Lance Glinn:

Welcome into another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Today's guest is Ian Cinnamon. He is the co-founder and CEO of Apex. Ian, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House. Happy to have you here.

Ian Cinnamon:

Thank you. It's actually my first time at the Stock Exchange.

Lance Glinn:

Well, welcome and we're so glad to obviously have you here at our annual Space Summit. So I want to start, Ian, at the beginning and it was the problem of how satellite companies struggled, not with payloads, but with the satellite buses that ultimately make those payloads function in orbit, those satellite buses. So take us into the room. I'm assuming it's a room. Take us where you and your co-founder realized this challenge was really worth building a company around. When did it click for you that Apex could solve these gaps in the marketplace?

Ian Cinnamon:

So I sold my last company, which was a software AI company, to Palantir. And when I was at Palantir, I had the opportunity to work with a lot of data that was coming off of satellites. And I saw firsthand that demand for the data was going up and up. People wanted more. There was this inflection moment where suddenly getting access to putting things into space got a lot easier. That was when Falcon 9 started reusing the rockets. Rocket Lab started flying regularly. The space industry was going through a big shift. And this is around when COVID hit, so 2020, 2021. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, people want more data. We can get more access to space. The space industry has fundamentally changed. And my first instinct was not, oh my God, let me go start a space company. My first instinct was, this is so cool.

My inner geek, the kid who grew up starting his rocketry club in middle school and high school is alive to see the space industry becoming something that's not just these big legacy players and traditional players, but it's agile, it's fast, it feels like software. So I was all excited and I started digging in more. And what I realized was despite the demand for more data coming off satellites, meaning more satellites in orbit, there seemed to be just like a blocker. People were not able to get more satellites up faster. So I started talking to everybody and I started asking questions and I said, "Why can't you launch satellites faster? What's the cause of the delay? What's going on here?" And when you talk to one person and they tell you a problem, you're like, "Oh, that's interesting." When you talk to five people and they all point at the same problem, you're like, "That's really interesting." And this kept on going where it was dozens and dozens of people.

I think before Max and I started Apex, we spoke to over a hundred different customers all complaining about the same thing. And the thing that was a problem was when you want to put a satellite into space, you need the rocket to launch it. That was pretty solved thanks to Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab and others. You need to build the actual satellite. The satellite is comprised of two major pieces. One is the payload. Think of that as the camera, the sensor, the communications dish. And then the second piece of the satellite is what we call the satellite bus or in the rest of the world, we call it the satellite platform. And think of it truly as a platform. It's almost like the chassis of a car. You bolt the payload on top. But the platform of the bus gives you everything you need to talk to the satellite, to communicate with it, to power the payload to be able to thermally basically dissipate heat, everything to move around, everything you need to fly this payload in space. So I saw people could make the payloads, but these platforms were just such a pain for everybody in the industry. I was like, "Let's go solve that."

Lance Glinn:

So you say to yourself, "Let's go solve this bus problem," we'll call it, of this slow, expensive, this highly bespoke nature of satellite bus production. That was a problem that you wanted to solve. So you and Max are sitting in a room and you're like, "This is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to move forward." Might've not been a room, might've been wherever, but you're sitting and this is how you want to move forward. Then what are the first steps that you take to then go and do that? Because it's one thing to find the problem, you found the problem, but then you actually got to turn those words or let's say a plan that you may have put on paper, on a computer into action. What's the first action step?

Ian Cinnamon:

So Max and I were actually, we were sitting together in a room. It was actually a WeWork office space in Santa Monica. We actually brought both our dogs, Aries and Nova, which is how in that moment we decided to name our satellites after the dogs. But we started whiteboarding out and we said, "Okay, if this is the problem, which is the satellite bus side, why is it a problem?" And it's a problem for exactly the reason that you said, which is it's all custom-made, handmade. You got to treat it like a product where you design it once and you make the same thing over and over again. So we kind of had that insight of we got to productize the idea of a satellite bus, treat it more like a chunk of software, you write it once and a bunch of people use it. Same kind of idea.

But from that day that we were whiteboarding it out to starting the company, it was about 18 months, and we spent about a year and a half chatting with customers, really understanding the landscape. One of the things that I'm very cognizant of is finding product market fit is like the holy grail for any company, and spending the time to really analyze the market and aligning the product to that market is so key. So Max and I really spent about a year and a half ideating on this before we said, "Let's go start it." So we started the company in September of '22, but we really started working on this in 2021. So it was really an amazing-

Lance Glinn:

In early 2021.

