Relativity Space’s CFO, Mo Shahzad, has been instrumental in shaping aerospace innovation, most significantly in helping build and launch Terran 1, the world’s first 3D-printed rocket. Mo's commitment to pushing the boundaries of what's possible in space exploration underscores his pivotal role in steering Relativity Space to the forefront of the industry.
In this episode, Mo joins host Andrew Seski to share his unique journey from growing up in Pakistan to joining a cutting-edge company. He provides insights into how competition fuels progress and emphasizes the importance of maintaining integrity and transparency as core company values. Mo also discusses how Relativity Space fosters a culture of curiosity and eagerness for learning, enabling the company to quickly iterate on its ambitious mission to make life interplanetary.
Tune in to hear from an incredible leader advancing aerospace ingenuity, as Mo navigates the industry’s complexities with an unwavering focus on progress. This episode provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of space exploration and highlights how modern finance plays a crucial role in shaping it.
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Please note that the transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. The content in the podcast is not intended as investment advice, and is meant for informational and entertainment purposes only.
[00:00:00] Andrew Seski: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Modern CFO Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Seski. I'd like to welcome Mo Shahzad, CFO of Relativity Space, to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here, Mo.
[00:00:23] Mo Shahzad: Thanks for having me, Andrew. Excited to be chatting with you.
[00:00:26] Andrew Seski: Well, I'd like to jump right into this episode by asking a broad question about what you feel is underestimated in the world today, given your unique vantage point.
[00:00:36] Mo Shahzad: Thanks for asking that question. It feels like one of those heavy-weight, ‘what's the meaning of life’ questions, but let me give it my best shot here. So look, I think from a professional standpoint, I'd say I'm an accidental space enthusiast at this point. I'm sort of four years new to the space world. And as I think about how the first thirty-six years of my life went by without thinking much about space and the last four where I've dealt really deep into it, I do think the world spends too little time thinking about space. And there's, of course, a deep enthusiast community around this that want to make life interplanetary and follow the Mars missions and Moon, and all the deep space stuff we've been doing in this country and in the world for the last fifty, sixty years. But I really do think we're at the cusp of this next privatization 2.0 or 3.0, however you want to think about that, in space.
[00:01:31] And with what's happening in basic things like compute power and advancements in software, which are sort of the enabling foundational technologies to make advancement AI in space that in this generation - not like two or three generations away - we'll see things happen on the Moon and on Mars, and it's gonna be just a wildly different experience. And for us, we're chasing all of this. Our mission at Relativity Space is to make life interplanetary - not because we think we'll destroy resources on Earth, but it's simply with this curiosity that we want to explore Mars. It's like, we've got ships and we're not going to just stay on the lakes and rivers. We're going to get them onto the oceans and explore what's on the other end. And I think that's going to be just such a wild, different experience.
[00:02:22] I think 99+% of the world does not think about that and hasn't absorbed that in a way, and I think that's deeply understated. So that's how I'd sort of answer professionally. I guess, at a personal level, I would say in this sort of post-COVID, Zoom, digital world, and maybe it's too cliche, but I think the very basics of human-to-human interaction and one-to-one conversation and the depth of relationships, which I've got not many friends in my life, but I've got very, very deep friends in my life.
[00:02:55] And I think that personal relationship is just so understated today. We've become this community again - super cliche to say, but I really deeply value. I tell my wife this: I'm not in the market for new friends, I just want to go and spend more time with my old friends. And I think doing that with coworkers and getting to know people at that human level is so, so, so important and something I have to keep reminding myself of. So those are the two sorts of things I would say.
[00:03:25] Andrew Seski: Yeah, those are great answers. One of the relationships I think must be the most sensitive in this space is probably with shareholders, investors, new employees in terms of the longevity of the goals that you're reaching. And I'm curious as to how you balance short-term and long-term goals. I think it's really relevant for CFOs who are trying to figure out their R&D spends in AI. And I'm curious as to how you think personally and professionally about how to measure short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals, especially because of the stakeholders that you have; how difficult it is to raise capital, keep investors excited in a space that will develop over decades as opposed to the life cycle of their funds. So really curious as to how you tackle those kind of really big challenges.
