00:00Good to have you back on the program. Last time you were with us, you were CEO of Axiom Space,
00:04so a little bit of a job, not a little bit, a lot of a job switch, but you're staying
00:07in the space
00:08space. Yeah. Okay. All right. Just making sure. Space space, you got me. $30 million seed investment
00:14around led by the company formerly known as Google Ventures, GV, other top tier venture
00:18funds included a banking relationship with JP Morgan. What are you setting out to do
00:23at Nebex that you weren't able to do at Axiom? Yeah, well, thank you first both for having me
00:28back. We met a few times. Always loved our conversations. I feel like I remember vividly
00:33your story about your father and kind of general connection we all have for space. Really cool to
00:39be hearing you talk about various space stocks and us speaking like it's a real economy. It's not a real
00:45economy yet, and it's not a real asset class yet. Why not? So SpaceX, by far, this largest IPO, very
00:52exciting. It's doing what public stocks do, and they've created a ton of value. A question I would
00:58ask is, why is there no remotely close second place? Right? Every other sector. I know the previous
01:06guest was talking about AI, right? 20 years ago, it might have been search or cloud or mobile. In every
01:14major revolution where there is huge value created, there's multiple massive winners, right? You know,
01:22look at the big four, you know, the FAANG stocks we used to talk about a while ago. There's always
01:26other ones. But the moat to launching a rocket and then landing it on a barge, which, you know,
01:33seven years ago was a big deal, but nowadays happens so frequently, we don't even necessarily show it.
01:38Uh, that's a pretty big moat. Pretty big moat. Absolutely. But again, why is there only one
01:44that's been doing it? And I think this is where Nebex comes in. We have a belief that this is
01:49a
01:49major transformation for industry and civilization. And Nebex is building what we call the commercial
01:55rails to go on the physical rails, the physical rails being those rockets that go up and down.
02:00And we've seen this over and over again. We've seen it particularly in New York quite a bit.
02:04Uh, when the railroads were built, um, New York to California, uh, three gentlemen in Buffalo,
02:10New York, uh, Butterfield, Wells, and Fargo created American Express to guarantee gold going
02:16from New York to California. And when they realized that they're guaranteeing it from robbers and gangs
02:22like Jesse James, they realized they don't actually have to send the gold. And that was American
02:27Express and travelers checks. JP Morgan, 1871, standardizes the shipping container. The first, uh,
02:34letters of credit between global banks guaranteeing, uh, trade. So we've seen this time and time again,
02:41but in space, everyone has been focused on the hardware. Everyone has been focused on the
02:45physical infrastructure. And when we talk about infrastructure, a launch a day is infrastructure.
02:52Launching giant rockets and landing on a barge exactly on their X logo. That's incredible
02:57infrastructure. Tens of thousands of satellites in orbit. That's infrastructure. Every other company,
03:02though, is putting up demos. So we feel there's this wide open space right now for a company to
03:07bring the rest of the economy along. Once those rails are set, going up and down, what's the
03:13next traveler's check? What's the next shipping container? What's the next trading platform that
03:17allows the economy to scale the way every other industry has? So how do we get there? Because the
03:22other thing I would say with space is, um, you want to make sure there aren't problems. It's
03:28complicated. It's difficult. I always think about, you mentioned my dad, like he would have been blown
03:31away by the idea that you could actually bring a rocket back and make it land. Because that's not
03:35the case when he was doing it. So I'm just like, there are regulations to make sure things are safe
03:40and secure. Um, lives certainly at stake in this concept of kind of building out space as a place for
03:46people to maybe live or data centers to exist. Um, what does it take in terms of international
03:53cooperation among entities, companies, and then the financial entities? Yeah. And again,
04:00we've seen this in other industries, aviation, right from the Wright brothers to Lindbergh going
04:06from New York again, uh, to Paris. We saw within a few years, air shows everywhere, right? The wars
04:13having multiple, uh, air forces. And then within a hundred years, that industry completely transforming
04:19life. We can't imagine life without airplanes now. Uh, the interesting thing about space,
04:24and I discovered this, you know, in my previous role, I'm new to the industry. I worked at Google
04:28five years ago. Yeah. And it's been my childhood dream to send astronauts to space. I got my shot.
