Peter Beck

And then in the afternoon, you know, the owner of the yacht would fly in his helicopter and, you know, you have to be able to communicate effectively with him as well.

And so that was super informative.

And then I went to a New Zealand national lab.

So it's kind of, you know, a government research lab.

where I did advanced materials and superconductors.

And that's where I learned a lot about composites.

And we did a lot of composites work for America's Cup boats and all those sorts of things.

And it was during my time there at this research institute that I went over to the States and did my rocket pilgrimage and came back and quit my job and put a sign up on the door.

And that was the beginning of Rocket Lab.

that's that's less trivial um so uh look we started with a small amount of investment and um and really bootstrapped the company and we've launched our first rocket to space not to orbit just a little rocket to space in 2009 and then following that i went and visited you know a lot of a lot of folks in the united states who were very enamored with what we had done on on such a short time frame

We ended up bootstrapping the company a little bit longer.

We worked for Lockheed Martin and DARPA defense agencies and did lots of really advanced technology work.

It wasn't until 2013 where I really felt that I had the credibility and the capability

to go and build an orbital class vehicle.

So, you know, I got on a plane and went to Silicon Valley and gave myself three weeks to come home with a check or be run out of town.

And at the end of those three weeks, we had our first Series A round in the bag from Coastal Ventures.

Nobody's interested in anything 100 years in the future, especially if you're a venture capitalist.

But no, I mean, I think where I was able to communicate effectively the opportunity and the scale of that.

And also, you know, it was at this time where, you know, small investments were being made into space companies.

So, you know, Vinod at Coastal Ventures had invested in a company called Skybox, which, you know, later Google bought for half a billion dollars.