So, back in June, Orbital Arc wrapped up our time at the Techstars Industries of the Future Accelerator in Tennessee with a big demo day, and eager plans to fundraise about a $500k pre-seed round to hire our first three people, and finish up our first prototype.
And then, I basically vanished for 5 months.
While the work has not stopped, a few things did happen that changed our approach a bit.
Firstly, as we pursued venture capital fundraising, we found that every conversation seemed to end the same way: “This looks really interesting! Seems like cool technology. Call us back when you have a working prototype.” Since building the working prototype was actually why we were looking for funding, that presented us with a chicken-and-egg problem. So, after a few dozen conversations that ended this way, I took another look at the finances. It turns out that most of the budget was to pay the first few team members. If the labor were free, developing stuff wouldn’t cost nearly as much. I did the math, and realized that if I didn’t have to pay a team, I *might* have enough capital to finish the prototype without any further fundraising.
Of course that presented a problem. I, personally, am fortunate enough to be able to forego a salary for a while longer yet, but none of the other people we were aching to hire were in that position. That meant that they would all take full time jobs at other companies, and I would need to do all the lab work myself. This was a blow, both because the people we had found were excellent, and also because it meant I would need to become a nanomaterials scientist in addition to all the other disciplines I’ve been teaching myself to put this design together; this was something I was trying very hard to avoid. Mostly, though, it was the people cost that stung; for some, they are still interested in joining us when the funds are available to pay them, but for others it was a missed window of opportunity; they’ve moved on (as any ambitious person would), and we will probably not get them back.
Facing that prospect was hard. But, since the alternative was to continue wasting time and money chasing venture capital, and since the team was going to need to move on anyway if the funds didn’t arrive quickly, I made the call to attempt the prototype on funds already in hand. With a completed prototype at TRL 4, we will have derisked the technology almost completely, and we will be a much more investable company, and also command a much higher valuation when we do raise. We can raise $5-10M instead of $500k, and take the tech to space on those funds, likely without needing to raise again before achieving profitability.
Second big change: my home life shifted very significantly; my daughter was born during Techstars, and when I got home I stepped into daddy duty. My wife has been on maternity leave since the birth, which is the only reason I have been able to make any progress at all with a newborn in the house all day, but for those who have never been parents, kids are time consuming, and it is time you WANT to spend. My wife needed breaks from childcare for her own sanity, so I took breaks from work to go do childcare. And, I loved it, and frankly I wanted to do a lot of childcare. My daughter is super cute, and she giggles now, and I got a video of her figuring out that she could bite her toes, and…. You get the idea. Best distraction ever, but still a distraction.
My wife starts back at work next week, and my daughter has been easing her way into daycare for the last week, so my workdays are already becoming much less distracting and much more productive again. I’ll miss taking baby breaks to have her nap on my chest, and I’m glad I took some time to enjoy her first few months. As company policy henceforth everyone gets at least 6 months of maternity and/or paternity leave; our work is important, but if anything is more important, it is our families.
And thirdly, a non-change: We did make progress, just quietly. After shifting gears away from VC, I continued taking shots at funding via grants and federal or state programs, with three more grant applications submitted and currently pending. I built out the corporate information security program enough to get us approved to pursue DoD contracts. I spent a week at Oak Ridge National Lab working on a TRL 3 prototype in-person with the imminent Dr. Nick Lavrik, and built up some degree of comfort with lab tools; that effort is still making good progress, with a scholarly publication in the works about what we are building there. I tightened up our analytical model for the device, and continued researching prior implementations of field effect ionization in ion microscopy, mass spectrometry, and lab applications, so that I am more confident than ever that we are building the right thing, and it will work.
And, it took three months, but I’m now trained on nearly all of the lab equipment I need at the Nanofab Cleanroom at Rice University, and can work independently there. While my skills as a nanomaterials scientist are still in their infancy, I started fabrication of the ionizers for TRL 4 four weeks ago, and am already working out kinks in various steps in the process, and learning the subtle art of e-beam evaporation of molybdenum (more on that next week). It is slow, much slower than I want, but we are finally, finally actually building the ionizers, and I am super excited to be getting this done.
While I am building the prototype, the next challenge is how to test it? This requires a vacuum chamber with high pumping capacity, a thrust test stand calibrated for millinewton sensitivity, the proper gas feed throughs and power connections to run the device in the chamber, and a way to collect electrical, thermal, and force-loading data. All of this is proceeding in parallel, and will actually be complete before the prototype given the rate of progress we are seeing. Our company advisor, Mike Patterson, runs a consultancy that specializes in designing and building ion engines. He and the members of his team were responsible for two of NASA’s best ion engine designs ever, flown on the Dawn and DART missions, among others. When I described what we needed, he told me they could build it. Not only that, but the guy he had in mind for the job is the guy that built all the ion engine thrust test stands for NASA Glenn Research Center for like 20 years. So, the testbed is in progress now, will be finished before the prototype, and will be much higher grade than anything we could possibly have built ourselves, or even rented.
So, to put it all together, the startup journey is full of ups and downs, and we’ve had both the last few months. But, on the whole, things are good. I took some time for me, but we still continued making progress, the path forward is clear, and our destiny is in our own hands.
Time to go get it.