[00:04:14] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, it's a great question. So first thing I'd say to you, Andrew, is in my seat from a ‘resource allocation’ perspective: this is a really, really, really hard job. And it's really hard because in most businesses, you would have a ton of signal that you get back and you put a product out and it's a little bit better than you thought, a little bit worse.
[00:04:35] You can understand and look at your assumptions and figure out where you were right, where you were wrong, and help push teams on what we need to do better to get there. Like, this is a program that will take hundreds of thousands of people, and certainly hundreds and thousands of labor hours, an incredibly complex product that is very circuitous in development and ultimately, even in manufacturing all the way out and how you then scale from one rocket to many rockets, like just an incredible amount of challenges. Millions of things need to go right.
[00:05:08] Any one thing can make it complicated. And so you really have to get in there and walk the floors and understand from every frontline person how things are going and keep a real pulse. And it's an overlay of some data, some experience, but a lot of gut and have to rely on my technical peers and our technical teams to really, really understand and in partnership, make the best decisions that are the best decisions for the enterprise.
[00:05:36] It isn't like a finance versus engineering type mentality, because it'll just come to a screeching halt. The other piece here that is very, very unique is thinking about how much planning is really possible when you're trying to innovate and do things that are wildly different. I think this is true of most businesses hopefully, where you're innovating and pushing the edges of - in our case physics - where if we tried to build the perfect company with the perfect plans and the perfect budgets, we will likely never launch a rocket.
[00:06:11] On the flip side, if we have it be Wild West, and anybody can spend and do whatever they want, and maybe we'll get to launch - but then we'll have to pause and be like, oh, shoot, let's put a company around it and all the mechanisms that one needs, right? And I'm not even sure we'll get to launch, because things like how to orchestrate 1,200 people that we have today and how to drive all hands, how to focus on just some basic things that you would need at a company of our size and scale are also critical because you can't get up and tell twenty people to stop working on what they're working on and change and pivot, and the cost of change is too high. So anyway, that's the sort of framing.
[00:06:49] Now, that said, to answer your question specifically, I think the key here is being nimble, yet finding mechanisms to hold people accountable. And so you want to have a long-range vision that you're communicating to people that isn't necessarily just making life interplanetary, but it's even more bite-sized than that. Then you take that and you sort of have your rolling twelve-month view - and then how do you fit into that long-range plan?
[00:07:16] And then how do you think about the short-term goals? And I will say to you that in my four years here, our plans are wildly different, but how we fill them and how we get there and the milestones we want to hit stay pretty consistent because we aren't funded by somebody with unlimited amounts of money or government backers or things like that. And so we've really got to run this public-company-style. And I guess the last thing I'll say on it is: in any journey like this, hopefully, the partners, the employees, the stakeholders, customers, investors that you have, government partners, understand that value creation here is not going to be a linear journey.
[00:07:58] And so you may take two steps forward and a step sideways and a step backward, but hopefully, ultimately keep driving the machine forward. And that requires trust and transparency that you build over time. And so we're super clear and direct with everybody. We've got the same plan internally that we have with customers, that we have with our investors. And that's ultimately, I think, maybe one of the other understated things in life - like the basic, basic things around integrity and commitments that you're making and sticking to those commitments. Those are the values I grew up with, and those are the values we're trying to instill at the company.
[00:08:38] Andrew Seski: You're talking in a very entrepreneurial way, where sometimes the CFO of a business is brought on way later in the entrepreneurial journey. But I'm curious as to where these influences came from, because you're speaking as if you have this ownership mindset. I think this is really powerful across any part of the organization, whether it's a C-suite, employees. Was there a time in your life where you felt that that was uniquely instilled?
[00:09:08] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, it's a good observation. In other words, I really don't know where my boxes start and stop, but I'd say the place where it was mostly instilled - my parents are both medical doctors, neither practices. My dad's always been an entrepreneur, small-time, all kinds of projects in his life. I understand buy low, sell high - where he found arbitrage of opportunities, he chased them. And I think some of those lessons around dinner tables were some of the most important things that I had learned. Everything from sort of how to operate a cash register to how to think about a factory operation to how to do import export stuff.
