. On the first day, my friend jammed the CD player, so we listened to the Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over for a week straight.
It was already one of my favorite albums. After that, it was permanently cemented. It’s a pretty easy choice for me.
Jeff Martin: That’s a great story. That’s awesome.
The Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over is your answer.
Jamie Gull: Yeah.
Jeff Martin: Cool. Thanks for joining me. Good conversation. Appreciate it.
