Originally right from when I was a young child, I wanted to be an astronaut, so that really, and I come from a fairly rural part of Canada. So I didn't have a lot of people to talk about what I wanted to be or any advice or support. But I finally found out that to be an astronaut, you needed to be either a fighter pilot or have a Ph.D. in some type of science. So knowing that the Canadian Air Force is very small, I thought my option. My best option was to get higher education and get a new engineering degree. So that's what I did and during my undergrad, I came across neural networks in the early mid eighties. And found that fascinating so I actually did my my undergrad senior project in neural networks and that took on a big interest in neural networks. And then I chose to do Ph.D. research in neural networks, hoping then that would kind of get the right at least academic qualifications to be an astronaut. And I went over to Scotland and started Ph.D. research in that area, and during that time, I applied to be an astronaut in Canadian Space Agency. Got a rejection letter. Still have it. But that kind of got me to rethink what I was going to do. And I went down to London, and at that time, finance was looking to hire a lot of PhD mathematicians, mathematicians, physicists, what we call now quant, people that know a lot of math and apply that to investing. So I got a job in that industry and did it for 30 years and absolutely loved it. I think it was a great consolation prize, other than being an astronaut. And then I got transferred to New York City, worked for JP Morgan and Credit Suisse and all the big banks. My last corporate job was at Bank of Montreal, where I was a CIO. Then, at that point, the space industry started to evolve, and you started to see companies like Elon Musk's company, Jeff Bezos got into it. And I said, okay, I'll finish my career in finance and then I'll figure a way to jump into the space industry, maybe similar to Jeff and Elon. Simple, just make a billion dollars, and then I'll do whatever I like in the face. That didn't happen exactly as I planned, but I did very well. And over the last couple of years I was planning to transition from my finance company to the space industry, and I thought I had two basic choices. One was to leverage my years of management skills and join the space company, or leverage my years of finance expertise and helped space companies from the financing. And since Ellen or Jeff didn't call me to be a be a manager, I thought maybe leveraging my finance expertise would be useful. And in fact, I ran into a couple of people, including Chris Hadfield, who is a Canadian astronaut who told me, there's a lot of great companies, a lot of great individuals, women, and men that really understand space technology and the space problems. But there's a lack of business experience and a lack of finance experience. And he advised me, maybe to enter the space industry, leveraging my finance expertise, and I thought that was a great idea. And then I ran and I started a company called 9.8 Capital, which is my company that provides an advisory to space companies, including strategic advice on their strategy on their corporate structure and their capital plan and then I ran into a young gentleman down in Florida, Erin Burnett, who is coming from a different industry, into space with a very different skill set than I have. He's very, he understands social media, understanding how to build communities and attract a lot of people to a certain mission or project and he identified, along with me in parallel that there is an early stage funding problem in the space industry. We believe that in kind of mid to late stage funding of space companies will probably well addressed by the traditional capital markets, including the incumbent VCs, private equity, and banks. But because the space industry is capital intensive and not only is a capital intensive, it needs a lot of capital really early, compared to Fintech, where you can bootstrap a fintech with $500,000 or a million dollars, and they do have a plan to get revenue in the space industry 500 or a million buys you two hoses in a well, it really doesn't get you far. You really need a five million early stage. So we identified a early financing problem in the space industry that no one was really addressing. And Elon Musk was kind of complaining that a lot of small companies were being extinguished because they weren't getting funding and thus innovation was getting distinguished. The big companies, like the billionaire companies, were doing well because they had capital. But young teams with crazy ideas that may turn into something wonderful weren't getting anywhere. We decided to start a company called Space Ventures, which, that's a big hat there and it's a platform leveraging new SEC federal rules, that allow a company to raise capital from the public. In the public of non, most noncredit investors, your everyday person, and a credit investor. And so we built this platform, it's gonna go live in December, January, and the two big different. And you probably know there's some platforms like that right now that are broad based markets like we thunder, republic, start engine because I think they're very good platform. The difference between our, there's two big difference between our platform. The first one, ours is industry specific, so we can add more value to the industry. We can curate the platform better. We can make sure that really good companies sit on the platform because we understand space. And the second more important difference is it's not just a technology platform. What we want to do is create a market. We want to bring a million or more space enthusiasts that are willing to invest in the platform, ready to pull the trigger on its pace. That's really what we wanted. I always tell a little scenario that I think is funny. Maybe you have to be an engineer to find it Funny. If you look at the public and think about facing criticism, and think about the IEE which is