The Truth About the Space Industry with Max Haot CEO of Launcher
Max is the CEO of Launcher, a company that's developing the world’s most efficient rocket to deliver small satellites to orbit.
During our chat we discussed Max's background (which includes an important role in the development of live streaming), the cost of sending satellites into orbit, what it's like working with the State Department, his take as to why space exploration is important, and important entrepreneurial/startup advice.
How would you use a satellite to help you grow your business or create a new one?
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Transcript
Mark Peter Davis: Max, thanks for being on. Welcome.
Max Haot: Mark, thanks, for thanks for having me.
Mark Peter Davis: Alright, so let's get started. Would you mind giving us an overview of your entrepreneurial journey. Maybe start from the beginning, some context and who you are and what you've done.
Max Haot: Yeah. Great. So I'm originally from Belgium no now I'm a thankful naturalized citizen.
And, when I when I finished high school, I wanted to be a TV director. So I ended up doing an internship in London in '95 to [00:02:00] learn, to be a live TV director. And as I started that internship, I realized it was really, really tough to get a job in television. It was a TV company called IMG. But I realized that this thing called internet was kind of a starting and as a kid, I had done BBS and road mound and BBS and kind of, I've been into computers and kind of the online version pre-internet there.
And I realized that I should really focus on the internet. So I started my career building a website and content management system for a large sport federations like Wimbledon, Manchester United, the European Tour of Golf, the US Tennis Association. And within that company, we built live scoring website publishing system.
And by the time I was 20 at a hundred people working for me, building high scale websites. And then through that, as I started to specialize in videos, we were already doing [00:03:00] audio streaming at that time and then video streaming as bandwidth started to increase.
And I ended up building a lot of video product, which we sold to Verizon in 2004 or 20005.
Mark Peter Davis: You s the product or you, it sounds like you started this agency. Did you sell the whole agency or just a product?
Max Haot: I was part of a company called IMG. You can check them out, img.com. They do sport management and TV and so on and technology. But I created like a division and a product and they bought the asset, the product, which was a content management product. And with that came the opportunity to immigrate to the US. So I was already from Belgium ,10 years in England and then this opportunity was there, I was super excited about it, always dreamed to move to US or to the West coast or East coast, and got the chance. So 2005 here I come, arrive in New York, run sales for Verizon and do an earn out for two years. It's obviously as you'd [00:04:00] expect pretty corporate, but it's still pretty interesting. And then at the right time, I decided to leave and start my first real company, which was a Livestream. It actually started being called Mogulus.
Mark Peter Davis: I remember. I first met you when it was still Mogulus.
Max Haot: The vision, which is very relevant today, was a TV studio in the cloud, so that anyone could mix multiple camera and do graphics and live stream on the internet without knowing anything technical.
So, obviously today that's a very relevant proposition. as we evolve, we focused on rebranding. One of the best business decision, I guess, at the time, we bought livestream.com. Same product. We branded it at livestream, and then we focus on a SAS product to enable creators and organizations around the world from churches to schools, to businesses, newspapers, and so on that wanted to do live streaming, but knew [00:05:00] nothing about it to build a video player and buy $20,000 encoders and so on. So with livestream that could obviously easily start. And we had a very scalable, obviously video player and CDN, and very affordable. So the business became a SAS business for a white label streaming and we grew it to over 60 million in revenue. And in 2017 we sold it to ISE Vimeo. So that's at a time, you know you asked the adventure, at that time I'd already set my eyes, after between '95 to what is it, 2017, that's a pretty long time to do internet and video. And you start to think, I'm 43 what do you want to do for the second part of your career and where you want to go? And so for me, aerospace and, I have huge passion in hardware. Actually, the camera we a use now is a another business I [00:06:00] run called Mevo mevo.com. live streaming cameras that I got back from Vimeo a year and a half ago.
