Achieving the Impossible with Top Talent

Welcome to the Space Capital Podcast. I'm your host, Chad Anderson, founder and managing partner at Space Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm, investing in the space economy. We're actively investing out of our third fund with 100 million under management. You can find us on social media @spacecapital. In this podcast, we explore what's happening at the cutting edge of the entrepreneurial space age, and speak to the founders and innovators at the forefront.

This is the Space Capital Podcast, and for today's episode, we have a special guest host. My colleague, Justus Kilian is a partner at Space Capital and we'll be leading the conversation today. Over to you Justus.

Justus Kilian:

So this is a Space Capital Podcast. I'm Justus Kilian, a partner at Space Capital, and today we're speaking with Brian and Seyka Measure co-founders at AdAstra, a company that's specializing in talent advisory for space and clean tech startups. Brian has a technical background with aerospace engineering degrees at the University of Michigan, and a stint at SpaceX. Seyka has built a career identifying and supporting top talent. In 2019, they launched AdAstra to help deep tech founders build exceptional teams at the earliest stages. AdAstra is one of the select firms that we've chosen to partner with at Space Capital to support our portfolio companies. It's an incredibly dynamic market. There's been a lot of changes in hiring and recruiting and retaining talent over the last several years, so I'm incredibly excited to have Brian and Seyka here with us today. So great to have you on and thanks so much for joining us.

Seyka Mejeur:

Thank you so much for having us. It's a great pleasure to be a partner and to get to have this conversation with you.

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah. Thank you so much. Really, really excited for this chat.

Justus Kilian:

Great. So I think a place to start would just be background and context setting. So can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind founding at Astra and what drove the two of you to focus on talent, particularly at early stage companies?

Seyka Mejeur:

Great question. So Brian and I, when we met, Brian was working at SpaceX and I was actually working at a CNC distribution company managing their talent acquisition and I had started a staffing agency for CNC professionals, so machinists and programmers and machine shop managers, really niche group of people and a very passionate about my work, having a ton of fun doing it. Brian is very passionate about his work and we really got to share that with each other. So at around 2019, all of our best friends are big space nerds and people who are also passionate about clean technology and it just made sense for us to put those two areas that we knew a lot about and really cared about together and to help these people that we knew find top talent for their organizations.

I had experience building out a company for finding talent and technical talent and Brian had this deep understanding of startups, the talent bar that's necessary to create exceptional technology quickly. So as we started, it felt like there was a new space startup popping up practically weekly and we're having these conversation over beers and going, "We're really looking for the best of the best." And we really saw a picture painted of all these people are looking for the best of the best and there's really a finite number of who those people are.

Justus Kilian:

Great. So Brian, what is the most important insight you bring from your time at SpaceX that you think fits into your role as a headhunter?

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah. Thank you. So I think that it's pretty unique to have an engineer doing headhunting work. Of course a lot of engineers are involved in the hiring process, but to have an engineer who's worked at SpaceX as a propulsion engineer has worked in another early stage startup, actually identifying these folks, engaging them and working them through the process is pretty unique. So from my perspective, there's a lot of firsthand experience that when I'm talking to founders and their hiring managers or candidates, I understand what they're talking about right away from my own experience and can really relate to them and help make those matches more quickly and easily than having to guess or learn over a lot of time. It was a pretty straight fast way to get to being able to add value.

Justus Kilian:

And Seyka, what is the most important lesson you've learned in past recruiting experiences that helps set AdAstra apart?

Seyka Mejeur:

Yeah. I think two, you're such a fun question you're asking. Two that really stand out to me is one, how to find hard to find people. So it's the way I like to say it simply is yes, we put all the keywords into a LinkedIn recruiter search and then our searching starts after we've done that basic search. That's when we really start getting into the nitty gritty of who is this person? If they aren't representing themselves in the popular spaces as who they are today, then what were they doing five years ago and how do I track that down and find them that way? And there are a lot of really fun case studies that we could walk through if that was... Spend hours talking about this, but really fun case studies of looking in really interesting places and going down rabbit holes in order to find these really skilled people.

