Jordan Noone On Building A $4 Billion Business By 3D Printing Rockets And Investing In Space Tech Startups

Jordan Noone was the youngest person in the world to get FAA clearance to fly a rocket into space. His venture capital firm, Embedded Ventures, has funded startups like Slingshot Aerospace (Series A Round), Chromatic, and KittyCAD.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Investing in space
• The new commercial ecosystem evolving in space
• Creating market leaders

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About Jordan Noone:

Mr. Jordan Noone is a Co-Founder & serves as General Partner at Embedded Ventures. He is also a Co-Founder & serves as Executive Chairman at KittyCAD.

Jordan served as Chief Executive Officer at KittyCAD. He is a Co-Founder & Executive Advisor at Relativity. He also serves as Board Member at Chromatic 3D Materials.

Jordan is also an Angel Investor. Likewise, he focused on technical direction and engineering design, including developing printing technology, launch vehicle design, propulsion design, software development, infrastructure development, and government affairs.

Jordan serves as an Advisor at Pixxel. Furthermore, he received a BS in Aerospace Engineering, and dropped out of a BS in Biophysics, both from the University of Southern California.

Connect with Jordan Noone:

• Crunchbase
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• PitchBook

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the dealmakerr show. So super exciting the guest that we have today. We’re gonna be talking about aerospace quite a little bit. You know from having an incredible journey. You know being in college you know without a doubt you know a college experience that many of us would dream of. Ah, to then you know going to Spacex then you know like becoming an operator and now being able to be on the other side of the table investing so without farther ado let’s welcome our guests today jordanrda noon welcome to the show. So.

Jordan Noone: Um, thank you all Ajandra I’m happy to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: Tell us a little bit about that walk through memory lane through memory lane of being born in California so how was life growing up there in Pasadena.

Jordan Noone: I loved it. You know I’ve never really gotten too far. You know I went from growing up in Pasadena it’s where my mom grew up my dad grew up. Um some of my grandparents grew up as well. Then um, and then to Usc and that’s really where I view my career starting I started studying aerospace engineering at Usc Back in 2010 and that’s what I view as the ah the catalyst and starter of the rest of my career.

Alejandro Cremades: Now What is this fascination around aerospace. How does that start.

Jordan Noone: My aerospace fascination I think started my dad um had a dream of becoming a pilot and for a variety of reasons that didn’t end up working out for him but I grew up studying planes then we had tons of ah books on planes whenever a plane would go by my dad and I would. You know, try to recognize what kind of plane it was um and that led to the aerospace engineering degree. You know I always had kind of this fascination with planes growing up. Um and I never really thought about working on rockets which obviously my career ended up taking me quite a bit. Um, it was my first week of College I was in my aerospace you know 1 to 1 class thinking I’d work on planes. The rest of my career and that first week of school a group called the Usc Rocked Propulsion Lab it was a hands on group. Um. In the school. They did a presentation. You know all the handson groups at first Friday of school did a presentation to the 1 to 1 classes I’m talking about what they were working on and they were trying to become the first student group to fly a rock to space which I found absolutely fascinating and I started.

Alejandro Cremades: And and also that led to being the first student to get FA clearance I mean what what it what is that? What? what? what happened there and how are you able to to really accomplish that.

Jordan Noone: Yeah I started hanging out with that group that day.

Jordan Noone: You know that that group I had started as a freshman I remember the first ah that first Friday after um, seeing their presentation I went to their group meeting. It was like four zero p m that Friday and you know the rest of the students went and that was their time to go to their first you know first frat party. And for me I was like this is my opportunity to work on some cool stuff with rockets and and I think it was really what I found captivating was them setting their own goal like you hear of a lot of student projects where they’re trying to fly you know a glider. A mile. They’re trying to fly a rock at a mile high like hit some you know Nasa competition goal that of flying an egg a mile high and bringing it down on a parachute. Um, but what really I’ve found captivating was that they were setting their own goal of they wanted to be this first student group to fly a rock to space nothing anywhere near what a student group had been done before. You know or had done before it was you know orders of magnitude past them. Um, and that was amazing to me so I started with that group. Um, they were starting to fly rockets that year they were flying one out of Black Rock desert Nevada and about nineteen days later building from scratch to flying this rocket at mock four nineteen days later which was this amazing push for me and um, but I ended up taking over the group as a ah junior I ran it my junior and senior year.