But my true passion and long-term adventure is to contribute to space exploration, right? In any way, obviously you have to have some commercial service. So the first service we building is delivering small satellites to orbit. And we can talk about how challenging and unique and hard it is. But while we talk about me personally, it's more about, okay, my next phase, I want to, , contribute to space exploration. I think that's the most important thing that we can be doing. In 10,000 years, if we are still around, we will be multiplanetary, I believe, and, and the moon landing, and probably Sputnik will be the most important event of at least this century in last century and beyond. Everything else is knows, at that point. So, but that's my passion and my interest and I started Launcher. So as soon as we sold to Vimeo, as part of the [00:07:00] deal, I started focus full-time on launcher. And, that's been since the end of 2017 and here we are. The Mevo side was an opportunity. Vimeo, wanted to kind of spin it out, divest it, it's an incredible team, incredible product. So I acquired it back, but the end goal is a funding for Launcher, even though obviously it's an incredible product that I love.
Mark Peter Davis: So you love film, tech and space. Let's unpack that a little bit. What was it about the film side that got you captured initially? Because you've moved away from that. What is that? And does that bleed into anything that's shaped your perspective and what you're doing now?
Max Haot: It's interesting. There's actually a movie that. Right. Computers, not film and rockets. Have you seen War Games?
Mark Peter Davis: Yeah sure. We're both old.
Max Haot: Sometimes I look back at the movie and I'm like, did that just define everything about my [00:08:00] life. That's kind of silly. It's obviously not serious, but for the video piece I remember I had the chance to be a friend of mine at High School his dad ran the only private TV station in Belgium or the only French speaking. You, we're only 10 million people there. And the French speaking is 5 million so there's not many TV stations for 5 million, but I had the chance to be in the newsroom. In Europe everybody's watching the news every day or at least did at the time.
And I was in the newsroom and seeing the live director that was calling the shots right. And cutting and doing the graphics and the live editing. And somehow I got locked on that, like, Oh, I want to do that. It's one of these things, right? So it wasn't from a film point of view, it was always from live. And I think it's so powerful, right? The idea that this person is deciding when millions of people are watching or however many [00:09:00] were watching. It's an interesting job, right. And it's high, skilled and it's tech. So that's how it started. So I ended up democratising that job right at the end, building video switchers and cameras and platform that allows anyone to do that.
But somehow in a round about way, I guess.
Mark Peter Davis: And how did you get into tech? Was that something through school or what gave you the technical chops to bridge.
Max Haot: That's the link back to War Games? I think I got a Commodore 64, or I know like at seven or something like that. And I wasn't interested in gaming so much. At the time I was doing basic programming and, like for example, replicating the cash register of the local store, like printing, choosing things in your shopping cart and so on.
So that's seven, eight year old, maybe eight. And then, I was lucky. Even at that time I saw the movie War Game and I'm like, I want a modem and I was in the computer store at that age and they had a 300 bits per second modem. And I got that and [00:10:00] that just started my interest already calling BBS and so on.
And then for one of my, like birthday or something like that, I got enough, presents for many people so I could buy my first computer, which was very expensive. It's probably, in that time's dollar, it was like 1,500 bucks to buy a computer. So for a nine, 10 year old I was very lucky my parents bought me a computer and I was a DOS PC XD computer. And then I started programming and doing different language. And then ultimately I built my own BBS software and ran it so people would call and exchange software and I would call the US to download like antivirus software to distribute them locally in Belgium.
And then my parents would get these crazy bills. It was kind of an interesting time.
Mark Peter Davis: So you were a child hacker?
Max Haot: Yeah. Well, not hacker. I might've tried to hack a few times, but I don't think it was a hacking prodigy, but, [00:11:00] yeah, I love computing, but actually at the time I fought, it was a bit, I don't know, like a bit too geeky for me or whatever.
Um, and, uh, , that was a different. So I wasn't kind of set on doing computer science and with hindsight I probably should have, no one really gave me that advice. So I was set on doing this video thing cause I thought it was really great and interesting. And then kind of the computer thing kind of got back very quickly, by the time I was 18, when I got my first, unpaid internship job that I ended up staying for 10 years at this place in London.
Mark Peter Davis: And that was IMG?
Max Haot: Yes.
Mark Peter Davis: Right. Okay. And so did you go to IMG after college?