Ian Cinnamon:

Yeah. It's an amazing journey.

Lance Glinn:

And you mentioned earlier that you're the guy who in middle school starts his rocketry club. So you always had an eye or a dream or an image in your mind of venturing into space, whether that be yourself going up in a rocket, I'm sure, or working in the space industry. Did you always foresee though, especially when we're talking about middle school Ian, that that was possible? Did you forever think that that was your ultimate mission or did you say space is great, but I'm ultimately eventually going to have to go elsewhere with my career?

Ian Cinnamon:

I had a few different hobbies in middle school and high school. So I liked the rocket stuff, space, really, really cool. I also taught myself how to program. I was doing the robotics club. But science and engineering, that was the key. I will say it's a great question though, because when I got to MIT for undergrad, one of my first instincts was I should go study AeroAstro. At MIT, it's called Course 16. And I remember taking an intro class in it and one of my biggest takeaways, keep in mind, this is like 2009, 2010, was everyone who was graduating was going and working for a big traditional company or the government. And there's nothing wrong with that. Those are amazing career paths. But with my personality, I'd get fired in the first hour. I don't know how that's going to work.

Lance Glinn:

You wanted to be your own boss.

Ian Cinnamon:

Right. A lot of that inspiration actually comes from my parents. They're writers and they work together and they're comedy writers, which is where I get my great sense of humor apparently, maybe. And seeing them being able to kind of work on what they wanted to and be able to direct their career like that was something very inspiring. And for me, I clearly don't have the comedic sense that they do, but I was like, "All right, how can I apply this to science and engineering?" And it was more of a source of-

Lance Glinn:

Did we almost getting Ian Cinnamon, the comedy writer?

Ian Cinnamon:

I'll admit that was never in the cards. So that one is a far shoot away.

Lance Glinn:

Got it, got it, got it. And every great company I think usually emerges at a moment when the world tilts just enough for a new approach to make sense. And you mentioned before that there was, or there were a lot of legacy companies that weren't necessarily causing the problem but weren't doing anything to address the problem that you and Max were trying to solve with Apex. How did you think about when you were first starting the company, not just in 2022, but in March of 2021 or early 2021, 18 months spent whiteboarding it, how did you think about competing or going against those legacy companies that have built a reputation, a longstanding one, that have that legacy and that history behind them?

Ian Cinnamon:

So we never actually thought about competing with them. The strategy for Apex is we want to enable them. So what we realized was there was a huge change in the industry and if you rewind to right before that change happened, which was reusing rockets and more access to space, if you rewind before that happened, the traditional players, all your big defense companies, the way they were doing things was the right approach. What happened was the market fundamentally shifted so they needed to take on a different approach. Structurally, they're not set up to take that different approach. It's like completely different culture, a different way of accounting. Truly every level of those companies is not set up for this. What it is set up for is partnering with a tier one supplier. So our strategy from the beginning was we're not going to go compete against all these... And they're great companies. You have the legacy call it traditionals, whether it be the Northrops, the L3s, the Raytheons, the Boeings, the Lockheeds.

Lance Glinn:

A lot of them listed here on the NYSE.

Ian Cinnamon:

Exactly. Or the newer ones like Anduril. They're all kind of in that same defense prime bucket. You have the Neoprimes, the traditional ones, but we said, "We're not going to go compete with them. We want to be the merchant supplier that enables them." What they bring to the table, the amazing mission analysis, the mission depth, the security posture, all of that, if we just allow them to have a platform they could put all of that on, they could now supercharge what they're doing and we could help them win.

Lance Glinn:

And so if we zoom out, the space industry is becoming much more mission-critical for communications, climate, national security, defense, logistics, so on and so forth, a ton of different industries the space industry impacts and will impact moving forward. Where does Apex fit into that larger story right now?

Ian Cinnamon:

So we see ourselves as the platform provider. Our mission at Apex, and if I fast-forward 20 years, I want to make it as easy to get a satellite into space as it is going to the car dealership to get a car and driving somewhere. It should be that simple. Oh, here's the model I need. Oh, I could get it delivered in a week. Oh, it'll launch a month later. Done. It shouldn't be this multi-year unrest.

Lance Glinn:

Let me stop you right there. So if you go to someone or if you went to someone earlier in Apex's journey and said that to them, how would they have reacted?