[00:09:50] At the end of the day, none of his businesses he ever raised tons of outside money, if any at all. And so this was always about: if you can save a buck, it'll go right down to the bottom line. And that real ownership mentality, which of course has a flip side, because you're maybe not scaling things as fast as you could and so you've got to balance it at the end of the day. But that's what was instilled in me very early on. And I also tried my hand at founding a company that I ended up selling [to] a couple of people up in the Bay Area - clearly not enough to retire. So I'm still at it 20 years after that. But, I think it's that lens that's super important at any executive-level role where you can't just think about the function. This job is not just about setting budgets and getting your audits done and critiquing your peers for something they could have done better. You really got to put yourself in their shoes. And this is something I'm learning and it's a journey as a sort of classically trained capitalist and a finance guy. I tried and learned and try every day to develop more and more empathy for where my peers come from and how to then think from their perspective and absorb and try to make, one plus one and our thinking better. But it's always about moving the company forward. That's got to be the lens that any executive takes. And certainly, I think at the CFO level.
[00:11:13] Andrew Seski: Yeah, I really appreciate you mentioning that. I always mention at least one point in the podcast that people should just hit that back 30-second button, just listen to that again. Having the lens of what's going to bring us forward to any meeting, it's just such a healthy mindset for any sort of group setting. So I think that's super valuable. One of the things I'm really interested in is the competitive nature of your industry in terms of talent acquisition. One of the things that stands out to me in terms of your career is how multifaceted it is.
[00:11:44] You've been on transaction desks at Goldman. You've been a CFO at The Honest Company. You've been through a different cycle of technology, waves of financial crises, and I'm really interested in how you think about bringing on the absolute best talent to your organization, because I think it's a big thing that is maybe something CFOs don't talk enough about, but falls into their wheelhouse every once in a while.
[00:12:11] Mo Shahzad: Yep. Yep. No, I appreciate that question. And these days I do have formal responsibilities for our people teams, including talent acquisition. I think whether or not I had that for all companies, no matter what you're doing, like, really complicated things, like rockets or something much simpler than that, all things really start with people, right? Like, at the end of the day, and I think this is a lesson I learned from a great CEO in my last gig, who sort of really instilled that in me and having a strong head of people, having a strong culture, making sure that that talent bar is super high. And I guess what I'd say there is: talent is certainly not a right.
[00:12:52] It's a privilege, and it's one that you've got to maintain. And so this takes everything from the basics of what our people team does and our talent acquisition team does, every sort of frontline recruiter and how they're telling the story and what the experiences are for the people, certainly that we hire, but for the 99+% of people that we don't hire and they walk away and tell their friends about us. And it's certainly true of the things that we do with our brand and comms team to focus on employer branding. It's certainly comes from actually winning, right? Nobody ever wants to go work for a company that you say, “It's a great culture and people are wonderful, but they are always losing” right? And so you kind of want to make forward progress, certainly, on the space side, it’s true. It's a small community.
[00:13:37] Mo Shahzad: And so people understand who's winning, who's not, who's making progress there. We do everything from the hand-to-hand combat, the more scaled stuff that you would imagine a 1,200 person company is doing and are super proud of the talent flows that we're able to drive. We're not trying to create an anti-any company, and we're not trying to replicate the culture of any other company. And our magic is to bring folks that understand the launch industry, understand space. I've worked in a variety of different settings and map them to a bunch of other backgrounds that haven't worked in space and still there's a ton of such roles that we need, whether it's material scientists or software, or what have you on the corporate functions, and make the magic happen by bringing those folks together and expand their thinking. So talent is absolutely critical.
[00:14:32] It's a dogfight for that talent. And unlike anything I've experienced, including finance, this industry still works very much in an apprenticeship-style mentality. And so we go after leaders that others want to work for and be inspired by because of their work as well as the cultural reputations they carry. You can then build around those core set of folks and develop those types of people internally. And that's been a pretty effective strategy, but it's one of the things I spend personally spend time doing with candidates every week. And if I'm not doing a candidate call or two or three or interviewing in a given week, I'll just sort of start to feel like, yeah, I'll feel empty about sort of my week. I think it's that critical what we all do. And this is for not even my functions. This is sort of trying to add talent across the organization.
