The Spacecraft Factory, with Ian Cinnamon (CEO of Apex)

**Ian Cinnamon** (0:00)
Chatting with the end users and end customers who are consuming this data, they would say, all I wish is I could get higher revisits, better data, more data, get new sensors on orbit. The question then would come, why is it hard to launch satellites more quickly? Well, it turns out it's really hard to build the damn satellite. If you wanna go get a satellite bus, and you want it quickly, I could literally have you, before you leave LA, you could be going back to New York or Austin with a satellite bus. What I can say is, every single major defense crime except one, is a customer of Apex, which we're very, very proud of. And that one who's not, I think soon will be, so just give it time. We actually make real money on everything we sell. So if you look at our gross margins, we're a lot closer to a software company than we are a traditional product.

**Mo Islam** (0:43)
What is the mission that Apex will enable or could enable in the future that you're most excited about?
Ares, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you. How does it feel to be the new CEO of Apex? No? You look pretty excited.

**Ian Cinnamon** (1:14)
All right, we tried. We got a little bit, we got a moment.

**Mo Islam** (1:16)
Yeah. Ian, welcome to the show.

**Ian Cinnamon** (1:19)
Mo, welcome to Apex.

**Mo Islam** (1:20)
Thanks for having me.

**Ian Cinnamon** (1:21)
Great to be sitting here in Factory One.

**Mo Islam** (1:23)
Thanks for having me. And you brought a guest.

**Ian Cinnamon** (1:24)
I mean, not the guest. I mean, this is the, Aries Innova are the namesakes that created Apex.

**Mo Islam** (1:30)
Well, he was a little nervous earlier, as we tried to get- He was. I was really hoping I could get some words from him.

**Ian Cinnamon** (1:36)
I do think he was trying to take over this whole time as CEO, and when you confront him and said, how does it feel? He didn't know how to react.

**Mo Islam** (1:42)
Well, he has his name in very large letters. What is that, by the way, behind you?

**Ian Cinnamon** (1:46)
That is one of our shipping containers for Aries. We have a bunch of Aries that we've- I mean, you see them all in the clean room behind you. Hopefully, you'll go in after and I'll build some, get our cost down, free labor.

**Mo Islam** (1:56)
Sure.

**Ian Cinnamon** (1:56)
But we have a bunch going off to customers and it's been fantastic, and this is one of the shipping containers. If you buy an Aries, you get it delivered in this.
You want to know my real dream though for when a customer gets the delivery of a satellite, is if you get a really fancy bottle of tequila or alcohol, you open it up, the lights go on, music plays. I want the unboxing experience for satellites.

**Mo Islam** (2:17)
Okay. Amazing.

**Ian Cinnamon** (2:18)
We got to up-level this industry.

**Mo Islam** (2:20)
Why not start now?

**Ian Cinnamon** (2:21)
Honestly, it's been a little bit of a, we have a lot going on. We have a lot of customers and we haven't had the time to do it, but it's like a great hackathon project.

**Mo Islam** (2:29)
Yes. Okay. You've raised worth of 700 million.

**Ian Cinnamon** (2:32)
We have raised, yes.

**Mo Islam** (2:34)
Yeah.

**Ian Cinnamon** (2:35)
A lot of responsibility on our shoulders.

**Mo Islam** (2:36)
A lot of responsibility on our shoulders.

**Ian Cinnamon** (2:37)
The good news is we're going to return that to investors like 100X.

**Mo Islam** (2:40)
Yes.

**Ian Cinnamon** (2:40)
A thousand X, so we're good.

**Mo Islam** (2:42)
We'll get into all that. But I do want to know, let's just start from the very beginning, especially for those who maybe haven't heard the Apex story from the very beginning.
When did you feel that the satellite bus market was broken? Because you don't have a traditional space background.

**Ian Cinnamon** (2:58)
I don't. I'm the least smart guy here. I come from a software background.
That's why we get along so well, it's a software background. I actually had sold my last company that I had started to Palantir. We were doing AI and computer vision. We were building models for different national security applications. At the time, Palantir was starting to get involved with Project Maven, and they bought us. We were getting involved with that, and specifically, my team and my program was asked to get involved with the satellite work that Project Maven was doing.