For the Apollo missions the burden of NASA’s budget fell squarely on the back of American taxpayers, and they were sold on this onerous arrangement by the context of the Cold War. When the main driver of your space program is partisan, your funding model is vulnerable to political risk. In this episode we explore the potential impact of mixing politics with commercial ventures in space. We discuss whether the current surge in space investments is leading to a bubble and ask whether investors can realistically expect to see a return on their investment.
Chris Wright
Hello, and welcome to Episode Two of our series money and the moonshot. In Episode One, we looked at the evolution of the role of the private sector in space exploration from the Apollo era when NASA paid private industry but was unquestionably in charge to the modern era, where entrepreneurial companies partner with and sometimes lead for state and space. If you've not heard it yet, go back and listen to that first. And now we move on to the money part. Who's paying for all this?
Space isn't cheap. The United States spent $28 billion to land men on the moon between 1960 and 1973, thats $288 billion when adjusted for inflation, but back then there was a clear political drive for all that spending. The burden of NASA's budget fell squarely on the back of American taxpayers and they were sold on this onerous arrangement by the context of the Cold War. It wasn't such a bad outcome. Watching the decade long race to the moon was a lot more fun than worrying about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of nuclear war. And the intoxicating nature of this race was enough to keep governments and constituents onside with this spending until the job was done. The peak of both Apollo and broaden NASA spending ever came in 1965. That was fine, but it came with a cost. One of them being that it couldn't last forever and didn't win. The main driver of your space program is political. Your funding model is by definition most vulnerable to political risk. That's why the arrival of the private sector was a financial driver not justified. contractor is excited once the government was on the hook for everything, today private capital and in particular venture capital underpins many of the most exciting names in space. Today's era involves a far more rounded funding environment and a healthier one to Seamus Tuohy, Principal director of space systems for Draper is in a strong position to evaluate all this. He's surrounded by the old and the new space history and spaces future outside his office as a fully functional Apollo Guidance Computer of a type to put men on the moon on his desk and models of modern day innovations such as the Space Launch System, Orion capsule and the Dream Chaser vehicle. Working at a nonprofit with its roots in academia, but one that says he's keen to stress is also keen to be a non loss gives him a unique window seat on past and present roles of state and private sector funding.
Seamus Tuohy
The challenge with government lead programs is eventually they end and if they don't transition or don't have A private sector part they'll stop Apollo stopped at 72. I don't think that'll happen the next time. And it's because of all the different funding sources that are coming in. If it turns out there's no market driven reason to go to the moon, or it turns out, there's no other reasons. Yeah, it'll stop. But the exciting thing about all the different sources of funding right now, it's not completely dependent upon one government agency to secure funding, you can imagine a world in which the Artemis program may end 2030 I don't think it'll be the end of humans going to the moon, the private sector will be there, because of the way NASA structure the program because of just the way the private sector is right now that that will continue. So I look at as being essential to sustained presence of the moon sustained utilization of the moon. And that's vital.
Chris Wright
There are arguments for the patience of venture capital is perhaps better suited to space from public money, which has to deal with the vagaries of election cycles and new governments, each of which thinks they have a better idea of what a space program should be than that Last, Obama said, When canceling the Constellation program to go to the moon,
Obama
but I just have to say, pretty bluntly here. We've been there before. There's a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do.
Chris Wright
No sooner was he out, then Trump through Vice President Pence launched the Artemis program to put people on the moon by 2024. Political priorities changed with the prevailing winds, one only has to look at the COVID-19 crisis today to see that he was Mary Lynne Dittmar chief executive of a deep space coalition,
Mary Lynne Dittmar
the White House and each administration wants to put its own stamp on what's happening in the space program. Very often they would have put it they want to put a stamp on it that's different than the administration that came before. Sometimes it feels like just because it's different than the one that came before. So you end up with sort of different targets and different timelines and all the rest of that. And so that certainly is a challenge, right? Because that gets translated through the process. budget request, and then the policy that accompanies that from each administration.
Chris Wright
It's always been this way, and it is troubling just how influential political motivation may be. And what we like to think of as an inspirational human endeavor that ought to be a bubble this stuff. Bill Anders, after Apollo eight was appointed to an advisory role on space by the Nixon government. His view was that the space program should be brought back closer to Earth now that the flag was planted on the moon, and he saw a little need for manned spaceflight. He is a massive critic of the Space Shuttle Program considering it and the International Space Station I mistake. And yet he's the one who sold the shuttle program in the first place. Here's how he says it happened.