[00:15:23] Andrew Seski: I'd love to hear kind of the origin story of how you met the co-founders and got into Relativity in general, but maybe this is a really interesting opportunity to kind of rewind time, go back to what you said in undergrad and some of those early career decisions that you made that you feel are impactful. One of the questions that I often get is: we highlight some of these incredible CFOs who have these amazing careers, but maybe I don't highlight the ebbs and flows and the messy middle along the journey to get there. But we'd love to hear kind of early decisions that you made that you felt were most impactful. Maybe you had mentors along the way that you'd suggest for folks. Maybe you're mentoring certain individuals right now in the industry. But we'd love to rewind time and kind of go back to those early days post-undergrad.
[00:16:07] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, that's great. I'm happy to share the story, and I think it's as messy as they come. It's always a sort of tell the narrative and the end, for a conversation, I can string it together. But as life goes, it's a series of bizarre decisions that have ended me here, right? And it was a lunch here or a conversation there that I did or didn't do that then has brought me to this point.
[00:16:33] And I'm a big believer that we, no one should live in the woulda coulda shouldas, and you are where you are as you're meant to be, and you've got to make the most of it. So yeah, on my journey, I actually started off as a bioengineering major and it was the introductory bioengineering 100 class that was as boring as they come, even though it was a math and physics and science guy growing up. And I just called it quits on engineering and said, okay, well, what can I do that's sort of relevant a little bit to the math, but not the esoteric Cat 3 or what have you that I was taking that year, but will allow me to interact with people and someone probably said to me, “Hey, finance is a thing to try out.”
[00:17:16] And it was a great program at Penn. And so I ended up transferring into the Wharton undergrad program and that was it. So studied finance, never really with the view to kind of going into banking or some of the traditional tracks that people do. I couldn't even told you what investment banking was, even after graduating with a finance degree, like things just come so fast and in a hodgepodge. So I tried everything from getting involved in some of our family stuff and didn't want to go out and prove myself and move to Wall Street in 2002, which was a very interesting time to be working on Wall Street.
[00:17:51] They wouldn't hire me in banking, but Deutsche Bank was kind enough to offer me an internal consulting role. I happen to speak Hindi fluently. And so they said, hey, we're doing this project in India. We'll ship you around. I met a bunch of people there. Accenture was the consulting firm they were working with to do a bunch of work on outsourcing stuff. I said, hey, let me go do this. These ‘kids’ at the time looked like they're having fun flying around the world doing a bunch of different projects. Did that. It wasn't as fulfilling as I maybe thought. I'd end up starting a company in the mobile advertising space right before the iPhone came out, but it's no good reason other than thought that maybe mobile advertising was going to be this big thing and it was still sort of creepy and geotargeting - which wasn't a phrase back then - but like, finding a way to SMS you coupons as you walked through cell towers and things.
[00:18:41] Andrew Seski: All you did that time?
[00:18:42] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, I was, this was now for four years after undergrad. And so I was, I was twenty-two, my undergrad was a little young. It's not a very public story, but that was a little bit young and undergrad and things happen fast and whatnot. So, I was at the right page at twenty-two, trying to start this company with three, four years of work experience - wasn't ready for it. Honestly, wasn't ready to drive a mandate forward. It turns out I'm not that good at the 0 to 1 stuff.
[00:19:11] I think. I'm much better at the 1-to-10, or maybe even the 10 to 100 or 100 to 1,000 people or dollars, however you want to think about it. I can't work in the chaos of very early stage stuff, but I also don't like the very large stuff. So that's kind of what I did. And hit business school as a reset and ultimately thought it was going to be this, do my JD MBA and started at UCLA because it was the only program I combination that would allow me to start in the business schools.
[00:19:46] And one of the option out of law school, thought I'd come up with another idea and build a network. And that never happened in a linear way. So investment banking was a backup option. I ended up at Goldman, thought I'd do it for two years. I'd do it in San Francisco. I'd learn the valley. That ended up being a five, six-year journey and an amazing journey and felt like three or four jobs in ones that got a ton of experience doing some really cool stuff, but ultimately came back around when we had our first child to say, life is too short.
Don't want to miss my own kid, and I have three of them. Their life, and I'm a tinkerer at heart, want to go be an operator, didn't really fully know what that meant. And I ended up in a number two finance role at The Honest Company, and it was here in LA and very interesting things happened there over the subsequent six years.