Jordan Noone: And in the years in between it went from an idea and some preliminary progress on flying a rock at the space to actually having built the first one and we flew that first one we flew the second one my senior year. Um, but 1 of the biggest bottlenecks on the way was the regulatory side. You know you have to call up the Faa and it’s it’s a pretty complicated process and ask for permission. It’s a whole application process ask for permission to fly something into the atmosphere. You know how do you prove that you’re not going to hit a structure. How do you prove? You’re not going to hit an endangered species. How do you prove? You’re not going to you know, hit an airliner. And you have to go through that entire process. It’s very very detailed, um and the fa was not a fan of a bunch of students doing this. You know what are these 19 year olds trying to do here. Um, but we ended up breaking through it was a very very tricky process and difficult but in doing so I ended up being. Um, been a first student in the world. Youngest person in the world to get an fa clearance to fly um those rockets to space then it was a lot of persistence. Um on the first side and then a lot on a software development side. Actually.

Alejandro Cremades: And how were you able to convince them.

Jordan Noone: And that we had built the rockets but the challenges is proving. You know, based on any variation in the wind any variation in how the rocket takes off any variation in the actual performance of the vehicle that um the faa does their job which is keeping the public safe. Whether that’s airliners airports structures and even stretching into um, endangered species then as far as where there is big enough land area to fly which is Black Rock desert Nevada is where a lot of these high power rockets fly from that you’re not going to land on the endangered Sage Grouse which is an endangered bird out there and it sounds very um, unlikely and a little bit pedantic from an analysis and like likelihood perspective but you have to prove that that you’ll land in this area and not that area that if the wind varies you’ll go over that area and not hit it things like that and um. There were times the fa stopped talking to us there was time the bureau of land management who is the same group ah or a similar group that we also had to have permission from to use the land not just the airspace but the land is well out there. Um, they would stop responding and with the bureau of Land Management we ended up driving in person. As students. We’d find 2 3 day windows to drive up to winnemuca Nevada then was about 2 hours east of Reno then it’s like a thirteen fourteen hour drive then and we would go and knock on the door and say we need to keep talking when they would no longer answer our emails and calls and with things like that on a persistent side where.

Jordan Noone: We ended up breaking through them realizing we were serious and then us ah developing software that I’d say is unlike what any students had developed before to simulate and verify the rockets. Um what you call Dispersion. So how? ah. Much variance. There can be in the performance and landing locations of the rockets as they fly. Um and it ended up winning them over.

Alejandro Cremades: And obviously you ended up graduating too and you go to Spacex. So why Spacex and what were you doing at Spacex.

Jordan Noone: E.

Jordan Noone: No great question and my first job after college was a Spacex internship which eventually converted to being full time I didn’t really know what I wanted to do but Spacex at the time this was in 2014. They just started flying their falcon nine rockets. Those are flying. You know a hundred times a year now and landing a hundred times a year now but they were just flying. Um, the first vehicle I worked on was flight 6 of falcon nine and it was a very exciting time to be um, working at Spacex because it was young. It was you know, kind of brand new groundbreaking projects that they were working on. And and they were local and ah in l a I liked living in l a and I didn’t really know yet where um I wanted to live or kind of try and so staying in l a was a good foundation for me. The first project I worked on. There was the cargo dragon spacecraft so that was taking um. Cargo to the international space station. You know flying from Spacex’s site in Florida and resupplying the space station. Um, which was an amazing kind of entrance to my career to work on something that um was so highly kind of complicated doing real missions like solving real needs.

Alejandro Cremades: And why would you say that so many people in Spacex ended up becoming founders.