Max Haot: No, no college, zero. So I went there, basically this friend that - and I really hope my kids go to college, I think it's pretty risky what I did but er g I did it - but this friend that had, his dad had a TV station, basically got me an internship at [00:12:00] IMG in London and it was supposed to be a one year internship as a favor. And then I was working in the library, putting video tapes in a warehouse at the time TV station relied a lot on beta video tapes to be organized and create content. So I was there, then quickly they realized that I had internet skills and computer skills. And then I basically the son of the founder, Todd McCormack, he was based in the US found me and then suddenly it's like, "Oh, okay, develop this website" and "Hey, why don't you hire two people?" And in like two years forward and we had a hundred engineers working for me and doing all of that stuff. So, it was just kind of organic. And so for two years, I think I was unpaid. and it was always like, I would call my dad and say, "okay, I'm going to go back to school." At that time I was thinking about film school. So that I'm glad I didn't do. But I was like "you sure, you want me to go back to Belgium. There's a real opportunity here. This thing, the [00:13:00] internet it's kind of might not be around. the opportunity might not be around if I go away for three years and come back."
And so I just kept going and I got a job and I got a salary and a bigger one and just yaer by year iterating.
Mark Peter Davis: It sounds like you seized the moment, scaling up to manage a hundred people is probably more useful than a college degree for most.
Max Haot: Yeah. I don't know how good I was at it. Maybe I should interview some people at the time that we did it and the products were good and the output was good. But yeah, that's an incredible, opportunity to learn and to create value. We were doing a lot of stuff. We had a lot of eyeballs at the time and it was pretty hard to scale. Right. We would do a Man United website or even Wimbledon, then we would do this JAVA app with real time scores. That was the first time. So you could go on wimbledon.com and see the scores. Even at the time the internet was obviously nowhere near as big, but [00:14:00] the technology also for servers was in the bandwidth was not there.
We would host in our office with like a 10 megabit slide. I mean it was just ridiculous. So scaling this stuff to, for this kind of world-class sport brand audienc was always learning with a fire hose. We were doing some interesting.
Mark Peter Davis: Now why did you want to come to the US? What was the, for a lot of the people who are going to hear this, I would assume they're going to be all over the world and they'll have different perspectives. Growing up in Belgium, what was the draw of the US at that point for you?
Max Haot: It's always been about work opportunity and entrepreneurship opportunities. So. England was, , I guess there were more importantly for me to do what I did in England than in Belgium. So that's, that's kind of how I ended up there and, and stay there.
And, and I love England and English people. but there was a certain, , if you look@whathappenedinthepre.com, boom, , for those of you. We're not around or whatever, like pre 2000 internet, boom. And [00:15:00] then, later, um, , there's clearly there was a lot of more things happening, even here in New York and on the West coast from, , if you look at it from, from the UK side.
so for me, it was very clear. My goal was always creating a company and getting investors. it, it just was really impossible in New York in, like I couldn't even see how I would get investors in, In London and , I'm talking about early two thousands, without, , uh, background and having proven that I can run a company myself.
And, um, , in New York, obviously there was a lot more, not more opportunities. And, I did start it with the cash proceeds that made from this transaction. So even though it was in, the AMG to veraison, even though it wasn't my own company, it was an exit and I had, uh, , shadow equity.
so it, it did allow me, , enough capital to, to start, , on my own, without any seed funding modulates. And then we kind of [00:16:00] started from there. So, yeah, opportunity. entrepreneurship coordinated it's it's clear. And, , um, , and by the way, what was interesting is I had a lot of Belgian investor and I still do, and a lot of European investors in, in my New York based, ventures.
Um, and , so there are a lot of relationships and capital you can leverage for entrepreneurship, but actually don't believe they would have invested if I was in Belgium. So
that's fascinating. And it feels, I feel like it's changed a lot. London, Paris, Berlin. Are all increasingly startup hubs. Have you had any draw inclination or desire to relocate back
at this point?
I mean, many of my friends throughout the year in New York where, , temporary expat, I've always been an immigrant. , even when I was in London. , I wanted to stay there and be there, from day one. And I just moved to the U S um, , as a, as a later decision and in the U S as I've always been like, Hey, I'm, I'm an [00:17:00] immigrant.