[00:20:35] I took the CFO role. 12 or 18 months into that gig and a big sort of transformation and ultimately turnaround of that business. That was fun and then came to Relativity because of [an] old mentor of mine called me and said, hey, you should meet this guy. Tim.
[00:20:50] Andrew Seski: It's always a great mentor in everyone’s [journey].
[00:20:53] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, yeah, it's actually a guy who was trying to recruit me for a few years and I'd never took the job, but he and I just ended up becoming close and we stayed in touch. He's a mentor of mine to this day, having never worked for him still. But he connected me to Tim and I honestly, I had lunch with Tim, our CEO, co-founder at this little sushi joint by LAX, and was like, let me go practice how to interview.
[00:21:20] It's been a minute, but I'm obviously not going to work in space. I don't even know why people take things up to space or how the business works. I've heard of the SpaceX thing, but like, I have no clue. This is not for me. I think as he and I got to spend time, the first lunch was all about values, family, upbringing, nothing about work.
[00:21:42] And I walked away being, I kind of like this guy. This is interesting. And then I started reading about space and the early history of aviation and I'm not a sci-fi guy, but picked up some of the Asimov, some of the classics that people read and just got fascinated, maybe like ten or twelve books over the four or five-month interview process and felt where I started this conversation of that - man, we are [in the] very, very early innings of what could happen in space - and then ultimately, I had no way of telling who's who in the emerging space landscape.
[00:22:17] Mo Shahzad: And I saw that a bunch of incredible talent from primarily SpaceX and senior folks from there were moving to Relativity and they must have something that I didn't, made the plunge and it's been an epic journey in that four years.
[00:22:35] Andrew Seski: That is an incredible story. I doubt there are that many folks who probably get a Jules Verne quote in their interviews, about sci fi and family values all at the same time. But what do you think are some of the more unique cultural influences that you've received and tried to bring over to Relativity? Because as you mentioned, this wasn't your initial sort of field going out of undergrad. all of the exposure during your TMT days at Goldman, Honest Company. I don't know that there's a ton of very visible overlap in terms of what you could expect, but maybe you learn not only from mentors, but maybe from the organizational standards that were set at those firms. Have you brought anything over that's been really productive?
[00:23:20] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, I think - certainly from a professional standpoint, maybe the most defining experience for me. So the part I skipped over, like, my parents moved to the United States. I grew up, was born and raised in Pakistan till the middle of high school until sophomore year. I decided to move here. And I think I carry that so-called immigrant mindset, DNA, sort of work ethic. And I never have approached anything feeling like it was mine and someone took away from it.
[00:23:51] Like, you've got to just sort of earn it and fight for it. And so I'd like to believe what I carry almost every day in my job is this imposter syndrome of being, man, somebody put me in this spot. And they believe that I can do this, but I don't know if I can - and that sort of stomach-churning feeling of like, gosh, like, can I do this? Do I have confidence? And I think that drives me to learn as much as I can and be open and talk to people and not approach anything with having the answers because I actually really don't. I think that's super, super important as you grow in your career. And I think beyond that, honestly, the difference between me and the next guy or gal is that I'm more willing to stick my neck out and make a decision.
[00:24:36] And as it turns out in life, you've got to just be marginally more right than wrong. And if that's the case, people are like, wow, you're amazing. You walk on water. And so I think the combination of those things has just allowed me to try to approach anything that I do with this learning mindset. And at the end of the day, maybe going full circle back to the entrepreneurial bit and having this ownership mentality, right? The way I want to show up with my peers, the way I show up in front of the whole company, people should recognize the same, with the same values, with the same integrity.
[00:25:14] And if you can do that, then whether you're criticizing or critiquing or. championing and celebrating wins, everybody will have respect for you because they understand that all you're trying to do is create ‘value’ and drive the company forward. This isn't about your kingdom. That isn't about you, this isn't about you trying to make a point or be smart. All you want to do is drive this company forward. Of course, who doesn't want that at the end of the day? And you've got to just do it nicely. There's ways to do it. And I often say to folks, there's no reason to be yelling.