Jordan Noone: No, it’s a great question and I think a lot of it is the entrepreneurial spirit that Spacex has you know they despite now being you know they’re kind of 13000 or so employees. You know when I was there it was closer to 3000 um, but that entrepreneurial spirit and ambition of doing new things pushing as aggressively as possible has stayed through that scaling which is fairly rare for for companies and um and the space ecosystem has opened so much even because of the success of Spacex and you know other launch companies that you know ten fifteen years ago was basically no commercial space activity compared to the amount you see today and launch was such a big bottleneck that was too expensive to fly things too complicated to fly things you know launchers going up too infrequently. And now you almost have the opposite problem or launch costs are going down so dramatically that there’s such an increase in in space activity that people don’t know how to handle things like in-pace traffic control then where it’s how you make sure two things don’t impact because there used to be so few things up there. It wasn’t a common concern and. So I think it’s it’s that where people get trained and then that work at Spacex is opening up the space economy then by launch costs dropping so dramatically that um that opportunity opens up for new people to take chunks of that space economy kind of is a direct transition from their Spacex.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s talk about then how does relativity space come knocking because obviously you know you’re here in an amazing company Ella Musk the founder I mean.

Jordan Noone: Experience.

Alejandro Cremades: Everyone you know I’m sure that is in Airpace you know would love to to to take a stop at working there so it sounds like you were already at the top. So why? why did you thought it was a good idea to to give your notice.

Jordan Noone: Well so spacex even at the time and it’s amazing company with um, what was 3000 people and there are certain things that Spacex does that we started to see an alternative to even Spacex like people tend to not realize Spacex is almost. They’re actually over now they’re more than 20 years old

Jordan Noone: And I think 21 years old as a company Ah they only became mainstream you know, kind of three four years ago that people started to know them outside of the aerospace world and and that’s something where they do have things that are dated. There are things there the the phrase that I remember. Was ah, no science experiments and that’s something where if something involved. Let’s say like scientific level development. It was viewed as a nonstarter in the area that we started to see benefit in that did involve what we’d call a science experiment to grow was 3 d printing. And many people know 3 d printing from like a hobby level of like you know, using something to print a Christmas ornament to Print Print a toothbrush you know to print some kind of do dad. Um, but there’s what’s called metal 3 d printing where you’re 3 d printing metallic parts and high performance parts. And that’s been fairly common in certain parts of aerospace for you know let’s say 10 years but the thing that we wanted to solve that eventually led to forming relativity as a company then was scaling that metal 3 d printing. How do you instead of printing something the size of you know, a one cubic foot you know so one foot by one foot by one foot size object. How do you print something the size of an entire rocket. So let’s say ten foot diameter and one hundred feet tall and that’s where we saw the potential but that involved development.

Jordan Noone: So both for myself and Tim Ellis Tim is my relativity cofounder. He still runs a company day-to-day Ceo and we saw the potential to scale the technology that no incumbent wanted to do not even the startups Tim was at blue origin I was at Spacex which you would still consider kind of startups of that phase then. That’s where me and Tim started going could append a paper and we did what I think anyone would do is you know search on Google how to get venture capital and then the first 2 things that came up was Mark Cuban’s name and we sent him an email. You know his email is fairly public and and we applied to Ycombinator which is ah the startup incubator in the valley and and we ended up getting capital from both. We got accepted into y combinator and then Mark wrote a check. Um, and then we got that capital and then started really going pen to paper on what would it look like to scale those printers up then and develop a company around 3 d printing of um.

Alejandro Cremades: And what ended up being the business model of relativity space for the people that are listening to get it how that’s the company make money.

Jordan Noone: Aerospace vehicles.

Jordan Noone: So what relativity does is sell satellite launch services when um and it sells satellite launch services to companies doing communication satellites imaging satellites logistics satellites a whole slew of applications and so very similar to companies like Spacex and Rob. Rocket lab and apll space systems. All the companies that are flying rockets with customer payloads on them. So it’s a customer is paying the company to fly you know their their satellites their components. The main difference with the relativity though is how those rockets are main. Relatively is vertically integrated all the way from flying the satellites operating the launch pads and the rockets. Um, operating the factories designing the rockets but also designing and operating the printers that print the rockets and that was the main innovation for the company which was. If you build a company around 3 d printing. It’s not because we’re obsessed with 3 d printing. It’s because 3 d printing is an excuse to digitize the factory. It’s a digitally controlled process it’s a process with digital feedback. So if you design the entire fact around 3 d printing. You end up with a flexibility that more resembles software development than resembles firm fixed infrastructure in a traditional factory so it allows you to iterate better quicker cheaper than traditional manufacturing. So there is the ability to let’s say develop faster or catch up to a company like Spacex.