So, , my wife, Rachel is a, is American. My kids are American. Um, , I made move around when they around the U S or, but yeah, I'm a really proud naturalize, , American passport holder. and it turns out that it's also very important for what I'm doing now with, defense and aerospace. but it's, it's in my heart. What I want to do. Um, ,
and you mentioned your wife, Rachel. I, if I'm correct, you're half of a power, couple. You want to give me a, you mind just give everyone a little overview of what your wife does.
Yeah. Yeah. Rachel, so we've been married since, 2012. Um, and then at the time she was a chief digital officer under Mike Bloomberg, and then she, for, for New York city then, for New York state, And the governor Kumo for a few years, did an incubator and now she runs, she runs a.
An incubator in a kind of, um, [00:18:00] accelerator, for technology within the MTA as part of the partnership for New York. So she, , we both work. She's definitely, yeah, very accomplished in it's. It's amazing to, to have a partner, to not only build a family, but also, , understand, what, uh, technology is and is innovative, innovating, and, and, uh, , fully engaged in the community.
And at this point, you both interface with the government at some level, too, which is. Interesting parallel.
Yep.
Mark Peter Davis: So, okay. So you came out of the Verizon role, you had made some money. How did that inform, enable you to think about your next move when you went to do McGillis livestream?
Max Haot: So it was a very simple process.
It's um, it was, okay, so. I need to start a startup, and, uh, I kind of brainstormed a few ideas. they were all centered around video. , one was a service to help video podcasts, create [00:19:00] graphics on top of the, , on top of, , easily add value and graphics and treatment. on not recorded video, right. on, on recorded video, and YouTube already was, , I'd been bought by Google and all of this was already going on right in 2007, 2008, when, when I started live stream or marvelous. and then, , another one was democratizing life. I had done a lot of live video at the time. If you wanted to do any live video, you had to, um, , buying an encoder five, $10,000, you had to go to a content distribution network companies , , no one had heard of other than, technology people.
You had to go to a sales person and negotiate, um, , a deal for maybe 50 grand a year and more and more. And then you had to build a video player, which when we started was flash, but then when the iPhone came out, you had to, , build something else and. And you have to build an entire platform and that's how, , newspapers and media companies and everybody would do live.
And [00:20:00] if you wanted to do live as a turnkey service, as we know on live stream YouTube, , Twitch, wherever that was not available. And so it's pretty good idea that once you do that red plug a camera and a computer press the go live button and ever player that can have, , one, one person to a,w, a million person watching.
and what was interesting, you can clearly tell it was in the air that the week or the month we launched at the time, our competitor, Justin TV, and Ustream that we were kind of the three, all came out the same week a month. And so you can clearly tell that. , we didn't really, we didn't really create these like somehow the stack of things that they do.
Yeah.
Mark Peter Davis: As the VC hat on, whenever you're seeing a deal, , there's two more out there. You just haven't seen him. So you have to be aware.
Max Haot: That's interesting. But, yeah, it was, we were pretty bummed. We're like, ah, but it's like, it's validation, , just in TV. It wasn't so successful in terms of the [00:21:00] SAS and the growth, but.
became Twitch, became, uh, the, the big winner that, , that was sold to Amazon. Um, Ustream sold to IBM and then we sort of later to, to Vimeo, but it was a, it was a, , an amazing time of the early days of what now everybody takes for granted, but it was fascinating, , we would go, , obviously trying to raise capital from strategic OVC and.
The question would get all the time. It's like, , now with video on demand on YouTube and on Netflix and what it was no Netflix, but whatever the equivalent people would be like, who needs live, like if you can. And it was like a real struggle to explain that there was a lot of value in live for the reasons we know now it's not the same thing as recorded content.
Just another category. Um, and, but now obviously it's, , I don't think we'll have, if I was starting a live video company, we would be having this discussion. So, it's really great to see how normal it is now. And, uh, , how [00:22:00] part of the world it is the expectation that anyone can learn.
Mark Peter Davis: What was the turning point when you knew it was going to work?
Max Haot: I think the, , the, the, the investor journey, the, , the capital kind of P and L journey was, , I put a few hundred thousand dollars and we got a few private investors. Some from Europe, , kind of got another 2 million in.
and, uh, , we, I was not even good traction with, uh, , your standard VCs at the time. Um, and, we did a deal with Gannon actually to a newspaper company, which invested 10 million. so that was a good day right. To, to scale. but with that, the service was getting more and more popular.