Ian Cinnamon:

That's impossible. I'll give you an example. So pre-Apex, if somebody wanted to go launch a satellite and you said to that person, "Can you launch it within 36 months," they'd look at you like you were high. They'd be like, "36 months? No. Five years maybe." Time horizons, I want to shrink that years to months and eventually months to weeks and weeks to days. I think we can do that. And that's what we're trying to accomplish here.

Lance Glinn:

And what role to, again, where the company plays, what role do you want the company to play as the number of satellites in orbit is expected to multiply? Because you said it before, there's this space has now been opened up to so many more opportunities, so many more possibilities. Satellites a lot more are going to be launched into space than the number that we currently have today. How is Apex going to help in that process?

Ian Cinnamon:

We will be the platform provider that powers most of it. So look, if you have a fully vertically integrated solution, a Starlink, Amazon Leo, which used to be called Kuiper, those should be, those are in the quantities of tens of thousands. We're not going to go play in that. But for everything else where you're talking quantities tens, hundreds, thousands, that is the ideal fit for what we do. So think of it this way. In the same way that Ford builds vehicles that operate everything from delivery trucks to a car that you or I might have to even truck beds for the military, we want to be that same platform provider. Now there's going to be super specialized things, using my car analogy one step further, where for example, USPS, United States Postal Service needs so many highly specialized vehicles, they're going to go design something custom. That's fine. So that's the Starlink and the Amazon Leo/Kuiper. Everything else we see is a great fit for us.

Lance Glinn:

And so then how do you prepare, if we are about to see this influx of satellites going into space and you want to be the platform for those satellites, how do you then start the preparation to make sure that when that boom really happens, Apex is ready?

Ian Cinnamon:

It really comes down to production. So everybody talks about I can go make a satellite. And sometimes people say, "Oh, there's a lot of satellite platform bus manufacturers out there." And it's true. If you want one or two satellites, there's probably a list of a dozen, if not more, companies you could go to. You could go to anybody from a EnduroSat, a K2, an Impulse, even the traditionals, a BAE, Ball Aerospace, et cetera, they'll make you one or two. But if you need a proliferated constellation of satellites, you need 10, 100, 50, a thousand satellites, not launched over a decade, but launched in the next 12, 18, 24 months, we are the best bet and frankly the only bet you can make, but it's going to be a pretty damn good bet.

Lance Glinn:

And so obviously the space industry is picking up so much noise, right? To those who may not-

Ian Cinnamon:

Too much noise.

Lance Glinn:

Well, it's too much noise. I mean, I feel like we can't go a day now without hearing about something in the space industry and it's become so much more mainstream than maybe it ever has been before. That's just noise though, right? As someone who is in the space industry working on it, working on these buses, these platforms, what convinces you that we're really standing at the edge of this massive expansion in the space economy?

Ian Cinnamon:

So I think it's two things is how I phrase it. So one of them is, yes, there's a lot of noise. My hope with that noise is it actually unites the world and humankind together. We're in a very divided world and I wish we were not, but we are unfortunately. There's a brief moment with Artemis II where I received text messages and emails and calls from folks I hadn't talked to in years who I didn't think they even knew what the space industry was being like, "Did you watch the launch?" And bring the whole-

Lance Glinn:

And did you watch the launch?

Ian Cinnamon:

We had it streaming on every TV in the office. It was everywhere.

Lance Glinn:

Same at the NYSE.

Ian Cinnamon:

But how amazing is that to unite the world?

Lance Glinn:

Unbelievable.

Ian Cinnamon:

So I do hope that that actually does deliver. So that noise I think is actually really important, right? That's signal, not noise. On the other hand, what gives me the conviction we're doing the right thing is I actually don't look at it as we're enabling the space industry. I don't see it that way. What I see it as is we are enabling defense. We're helping out significantly there. We're enabling certain types of communications. We're enabling sustainability and understanding Earth. We're enabling exploring the cosmos. Those are not necessarily, I wouldn't even call those space industries. Those are telecom, military industrial complex, things like that. We're building up the defense industrial base, not just for space, but in general. And I think that, when I see the applications that we're able to have, the impact that we have on everyday people, whether they realize it or not, that inspires me and gets me and I think our whole team excited every day.

Lance Glinn:

And you bring up a good point because I think that also brings up the need for education so to speak, right? Because you said you don't think about it as the space industry, you think about it as enabling telecommunications, enabling defense, enabling sustainability. So it's these things that impact people on an everyday basis. How important is it to educate the common audience that might not be so intertwined with the space industry as to all these great things that a company like Apex and other companies are doing to help them on an everyday basis? Because a platform or a bus could be helping them with something that they do on an everyday basis that they don't even know that bus is helping them for.