Jordan Noone: Despite what was a kind of 15 year head start at the time and and that’s kind of the model itself is selling those rockets but selling better rockets more reusable rockets faster develop rockets because of the underlying digital technology.

Alejandro Cremades: And I guess with the company I mean it sounds so fascinating. But at the same time so complex at what point do you guys realize hey I think that we’re into something here.

Jordan Noone: No, it’s it’s a good question in the way and I don’t think we had as mature of a framework for it at the time like I was I was 22 when we started Tim I think was 24 25 and this is back in 2015 and that. I think we had a lot of kind of ah win behind our sales because of the fact that the commercial rocket ecosystem and especially Spacex was building so much momentum like if Spacex hadn’t existed prior to relativity relativity would not have been successful and I say that because Spacex proved that a commercial company. Could develop a rocket a traditionally manufactured rocket. They proved that the commercial investment interest could see um, positive returns there’ something that had failed in every commercial launch attempt prior to Spacex you know, no one knows the names of the companies prior to Spacex because they all failed pretty quick then in fizzled and lost a lot of money in the process. So Spacex proved. It was possible to build a commercial rocket launch company and and by doing so the 2 things that helped relativity was make it so and this is kind of the rule of thumb that I I even carried to our investment work today is counting miracles how many miracles need to be solved for the company to be successful. And as complex as relativity is you know supporting rocket development printer development things like that the rocket development while technically challenging expensive operationally challenging had been proven out the printer development was the miracle to solve for relativity and we did that you know over the course of the first you know four or five six years

Jordan Noone: Proving out the printers then in a way where the rocket development in the Rocket production and Rocket launch operation that was supported as we scaled by people who had done that in their previous jobs. They’d done that in spacex they done that at Virgin Orbit. They’d done it at a lot of the other companies in the industry. Where we contained the core development into a very kind of finite tangible amount of risk that we we solved over time rather than something that would have been solving all of those areas at once.

Alejandro Cremades: And in terms of a capital. How much did the company raise how much has the company raised today.

Jordan Noone: The companies raised about one point three billion to date then um, that started with the first round which was a hair above 500000 you know it was something the seed round was 500000 back in 2015 which we considered a lot of money for a seed round when you talk about seed rounds today. There’s still quite a bit more. Inflated than that. But you know it went from 2 of us with $500000 we developed the first subscale printers. We made the first parts it was just myself and Tim in those days and then we raised you know, 14000000 and then we raised 30000000 and then 700000000 and you know, compounded from there and then there was ah another round after that as well. But in doing so we incrementally proved out the printers. The printed rocket technology the team the operation in a way where those higher and higher fundraise amounts were warranted over time.

Alejandro Cremades: And I mean it sounds like you guys were on this rocket ship and and I’m sure having a ton of fun I mean now the company has how many employees have the company now.

Jordan Noone: Um, the company’s around 1300 employees

Alejandro Cremades: That’s absolutely unbelievable like being the co-founder of something like that Jordan congrats to you. so so why? why? why deciding hey it’s time to turn page here.

Jordan Noone: For me I loved the early days I loved when the risk in the product development was truly kind of tangible in the printers then that we had to prove out for the first time it’s kind of that 0 to 1 moment then for companies that you hear about we had to prove out that the printers. Could print rocket quality parts. We had to scale the printers to the point that they could cover rocket size parts then we had to develop and integrate those into full up vehicles and then demonstrate that the printer production scaling could make rockets faster cheaper. You know, iterate quicker then in the company would not be successful. If it wasn’t for proving all of that out and we incrementally burnt down that risk um over the beginning years of the company. You know it was when we were 7 people 14 people kind of 20 people where a lot of those milestones were burnt down by that early team and that’s when we reached an inflection point around. And say like 2019 or so where we started biasing more towards hiring people who had solved other challenges in their previous lives. You know when we’re hiring the printer team when we were doing the printer development then there wasn’t someone who had built the world’s largest metal 3 d printer before there wasn’t someone that had printed a rocket before. Then we had to figure out who to even hire how to build those teams how to train those teams and then came you know hiring you know a Vp that had hired that had scaled production before a Vp that had scaled software development before a Vp that had scaled um you know regulatory operations before for rocket companies.

