Space SPACs and the Public Market
YYashad KulkarniDec 14, 2021 at 9:23 pm31min
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00:00Speaker 1
There's a bit of a symmetry to this, we started the event talking about raising growth rounds. And also, we started that session with a discussion of snacks. So we have a panel dedicated to that very topic. And in general talking about taking your space startup public, so to explain, please welcome. killin Brandon from Astra who will be joining us virtually on the screens. Andrew rush from red wire, Adam spice from Rocket Lab and your moderator is Devin Coldewey. Thank you for
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00:37Devin Coldewey
joining us. And thank you, Darrell for stealing the joke I was gonna use to open my panel. So really good start for us. And thank you, Kelly, for joining us via zoom. I hope you're I hope you're feeling better. So I think we can we can assume some general knowledge about Spax in the audience here. So we don't need to go into the details of what exactly one is. I think we learn more if we just hear from you all, how and why you arrived at this as the the choice for moving forward in for your company, because you are all very different companies. And you all chose this for different reasons, I'm sure. So Kellen, if, if you wouldn't mind starting out, I'd love to hear why you went with why you went with the SPAC?
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01:22Speaker 2
Well, it's it's interesting. Previous to this dispatch process, I've taken two other companies public and in a traditional IPO. But really why the SPAC was right for Astro was that it allowed us to accelerate our path and our roadmap. And quite frankly, we would not, it would have taken a lot longer to be where we are actually today without the spec process being available to us. So for us, you know, our business is capital intensive. And so getting out to the public markets allowed us to really accelerate.
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02:00Devin Coldewey
Absolutely, the speed is obviously a big part of it. The the IPO process, I haven't tried it myself, but I hear it's kind of rigorous. Andrew, you have any other any reasons we should hear about?
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02:11Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, I would, I would classify red wire as a public space company, not a spec company. Sure. And, you know, our, our focus is on enabling, you know, enabling people to participate in this second golden age of space to be to help build that very, you know, next infrastructure in space. And that's a longer, that's a long term view, you know, we're just on the doorstep of the future here. And being a public company, really sets us up for that long term success. And so that's why that's why we strove to be to become a company when we did.
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02:49Speaker 3
Yeah, I'd say for Rocket Lab, when I joined about three and a half years ago, you know, Peter Beck, and I really thought that a traditional IPO was going to be our path. And I think, you know, having, you know, multiple years of revenue, made that a real possibility for us. But I think what really made us pivot towards this, the SPAC was really that the quantum of money that could be raised, right, so given the pretty, you know, ambitious plans for neutron or larger launch dates, in particular, it that's something where, you know, the amount of money we could raise traditional IPO would have pretty much consumed all have that right, and left us with anything else to go pursue other things, which we've been doing a lot of other things. So it was really just the size of rays that we could do was really what drove us in that direction. But I would say that, like there is no free lunches, it's not such an easy process, it's not typically quick process, I think it's got a lot of unique attributes to it that make it difficult to start your life as a publicly traded company versus an IPO where you can really kind of build that institutional shareholder base as you kind of go through your process. So it's, it certainly doesn't come without trade offs. For sure.
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