Bill Anders
I got a call right before the election. I think it was well Paul called me and he said bill, he said done these you said which one of these programs the test one or the full up one, we'll get the most votes in Southern California. That was it. I say Well, Mr. Holloman even though I thought they should have done the test window and to be honest I did the bigger the bigger the vehicle the more votes. That's it. We got that shuttle on more votes for into Midlanders to Bob Halderman wanted to have a few extra boats in Southern California. That was the root of the decision.
Chris Wright
NASA just has to live with the vagaries of the electoral cycle and a sanguine about it. This is Alexander MacDonald, NASA's chief economist.
Alexander MacDonald
Well, thankfully, physics doesn't change all that often, at least to our knowledge. And so there are certain things that you know, you're going to need to do you know that you're going to need to have certain types of heavy lift capability. In order to get all of the the mass and the propellant. For Journey to Mars into space, you know, you're going to need certain types of robotic precursors in order to identify your landing sites. And so what NASA does is as you know, as a crucial surface, basically identifies these things that we're going to need and tries to make the case for these different pieces for the goals that have been articulated. by Congress, and by the, you know, by the White House over time, and say, well, in order to achieve these things, here's what our engineers or a scientist thinks we're going to need to do.
Chris Wright
And this is Steve jurvetson, founder of future ventures and formerly a partner of Draper Fisher jurvetson. He is one of the earliest investors in SpaceX, still a board member and also an investor in Planet Labs, the earth imaging company,
Steve Jurvetson
a business case continues through political cycles, a business case continues for longer than four years ago, if you have a political football, and that's an F. That's obviously bad, right? That's really bad for long term planning. There's two ways around that one is building in an actual political funding process, a way that sort of shields an organization that NASA has tried that over the years, like, Hey, what's not being bandied about? This is This is crazy. Let's have some long term commitments. And those are tricky, right? It's tricky to get appropriations, in fact, really, it's tricky to get appropriations that are committed for longer than certain periods of time. But the other galvanizing factor is sort of the elephant The room is what about an external galvanizing threat like China on Mars? China on the moon maybe more, more specifically China that may very well galvanize and is probably galvanizing a bit of the momentum you see now,
Chris Wright
Jurvetson makes an interesting point. Apollo was clearly in large part about politics, but that situation could happen again. America is not the only player in space whether on the state on the private side, the first private lender to reach the moon crushed into it in April 2019. A craft called the bearish sheet, which means Genesis in Hebrew, built by the Israeli nonprofit space I L. Toyota is building a lunar rover in partnership with the Japanese space agency JAXA. The European Space Agency lists dozens of private contractors providing everything from batteries to camera and algorithms. China has about 100 private space companies such as link space, which like SpaceX and Blue Origin, has successfully launched rockets which have returned to Earth intact and reusable. China only allowed to these companies to set up in 2014 70 of them have been launched in the last Last year, so political imperative is not necessarily gone forever. It's not impossible but another race could become a spur for state spending.
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Chris Wright
It's clear that the private sector is going to be the driving force in commercial space From now on, and will also be instrumental in the 2020 for moonshots and efforts beyond that to reach Mars and its big business. The United Launch Alliance has estimated that the space investment market could grow from 360 billion dollars today to $2.7 trillion by 20 4560. of the world's 500 billionaires you la points out of space investments. Better still, you can do more with that money has cost to fall and thanks to reusable rockets and the miniaturization of electronics adjusted to today's dollars launching a Falcon Heavy cost one 20th of what it costs to launch a Saturn five in 1969 payload delivery nano satellites, space tourism even intercity spaceflight, there are plenty of valid business cases to tempt us aloft. Plus, well the golden age of the Apollo era is cherished it was in fact a spending race between just two nations. Today there are more than 80 countries with satellites in orbit. We asked Steve jurvetson to tell us more about the behavior and influence of private capital.