[00:25:52] We're not in an operating room. You didn't hand me a scalpel when I asked for something else and someone died. That could all be fine. Mistakes happen and we sort of just figure it out. But we're not going to yell at each other and we're going to hold each other accountable. We're going to be super clear. We're going to have high-performing conversations and the way we go about things, right? I don't know, old boss that used to say, it's not just the what, it's the how, and so we focus on both those things. And if you can do that, there's a lot of parallels in what a turnaround story looks like, with what a growth, high growth, out-of-control scaling type operation looks like. It's quite remarkable. Or what a diaper business looks like with the complexity of what a rocket program does. Like those dots start to connect much easier as long as you've got your values and your motivations in line.
[00:26:42] Andrew Seski: Yeah, I mean, the kind of parallels for me and athletics was always the way that you do one thing is the way you can do everything. So why not hold yourself to the higher standard? It's something that loosely comes up on every episode, but just want to put a statement to that sentiment. One of the things that I think that we've talked about is kind of mitigating conflict and solidarity and vision. How do you feel personally or professionally about the need for competition in your industry? It feels relatively consolidated. The public may view it as either governmental or a billionaire class of [the] next venture. And I'm curious as to how you see your role in filling a competitive stature in what may be seen as a very niche part of the investment community and also what we're building, to be maybe inter-multi-planetary in the future.
[00:27:40] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, look, I think the first thing I'd say is I have incredible, incredible respect for what SpaceX has built and what Elon's done. I mean, I never worked there. I do know many folks. I've actually known Brett, the CFO at SpaceX for many years. It's just an incredible amount of regard for how they've created value and done just unprecedented things. I mean, certainly ten, fifteen years ago, nobody would imagine it. But even from what they've done in the last three or five years, just like, absolutely remarkable.
[00:28:11] I think that's awesome. As a sort of classically trained capitalist, as I said, competition I think is key in any industry doing anything. We're going to really push humanity forward. We're going to do what's right for us as human beings, whether it's space or anything else. We're going to want not monopolistic behaviors. And I think that said, I also am a big free market guy and think that as long as people are playing by the rules and doing the right thing, to each their own. And we've got to come around and we've got a story to tell and capital to raise and got to do the things that we're saying we're going to do and get people to unlock more capital for us and then use that capital to, hopefully, create more competition. And there's others in the industry trying similar things with varying amounts of success.
[00:29:03] That's on us. I have no one to sort of point to and say, they need to slow down. They should continue to do what they're doing and drive shareholder value and keep pushing humanity forward. As long as people are playing by the rules, right? I think that's where things get messier, if you're starting to show monopolistic tendencies. So yeah, I think competition's super important, but it's on us to go make it happen more than anybody to sort of give it to us.
[00:29:32] Andrew Seski: I want to spend a few minutes on sort of the more revolutionary breakthrough aspects of Relativity, in terms of 3D printing, in terms of Terran 1. I want to go through a few of the big milestones that you've already achieved. And maybe what that looked like in terms of that messy middle and what you kind of see as those large milestones. Maybe we could end sort of on what you think is most exciting in that next three to five year time span, as we all try to ingest what's newly available in AI or other technologies that are going to make all of these very, very arduous processes at least somewhat more streamlined and easier to accomplish with smaller teams.
[00:30:14] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, yeah, happy to talk about that. So I think the company was founded eight or so years ago on really the premise of 3D printing and what that's going to do in terms of in automation technology. Now, at the end of the day, especially when you think about rockets and reusable rockets, when you spread that over twenty or more than twenty reuses over time, it's not really like your bill of materials and your costs you're optimizing for.
[00:30:40] What it really allows is a speed of innovation and an iteration speed, right? And the faster you can build hardware, the faster you can test it, launch it, the more you can learn and put back into your product. So if you're not beholden to fixed tooling, as much as some of the traditional aerospace manufacturers would be, then the better off you would be and better off humanity would be over time on any sort of large-scale manufacturing, whether it be rockets or many other metal products over time. So I think that still remains absolutely true and core to what we do today and think about. Of course, the flip side of this is the landscape in space with what Starlink is doing and how quickly it's growing, some of the other constellations that have been publicly announced, some others that have not been publicly announced, how we're sort of starting to - as a humanity augment - the terrestrial telco networks with space.
