hi i'm tim ellis ceo and co-founder
relativity space and we are building the
world's first robotically 3d printed
rocket launch vehicle
you can probably recognize the biggest
names in space by just using their last
names bezos musk branson
but you might want to keep an eye on an
up-and-comer
ellis
in order to join elon musk's spacex in
the race to mars tim ellis's relativity
space is building the world's largest 3d
printed rocket and if that sounds crazy
just wait thanks for taking out some
time i really appreciate it yeah of
course excited to chat with you and
share more about our story you've got a
wild story tim spent five years working
at blue origin before leaving to start
the first 3d printed rocket company with
a 500 000 check from mark cubit a few
minutes after cold emailing mark cuban
we had a half a million dollar
commitment but this isn't some
hypothetical futuristic idea relativity
space currently has two launch pads one
at cape canaveral and another at
vandenberg air force base
and at 31 this dude is just getting
started the three numbers to look out
for in this story are one hundred
thousand the amount tim had in student
loans when he started relativity space
1.4 million the amount of square foot
the company currently holds and 1.3
billion relativity spaces total outside
investment
here's how a kid's love of legos turned
into a multi-billion dollar startup for
cnbc make it i'm nate skid this is
founder effect
tim grew up in plano texas where he says
all the houses look the same he was
hyper obsessed with legos i actually
played lego so much that my thumb on my
right finger
is permanently bent backwards literally
from pressing the pieces together so
much in high school he did the least
amount of work needed to get top grades
for him it wasn't an issue tim says he
got a near perfect score on the act even
though he forgot his calculator i
literally had to remember how to do long
division and trigonometry by hand on the
fly during the test
so stem always came easy to tim but his
passion was in writing in 2008 he landed
at usc when a friend named jordan noon
invited him to join a student-led group
called rocket lab after witnessing a
rocket launch in person he was hooked it
looks like looking at a star like video
never captures what rockets are like in
person and the vibrations are so crazy
that it makes the air soupy and thick
tim and his teammates launched dozens of
rockets eventually leading him to an
internship at a scrappy startup in the
middle of the mojave desert called mast
in space systems which was the first
company to turn a rocket engine off and
then re-light it while in flight
the engine turned off we all held our
breath and then two seconds later the
engine turned back on it kind of like
caught itself in mid-air and then came
back and landed and everyone was
freaking out everyone being all six
people jordan headed to spacex while tim
did three back to back to back
internships at jeff bezos's blue origin
he made a name for himself by taking on
incredibly ambitious projects tim was
easily the youngest and least educated
intern at the company how much does an
intern at blue origin make
i think it's like free housing and maybe
a few thousand dollars a month it was
like fairly well paid it wasn't it
wasn't crazy
but yeah it wasn't a lot of money what
was the interview process like for an
internship at blue origin they would you
know ask a lot of riddles and kind of
it was it was almost like a it almost
felt like a y combinator interview
honestly where just every you know i
think there were multiple people on the
phone and it would be a technical
question and then a space history
question like how many people walked on
the moon and then what's the lift over
drag of a arab reentry capsule and you
know how many golf balls can you put in
a swimming pool like it was just a bunch
of topics rapid fire
it didn't take long for tim to recognize
the potential of 3d printing on an
industrial scale
i did the first ever metal 3d printing
at blue origin throughout these
internships because it was physically
the only possible way to shrink the
manufacturing times and and you know get
costs low enough to fit within an intern
project budget you thought it was a
no-brainer that it was both faster
cheaper and performed just as well as
traditional parts and so that was after
my third internship but when i came back
and worked there full time and started
six months later after graduating with
my master's no one had done anything
with it
his primary role was designing the
rocket end line thrust chamber and
reaction control system for the new
shepard capsule but he couldn't stop
thinking about the unlocked potential of
3d printing i mean i remember it's
basically nine months of being told no
i'm wasting my time you know i was told
no by my manager and my manager's
manager that you know they were never
going to do 3d printing but i still kept
at it and i was
refining my numbers about how much