the Institute of Electrical Electronic Engineers. There's 450,000 people in that organization. How many space geeks you think there are in 450,000. I think there is 450,000. Yeah, it's just big big, big, big. In fact, we did an experiment on, we like to build our market through organic growth and recognition of our brand and and being in the media, and that will come. But we also believe that going through the social networks, like linked in like Instagram like Facebook, and paying to get to those clients is a viable way to build up the market as well. We ran some experiments thinking that it made the cost of acquiring a client or a member to the platform will be around $5. It actually turned out to be a dollar, that's how, how interesting, so you spend 10,000 dollars, you get 10,000 members to the platform. We believe it's scalable too. We believe that's quite scalable up into the millions of people, some platforms and magazines and media that quotes a population of enthusiasm of around 30 million people that are interested in space. And if you look at Robin Hood, one of the most active stocks is Virgin Galactic. There's a fascination with space and the other because we're between, we're creating a market for space companies to raise capital, but also for the public to invest in space companies. Social aspect and a social equality aspect to this as well, the original 1933 Securities Act protected the public from getting hurt by investments. So they said, if you're not a credit investor, you cannot invest in private equity. And that wasn't, some people may view that is inequality, but I think it was really, the driver was to protect the public, not to make the rich richer, which I think it has done. But the original objective was to protect the public. So, for all these years, your average working person didn't have access to the private equity market until the 2015 Jobs Act, which the Obama administration put in place that now allows a non-accredited investor to invest in private equity. And we believe there's a lot of people out there and you can, with space people, they would love to have a piece of space, but it just wasn't available to them. So another thing about space ventures. We don't think it displaces VC either. I think there's still a place for VC and private equity, but we're going to solve the very early stage problems of the VC or Capital within the space.

That's a great question and quite important for different stages of companies. When you look at early-stage companies, there's no financial performance to go on. There's no acquisition to go on. There are no market tests to go on, so there's not a lot of empirical evidence that's quantitative for someone to go on. And a lot of VCs wait until revenue or post-revenue because that gives them some quantitative ways that to measure. So when you're early, early stage, really, you think about the three things that are important team, market size, and product. And I say that in that order because that's the order I look at a team first. I just got off the phone with a young gentleman spinning out of blue origin that works directly with Jeff Bezos that is starting a new energy company that is building a nuclear power generator this big, and he had, all the science is improving yet, some of the basic scientists, but you really have to go, how big is the energy market for space. It's massive, right? It is massive. There are all kinds of problems with solar panels. There's all, you probably know some power sources that are on the Mars Landers now in particular, but they're not very efficient, So there's a massive market for people like 50 million, 100 million, 500 million. but then the team is the team credible and they have the right stuff. Have they done it before? Do they come from a company that has been successful? And the last thing is the product because a good team in a great market is going to figure out the product. I have to say the product, if they have a wonderful product right now, that's fantastic. But a really good team in a lucrative market is very interesting. And they're the type of things that we look for and in space ventures, because it's a curated platform, we believe the philosophy is, we don't want to choose the companies that go on the platform in the public, we want the public to decide. But we certainly want to avoid and exclude companies that we don't think are good and we always joke that, the first filter is we don't want Bernie Madoff and his brother on the platform starting a space company. So we eliminate those types of things and then we kind of look into basic things. Is it incorporated? How long has it been incorporated? All those basic things. And then we get to a higher level of due diligence. With technology, do they have any client traction? Things of that nature. So, yeah, we're looking at all those things.

Kind of aligns with what I just said. I like to hear a little bit about them and where they're coming from and what qualifies them as a individual to tackle a certain problem, If they have co founders that round out their skill or complement their skill set because you can't do everything well, so if you're a good salesperson, you need a good technical person, if you're a good technical person and you may need a good marketing person, so I like to see a nice round of team. I'd also like them to really understand their market. What are they selling? Where are they selling it to? The space industry probably has, is suffering a little bit from the product first. All these engineers and scientists have this shiny object, and it's super cool, but they don't know what to do with it. I usually start the opposite way. Look for a problem in an industry and then really understand how you're gonna market it, how you're going to sell it. How big is the market that you're selling it into? I'd like to see teams that really understand that, and then, if it's a disruptive technology that can be protected and not replicated by another firm easily, that's very interesting