[00:31:38] Has also just moved at a pace much faster than I think, honestly, even we had the thesis on - i.e. the world needs more large rockets and there's this huge supply, demand and balance of what the world needs in terms of larger vehicles and larger rockets. And so I think for us getting Terran 1 up and running, that was an 85+% by mass 3D printed vehicle was awesome. It was the world's first, world's largest 3D-printed object. We got it to space for much further than our original goal and what we had by many standards was arguably the most successful launch for a venture-backed company in history. Super proud of what we got done there. And I think a lot of the foundational technologies there are a running start to the Terran R program. That's our larger reusable rocket. And the reason we have been able to make such fast progress is in large part to the science risk we brought down with Terran 1, the world's first liquid oxygen methane engines in the West, certainly - and China was the only other one that was trying a LOX methane engine and got it to space 3 months before we did.
[00:32:48] So, there's just a number of different firsts that got done there. And I think where we are morphing to now is to say, okay, we've got this incredible demand. We've got several billion dollars worth of customer backlog at this point. In order to hit and execute that and ramp at the pace at which we think the world needs rockets and believe the world needs rockets. No manufacturing technique or nothing is sort of dogmatic about the way we're going about this. Our customers care how we build the rockets, ultimately they want their satellites delivered to orbit. And that's what we're focused on. And that's the lens in terms of creating shareholder value. So that's sort of the first part of your question, maybe in terms of the next two to five years and what we think is most exciting. Like, what I'd say there is: this business from a customer perspective, and from a financial return perspective, certainly is not interesting if we launch one, so then we double it and then we double it again the following year. And over time, we can get to a dozen or twenty launches.
[00:33:52] It just doesn't return well enough, so we have to build not just for first launch, but we have to build from rate right from the outset - because it is very, very difficult to ramp a rocket program to rate if you haven't built some of that cultural elements right in your in your program from the outset. So we're super focused on doing that without getting too far ahead of ourselves too, because that can be an equally difficult problem to handle.
[00:34:21] And reusability is key to that. We're proud of the team that we built to help us deliver on this mission, but there is certainly a ton of humility and what I want to portray here, because building what we want to build and doing dozens to a hundred-plus launches a year in the medium term is a nontrivial thing from where we are.
[00:34:43] But if we can do that, our belief is it'll be great for humanity. It'll be great for competition. It'll push us forward. It'll be another massive stepping stone in making life interplanetary and ultimately the long, long-term vision that we have is making life interplanetary, but also building this industrial base on Mars and 3D printing will be core to being able to do that with in situ materials and the like.
[00:35:08] And so this is all sort of chapters in our long journey, and we're in the very early stages of it, but excited for the progress that we've made and super pumped for what's to come in the next couple of years as well.
[00:35:22] Andrew Seski: Well, I just have one more question on this, because I interviewed the CFO of McLaren and formerly Aston Martin. And he had attracted, in a really unique way, some of these amazing engineers who could put together plans for engines that would be the fastest in the world, and they had budgetary constraints. They're public traded, there were all of these trade-offs constantly. So, do you have any advice for CFOs who are thinking about a playbook to try to communicate really effectively between a broad, diverse group of stakeholders, whether they're the engineers internally and you're trying to set a budget, their shareholders, investors, your C suite or board? Do you have any kind of overlapping advice on how to be transparent across the whole universe or how you could bring in some unique talent to help you speak the language of the engineers to maybe somebody who may not understand the intricacies of the work that you're doing?
[00:36:23] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, I think it's a really, really important part of the CFO role to be able to connect these dots and to be able to translate these stories. What's really important there is what I said earlier. And I think you're reiterating here. It's like: you've got to have the consistency and transparency in in all of those ‘stories’, and how you tell that narrative in different settings and in the context of an all-hands or a technician gathering versus a high fidelity rocket engineer team versus a finance group or an investor stakeholder or to a customer - you're going to tweak it, but the substance and the core of what you're saying should be the same. And this role, the finance role, this mindset of driving a company forward.
