Founders Fund's Delian Asparouhov: Varda lands first publicly traded pharma client, Jared Isaacman unveils sweeping NASA space policies

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Well, we have Delian aspiruhov in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV Ultradom. Delian, how are you doing? Congratulations on this year's Hill and Valley. Give us the update. How are things going?

Um, you know, I think somehow best one yet. Sorry to miss you boys on this one.

Um, you got to miss out on my childhood, you know, basically wet dream. I got to be on stage with Jared Isaacman, which

I know.

So, yes. So, yeah. So, we had him on the show. Electric. Thank you for making the introduction. One of the best moments on TVP to date. Uh but what was the focus of your conversation with Jared Eisman?

Um I think what was exciting was uh today was the day that Jared decided to unveil I believe it was called the ignition uh set of policies. where is probably the broadest change to the um basically space policies in the United States in the past 20 years in particular about um a set of different projects. One um how to basically win the lunar space race. I think even on you know sort of prior TV appearances I've talked about how I would love to see NASA go from basically landing uh you know lander once every you know sort of year to instead like once every quarter once every month and send robots out you know ahead of the humans to go establish that infrastructure. Today Jared literally announced that that's basically the official policy. They literally starting in 2027 want to be landing robots on the moon every month and yeah it's going to be experimentation on paving and like you know energy and communications and things like that and like you know maybe even trying to use the regalith to like form some structures but like that type of testing is what's going to get us to the point that when the humans are there they already have a bunch of experiments that have you know sort of gone well. The second was around um he is uh calling it the uh SR1 um or SR freedom uh mission where they're going to build uh the first nuclearpowered uh spaceship uh to basically go from Earth to Mars. Uh and then when it gets to Mars uh they're basically going to open up the re-entry vehicle and fly four helicopters out onto Mars and land them, which is just like the coolest like sci-fi thing ever. And then the third area is basically igniting the lower Earth orbit economy obviously with my VAR I had on. super exciting to see administrator, you know, sort of prioritizing that. It's something that obviously people have talked about for a long time, but I think we're finally getting to ignite it. And then lastly, I think of this as sort of like round one of my, you know, sort of future NASA administrator interview. So, I think I passed. Uh, but my goal is, uh, Jared is the youngest administrator ever confirmed. I've got 10 years to make sure that I, uh, you know, beat him, take that record away.

That would be amazing. Uh yeah, the the the experimentation on the moon seems super important because NASA's great at doing science and the uneconomical things. And if we can go get some data on what makes sense on the moon, then industry can flow. Uh Elon put out this uh presentation about a mass driver on the moon. I think you've been talking about this for a while and it feels like this is years away, but anything we can do to derisk that to understand is that the thing that we should be doing with Starship and Optimus, then there will be more excitement. But I want to know from your perspective, there is a new like crazy thing going on in space, the mass driver on the moon. Does that make your job easier at Varta? Because you're like just doing biofarmaceuticals in space now.

Yeah. Um uh it does make it a lot easier in that if you think about what it takes to like make a drug in space. Um there's for sure some super complicated ingredients that we kind of have to bring from the ground.

There's a lot that we do up there though that like requires like water just to like flush out the bioreactor after each run. Right now, we just bring the water from Earth. As you can imagine, bringing water from Earth up on a rocket into a satellite, pretty damn expensive.

Mining water on the surface of the moon, sending that for free via like a, you know, mass driver directly to our station in lower Earth orbit. That's a heck of a lot cheaper. And so, I get really excited by some of these like lunar things in that it's not a place where you can do microgravity manufacturing cuz there is gravity on the moon. So, it kind of destroys the whole point. But there's a bunch of these like, you know, sort of simpler precursor things like, you know, the area that I think will take a long time is like we're not going to be making, I think, like solar panels or chips, you know, anytime soon on the moon. Like that stuff's pretty complicated. But like basic metal structures, water, you know, propellant, things like that. That'll actually, I think, like happen relatively near term. Like I don't think it'd be crazy to imagine that in like 2027 there's going to be like a rover that has a little like ice melting operation that then like turns that ice potentially into like, you know, liquid hydrogen that a future Starship might use for fuel, right? which by the way is like insane to say it's literally possible to make hydrogen fuel today that is not sci-fi.

Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Uh talk to me about like the the I I think uh it was really fun investigating the mass driver. Is it 15 years? Is it 10? Is it 20? Whatever. But it's just cool to hear someone 500 maybe. Who knows? But uh it's just cool to see an entrepreneur that everyone knows uh actually think in decades. And I'm wondering about first off like do you think about Varta on those terms? Do you think about like what will you be doing in 20 years? And then sort of in the advice for founders VC hat like there are risks to going out there on a ledge and standing on stage and saying I'm going to do this in 20 years and everyone's like yeah it's sci-fi he's trying to pump or whatever. uh talk to me about how you process thinking really long term and then actually sharing that with your investors, your community, your customers, the world, etc.

I say the thing that I'm proud about at Varta is like we have had the exact same vision from day one and we've basically hit the exact timeline that we always both promised like investors, our employee base, our customers, which has just been this generation.

You weren't aggressive enough.

You Travis Travis was saying you weren't aggressive enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, so you've been on track.