We actually were not using city and we were one of the first customer on Amazon web services. but the bill became about $500,000 a month. Wow. so 10 million is not much. and so we were, we work out of, , depleting cash. We didn't have any monetization, we couldn't raise any more money. and [00:23:00] that really wasn't looking good.
And then we started the premium SAS service. Right. So if you want it to remove ads and you want it more storage, more. Video quality. we started live stream pro or premium, three 99 a month, something like that. And just as soon as we launched it, , revenue came in and then we quickly got to a breakeven point, um, , within a year.
so that, that was the point, , enabling the SAS service. And realizing that, that, uh, , we could get to a point where we not, we not dependent on the next funding, we will have options for, for the future.
Mark Peter Davis: Do you think you could have launched with a SAS service versus waiting?
Max Haot: Yeah, absolutely.
I think, um, I think we, , the, , I think you have to go all in one way of trying to create, , a Twitch or a competitor to YouTube live. Or you obviously you should just go premium, right out of the gate. I think as , the expectation to pay [00:24:00] for services is increasing all the time.
And personally, I prefer to just pay directly and kick the tires with a trail. know when I'm purchasing services. And rather than kind of services that are mixed premium and free. And, , it's like, it's like, you're not clear where you are. So I think that that user or customer behavior is, is ever increasing now.
so yeah, it should have probably been, a premium white label, player, uh, focus on, on quality and ease of use and so on. maybe a bit more affordable, , you can see now we know, obviously Vimeo very well has built a very big, there's public information about the revenue, but a very big SAS video business with, uh, um, , $7 a month for, , $50 a month or something like that.
So, so maybe lower price and directly premium, I think. So
Mark Peter Davis: kind of an interesting narrative that you, Justin TV launched. Had interesting [00:25:00] technology, maybe didn't have product market fit and both found different market segments
Max Haot: where it clicked. Oh, it was really interesting. And that was a debate, , the gaming so that their history was, So firstly, as we, as we've done live streaming, I mean, there are billion dollar subsets of ideas in live streaming everywhere, and there's still many that are not known a billion dollar valuation, whatever you want to call it.
Right. And, there's so many, right. And it was always clear. So like, I probably think you could do, uh, , uh, , house of worship related, so, and get to it unicorn. That was kind of very big category. and, uh, gamers, , we had more GenX streaming. We were actually, there was no Twitch, there was no gaming service.
And, we accurate build, an encoder called broadcaster for gamers. And we were by far between Justin TV Ustream and us, we were the Mo the most popular, gaming category service in the early days. Right. Right. and, and it [00:26:00] was wow. Suddenly, , more Jen comes and plays Minecraft, and we have, , a hundred thousand people on the network.
and we had many time to debate, , should we focus on, on a vertical and should we focus on gaming? and you got to, , give it to the Justin TV, uh, people, , the team, they saw it, they saw what we saw. We all had the opportunity. they seized it. they give up everything else. Now they didn't have to give up anything.
We had $30 million, a year of revenue to give up, to, to basically pivot into, into, um, into gaming. So it would've been a much harder decision for us and, , by the way, we might not have executed as well as they did, , they, they really provided a great experience, and, and captured the community and added business models on it.
But yeah, the, it could have been us, but so. So are the other $500 billion idea related to livestream that some we know now and some we don't. Yeah. And an
Mark Peter Davis: interesting narrative in there that success can be a liability or a blocker.
[00:27:00] Max Haot: Yeah. The, the, the, , success and survival, , we had other revenue stream as well.
We had a production business. We had, we had an advertising business with new station. So, , on one hand we were not the classic, , here's 50 million from a hundred from a. And a name brand VC behind us. And don't worry about, , monetization let's focus later, so we didn't have that.
And so a lot of it was. Surviving, right. Like creating, proving the business and, yeah, it can be, it can be limiting if you don't get the big one. Um, but , it's entrepreneurship, , the, the most important is to keep going and create value. So, that's what we did.
Mark Peter Davis: So can you give us an overview of launcher?