Jordan Noone: And that for me felt very different like there’s huge challenges with scaling and operating at that level I want to sound like those are dismissive you know or that I dismiss those that but they’re different challenges and I had was less satisfied by those and I was craving kind of going back to the early days of when we were doing that fundamentals 0 to one r and d where there is no textbook. There’s no company to reference. There’s no person to hire that’s done it before you’re figuring it all out from scratch and there’s no one coming to save you. It’s kind of all on you to solve that yourself then. And I enjoy that part.

Alejandro Cremades: So then so then how do you start to think about hey what could be the next chapter here for me and and how do you land on the idea of going to the other side of the table.

Jordan Noone: Now it’s a good question and what ended up happening is one of my friends that I had met my industry friends I’d met along the way at relativity was another investor called jenna’ Bryan her name’s jennabryan then she’s based out of l a she’s from Alabama she was a partner at another fund in Los Angeles and and she had reached out to me originally in kind of 20182019 to join an event series. She was hosting bringing together venture backed founders that had success working with the us government which I was viewed as a ah I didn’t realize at the time but viewed as kind of a shining star of having done that. Then at the time then um and even tracing back into my usc days of working with the us government on regulatory issues and and launch issues and um, she reached out to me to help mentor her portfolio during those events then because she had a passion to see. Us national security development within the startup innovation community. Um, that’s a much more active topic today but rewind four or five six years ago that’s still when it was kind of taboo in Silicon Valley to be working in defense.

Jordan Noone: And um, so she wanted to see how to build that passion within her portfolio. Um and her passion for it comes from the fact that her brothers of e 22 osprey pilot. Then he’s in the South China sea on an aircraft carrier kind of at the front lines of what is growing to be a potential conflict and so she has a very personal interest in seeing. National security innovation. Um for her brother’s sake. You know for the country’s sake and um, but that said, that’s how we met and we shared a lot in what we wanted to see we became friends through that event series. What we shared a lot in what we wanted to see different in venture. And um, and as I was stepping out of relativity I didn’t yet know what I wanted to do next I wanted to spend some time kind of soul searching and she first asked me if I wanted to be an advisor to a new fund. She was starting a fund called them ved adventures and and. Sort of becoming an advisor you know, kind of to kick the tires and you know get my feet went a lot of it to get exposed to what companies were out there because as a fund you get to know a lot of companies and she noticed before I did and I came to accept this as well. Um, very very positively accept it that that opportunity to work with early stage companies. Then at that kind of 0 to 1 phase to help mentor them leverage my previous experience to help them and not end up being stuck in what we call a champagne problem of growing past the scale that you enjoy that would all come together working at the fund.

Jordan Noone: Because I would be evaluating companies investing in them mentoring them over time and then passing them on to larger scale investors over time in a way where I would essentially get stuck at the scale that I enjoy. And she saw that asked me to come on as a general partner. Um, if you ask her she says it was quite a challenge to get me on board if you asked me I say I accept it essentially immediately once it made sense. Um, but that’s what pulled me in is is her recognition of that.

Alejandro Cremades: And it’s a 100,000,000 fund correct. That’s amazing. Good stuff now in your guys’s case you know what are the typical companies that you like to see and and and what what is the investment theses.

Jordan Noone: That’s correct.