Ian Cinnamon:

And part of what makes it hard is space is less accessible. So if you develop a radar station on Earth, you could walk over and give a tour and go see it. With the satellite, all you really see is the rocket taking off and that looks really cool. The Artemis launch, we all streamed the launch live. Were you streaming the footage coming down every day? Yeah, maybe you check in once on Twitter.

Lance Glinn:

Every once in a while to see what's going on. Yeah.

Ian Cinnamon:

But that's not like the highlight moment. So it's further away, it's harder to touch, it's less accessible, so it does make it more difficult. My hope is that with all this noise, there is a lot of signal like Artemis and other programs that bring people together.

Lance Glinn:

So I want to pivot the conversation for a few minutes to Project Shadow. Now for listeners who may be hearing about this ongoing venture with for Apex for the first time, just walk us through what Project Shadow is and what makes it so groundbreaking.

Ian Cinnamon:

So a little bit over a year ago, there was an executive order that was announced at the time called Iron Dome, now called Golden Dome. And it basically said, we're going to pour a good amount of money, about 25 billion into bolstering US missile defense. If anybody's seen the news on what's been happening in the Middle East, more missile defense is probably a good thing. And my hope is it's everyone can agree we don't want to be hit by missiles. I certainly don't.

Lance Glinn:

Sure. I would agree with that.

Ian Cinnamon:

I'm glad. There was one line in that executive order that called for a new type of missile defense and that was space-based interceptors. So what that means is if you have a missile that's being fired, normally we intercept it from the ground. So a missile gets fired from the ground, it's going to come hit the US, God forbid. We have another system-

Lance Glinn:

Defense system.

Ian Cinnamon:

... on the ground that fires basically a counter missile that tries to hit a bullet with a bullet in space. It's very difficult. But these missiles actually do go into space before they come back down to Earth. So the idea is, well, instead of having to fire an interceptor from the ground, if it's already in space, the missile's going to pass it, just boom, knock it down while it's up there. This has been theory for decades. This is not a new idea. What's new about it is we're finally at a time in history where we have enough access to space, there's companies like Apex making enough satellites at scale, and the interceptor technology is there where it's now economically viable to do it. So I got really excited when I read that and I said, "Okay, this is amazing. We need to make sure that we prove to ourselves, to the government, to our partners, to the public, to the taxpayers that this is technically feasible because it sounds like science fiction."

Lance Glinn:

Sure.

Ian Cinnamon:

So I put our team together and we came up with this idea called Project Shadow. So Project Shadow is a scaled down, think of it as a miniature space-based interceptor. And it's meant to demonstrate the core pieces of the technology. It's launching in just a couple months, early July. And what's going to happen is it launches on our Nova, our medium-sized satellite bus platform. It is two miniature interceptors that deploy. They actually fire a real solid rocket motor, establish a crosslink between the interceptor and the host vehicle. So you could send inflight target updates called IFTUs or things like that and actually fire these in orbit. Fully self-funded by us. There's no government money coming into it. We're doing it because we feel like it is a national good to prove that this tech exists and frankly deter our adversaries. We're in a space race. We're not going to win unless we do things like this.

Lance Glinn:

So Ian, you say we are in a space race, which I obviously think we are, so I definitely agree with that. How do you think about that space race, you, Max, all your employees, when you go into work every day knowing that what you're doing impacts safety both globally and domestically?

Ian Cinnamon:

It's a huge piece of it. And what I will say is the two things that I think that every one of our employees, myself at least, it's had Max excited, is it's a combination of saying by launching these systems, we can both inspire people, that's one part like Artemis, and the second part is frankly, keep us safe. And the more and more that we see funding going into the Space Force, the more that I feel like America and our country and the West really have a shot of winning this race we're in the middle of. The enemy is not which prime is going to win the contract or which bus supplier gets used. There's one competitor and that competitor is China, and we are in the middle of a race with them. They are in a hugely advantageous position where the idea of a public government like the government and a private company is mushed together into one.

In the US, we have this beautiful thing called capitalism, which I love, but it makes it harder for us to all unite around a single effort. And it comes now, I think the benefit of capitalism is we get much more technological edge, we're innovating a lot faster, we get new ideas, but it doesn't allow us to say, "Okay, let's pause everything else and focus on this one thing." So we as the industrial base need to come together to preempt that and do that. And the gamble that I'm making and Apex is making is that the juice will be worth the squeeze and we'll get paid in spades later, but we're willing to take that risk.