Steve Jurvetson
The space industry is larger than one of private investment today, right. So most of the exciting companies you can think of are not publicly traded companies, which is an interesting starting point, digging deeper into that, where's that funding largely come from? It's shifted dramatically over the last 10 years. So just 10 years ago, it would have been Bezos himself. Elon Musk himself who put up hundreds of millions of dollars to fund their own enterprises in the case of Bezos, it's entirely him funding his enterprise in the case of Ilan was just the first hundred million, the riskiest hundred million This is real money, but it is like this is not insubstantial some to invest in a project that perhaps no one else would have invested in at the time. Now, how far that's changed till today, right? If we jump to the other end of the spectrum, there is no end. It seems a venture capital firms, not just individual investments, but firms tripping over themselves invest in the category over 300 of them, 350 of them, frankly. And here's the most amazing statistic that I recently came across in 2018. So last year, there were 114 venture firms who made their very first space investment, so they had not yet done anything in this category. It's it's sort of a hockey stick of recent interest more to the point. I remember another interesting milestone and funding for space in 2015. Now, two companies, I was on the board of SpaceX, and Planet Labs satellite company in a rocket launch company had raised one point $1 billion between them. That alone in his invention investment space exceeded all prior years, combined times to like talk about a hockey stick right? And then today 70% of all venture investment in the space sector occurred in the last three years.
Chris Wright
jurvetson was one of the earliest backers of and believers in SpaceX and still serves on its board. So let's start there since it illustrates many of the challenges investors face when deciding to back in name in this field. Elon Musk wants in the short term to disrupt the launch market and has bringing costs down dramatically through the use of reusable rockets, which is also about Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin is doing. But he also wants as his endgame not only to reach but to populate Mars in order to increase the long term viability of our species. The mechanics of payload delivery are easily assessed. But how does one analyze the business model of building colonies on Mars in order to further sustainability of the human race in the event of a mass extinction event on Earth, there's no spreadsheet that fits into
Steve Jurvetson
When we first invested in SpaceX, we did not attribute any value to the Mars program. It doesn't mean it wasn't important. It doesn't mean it isn't a reason we invested. But we couldn't do the exercise you just mentioned to say let's pencil out economic case. And I think we would not have invested if that was the only economic case. In fact, I can say that with certainty that we can probably most of SpaceX investors would not have said, Okay, we're going to invest back then hunker down for 20 years, and then we'll have a business case. That is bad for a number of reasons. Not only is it bad as an investment on turn by money, but it also means you're building a company in a particularly unhealthy way. You want to iterate with customers, you want to learn from the market, you want to build products and services that are useful all along the way instead of betting everything on this big hail Mallory, you know, 10 years out or a decade or two out. And so the investment thesis for us in SpaceX has been and continues to be that there's a really interesting business opportunity here. And now in low Earth orbit, soon the moon eventually Mars. And that market initially was rockets, launching satellite payloads for all kinds of customers, both commercial and military. And then secondarily, there's new opportunity, which is broadband satellite data, basically connecting the next 4 billion people online via a terminal that's on the ground that connects directly to satellite and unlike satellite phones in the past, so with higher bandwidth and lower latency, frankly, than even traditional fiber in some cases, that's kind of mind bender is completely different architecture than anyone has ever had before. There's a new capability. It requires a whole lot of satellites and a whole lot of launches. That wouldn't have been conceivable, you know, just 10 years ago, but SpaceX Looking ahead, like, we're driving the cost of launch down like 100 X, what might we start to do that no one was thought to do before. That business opportunity alone is one of the major reasons we were cited future ventures to invest in SpaceX. Even recently,
Chris Wright
the idea of making good money from Mars can be dispensed with fairly quickly.
Mary Lynne Dittmar
There is no business case for going to Mars. There's just no business case for going to Mars.
Chris Wright
That's maybe Lynn did ma who is the CEO of the Coalition for deep space exploration and used to run flight operations on the International Space Station. program for Boeing. So if she doesn't think there's a commercial case, there probably isn't.
Mary Lynne Dittmar
There's really not a business case for going to the moon yet. Yeah, it'll be a while before we have that sort of being owned or taken over by private industry decades and decades, if ever, I mean, Mars is a long, long way with a lot of problems. It just goes from here to the moon is 230,000 miles, the distance from here to Mars is 140 million miles. They're really not even remotely comparable, right.
Chris Wright
In the meantime, though, there's some concerns the private equity is overreaching. And but the market is already more than full. Denmark says,
Mary Lynne Dittmar
probably the launch vehicle market is totally saturated. At last count, there were 133 launch companies, okay, around the globe, and there clearly is insufficient markets stay more than just a few. So that'll be interesting to see what happens.
Chris Wright
So Steve jurvetson, do you have concerns about the amount of venture capital being deployed in this area?
