I was an early SpaceX employee, and my equity helped me pay off student loans, buy a home, and make risky career moves. This is a story of how a small space company in Los Angeles called SpaceX changed my life. I was in grad school at Stanford, finishing my master's and wanting to do a Ph.D. I had worked at NASA the previous summer, and one of the women I worked with was also a Stanford graduate, and she suggested I check out SpaceX. I applied and interviewed in the two weeks between flight three and flight four of Falcon 1. I interviewed with Elon Musk, and I knew I wanted to be on the founding team. My Master's ended at the end of 2008, and I began in 2009. I was on the propulsion analysis team, which was four or five people. Our responsibility was to design the first reusable rocket engine. I started there when I was 23 and left when I was 27. It was a little bit of naive immaturity, but I knew I wanted to start a company one day. SpaceX was growing like crazy, and I still love the company. The IPO is pretty cool. I'm on a bunch of text threads with guys who were there around the same time, and a couple of them are still there. It's cool to see how big it became. When I got there, they gave me an equity component. The HR woman who was going over it with me said, 'We think some day, in 10 or 15 years, this might be worth $250,000-300,000.' She said it might get me a nice down payment on a house in Los Angeles. We all laugh about it now, but it was true. The fastest way to become a millionaire in space is to start as a billionaire. Buybacks have been regular for the last 10 years. We've taken a little bit out every now and then. For example, we paid off my wife's student loans a number of years ago. We put down a down payment on a house. I joke that we did actually get a down payment on a house! She wasn't lying when she said that. It's a house that, on our normal salaries at startups, we wouldn't have been able to afford without that additional windfall. We also love traveling. We've got a seven-year-old and a one-year-old. We're going to go on slightly more adventurous trips because of it. My wife is also thinking of doing a larger career change that would come with a decent salary reduction, which she probably wouldn't have been able to do without something like SpaceX. Professionally, I've always been risky. If the majority of your net worth is tied up in a rocket company, you must be a risk-tolerant individual. Gambit is a VC-backed company. We've raised about $15 million to date, and there are a couple more investment rounds that are coming. The IPO puts you in a position where folks with a substantial amount of equity could be interested in becoming investors. At least ten of the people I worked with intimately have started their own company. There was a band that I played in with five SpaceX people; four of us started our own companies. I played guitar. That whole ecosystem can fund its own endeavors and each other. The quantum of capital that they can put in is not like your typical family and friends round. That's typically $20,000, $50,000, maybe $100,000. Here, that could be on the order of $1 million, maybe $2 million per check. You also become a bit of a mercenary, asking, 'I don't need a paycheck from what I'm going to go do, so what am I going to go do?' It's liberating. The equity also allows me to take a lower salary at my startup, so that I can go out and hire more people to make my company more successful.