Jordan Noone: Yeah, so our primary thesis is national security space technology and um and breaking that down the space technology side a lot of that comes from on see my background and there’s a growing need for that I had mentioned the Spacex side where there’s a lot of. Commercial interest and has been in commercial investment interest in commercial launch that investing in companies like relativity spacex um virgin orbit you know a set of others then um, but there was a lagging interest in investing in the areas that we call you know beyond launch what happens is launch costs come down. Because launch was such a bottleneck and we built such momentum there as an industry and lowering costs that a lot of the investment world was not yet ready to invest in new areas and happen after launch. And a lot of that we credit there’s just less technical depth within a lot of the investor base. There’s less of a vision for how that’ll play out kind of just a riskier area to be investing in. Um, so we the op saw the opportunity to help fill that as far as what happens as launch costs come down. And new things happen in space that haven’t happened in space before or areas that were previously in space get disrupted because of the rapidly changing economics underneath the launch efforts and so our portfolio itself would split about a third in space assets.

Jordan Noone: Ah, third advanced manufacturing pure’re back on earth so very synergetic with um the space portfolio and then a third digital engineering so software for hardware design. How are things designed. How is the supply chain managed how is kind of all the digital innovation in the world affecting aerospace production and development. Which is a fairly untapped area even by dcs.

Alejandro Cremades: And I’ll show you guys are quite unique in the sense that you’re been spinning out companies like a kitty cut. So why? what’s that What’s that model you know what? Why do you guys? Why do you guys spin out companies. How does that work.

Jordan Noone: No, it’s it’s a great question and for us we call ourselves having a kind of a high conviction high concentration thesis which is not what every venture investor has you know you you hear a lot in the venture community on. Sufficient diversification to hit power law returns by being essentially I call it lucky that you hit a unicorn then and for us you know we respect that model. But it’s not really, what gets our wheel spinning. We like having that very high conviction approach with companies. Where we can have less diversification. We still have you know quite a bit but less than most vcs and that often involves building thesises around how the markets will play out how certain sectors will play out how certain technologies play out and trying to find the companies that fill what we find to be ah you know a market winner. Because of that conviction and sometimes that’s done by you know, a company coming to us kind of forcing us to evaluate an ecosystem and us deciding that is a company that will be a slam dunk or us seeing that company and we decide that we want to go after them. But sometimes there’s no company that fills that gap. Well. We recognize a gap. We recognize an opportunity and there’s no company. We’re seeing that fills that in a way that we get conviction and that happened with what ended up becoming Kittycat where it was beginning of 2021. We really wanted to fill a hole in our digital engineering portfolio.

Jordan Noone: And we had some companies we were working with but there was a gap there that we saw and we built a thesis. It was myself. Um, Jenna and then one of the fund advisors. Her name’s Jess Frizeell then she was a cofounder of 1 of the companies in Jenna’s previous portfolio a company called oxide computer company. Um, but Jess and I shared a passion. As people who had managed significant software development before as people who had managed significant hardware development before that all of the advantages of software development in the world. Being able to iterate quicker automatically test software automatically pushing into production all the things that make software kind of just appear in front of you today. So much quicker than ten fifteen years ago then none of those have migrated into hardware design and relatively we migrated them into hardware manufacturing with the. The printers and the digitization of the printers. But none of that software development and kind of the flywheel of software you hear about had gone into hardware design so me and Jess we shared that passion. We shared that kind of hardware software hybrid background. Um, and we brainstormed essentially what would become a market winner. In the hardware design ecosystem kind of the digital engineering ecosystem and Jenna heard us talking about this continually we wouldn’t shut up about it then in the way that we very much had a thesis that we believed in there and she encouraged us to you know? Well, if we can’t find a company working on it or working on it in a way that we thought would succeed.

Jordan Noone: Let’s form that company ourselves and then build a founding team around it so ended up ah forming the company as a spinout then you know and we did the anchor investment when I say spinout that was the sole. Um and a contribution for the seed round of the pres precede round was embedded writing a check. And and then we found a Cto cofounder her name’s Hannah boar and out of Pixar so we needed the graphics animation background for building part of the company up and then the challenge was ah finding a Ceo that was kind of this very haphazard route how we built the company then. I ended up stepping in as Ceo because I had built a lot of the vision for the company I had built um the executive team in mentoring Hannah and I was doing sales I was doing fundraising and kind of the kitty cad team and embedded team settle that it would be easier to promote me to Ceo even part-time. And better for the company for me being part-time than me spending time trying to mentor someone and to take over taking over a company that I had such a large contribution and founding then and setting the vision for um so I ended up coming in a Ceo and then you know long story short or long story long then just came on full-time as chief scientist last year. Then? um and with her as chief scientist and her having that same foundational value to the company. We ended up promoting her to Ceo and myself to executive chairman to round out the founding team but it ended up being something where um, amazing company. We’re super happy with it so far and even the embedded lps have a huge respect for.