I think to an outsider, they're going to look at it and think it's kind of like a space X. Right, but that's, that's a pretty layman's view of, of what you're doing. Will you kind of fill in the blanks, give us a little color around where you sit in the market and what [00:28:00] the firm's doing.
Max Haot: But actually the, the parallel for me to what's happening in aerospace or in launch in satellite is, uh, , back to 95, the early days of the internet.
So, or even the early days of computers, which I was in there, but it's, it's like, , Know, if you had started a computer company, probably at the time, there was only Microsoft and Apple or IBM people would have said, , You're you're just trying to be another Microsoft and you look at to the head and that that's just a ridiculous analogy.
There's such a big ecosystem and a need for many entrepreneurs to do many things. so that my view is that we are right at the beginning of what we can do in space exploration and law of orbit services. It's just the beginning. It's been stagnant since the first satellite, which was Sputnik in 1957.
and I want to be part of it. Obviously the most successful, the biggest, and that will remain. And that, that really opened, made it even possible to create a startup like launcher, without a few hundred [00:29:00] million to get going is, is obviously space X and Elon Musk. but that's the macro view.
So if you look at what we're doing, we building a small rocket to deliver small satellite to orbit. So, yeah, it's a rocket space. X is delivering satellite to orbit. Now they're doing Starling and we are it's smaller. Why is it smaller? Why? Because it's useful now before, if you had a small rocket, there was no small satellite, so it wasn't useful.
And now it is, so the barrier of entry is lowered to be honest everyone that's trying to build a small rocket is really trying to build the biggest rocket they could build and the the bigger is to some extent more useful but you have to be able to start somewhere. And so for the, for the context, , there's many, , some people that might watch the, there are many, , startup like launcher trying to build rocket to go to orbit, but you have to remove the whole noise from the market.
So. Out of the 200 countries around the world, only 11 have reached orbit. Only 11 have delivered something with their own rocket, their own technology to orbit. I can tell you that [00:30:00] every single one of them want to have these capabilities so that they could put defense satellite, Earth observation, and communication satellite and so on without having to do international deals with allies that have that technology. so that's the first, , if you think about that, wow, that's a lot of demand for this technology. These are all these other country, obviously. we only want to work with the ones that are allies and, and of the government with government permission, because this is restricted.
and then if you look at the number of satellites, so between 1957 to, to today, there's only been 5,000 satellites ever sent to orbit. And, out of these only maybe one to 2000 operational. Right now between entrepreneurs getting involved in, in, in satellite launch and we'll explain why that's not possible and the government and, the internet constellation such as styling is not possible to, to build a high-speed [00:31:00] low-latency internet. from lower forbit there, our proposal to send more than 30,000 satellite in the next five years. So,
Mark Peter Davis: and these are mainly telecommunication technologies or
Max Haot: they, everything there. So firstly, you have a first, I mean, even if the viewers don't know why do we even need satellites? Right. And so people don't realize somebody a thing everyday has to know it is a great creator for space should check him out.
Come on, come up with this idea of echo, decided that we should have a satellite awareness day and stop all the satellite service for a day. So everybody kind of gets an ID, but, um, , the, the one that every most people know, but the air force created GPS and we use GPS, , everywhere, Uber, Google maps, ways, whatever.
Um, , there's, observation, , we gather a lot of data, um, , from observing the, uh, for economic needs and, and trading and so on. Does all the weather, , how do we know what the weather is like in the ocean? And how do we have ships coming from China safely to California to deliver goods [00:32:00] from Amazon?
all of that is because of satellites. we have safety and, and, , in hurricanes and so on from satellite, we have, um, , high-end communication from the sea that relies on satellite. We have earth observation. How do we know that? , we have problems with, uh, with the atmosphere and we've, we've um, and we've, auctions raising and so on.
We use satellite technology. So there's, an incredible amount of value there in the traditional way. You would. Build and launch a satellite service, before let's say five years ago, the equation was usually about a hundred million to a billion dollars to design and build a satellite single one, and then about a hundred million dollars to launch it.
So you're not sending one satellite. If you can't find at least let's say $300 million before. And , if you really want to build a real service with three or four satellites, you need cashflow for your operation and marketing, whatever you