And sometimes that means that the only way to contact them is finding some obscure YouTube profile that they put together five years ago and messaging them through that and we've had success that way. So it's really about thinking outside the box to be able to create a blueprint of who you're looking for and finding unique ways to actually getting in touch with them and providing them an opportunity that matches with their motivations.

And then the second piece is setting up processes that optimize the closure of top talent. So a lot of times we're talking to really incredible founders who have amazing networks. Brian's from SpaceX, a lot of our great friends are from SpaceX and you have somebody with a SpaceX network who's going out to start an organization and they may be able to text some of the top people that are out there. But being able to have a process that ensures that the talent is being corded and understood effectively for an ongoing period in order to actually close them is a piece of the puzzle that is really fun to set up in the early stages of an organization.

Justus Kilian:

So you said a really important word there that I think is worth unpacking before we get into the meat of this conversation. So top talent, so much of the work that we as investors are doing at seed stage and early stage investing is understanding that question of what does top talent look like both on a business and an engineering front. You also are trying to assess and define top talent. So I just wanted to lay out some of the ways we think and try to define and put a process around evaluating top talent and then also get your perspective on it. So here's how we think about it. It starts really with the CEO, the leadership experience and their style of leadership, the area specific expertise that they bring to the table, their ability to fundraise, prior sales track record, and really importantly coachability, a willingness to listen and engage and learn from others.

The second dimension then is the people they surround themselves with. So this is the leadership team and in particular, does that leadership team have a prior startup track record? Do they have a tenure working together? How long is that? How stressful has it been? What have they actually accomplished together the depth and breadth of that network because that leadership team is going to rely heavily to unlock a lot of their vision on the people that they know.

A third dimension is the completeness of the team. So as we're assessing the CEO and the leadership, likely there will be gaps in the strengths that they bring to the table and opportunities to fill out that completeness of team. So being proactive and intentional and almost reflecting alongside the management team on where they want to get stronger. And then lastly is for us is incentives. How much do they actually own of the company? Are they going to be incentivized over 10 years, put blood, sweat and tears into making this company over the long term? What other personal interests or commitments do they have that require attention outside of the work environment?

And then also partners and family members. So we do spend time getting to know partners and understanding their familiarity with the startup journey and some of the challenging road that lies ahead. So it really is a multi-dimensional approach. We also talk to customers, we also talk reference checks and so on and so forth, but those are the four dimensions that we try to dig in to assess team and top talent, how it fits together. So I mean I guess I would love to understand what that means from your perspective as a headhunter.

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah. First of all, that's great. Thank you so much for sharing those. I feel like we just got a nice little shortcut there or insights into how you operate, which I really appreciate you sharing. I guess first off, I noticed that you didn't mention the vision of the CEO or the ability of the CEO to communicate that vision and be able for them to attract a great team. And I'm curious what your thoughts are and if that is a primary area that you're looking at with the CEO as well.

Justus Kilian:

So for us it's less about setting the vision. The vision then is the first step. Their ability to attract a leadership team to that vision and then subsequent talent around them is a direct measurable result of how well they can tell their story, how big of a vision they can set. And then similarly on the fundraising side, that proof of sales, that proof of fundraising requires them to also tell that vision and that story from to an investor lens. So just the vision itself is hard to objectively quantify. Is it big enough, is it bold enough, is it strong enough? But those other secondary measures we can use as proxies to assess that.

Seyka Mejeur:

That makes a lot of sense and we're often assessing very similar things when we are having conversations with new startups, new companies that we're assessing partnering. We often are speaking to companies that are at a very early stage and maybe haven't proven themselves out there in the market yet and we're having conversations... I mean I can just off the top of my head, I can think of a handful of examples where the technology actually seemed pretty cool and the leadership team we thought was just not going to be able to get the organization where they needed to go.

So we take that responsibility very, very seriously because we are working with candidates who can often work almost anywhere. I'm sure we could talk about this later, but typically people who are in our industry are taking a pay cut comparatively to if they were to go into other industries. They have exceptional technical skill, high communication ability and eq and we want to make sure that we are presenting them only the best opportunities. So we take it responsibility for sussing organizations that way and also helping candidates think through these items when they're interviewing. Yes, the company is our customer. We are partnering. Our top goal is finding the right person for the company. We're not out there finding companies for people, but it does end up happening that way often.