cheaper and faster it was going to be
and then ultimately i remember getting a
very brief meeting with jeff
and you know he essentially like in the
room was like tim i'm one of the richest
people in the world
of course we can do this and i was like
yeah that's what i've been saying and so
then we i bought the first metal 3d
printer at blue origin and then started
kicking off the 3d printing division
did you learn anything specifically from
working closely with jeff that
made a big impact on you
i mean i think i'm i feel like i'm still
still learning from them like it's great
to set a north star that fundamentally
you don't think people are ever going to
want rockets
slower with more parts with more manual
labor and less automation like there's
no world whether it's one year 10 years
or 100 years where anyone's ever gonna
say you know what i actually want more
fixed tooling and less flexibility and i
want it to take longer and cost more and
have more parts and more complexity so
you know it almost sounds kind of
obvious but it's not so obvious when
you're really thinking about innovation
tim saw the impact 3d printing could
have on an industry saddled with
millions of square feet dedicated to
antiquated tooling in a cumbersome
supply chain
if he could drastically reduce the price
of building rockets the cost of space
travel would decrease as well there's
just these giant factories full of fixed
tooling building products one at a time
by hand with hundreds of thousands to
millions of individual piece parts with
almost no automation and that paradigm
is just as true 60 years ago as it is
today
tim thought if we as a species are ever
going to get to mars we need to develop
an intelligent 3d printer capable of
everything from building rockets on
earth to servicing them on mars as i
realized
you know for that future to exist
someone was going to have to found a
company somewhere that built an
industrial base on mars i felt 3d
printing
was really inevitable like you need a
small lightweight factory that you can
launch on a rocket to another planet
that can build a wide range of products
with very little human involvement and
so i thought all of those north star
parameters described an intelligent 3d
printer and then i just thought well if
we get started today
maybe we could be the person to start
this company
tim left blue origin in december 2015.
he knew some combination of 3d printing
and artificial intelligence was the
future of space exploration and it's
just 25 years old he was willing to go
all in so he got together with his old
friend jordan who had recently left
spacex and the pair began plotting their
next mission and then we very quickly
met up but at starbucks and i kind of
wrote on the back of a starbucks napkin
this idea of 3d printing being
inevitable for existing on mars and that
you know 3d printing really was an
automation technology and it was about
part count reduction fixed cooling
reduction speeding up the rate of
progress and learning because you know
the faster you can 3d print then of
course the more you can build a product
test it improve it and keep iterating
and so i just kind of drew out this
diagram linking everything together at
the high level but there was only one
problem
they were flat broke in fact tim had
about a hundred thousand dollars in
student loan debt
how much did you guys have saved up to
like invest in this company from an
investment standpoint like i mentioned i
was 25 jordan was 23 i had over 100 000
of student debt that was my one money
mistake was uh doing a master's and i
did not have a scholarship for the
masters and i didn't do a ta ship
because i was so hooked on rocket lab
i'm from texas i'd heard from one friend
at usc that
mark cuban like actually responds to
cold emails and so i just as the very
first email i ever wrote with my
relativity space email address wrote
mark cuban a cold email actually guessed
his email so i put 20 different
permutations of mark.cuban at gmail.com
mcuben you know mark hotmail.com and
then i had the message subject line of
space is sexy 3d printing an entire
rocket and then i laid out you know from
plano worked at blue origin jordan north
at spacex here's what our experience is
and then five minutes later he said well
what do you want from me we're raising
half a million dollars for our seed
rounds you know i was making numbers up
like i didn't really know at the time
what we were doing because we were so
new to it you know i said well hey do
you want to put in a hundred thousand
dollars we're raising half a million
dollars and then he replied back you
know probably 30 seconds later and said
you know what i'll actually do the
entire thing i'll give you the full half
a million dollars and so just like that
you know kind of a few a few minutes
after cold emailing mark cuban we had a
half a million dollar commitment i
haven't told mark this since but he was
trying to wire us money to a bank