04:34I took it. I was really good at it. Sent 16 astronauts to space, 12 sovereign nations, um,
04:40billions of dollars of revenue, again, all as an outsider. And as special as I believe I am,
04:45especially my parents think I am, there's eight billion. There are eight billion special people
04:51in the world. Why is nobody else cracking this code? And what I realized is I think we uncovered
04:57right under our nose, a gold mine, which is literally the only industry left on the planet
05:04that hasn't been touched by modern finance. And there's a geopolitical history behind this back in
05:09your father's time, um, the space race. John F. Kennedy, we go to the moon, we do these things
05:14not because, uh, they're easy, but because they're hard. I think we all get goosebumps when we think
05:19about it. That's kind of our origin story space in the United States. At that exact same time,
05:24students in schools were being trained to get under their desks in case there was a nuclear attack.
05:29It was an arms race. And there was two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. And
05:34everything came out of that. And originally, the first collaboration between those two space
05:40superpowers was what eventually became the International Space Station. And to remove
05:45complexity and politics from it, they decided no money will exchange hands. And it worked. And it
05:52maintained peace and diplomacy even through the current conflict. But now with a company like SpaceX
05:57and Starlink and Starship, we need financial infrastructure to actually modernize the industry.
06:03I want to go back to, and Tez, we only have about like four minutes or so left. So I
06:06want to kind
06:07of get to some of what you actually kind of plan to do in the deals as this platform gets
06:11up and
06:11running. But I mean, I always believe that if there's money to be made, money will go there.
06:17And you started off saying, why aren't there larger competitors to SpaceX? So if the money hasn't gone
06:23there already, maybe it hasn't gone there for good reason. And maybe you need to have it concentrated
06:28in one hands or government still being very much controlling a lot of stuff.
06:34Yeah. And I think you've nailed it. I don't think it is a cause and effect. If you follow the
06:40dollars,
06:41it is a massive market today. I know last time I was here, we were talking about orbital data centers.
06:46We've spoken about pharmaceuticals and space manufacturing. We saw in SpaceX's IPO, the $28
06:52trillion TAM. Awesome. Awesome. Total addressable market. Yeah, total addressable market.
06:58Totally realistic? Yeah, why not? Okay. Why not? But that's vision. We can look at exact numbers in
07:062026. We can follow the dollars, which is what we all should be doing. And every dollar goes back to
07:12a government budget. The beauty of government budgets is they were appropriated five years ago.
07:16The beauty of government budgets are publicly available data. The exact dollar amount that's going to be
07:22transacted in 2026 is $138 billion. It's actually $137.4 billion for the weirdos who've
07:30checked every single RFP and tender and know where every dollar is going. So we know that that's a
07:36massive market now. So there's no guesswork there. It's all coming from government budgets.
07:41So the reason it hasn't actually accelerated is because it's been a sovereign to sovereign
07:47business. And now with commercial supply, it's changing.
07:50We're speaking with Tajpal Bhatia, the CEO of Nebex. So who are your first customers going to be at
07:55Nebex? So Nebex is a financial exchange for cross-border space transactions. When governments
08:00need to buy commercial supply from another country, it gets very complicated. And basically,
08:05that's every single space transaction. If you want to get off the ground and you want to-
08:08Export restrictions. There's lots of things that go on.
08:10Exactly. Import, export, ITAR, IR in the case of the United States. Taxes, tariffs, politics,
08:17policy. Procurement rules. Procurement rules. For many European countries, money cannot actually
08:23leave their borders. And they invoke what they call the barter system. There's no real barter system,
08:29but it's usually some sort of value and kind bilateral trade that agencies will do. So there's
08:34no trusted counterparty. There's no neutral, central clearing settlement system for these deals,
08:41which forces every deal to be bilateral and sequential. There's no parallel processing in
08:47this. So when companies are going after government contracts, they win the contract, they get their
08:52payment, they hit the next milestone. How do you take the politics out though?
08:55In a world where geopolitics does determine who you sell what to, and especially it's heightened
09:02in terms of the sensitivity, whether it's natural resources, whether it's weapons. How do you get
09:07around that? And forgive us, we only have about 45 seconds.
09:09I can answer in 15 seconds. Five years ago, when I was working at Google, I'd never spoken to a
09:14world
09:14leader before. Sending 16 astronauts to space, you're dealing with presidents and prime ministers.
09:19I don't even pretend to say I understand politics, but we have the most efficient vehicle as humans
09:26to solve that, and that's the markets. So capital markets. And you mentioned the relationship with
09:31JP Morgan. What's happened is in this time warp that has become space, the space business is stuck
09:37in 1969. This building is a couple billion dollars, right? The bankers who finance this get paid on
09:44transaction fees, assets under management. The atomic unit for space is a launch, which is about a
09:50hundred million dollars. You can't get the time of day of any Wall Street banker to come finance that,
09:54even if it's a bankable deal. So doing it at scale, bringing the capital markets in,
09:58makes it a money problem, not a politics problem.
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