[00:37:14] Ultimately, the job is: what are we doing? Why are we doing it? How do we do more of the things that we're good at? Less of the things that we're not good at? And then being able to tell that narrative, hopefully with metrics and hopefully with substance and facts and reality over time. It's not just some fictional storytelling that you're doing constantly and that is like a real art and how to bring this job together. And it's not something that someone describes in a CFO job description, but I really found that finding a way to influence different stakeholders to drive the company forward is the job - and for everything else, you've got to hire amazing talent to can do much better than I would be able to in terms of running an audit or running a budget process or what have you.
[00:38:02] But my job is to - puppeteer sounds like a very negative connotation, but it's really just sort of push and pull the different pieces and different people and stakeholders in the mix to get everybody motivated to get to where we want to get to in the short, medium and long term as you had highlighted.
[00:38:24] Andrew Seski: My final question is sort of selfish. I just would love to know what it's like before either the night before or the day of a launch. What does it feel like? How are the employees reacting? Do you all get together? What does that actually look like just to bring some transparency into those hours and days leading into such a monumental event?
[00:38:47] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, I think it's nerve-wracking: everyone's sort of equally anxious, but equally excited. So much could go right and so much could go wrong. And you've got this mix of feelings between, well, even if we didn't hit the goal, we would have such massive forward progress. But yet, ultimately to the world, maybe and to certainly unsophisticated nonlaunch people, you look at it in a pretty binary way, which of course isn't true for any launch or any program.
[00:39:20] So, I think it's just a nerve-wracking thing and you're working constantly in the run-up to a launch and you're sort of digesting data for days and weeks and months after and analyzing. So the work never sort of stops at launch. And at the end of the day, you want to instill some calm and some confidence - and it's a very, very unique set up than anything else that that people are putting out, because there is sort of a ‘binary lens’ that people put on it. Did it work or did it not work? So, yeah, it's exciting. And then, in the case of our sort of Terran 1 launch folks were stoked and there were a lot of celebrations and my old age doesn't allow me to celebrate that way anymore, but I know folks had a ball celebrating and enjoying kind of years and years of work and hard work that they put into that program.
[00:40:13] Andrew Seski: It's incredible. I mean, there are only so many teams who get to celebrate that kind of achievement no matter which way it goes. So congrats to the Relativity team for all the progress you've made so far. Mo, is there any core defining characteristics that you're looking for? You've mentioned a lot of them that you embody. When you're looking to expand your team, I think this podcast gets a lot of finance folks who are looking to reach the CFO seat someday, current CFOs who are looking to borrow some of your unique playbooks in terms of communication. But for those who are just interested in the company and see the podcast because space is maybe our next frontier - and really pressing societal need. How can folks get in contact with either you or the company in terms of just thinking about next steps for their career?
[00:41:02] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, absolutely. As I said, talent is a real privilege here. And so happy to take the time and talk to folks that are interested in our company. We're hiring hundreds of people, jobs are on the website. There are ways to get into this industry with having zero background in space or certainly engineering like I do and squeeze my way through here. And so there's definitely tons of opportunities for people that have never worked in space and to do that.
[00:41:13] And I think there's a bunch of stuff on the website that folks can read around our values and things we care about, how we interview and the like. The thing that I personally spend a lot of time in with candidates on is just like making sure that they're fast learners. If you're curious in life, then you're likely curious not just about domains and industries, but you're curious about yourself and you're focused on your own improvement and growth and development.
[00:41:59] No one's going to be a perfect fit for any job. And if you are, then you're going to be bored quickly and want to move to the next thing. And so I'm just looking for fast learners that can adapt to a place that's actually not easy to work in - not because the culture isn't great, but because things shift so fast and you've got to stay nimble. And so, as long as you can pivot and be flexible, then this is a place to work. But it requires a stomach to work here, no matter what function you're in to be able to handle what we do. And at the pace at which we do it, the pace at which things change.
[00:42:34] Andrew Seski: Well, thank you so much. This has been one of my favorite episodes of the Modern CFO Podcast. I hope you'll join me again in several years when we've got the next update to share with the world. But for now, I want to thank you for just all of your time and preparation. So thank you again.
[00:42:50] Mo Shahzad: Yeah, thank you so much, Andrew. I really appreciate it. And thank you for everything that you are doing also for the community and bringing folks together to share and compare notes and learn from each other. So, much appreciated.
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