Lance Glinn:

And what does private and public partnership look like for a company like Apex?

Ian Cinnamon:

So I mean, in the US, what it really comes down to is working with our government counterparts, so working with folks in the Space Force and the intelligence community side to put the right demand signals in place and deliver them products when they need it. I think historically the Department of War and the intelligence community have actually done a pretty good job saying, "I want systems that do this or this." But with anything in government, it's tricky, right? You have budgets don't get approved, money gets moved from one program to the other. And while intentions are good, not having a very strong permanent demand signal makes it a lot harder to tell industry, "Hey, go do this."

Lance Glinn:

And so a program like the Golden Dome would obviously rely on sort of this rapidly scaling spacecraft production.

Ian Cinnamon:

Exactly.

Lance Glinn:

You need obviously the production to be there in order to make these interceptors go into space.

Ian Cinnamon:

Thousands of these.

Lance Glinn:

Exactly. So how does Apex's sort of this mass manufacturing model for these buses position the company to support this defensive architecture?

Ian Cinnamon:

The reality is if you want to go put 10 satellites into space, there's a lot of people you could call, but if you want to go launch a hundred or a thousand satellites, nobody is building at that scale unless you're fully vertically integrated like a Starlink or a Amazon Leo. The exception is Apex and that's what we built Apex to do. So we really are the only company capable of building at this scale that meets the timelines, not just the number of satellites. It's number of satellites on what timeline that the government actually requires.

Lance Glinn:

So Ian, dig in deep for us then, what does success ultimately look like for Apex with Project Shadow?

Ian Cinnamon:

So we see Project Shadow as simply the technology demonstrator that really helps prove to the world that Golden Dome space-based interceptors are a valid concept. So that's almost put that in one bucket. The other bucket is the main Golden Dome space-based interceptor program. I unfortunately can't go into a lot of details on that program, but let's just say for Apex, it would be really doing the core of what we do, which is being the largest provider of platforms and enabling constellations of not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of these interceptors to keep us safe.

Lance Glinn:

And so Ian, as we begin to wrap up our conversation, when you just look across the global space ecosystem, what signals are you seeing that sort of help you understand where the industry is headed over the next five or 10 years? Because it's one thing to have all this noise now and see all the news and media surrounding the space industry and companies in it. But if you look forward, what are you seeing, the trends that you're seeing that are sort of guiding it in the next decade?

Ian Cinnamon:

So I would say look outside the US because I think within the US you could get a little myopically focused on, hey, where are investors putting money, what's happening. Look at what China's doing, what Russia, what other countries are trying to do. China has, I believe it's seven or eight companies trying to build rockets to compete with SpaceX right now. China's announced plans to launch a constellation of 13,000 satellites in the coming year. So that's more than the US. Do you know how many of the US government launched last year?

Lance Glinn:

How many?

Ian Cinnamon:

It's about 200 government satellites. Of course we have things like Starlink and other, but government satellites. China's beat us. So when you look at that, you just look at what our competitors are doing, what our adversaries are doing and say, "Wow, they're pulling ahead." They don't care about the venture return. They care about what mission do they need to accomplish. So you look at that as the demand signal and you say, "Oh my God, we need to be doing things differently to catch up and win."

Lance Glinn:

And so 13,000, 200, how do we close the gap?

Ian Cinnamon:

Apex.

Lance Glinn:

Apex.

Ian Cinnamon:

That's why we're here.

Lance Glinn:

That's why we're here. That's why we're here.

Ian Cinnamon:

Truly though. It's all about the high rate production. That is what it comes down to. And we are here to meet the call and we've been very fortunate to be in a position to begin to meet that call.

Lance Glinn:

And so when you think about Apex's next chapter, it could be a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, 15, 20, whatever you want to put it on, when you think about this next chapter for the company, what's the leap you want the company to have made? What does success look like for Apex in the future?

Ian Cinnamon:

For us, I want to see more Apex platforms going to orbit than any other vendor. So whenever you hear about another Falcon 9 taking off or anything like that, I want to know that more than half of the satellites on there are being powered by Apex.

Lance Glinn:

Well, Ian, I always enjoy having conversations about topics that I don't know a lot about and space is not a topic I know a lot about. So I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate your insights. Thanks much for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Ian Cinnamon:

You're quite knowledgeable, I must say. So it was a great conversation. Thank you for the great questions.

Lance Glinn:

Thanks for coming on.