We have top people who are not willing to make a change now, they come back to us two years later and say, "Hey, I'm looking now what's out there." However, we still take a lot of responsibility for making sure that the candidate gets what they want because we are not trying to put a butt in a seat. We are trying to really find an excellent match for what the candidate wants and means and is motivated by and what is truly best for the company. So finding that means we need to help the candidate also think through what do you think of this leadership team? What do you think about what this company is after and how they're delivering their story and how this team meshes and communicates.

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah. Because if they're not excited about this stuff, if they haven't thought through this stuff before they start, then it won't be the right fit for a lasting relationship at the company. So we definitely take that into consideration in making sure our candidates are thinking through these things and are aware of these things and that they're making the right decisions so that it's a fruitful long-term relationship.

Seyka Mejeur:

And some of these things aren't black and white, like this person's really technically excellent. Sometimes there's an organization that says we have team meetings and people really dish their opinions and it's very direct and we wrestle with it and we come out solving problems and feeling great and people march on. And if we're in communication with a candidate who really doesn't like conflict, who is technically excellent but really would prefer niceties and there there's a culture mismatch there, we can have the conversations to help both sides understand, okay, this is what would need to happen to have that fit work well. But there needs to be some massaging and it ultimately might not be the right fit to put somebody who's much more passive into a really direct confrontational environment even though it's not a quality judgment on either side, it's just potentially not the right fit.

Justus Kilian:

Well great. I mean I'm hearing a multi-dimensional matchmaking process on your end as well. It's not only the technical abilities of an individual, but it's the culture, the organization you'd be placing them in, that individual's aspirations, the room to grow in that role. So the ability to find that perfect fit is really important in longer term retention. Can you guys describe the recruiting environment and what it looked like when you got started back in 2019?

Seyka Mejeur:

It has been such an interesting ride since we started in 2019. I guess a quick description of what we've seen. I'll try to hit them but jump in when you hear you have something else. But things started to flow in 2019 was looking really good. When COVID hit, it went silent. We saw companies that were going for funding. Late 2019, early 2020 that just could not get funding and couldn't even get calls practically really dried up. Everything was hiring freezes all around. We saw that last for about three months and then we got hit with a tidal wave of work.

It felt like things were just flowing and people were like, we're going to push through. We don't know what this COVID thing is, but we're going to push through and make it happen. And we saw that really continue a pretty big uptick. I mean we had a wait list. We were working on scaling ourselves in order to be able to sustain the work that was coming to us and really wanting to support the startups that were out there that were really trying to mission through this strange dynamic time in our economy.

Brian Mejeur:

It was probably around a year ago, summer of last year where things started to shift. I think the realities of rising interest rates. Money used to be very, very cheap. Money got more and more expensive and so things started to shift quite a bit. And in the last year, especially the second half of 2022, we noticed a lot of companies either struggled to get their next round of funding or be nervous about that. So there's a lot of belt tightening that was going on. A lot of really intentional hiring and, or mergers and acquisitions are starting to happen. We've seen companies shut down and layoffs happen. So we've definitely shifted from this really low supply, really high demand market into a more balanced place now.

Seyka Mejeur:

What's really interesting about a lot of this is when was it Q3, Q4, 2022, we started seeing some really big layoffs coming through, especially in the tech market. And we're talking to CEOs and the people who are looking to hire and they're like, this should be great. There's going to be a lot more talent available. And we were like maybe. Yes, there will be more talent. I'm not sure it's going to be the people that you are looking for. We are typically taking people who are happily employed somewhere learning about what motivates them, what their dream job is, what they're hungry for in their life and in their mission and in their career. And then helping sculpt that in this new role.

And in a lot of ways that is what we saw is that the people who were happily employed were now more risk averse because they're seeing layoffs happening around the globe and their friends and their colleagues being laid off and people not wanting to relocate. That was a big one, more risk averse for on the role side. And because they don't want to give up a good interest rate on a home move across the country and now have to get a terrible interest rate. So we saw what felt like there would be a flood on the supply side. There were definitely some roles that were supported by the big layoffs that were happening, but I think in large part it made the talent that we were targeting more resistant to change.

Justus Kilian:

That's interesting. Yeah.