Steve Jurvetson
Oh, yeah. In space, specifically. Yeah. So Oh, my God. Let's just say it is nearly impossible to contemplate the number of groups that are making their very first space investment to say this is done with savvy insight and wisdom. I'll point to one the most dramatic example of this. There are now over 130 companies doing the exact same trying to do the exact same thing which is a rocket to launch small satellites into orbit. So going at the part of the market that SpaceX abandoned.
Chris Wright
Part of the reason for this saturation is with the satellite launch market is not as big as many people envisaged. The majority of small satellites are now launched in huge constellations. SpaceX, for example, private Satellite Broadband program is launching about 60 at a time, and even if that wasn't the case, there's still a sense of a gold rush happening.
Steve Jurvetson
There's no way 131 I don't understand how someone invest in the 20th, the 50th, the 92nd, the hundred and third, like what are they thinking like? Do they actually believe all predecessors will fail or they think this is a market is going to support 100 different competitors, it makes no sense. So in the long run, I think there'll be one, maybe two serving the West one maybe to serve in China, and they aren't going to be great businesses. But the big picture, I think, is moved from a legitimacy of the category, institutional investor mindset, meaning it's only available to, frankly, angels. I'll be at super angels, you know, billionaires who invest in this. And you might include Paul Allen and Richard Branson in that family of billionaires, that were the early pioneers. Then some venture firms such as our own that were the earliest investors, you know, before it was popular, and when there was no one else doing it. There were probably only three or four venture firms investing in this area back in 2008 2009 timeframe 10 years ago, and now it's you know, everyone in their pet is which hasn't hilarious, frankly.
Chris Wright
So we're a public markets here. It's true that many of the stalwarts of the space such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been listed for decades, but they only do space among a host of other things. It's also true the Virgin Galactic is listed. But that's a very specific and easily understood use case space tourism. And even then it wasn't conducted through a public IPO but a backdoor listing to the New York Stock Exchange, and only after having originally sought private funding from Saudi Arabia, and suspended it in the light of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Otherwise, it would probably never have gotten near public markets, or at least not yet. Fidelity took a stake in SpaceX recently, which means that some of its mutual funds have exposure to it. But generally speaking, there is a sense that space and short term investors commonplace in public markets are not necessarily good bedfellows. This is an email Elon Musk sent to the SpaceX staff in June 2013.
elon musk email
I'm increasingly concerned about SpaceX going public before the Mars transport system is in place. Creating the technology needed to establish life on Mars is an always has been the fundamental goal of SpaceX. If being a public company diminishes that likelihood, then we should not use Until Mars is secure. I'm hesitant to foist being public on SpaceX, especially given the long term nature of our mission. summit SpaceX have not been through a public company experience may think that being public is desirable. This is not so. Public Company stocks, particularly a big step changes and technology or involved go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution, and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products.
Chris Wright
Nobody would ever accuse Elon Musk of being short of conviction. But is he right? Are visionary companies better away from public markets? Steve jurvetson thinks there might be
Steve Jurvetson
it does beg the question, is it attractive to stay private a lot longer than people had ever contemplated before. Google's an early company in this regard and went public a lot later than a lot of people thought they should. But frankly, they probably should have waited even longer. Same for Facebook. It wouldn't have been online. are not to be in the public eye. I think they will eventually Planet Labs, you know, satellite imaging company doing quite well growing like crazy companies like that probably will go public within the next two or three years same could happen to SpaceX, they could choose to go public anytime they want. Let's just say if you're a CEO of a public company and a private company at the same time, you probably enjoy one of them more than the other.
Chris Wright
So is Elon writing his email about not wanting SpaceX to go public yet?
Steve Jurvetson
I personally think so. Yeah. And I'm on the board about this. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, it's going public, I think serves a couple of major functions. One is a financing event and liquidity, and the second can be a marketing event. So back in, let's say, the 90s, eBay IPO was a huge boom for eBay's business when the customers the mom and pops that are using eBay were like, wow, this is this potential company. I actually see audited financials publicly. I will trust my small business to run on eBay. You might imagine the same goes on for Alibaba and what have you. Well, fast forward to the present day. I'm not sure Alibaba is doing just fine as a private company to write to they have to be public to gain credibility, the way you might have felt in the 90s or the so I think that was fading as a reason to go public. And then it goes back to the first Do you need money? Do you need to do secondaries Do you need to keep going to capital markets such that you want to lower those transaction costs and just be in the public eye? Maybe right? It makes it easier to structure bond offerings. If money is coming plenty easily and you have all the marketing you need, if not more, and marketing, you might stay private indefinitely
Chris Wright
one of the most unique perspectives possible in this field is from Bill Anders, who was an astronauts on Apollo eight and also a private industry chief executive at General Dynamics. tellingly, when he actually owned a space related business, a General Dynamics, the Atlas rockets business, he sold it because he couldn't find anyone in the company who actually remember to have a central rockets. They made work. And if he couldn't understand the hardware, how on earth could it be right for shareholders to own it? It was sold to Martin Marietta, which itself was bought by Lockheed a year later and as has done It's about the ability of regular public market shareholders to understand what they are buying in the military or space arena. Would you invest in space?