Yeah. Like our 20-y year vision was always we want to create the like first industrial outpost in lower Earth orbit. The reason being that we believe that it's going to be the invisible hand that lifts humanity off the surface of the planet, not just bigger rockets and exploration budgets, but we've taken a very pragmatic step-by-step approach, which isn't like let's go launch the industrial station from day one. It's like go do these sort of like, you know, proof point missions, start to get revenue flowing through the system, get pharmaceutical customers on board. I'm super excited to say can't announce the name today, but within the next week we are going to be announcing that VA now has a publicly traded pharmaceutical client where we're going to be regularly producing drugs for them in space and they're like a tens of billions, you know, massive, you know, sort of corporation. Let's bang the

congratulations. Bang, bang, bang. I mean, and I see that as like that's the starting line, you know what I mean? Like when you talk about like a 20 year long vision, it's like it's been 5 and a half years to get to this point. The whole point of starting Varta was that we would actually go make space drugs for drug developers. We're finally there. We've got the first handful of those, but like we still have a long ways to go. There are plenty of software companies that get 5 and a half years in. They've literally basically built the entire product and that's basically and they're coasting on it for the rest of their lives. We literally have just gone to the starting line. We have made our V0.5 of the product. We've laid out to all of our, you know, sort of employees and customers and investors what V1 through V20 look like and we know what they look like. It's just you can't just skip to V20. you have to go, you know, one step along the way. Next version, yeah, right now we've got these like satellites with pods, by the way, five feet to the side of me. We've got actually a flown re-entry vehicle here in Hill Valley, which is pretty cool. Um, next version is going to look like, you know, sort of mini space planes, bigger bioreactors, and so

cool. Very cool. Did we

a state actor offline? We're back. We're back. I was worried there. But yeah, Hill Valley Forum 2029. We're gonna have a full like space plane here with bioreactors on board.

I can't wait, Jordy.

Amazing.

Sorry.

Oh, no.

Cut you off. Uh what is the what else should people be tracking in space? Everyone's interested in space data centers. Everyone's interested in you know manufacturing stuff in space. Is there like a next next thing that you're starting to hear rumblings of either in the academic community or in the early stage startup? I've seen some stuff about like put solar panels up there, beam down the energy. It feels like it's pretty useful if you have the energy up there just do stuff up there. But what else are you interested in in exploring or at least like hearing a pitch for? I think um one macro trend that I point out and then I'll describe some pitches. The macro trend is like look when you look at the like market caps of all space companies before today that were like publicly traded

you're talking about maybe like you know 15 20 25 billion like total SpaceX is about to go out at anywhere from like a 1 to2 trillion valuation just the amount of capital flows that are about to happen that are both people obviously buying into SpaceX folks that are rotating from their SpaceX position to potentially nextG sort of application areas that they're interested in. this entire field is just going to have a like huge amount of attention, you know, basically brought to it. Yeah. And so, yeah, we're definitely paying attention to the next application areas. Um, I like to think of space in some ways like a highway where it's like, um, you know, when you first only had a handful of cars there, everybody kind of had to bring their own gas tank. Once you got thousands of cars up there, well, now all of a sudden you can start to invest into a gas station, right? And start to have supply chains around it. Heck, even like, you know, there's people starting to think about not just beaming solar power down to the Earth, but also beaming solar power to other satellites. So you start to think about like what do power utilities look like? You have folks like Bridget Menler and Northwood that are thinking about okay Starlink provides internet to everybody on the ground but like at Varta we don't have internet on our satellite. We get to talk to it like for you know 15 30 minutes once every three and a half hours. Bridget Menler is hopefully going to make it so that I have 24/7 internet basically in space and can talk to my satellite whenever. And so I think we think about these things as sort of like there's like layers of infrastructure and as you build up each layer reusable rockets, space factories, gas stations, ground stations, now you start to get to do the application layers on top of those. And so I look forward to I think one day you'll see Founders Fund lead around in a lunar ice mining operation. I don't think you know we're quite ready for that in terms of all the infrastructure, but like I also don't think that's like 10 years away. Like I would bet that in the next 5 years we lead a like 10 plus million dollar financing round into a lunar ice mining operation.

I can't wait for it. There's also a satellite bus company that you invested in. How are they doing?

Uh Endurosat, the CEOs, you know, sort of here. They're rocking and rolling. they like continue to somehow be profitable evid positive you know north of 2x revenue growth you know sort of year over year which by the way there's like literally no other space that's at their scale you know sort of doing that and so um yeah he's deeply impressive he's got this like huge 250,000t facility in Bulgaria obviously out of all places but it is like the most modern looks like Samsung electronics manufacturing line and he's literally pumping out like satellites left and right so they're rocking and rolling

that's amazing well uh congratulations on another successful hill in valley thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with Yeah. Thank you for putting on a suit.

Yes, you look fantastic. A very bipartisan suit. You know, we love Republicans. We love Democrats.

Do you have one one red one red shoe, one blue shoe or something? What you doing?

I just stick to all green today. You know, money, baby. Green is our signature color. Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye, boys. Bye.

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It uh it was a very cool experiment. Bill Peebles and the team congats crushed it. Uh broke the internet, but uh but the tool will live on. So I think it makes a lot of sense.

This red lighting is really getting dramatic. Red alert. I like it. The production team's been working overtime. So thank you to everyone there. Uh well, back to the debate about AI powered video. Somewhat Sora related. Kyle Harrison said people will call this the future of media, referring to the AI love island. Uh but that inclination needs to be aggressively disagreed with. Uh content creators will fill the market. Don't push to stop creation from trending towards slop. Push to lift the global conscious to be hungry for more than slop. And Olivia Moore from Andre Horwitz pushes back. Says going to respectfully disagree with Kyle on this one. There's a lot of AI slop out there, but this series has consistent