Brian Mejeur:

And then from a broader perspective, at the end of the day and stepping into 2023, we've really seen things stabilize a bit more. So while the belts are a little tighter, the best companies are still raising lots of money and they want to get their money returned to their investors ASAP. So these companies are still going to need to hire a lot and hire quickly and they're still looking for the best people. So there's still a lot of really great movement going on it. The environment has really shifted a lot over the last 12 to 18 months. We've seen a lot of dynamics changing in, and frankly there's a lot of seasonality in hiring as well.

Justus Kilian:

At the peak, we saw candidates from our portfolio or more broadly coming to us through space talent would have four offers simultaneously and two or three of them they wouldn't even respond to. They just pick the one that they wanted and go from there. Now we're seeing candidates go through a much more thoughtful process matching with a company. An offer that seems to be more thoughtful in terms of what they can offer and actually understanding a little bit more of what the candidate wants as opposed to just making a decision really quickly. So we've seen that dynamic balance out between company and employee and it feels much more healthy in my opinion. Would you guys agree?

Seyka Mejeur:

Yeah, absolutely. And I also would like to throw out a quick note to any candidates listening, please do not respond to job offers. The industry is small and the ability to have strong relationships is really important.

Justus Kilian:

Do you think there's any consequences that are coming down the line from some of this frenzied hiring?

Brian Mejeur:

That's a good question. I don't know if we've seen that too much from within our clients. We're typically called in when they are desperate for a really specific person and they really need to make that happen. So we're less often in a place where our clients are just hiring people because they can. It's much more the opposite. Hey, we're tapped our network, we've looked through all the applicants, we've done some sourcing and reaching out ourselves, we can't find the person we need. Please go find the person. So that's typically what we're seeing much more often and haven't been had a front row seat to any frenzied hiring fortunately.

Seyka Mejeur:

One thing that we did see during this flood of supply is that internal talent acquisition teams were feeling quite overwhelmed with the number of applicants that they needed to get through. And typically at early stage startups, these teams are not massive and the bandwidth is not massive. So if you have to look through 500 profiles in order to find the person, there's a lot of fatigue that comes with that. You might miss some things if you just looked at 300 resumes. So that's something that we were hearing a lot about is just like we've got a backlog now of a lot of resumes that frankly don't make sense for this role and I just have to flip through them in order to even try to find the people who stand out.

Justus Kilian:

Great. So I'd love to drill in here and now shift to the company level and talk about a couple trends that we've actually observed in our investing and get your thoughts on it. So back to this idea of top talent, we tend to see that top talent gravitates towards the toughest and most important problems. So that's the first one. I would love to get your thoughts in terms of when you're selling a company, when you are positioning it to what you believe are some of the best candidates out there, how does that resonate in terms of the vision and the problem and the importance of the problem?

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah, absolutely. We are in highly mission-driven industries. Space engineers are typically really underpaid compared to what they could make in other industries. And frankly, that's also why we are supporting companies in the clean tech space as well, all about the mission. People are either excited to solve the hardest problems or make the biggest impact. These are always the things that the best candidates we talk to are interested in. So we see that day in and day out and those are the key characteristics of the companies and the candidates that we're working with.

Seyka Mejeur:

It's a big part of what we seek to understand from an organization and really work to comprise our own story that we're telling about that company so that we're able to communicate the difficulty of the challenge and how important the mission is to these candidates because that's exactly right. That's what they care about when it comes down to it is how big is this problem and how big is a mission?

Justus Kilian:

Do you see some risk in that approach with bringing on great talent but then underpaying them relative to the market and relying heavily on that mission and that vision and that problem set to keep them motivated? Oftentimes when you peek behind the veil, things aren't as clean or as clear as you think, and solving problems is always more complicated or multidimensional. So how do you think about that in terms of your role or when you're working with a company to make sure that they're well positioned to manage through that potential risk?

Seyka Mejeur:

Such a great question. I think there are so many different ways of looking at this. One is we're using the phrasing of underpaying, which is not fair. Our clients are typically paying market value compared to our industry. However, if they're to go into just pure tech, now we're talking dollars that are just not comparable and our candidates are typically... So we are not typically working with clients that are underpaying compared to market value. They might be paying market value, but we're looking at the top 1% of talent. So market value is still quite below what this person is worth. And then you look at what they would be making in another industry. And that's what we're really talking the differential.