Jordan Noone: The style of doing that because it ends up being a very very strong head start on a returns generator that D risks um and balances a lot of the rest of the portfolio.

Alejandro Cremades: But hey I like that if you can’t find a company you just create One. You know you can’t find a company to invest in hey you let’s just build it So That’s pretty cool now. Obviously you build that unicorn yourself you have fame you know, being in it. You’ve done it. Ah, now when it comes to being on the other side of the table and being able to rock to recognize others that have that potential of doing the same thing because you’ve seen it, you’ve experienced that you know how it looks like when it comes to Pattern Recognition. What are the 3 key things that you look in companies when you are evaluating them.

Jordan Noone: No, that’s that’s a great question as far as the 3 key things and for us. Um I break it down the first one is a very strong technical Differentiator. You see a lot of companies that have you know Marketplace moats they have moats in various ways. And at least for us and our best ability to evaluate companies because there are plenty of companies that build on top of moats outside of technical differentiation and how that technical differentiation wins over a market where we feel we have the best asymmetric edge on evaluating companies is those ones with a strong technical differentiator that results in a moat. And strong defensibility over Time. So The first one I’d say is there. There’s plenty of companies. It could be summarized pretty easy as Marketplaces pretty easily is what I’d call like a dashboard company. They’re just an interface on a website. There’s no tech underneath and despite it being code. There’s no kind of tech differentiation Underneath. And those we pass on then so that’s the first one I’d say in differentiation. Ah, the second area I’d say is that they’re under noticed in the market then and that’s a challenge to find because we look for companies especially when you’re looking at you know extreme space technology and. You know, ah some of those areas are heavily invested in like launch then where almost every fund has some exposure to the commercial launch world now and we don’t invest in those areas where every investor is going after them, but there are some sectors in space that are so far out.

Jordan Noone: In expectations on generating returns expectations on market development around them like they’re very immature or none-existent markets today that those companies are going after we can’t generate returns for our ilps if those are on longer than you know, a 7 to 10 year times scalele or it’s sufficiently high risk of manifesting markets around them. So we try to find companies on that cusp where they’re perfectly timed. They’re not so early in market development that there’s not going to be returns potential from them. But they’re not so late in their market development around them that every other investor is chasing them which means inflated prices. Excessively fast or rushed processes that lead to misses on an investment process side and so that’s the second area and then the third I’d say I’d say is um is founder ambition than in potential there and you tend to see that at least for me I really like seeing people that have done things on their own. Not just school projects not just things that were catered to them. It’s they had a passion for something and they went after it um relentlessly and and I’d say that’s necessary because building a company building a startup no day is easy. You have your wins you have your losses. You know, depending on the day. It’s high highs low lows building a company up then um. But you have to push through those then you can’t let the victories distract you from what is actually continuing to make progress and you can’t let the losses get ahead of you either and slow you down, you just have to keep pushing through and it is for me the example I’d use on ah pattern matching mirroring is things like hands on projects in college.

Jordan Noone: On the side. You know if they were at a big job. What were they doing on the side because you know being at Google for 10 years means nothing on eventually creating a startup things like that where the ability to demonstrate. Ambition on their own is huge for being able to carry a company over a decade.

Alejandro Cremades: Absolutely now for the people that are listening that will love to reach out and say hi. Where’s the best way for them to do so. Jordan.

Jordan Noone: Ah, the best way I’d say is just messaging me on Twitter when um, my Twitter handles. Um, the Jordan Noon um and just search for me, you’ll find me and then alternatively my email address for the fund is Jordan at embedded dot ventures.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing, well amazing. Is he enough? Well Jordan thank you so much for being on the deal maker show today. It has been an honor to have you with us. Thanks.

Jordan Noone: Happy to see messages on both.

Jordan Noone: Um, thank you very much and thank you everyone for listening.

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