account that didn't exist because we
didn't even have a company yet
how long from like writing your business
plan on the back of a receipt to you
guess mark cuban's email probably like a
week
maybe a few days i was technically yeah
i was at my uncle's funeral when i was
writing the cold emails to mark cuban so
it was like
yeah it was a very kind of uh crazy time
why didn't you ask bezos for that first
seed funding why did you go to cuba
maybe i was just nervous at the time
that if you know i asked him for the
funding that i don't know i was working
there i just left and you know i left on
good terms and it all seemed fine but i
don't know it's a good question i really
hadn't even thought about that at the
same time tim and jordan were accepted
into y combinator which meant they had
three months to prove they could build
the world's largest 3d printer and use
it to build a rocket they made it just
barely and so i remember jordan while i
was rehearsing the pitch for demo day
jordan
my co-founder was in the lobby
like fighting to to file the provisional
patent and finish the patent paperwork
on the day of demo day as we had just
gotten these parts in and then uh yeah
we filed it did the pitch i think we
were the last presentation of the day so
we pitched off the record and anchored
it because we had some ridiculous number
of customer contracts relativity space
sells room on the rockets it launches
into orbit to companies like nasa
telesat and the dod the same as what
spacex does and other private launch
companies and so we have a launch site
at cape canaveral we also have one at
vandenberg air force base
ellis says taren one is the most
pre-sold rocket in history so i think
it's definitely showing a lot of the
customer confidence in what we're doing
how much have you totally raised how
much square footage do you have how many
employees do you have now so we've
raised a little over 1.3 billion dollars
to date we've got 700 employees now so
we're 100 kind of right when covet
started so we've gone from 100 to 700
over approximately the last two and a
half years so pretty fast scaling as far
as square footage so we now have i guess
like 1.4 million square feet in that
ballpark
netflix was actually the least before us
and so you can actually see this
building i i just learned this you can
see this building in a space for us the
tv show
um which is kind of hilarious that yeah
now we're gonna build the world's
biggest 3d printed rocket in this new
facility
relativity space is currently valued at
just over 4.2 billion dollars making it
the second most valuable space company
how do you run a company of 700 people
though i'm now realizing a lot of the
things that i got made fun of for
growing up whether it was researching
every topic under the sun and following
all these threads and being hyper
curious and picking up and pattern
matching information like all of those
skills have let me scale
and run relativity we've been also very
fortunate to bring on a lot of people
that led the first generation of private
space companies so we have the guy that
led the entire dragon capsule program
from the first person on the program to
leading the entire thing
over his 13-year career with spacex with
the person that led all of production
launch a 3000 person team for the whole
company one of the ctos and co-founders
is an advisor helping us design our next
generation rocket engines we've got like
quite a lot of very experienced people i
think across our whole
700 person team we've done well over 30
000 rocket launches in our prior history
the depth of knowledge that you have to
have to not only be a figurehead but to
actually be the highest level or one of
the higher level
um intellects on the team that's got to
be crazy like that has to be insane do
people not understand that about elon or
someone like yourself or like you know
or am i conflating two things i'm sorry
if it's a question it's actually a
really wonderful question and i do think
super interesting so i can definitively
say i i you know i've met elon i've not
worked with them of course directly but
from everything i can gather the guy's
an engineering genius like there's no
question about that like he himself
is very special in how hard he pushes
where he chooses to be ambitious
um you know driving teams to see this
vision and really
kind of come around to it being possible
and i think you know it's probably the
same with relativity like yeah for sure
i'm definitely plugged into technical
meetings decision making like i could
walk you through
every single
way our rocket engine works why it was
made that way what the decision process
was
the the 3d printers the material science
the control algorithms like yeah i'm
definitely it's actually in many ways
relativity is a playground for me to
continue to learn from and the more
great people we bring onto the team then
you just learn even more because now you
have some of the world's best people to
learn from