Bill Anders
I wouldn't invest in these. I mean, I don't know if about it. I don't know how an investor can know. But today, I don't know how you Who do you invest in view, I don't, I don't eat bonds, not a public company. I wouldn't mind touring in space. If I were young yuppie, it's really hard to see where to put the money. I don't think that I don't think that the Wall Street is going to be the great Sieve of this.
Chris Wright
If we accept that the private capital is the most natural fit for space that raises a host of other questions. Where is liquidity? How do investors get an exit? What sort of timeframe should they have? And is that materially different to other industries? Here's Steve jurvetson, again,
Steve Jurvetson
I admit a bias, here at future ventures and throughout my entire 25 year career as a venture capitalist, I've invested in moonshot ideas, things that are unlike anything else, things that if they succeed will change the world, but are highly risky and take a long time. And so in this firm, for example, we have a 15 year horizon not even attempt. So most venture firms have a 10 year fund life, it sounds long, but we've found that it's not long enough, we need at least 15, we think for almost all the investments we've made that have been interesting, gear nine, or 10, or like some of the peak years, heading to future growth. So I do think you need to have a long term perspective. Luckily, I do see a growing number of investors who are taking a longer term perspective, in contrast to an even larger number, investors are taking a very short term perspective. So to be clear, there's a bifurcation in the investment world simple answer your question, it takes longer, I think rightly so. And the opportunity should be, you know, many billions, if not hundreds of billions of market size and market potential to justify the time you're taking in the risk business. Right? So it's not it's a risk capital, majority things we invest in fail, and keep reminding ourselves that right most every cool thing I see is going to fail.
Chris Wright
What do you tell investors when they come in
Steve Jurvetson
We lead with us, in fact that our entire pitch deck to our investors that invest in the fund was like, here are the crazy things we want to invest in that are one of a kind that are unlike anything we've seen before. But this will take longer hence the 15 year timeframe that we probably won't have much. I mean, I pretty sure I verbally said we'll probably don't have much to show for it, you know, three, four years in because by definition, you're not liquid on anything yet and other investors may and not woken up to the sector yet.
Chris Wright
In truth bigger companies do have facilities for liquidity even without the public markets. If you work for SpaceX for example, you get access to share offerings for employees and existing investors who require liquidity. But the point holds you need a different attitude not only to risk but to time if you want to invest in space. Here's Mary Lynn Dittmar
Mary Lynne Dittmar
investors that are coming to the table and doing this they're taking a gamble all investors gamble The thing that really sort of purses one set of investors from another though really is their window. How long am I willing to wait okay for return on investment. Now, you have Some call social philanthropic investors. But let's be clear the majority of people are not social philanthropic investors, the sort of traditional window for return on investment used to be three to five years, right? Even for a startup, maybe five to seven years. I mean, we know in space, if you're not willing to ride it out for at least a decade, don't put your money on the table, be my advice,
Chris Wright
Set against that, perhaps investors get into the sector for if not exactly philanthropy, but at least a sense of altruism, but they're committing their funds to the greater good of humanity. And after all, if you're investing in space, you're taking something of a leap of faith, whether it's about investment duration, or the nature of our species, it would be nice to think you're also advancing humanity to the
Steve Jurvetson
financial reward is, for me at least is a byproduct of making a difference in the world of helping entrepreneurs change the world and improving the vector progress that even that's big stuff, right? The SpaceX succeeds and we're a multiplanetary species that might go down like one of humanity's greatest hits, right. If we Make some thetic meat and get us off like slaughtering animals for meat production that might save the earth in terms of climate change and other land use and freshwater use issues. And I could go on and on each of these companies if they succeed, history books could be written about them. And then so similarly, I would hold my LPs have that same pride, frankly, in what SpaceX has done pride in what Tesla has done, especially, yeah, ultimately, the only investments we make the money, but they feel good about it because they're making a positive difference, right.