That being said, the way that we think about this, especially with early stage startups is the compensation needs to be reasonable. It needs to be approximately market value. We are very aware that cash is king with a lot of these startups and a little more cash means a handful more days to be able to get to your goal. And that really matters. The way that we frame it when we're having these conversations with candidates is the cash is there to make your life work, but the equity and the buy-in and the massive upside, the financial upside that would be realized is through achieving these goals and making the mission work. And that's where the payout really comes.

So yes, I think that underpaying top talent is a huge risk, not only because when things get tough and push comes to shove and life isn't feeling as comfortable while they're working on these really hard problems, that's a breakdown. Especially because a lot of these hubs of space talent are in some of the most expensive places in the world like Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Seattle. So yes, underpaying is a huge problem. We are typically not working with clients that are truly underpaying for market, but we do want to be very clear and direct with candidates that we know that you could go to Amazon or a Facebook and make more money, especially in the short run, but deliver on this mission and the payout's going to be massive and the mission is not comparable to what you'd be doing elsewhere.

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah. I think that's a great summary of how we're working with candidates and helping them conceptualize and understand these things. And then on the company side, I think there's also a common, we'll call it issue or hiccup or roadblock, is when you're trying to hire that engineer who's maybe eight to 10 years out of their career, they've built up their base salary quite a bit. Maybe they just bought a house, they have a family, they're in a place where they're a lot more comfortable their lives and their salary supports that, but they don't have a massive nest egg to support a big pay cut and just counting on the equity. And that's where we can get into some sticky spots and where I think it's really important for founders and leaders to know when it is appropriate to flex on up on cash and down on equity because sometimes people are just in that stage of life where they can still be really bought into the mission, but they're in a stage where the cash is more important to them too, and when it's appropriate to flex on that.

Justus Kilian:

Super important. Okay. So the second trend that we've observed is that top talent in founders and co-founders tends to attract other great talent around it. So almost like a clustering effect. And ultimately what you then see is a select few set of companies that are doing truly incredible work. I mean SpaceX is clearly an example of this. They've been able to do it for a very long period of time, build a very unique culture, maintain that vision. So it's impressive. Muon Space is a company in our portfolio. They've been able to essentially go from the back of an envelope concept for a next generation satellite to in space operational in less than two years, unlocking step changes in business model and technical capabilities along the way. For us, that's another great example, but we'd love to hear what you guys see as you're placing candidates and that fit with that attraction effect.

Brian Mejeur:

I think that A players hire A players, the best want to work with the best and surround themselves with the best. They know where the talent bar is, where it needs to be, and they see that in people when they're placed in front of them and frankly, they have these people already in their network. The more you can hire in your network while still having diverse teams, which is a key challenge, I'll make a note of the better. You can scale quickly, you have rapport within your team. So I think these are critical components to being able to execute quickly and make fewer mistakes while you're in those early stages trying to grow. And it only makes your long-term vision or operation better because you keep that talent bar really high. You can promote from within, you can train early career engineers more easily. It just makes everything else flow a lot more smoothly.

Justus Kilian:

That's often a risk when scaling that talent bar. To be able to achieve effective growth, you have to compromise on some of the standards or thresholds that you've set and it can have really detrimental consequences. So I totally agree, really important to set and maintain that high bar. I mean it starts at the earliest stages. So shifting perspectives to the candidate side, let's unpack what it means to work at an early stage company and who are the best candidates for this environment?

Seyka Mejeur:

So something interesting that I think is probably going to be old news to a lot of listeners, but might be interesting for us to dig into, you tell me, is there is some truly technical excellence at some of these legacy organizations, the Raytheon's, Northrop, Boeing's of the world. Technical excellence people who have exceptional education, they've been promoted, they've worked their way up the ranks at these organizations and we are always interested in having the conversations with them. What we find is typically people who have been embedded at these legacy organizations, especially for extended periods of time, it's can be really hard for them to operate at a startup. And there are a few reasons that we typically see this show up.

One is there's so much structure in place at these legacy organizations been put in place for a long time. There's red tape and there are approval processes. This means that you have really clear boundaries exactly what your work is. You often know exactly what your priorities are. They've been handed down by a supervisor. If you have a new idea, you put it through the approval process and it may take, we hear reports of months, sometimes years for those ideas to come to fruition. And all of those things are about as different as possible at an early stage startup. You could have an idea today and have it in place tomorrow. The structure you're often building it, not operating within it, and the pace of creation happens, happens really, really quick.

Another reason is the breadth. Breadth of technical expertise is much more narrow. You're often working on, let's talk about one physical component of a rocket. You are responsible for maybe one screw at one of these larger organizations and you are the best expert that has ever been there on that screw. But at a startup you need to own the whole rocket and you need to be able to put so much more of these components together and really be able to understand deep and wide understanding a lot more. You're not going to have six people on your team for one box.

Seyka Mejeur:

And then the third piece is the willingness to move fast. So I mentioned pace of innovation, but there's a great story. An interview I conducted a couple of years ago where I was looking for somebody who would be working on mechanisms. And if was somebody who'd come from, had a really great track record of excellent product creation, but product creation had typically taken three to five years for what they were creating. And I'm asking them general questions about what do you think about being in a really fast-paced environment? I think that would be great. I like that. I think that would be wonderful. And then, okay, let's go a little deeper. Let's get a little more information.

And I asked, "Well, how would you feel about designing a mechanism that broke when you tested it on during a test?" And he was like, "That would be awful. I would hate that. I would never do that. That goes against everything that I've learned." And I'm like, "Okay. But in this context, the whole team is aware that it might break. This isn't like you just messed up and it broke. The whole team's aware. We're just trying to get to what can you create quickly that has a good chance of working and then it doesn't. And you could just hear the gears just crashing in his brain." And that's a piece of it. If you are used to having your sight set on perfectionism and you're like, I'm going to make sure that I'm creating something that will work, going to take longer than a lot of startups are willing to spend. And sometimes you're going to get better results by breaking things fast, learning from it and moving on to the next step.

Justus Kilian:

Yeah. You can get path dependent if you spend a long period of time in a certain culture, career environment with a set of resources. And it can be really hard to adjust and take on a startup at that point. So that's really helpful to hear broke down. I do want to touch then a little bit on students and young talent coming into the industry. So Brian, you and I were discussing competition for internships at SpaceX, and you'd mentioned that there are three domains that a candidate can excel at coming out of school that can really help them compete for, and how they're evaluated in terms of potential internships. So can you share that framework and maybe if you even want to mention your own experience going through that SpaceX internship process or how you stacked up? Yeah.

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are three key areas that you can make yourself a great candidate coming out of school. You can have a great education with a great GPA, you can have great internships and, or you can have great student project experience through college. And of course all if you check all three of those boxes, that makes you a really, really ideal candidate. Some places might even want all three of those. I think it's a little unrealistic to expect candidates to be really strong in all three of those, especially when you're talking about student project teams that are running concurrently with school. It's really hard to keep a really, really high GPA and having a lot of leadership on a formula SAE team or a solar car team or something like that. So I think what's most important is to pick two of those that you're going to excel at and really show what you're made of and may be able to highlight those things both on your resume and in talking about them in interviews.

So I think my education and my internships were pretty strong, but I did not do any student project teams. My time in school, I focused on being at school and by getting great internships and continuing on that journey. And that worked well for me at SpaceX, but I was the odd one out there. I think most people are coming from really strong student project groups. There's a lot of very practical engineering skills that you develop by actually building hardware while you're in school that isn't really taught in the classroom. So we talked about this while hiring at SpaceX and we're talking about this with our clients all the time about just how important and valuable those student project groups are for early career hires. So I just encourage candidates to probably focus in that direction and get probably ideally a three or so.

But that's really where you can learn the most. And then what you learned is make sure it, and you can talk to it, you can talk about what you owned and the problems you face and how you overcame them. And those are the things that are really most interesting to our hiring teams. And the other benefit is it's hard to put a lot of what you worked on at a space company on a resume and in a portfolio. You can build a portfolio in college. You can say, "Look at this thing I did." You can point to it, you can show a video, you can talk through the intricacies of each detail and the more depth you can show about what you owned and those roles, it's going to be massive.

Justus Kilian:

So if you want to learn more about how Brian secured multiple internships at SpaceX and some of his background in getting to AdAstra, we did a deep dive, a spotlight on space talent, and we'll put a link to that in the show note so it could be we're checking out, it's really good. So there's a lot of big shifts on the horizon. So we're seeing M&A in the industry. Companies are starting to fail. Starship is potentially coming online, reaching orbit later this year. Let's hope. Let's see. What do you think the next 12 months will look like for talent at space companies and how are you guys thinking about the next 12 to 18 months?

Seyka Mejeur:

End of last year really slowed down. This year we've seen a big uptick, definitely seeing a lot of movement in clean tech and definitely movement in the space companies. One interesting note is we have seen a handful of the excellent candidates specifically say they are not interested in launch vehicle companies. So we're seeing a little bit of a shift there where... I mean, that was a hot move in, everybody wanted to work there before and now we're seeing maybe a little bit of a distancing there. So yeah, what insights do you have for next?

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah. I think that we talked about how the market stabilized a little bit, and I think that is starting to feel very true and has me feeling very optimistic and that we're in a much more stable place, not just in the last year where things were tougher, but even a couple of years before that where things were maybe creating a little bit of a bubble, if you will. So I think we're in a place now where money is being distributed in a more healthy manner. The right teams are swimming and some of the wrong ideas or the wrong teams are sinking. But ultimately this is natural and this is good and this is the right evolution that we need for our industry. And I don't think we're stopping or going down at all. I think we just had a nice little course correction here and I'm excited to see what the future holds.

Justus Kilian:

And that course correction can come with some pain. Individual candidates can feel that loss from companies. Virgin Orbit bankruptcies a good example. I think the really important thing to know is there are well-funded companies out there. There are some very attractive and strong tailwinds from the Department of Defense and NASA budget that are helping on the revenue side for a number of companies out there. So very quickly, the talent that was at Virgin Orbit has been picked up across other leading companies in the industry.

So that knowledge that builds at a company while the company may fail, what that candidate achieved, the risk and development and knowledge that they took will continue on. So I think we always think of inflection or changes and we talk about it at very high level, but a lot of that value resides in the people that then carry that onto their next role. So that gives me a tremendous amount of optimism as we see more higher quality companies being founded, funded, and taking advantage of some of this new technology. That some of the battle scars of the last three, five years will be carried with this great talent as the industry progresses forward. So where's AdAstra going from here?

Seyka Mejeur:

We've got our focus on executive leadership and our highly technical roles, and we're keeping our finger on the pulse of some really exciting, very early stage companies that are popping up. And we're really just staying in harmony with the changing dynamic industry and making sure that we're here to get an even more robust map of the talent that's out there and exactly what they're looking for so that we can continue to be this builder that understands who the companies are, who all the people are, and what they both really need in order to reach those synergistic outputs.

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah. We're small, we're agile, we know what's going on in the industry and we want to flex to make that happen. We talk about how our mission for the beginning has been to catalyze innovation. Without talented people in the right companies, innovation doesn't happen. So we consider ourselves a key player in catalyzing that work and are aligning ourselves even more closely with the companies that have those right teams, those right ideas, and are looking to bring on their first department head, their VP of this or whatever it may be. And really create highly powerful dynamic teams from the beginning to catalyze their growth and ultimately what they're capable of achieving.

Justus Kilian:

My partner Tom always says vision without execution is hallucination. So couldn't agree more.

Brian Mejeur:

Yeah. Heard that the podcast and really enjoyed that one. It's like, "I got to save it."

Justus Kilian:

Well, great. Well this has been a fun conversation. I did want to mention that the two of you have a podcast, it's called AdAstra With. It's great. One of my favorite episodes is with Hans Koenigsmann and you have a number of SpaceX alumni that have gone on to start companies Argo, Datum, talking about some really interesting technology and problems that they're solving. So I love it. You two both do a great job unpacking critical questions, and it's really interesting to see who and where and how you're connected. So highly recommend that. We'll also include a link to that in the show notes. So Brian, Seyka, great to have you on today. Thanks for coming on the show, really appreciate the work you're doing.

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