Chris Wright
So what have we learned over the past two episodes, that much has changed. A two party state funded, politically prompted space race has been replaced by one with a far greater range of actors with a far greater range of goals. And this is the good bit a more diverse field of potential funding in order to achieve them. So we've discussed the history, the money, the politics. Now, how about the possibilities? later episodes of this series have plenty of themes to examine? There is Satellite Broadband, Deep Space mining and its applications On Earth, synthetic food, 3d printing brain machine interfaces, the economic rationale for manned spaceflight versus robots and why not the quest for human immortality. Join us on that journey.
Now before we conclude this episode we're going to bring back in Vanessa Colella, Chief Innovation Officer of our supporting partner city. Vanessa Colella, welcome back to the program.
Vanessa Collela
Thank you for having me.
Chris Wright
A series so far has focused on space related industries. But I'm also curious what other moonshot ideas are sitting watching and what things excite you
Vanessa Collela
certainly at City, our sector, specialty analysts are very excited about the idea of electrical propulsion for aircraft. But that's an area where we've done a tremendous amount of research and we're quite excited about it, especially when you consider the significant need for the aviation industry to reduce admissions. This was all a topic pre code. and will continue to be a big topic after things settle down. Because there's pressure on companies to act as responsible global citizens. Some might even say, you know more pressure today than there was six months ago. As similar to other disruptors, we think electric propulsion will emerge initially in a very niche aviation market before expanding to larger markets. And as you guys know, this is something that we see in all innovation, it comes in somewhere small before expands. And we did a few reports late last year looking in detail at four different niche markets where we think electric could be a pretty major disrupter to aviation by 2030. This is both in pilot training aircraft, which already exists as well as things like air taxis and ultimately, general aviation and regional aircraft is some of this as I mentioned, is already happening it just last December, there was a short test flight in Vancouver, involving the six passenger aircraft fitted with an electric motor. So even if right now there's only range of 100 miles and there's still a lot of work. work to be done in battery technology to improve the range. But if those things can be fixed, it could transform the way we travel, not just the travel that we think about today, but making sure that we have a an efficient and a sustainable travel system, air taxis and urban Air Mobility, they have the potential to have such a big difference in our day to day lives. But an electric single engine aircraft that can fly up to 800 miles has the potential to be hugely disruptive, not just for individual lives, but frankly, for the whole existing aviation sector.
Chris Wright
So as you know, in this series, we've been looking at how both public and private sector partnerships have evolved in the space sector. As Chief Innovation Officer for city are you seeing these kinds of collaborations in your organization?
Vanessa Collela
Absolutely, Chris, for a long time, we've thought about is it public sector or private sector? And I think what we've seen is that public private partnerships are really essential to solving large scale global challenges. We think it's critical not only to look outside, but really to take An outside in approach where we're partnering with investing in organizations. This includes not only startups, but governments, academic centers, nonprofits. You know, when we think about public private partnership, it really will be a network of players that come together to solve some of our most important problems. But it also helps us stay ahead of the curve. It helps us accelerate the adoption of new technology and figure out how we can bring in cutting edge solutions that better serve our clients.
Chris Wright
And also as Chief Innovation Officer for city a key part of your role is to drive innovation. From what you've learned and been practicing over the years. What advice would you give to any of our listeners on how best to drive moonshots innovation in large, established companies?
Vanessa Collela
My advice would be threefold. First, you think about what ecosystem you'll need that will allow for innovation both from the inside out and from the outside in, you know, the partners you might need to bring to the table might not be obvious, but they'll Strengthen what you're doing. Second, embed innovation within your culture within your leadership team. That doesn't mean just talking about innovation. It doesn't mean just saying we're curious, it means make sure that across your leadership table people are willing to say when they know the answer and when they don't. And then third, make space for people through programs through hubs through labs, to encourage your employees to innovate. Allow them to test ideas, experiment, challenge the norms of the company. If you can do those three things, I think you'll find that it can be a great benefit working within a large established company. Because when those moonshots flourish, you can have impact on a scale that's far greater and a far shorter period of time than if you're starting from scratch.
Chris Wright
Vanessa Collela, thank you very much for joining us.
Vanessa Collela
Thank you for having me.
Chris Wright
This has been Euromoney audio production created by Chris Wright and Chris hunt.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai