When you Are on the Moon you can Touch it!

When you Are on the Moon you can Touch it!

Sepatuads.com   April 16, 2011   Comment  

In school this week, my son learned about his senses.  In an effort to describe the difference between "sight" and "touch" the teacher used the moon as an example.  "The moon is something we can see but not touch," my son's teacher explained.  Incredulous, my son announced,

"When you are ON the moon you can touch it."

It is our job to create this attitude in a whole new generation - of course you can touch the moon when you are on it because your generation will travel to the moon  - not just the astronauts of this new generation, but you personally.  This new generation will go to the moon and use the moon's resources and learn from the moon and have fun on the moon.  The moon is REAL - let's go touch it!

Video of the Delta IV Heavy out of Vandenberg

Video of the Delta IV Heavy out of Vandenberg

Sepatuads.com   Januari 27, 2011   Comment  

On Jan 16, my son I watched the first launch of a Delta-IV Heavy from Vandenberg. I blogged about it. Here is the video I shot of the launch. We are off base at a public-viewing area. My video is hand-held…sorry for the shakes.

If you listen closely, near the end of the video, you can hear my four year-old saying,

“Wow, that rocket went so high, I can't even see it...COOL!”

For those that want to instill a love of space and rockets in a new generation of pioneers, there is nothing better than letting them experience space – launches are a great way to do that.

Interview with the Founder of The NewSpace Business Group

Interview with the Founder of The NewSpace Business Group

Sepatuads.com   November 28, 2010   Comment  

Are you a NewSpace organization? Could you use a group of MBA’s at your disposal to complete company projects without the cost of keeping them on your payroll? Meet the NewSpace Business Group. Think of the NewSpace Business Group as a network for nearly minted passionate, space-minded MBA’s that gain valuable business experience by solving real world problems for the NewSpace industry.

So listen up Altius, Armadillo, Bigelow, Masten, XCOR, SFF, and NLV Challenge competitors. The NewSpace Business Group is available to assist with your:

• Market Research
• Competitive Analysis
• Pricing Strategies
• Business Development Strategies
• Business Plan Development
• Internships
• and more.

Here is an interview with the group's founder, Jonathan Card (another interview in the series from Space Studies Institute’s Space Manufacturing Conference 14).


Q: Describe the NewSpace Business Group.

Jonathan Card: The NewSpace Business Group is a student group for business students, historically at the MBA level, interested in space businesses. We are focused on bridging the gap between the space technical community and other specialties in business that are necessary to run a successful company. One of the most destructive things that our current space policy has done is that NASA has frequently had to act as the intermediary between the space companies and the public. NASA's goal has been to foment experimentation and technical advances that were necessary in the 1960s to get humans to space.

Unfortunately, it's not enough for the technology to exist, but it has to exist in a network of social institutions that manufacture it, improve it, and operate it and there has been limited success in forming these kinds of institutions. This is very difficult for the government to do in a democracy, but NASA has recently begun to rectify this. COTS, SBIR, and, I think, Obama's recent NASA budget have started to bridge this gap.

The NewSpace Business Group is a setting for people in the space community to apply what they are learning in school to the industry that needs to learn it and so that business people that specialize in Marketing, in Finance, or in other aspects of private companies can learn from the NewSpace Business Group members on their campus that space is a viable place to do business and make a profit. It's less and less true that there's only one customer (NASA), that you need to get money (from NASA) before you can build anything, that you need to structure your company around government contracting and procedures.

Q: There are many other campus organizations. Why do you think you will be able to attract top business talent?

Jonathan Card: Because space is awesome, of course! It's space! Seriously, though, space is the New World of our time. It's a place that is unsettled and full of riches, from solutions to the energy crisis to new IP that can only be discovered in space. It is what will keep our civilization alive when an asteroid comes to finish us off like the dinosaurs before us, when nuclear weapons finally get out of hand, and when some unknowable tragedy strikes our ecosphere. In the end, money is the way for the people to show what's important to them; since space is important, there must be money to be made and the one to figure it out, gets to keep it. Fortunes were made, lost, and made over and over in the transatlantic trade and in the mines and forests of the New World. It will happen again in space.

Q: How do you see the NewSpace Business Group benefiting the NewSpace industry?

Jonathan Card: I would like to see NewSpace alumni forming the next cadre of managers and entrepreneurs of space-oriented companies. There are a lot of exciting companies coming of age right now and there are still holes to be filled in. Companies are just learning to talk to each other, how to do business with each other, and what institutions other industries created for themselves that space companies don't have because the unrelenting NASA-focus of the past has prevented a mature industry from emerging organically.

There are opportunities here that we haven't yet dreamt, and they are problems that MBAs and other business school students study full-time. We are the leaders that will make this industry make money and will make money elsewhere and bring it to NewSpace and so into the future.

Q: What you like the NewSpace Business Group to grow into over the next few years?

Jonathan Card: I'd like to make it into a national campus organization whose members know each other, work together, and can learn to rely on each other. I'd also like to make it into a group whose name becomes a credential; that, with the NewSpace Business Group on their resume, business school students can be assured of at least an interview with investors, companies, and other firms in the space industry.

Q: How can the New Space Industry benefit from your group’s efforts today? Internships? Projects? Other?

Jonathan Card: We have done projects for NewSpace groups already; we helped organize some of the events at the NewSpace 2009 conference (it was this experience that led to me becoming Treasurer of the Foundation) and we did an industry analysis of the future of the CubeSat industry for a Google Lunar X Prize competitor applying modern industry theories of innovation to see if we can establish some insight into the future growth of that technology. Portions of that paper are being prepared for public distribution; stay tuned to http://www.newspacebusiness.org/ or our LinkedIn group for more information on that, probably in December. We are always looking for projects and internships for our participants. The benefits are subtle and more widespread than you may think.

Last spring, we arranged a campus talk by Dannie Stamp, the former COO of Iridium (you can watch this on our YouTube channel); bringing such a luminary to campus was important to the school and it was my understanding at the end of the year that the school was interested in building stronger ties with him. This kind of relationship can be an important way for NewSpace to be highlighted in publications and to be used as examples in classrooms. That kind of publicity, in the context of other topics, is an important way to mainstream what we're doing.

Q: How can the New Space Industry help you become successful? Where do you need help to take the New Space Business Group to the next level?

Jonathan Card: I don't really want to focus on "how can the NewSpace industry help me". It's important to me that this remains a group that comes together to help the industry. Even when we are looking for projects, it's important that those projects are not just make-work for the sake of a good idea. If we can't help NewSpace, there's no point is being a group. If NewSpace can't help humanity, there's no point in it existing. I firmly believe that for-profit businesses, and those of us that believe in the power of the private sector, exist solely to serve others and be others-centered; usually our customers. I guess the most the NewSpace industry can do for us is to remember that we are there for them, and our members are a group of people that will know something about their industry, and if they need something done or they need good people, we are here to help.

Q: If anyone reading this wants to get involved how can they get a hold of you?


Jonathan Card: jcard@email.arizona.edu will still reach me, even though I've graduated, as will any message through the LinkedIn group. This has been dormant for the last few months, but we're revisiting it and will be re-opening it for new members soon. We welcome industry members, students, prospective students, or anyone else that wants to keep up on our activities.

Q: What should I have asked that I didn’t?

Jonathan Card: What are you doing now?

The NewSpace Business Group has alumni at Sargent Controls, which manufactures parts for military and civil space and airplane parts, and we have several members that have started their own businesses after business school.

I'm working at a cloud software company, B50 Data, making software for tracking maintenance for commercial shipping fleets. We're finishing our first round of sales calls without any venture or angel capital, and we're very optimistic. In addition to polishing the paper on CubeSats for publication, I'm finishing a paper overviewing international property law and various means of resolving complex IP legal situations, like those in cloud computing, other than expanding the power of the UN.

I've also started inquiring about re-establishing the Serviceable Spacecraft Committee on Standards at the AIAA so that we can start work on docking, berthing, and refueling standards that we need in order to have things like orbital fuel depots. I've heard so many people talk about how NASA needs to start establishing industry standards, but that's not NASA's job. It's our job, and it's time we did something about it. I've gotten some interest in it from some good people, but it's still an infant idea. I'm also heading up several committees for the Space Frontier Foundation, and I'm investigating some interesting possibilities that may lead to a NewSpace company. Nothing definite yet, but I'll keep you informed.

5 Ways to Make Government Contracting Cheaper

5 Ways to Make Government Contracting Cheaper

Sepatuads.com   Oktober 23, 2010   Comment  

Since 2000, the US has doubled the amount it spends on contracted work (from $200B to $500B). According to the GAO, of the current 95 major defense acquisitions projects, one in four is overrun. Cost growth from these programs is valued at $295B.  In August 2010, the US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, announced sweeping efforts to reduce Defense spending. He announced base closures, overhead reduction targets for all branches of the military, the eradication of Joint Forces Command, and many other targeted reductions.

Because of my day job as a contractor, I see first-hand (or have talked to others who have seen) the system of cause and effect that prevents the current government/contractor system from incentivizing and institutionalizing cost savings. Let me explain a few of the forces at play (very simplified) and then elaborate on potential solutions to reduce the cost of NASA (and DoD) programs.

Background - Contractor:

• Wall Street primarily judges large aerospace companies on three criteria. What are your “Orders”? What are your “Sales”? What is your “EBIT”?
• Orders are the value of new contracts or the value of contract extensions you have won during this period. Usually orders represent work you have not yet done – kind of like “backlog”.
• Sales equal the contract costs incurred plus profit you have earned during this period.  This is the value of your labor, your subs’ labor, any material you procured while executing your contract, and your expected profit for those costs.  Sales represents the volume of work you have completed.
• EBIT is Earnings Before Income Tax – this is the contract profit you earned during the period.
• With Wall Street quarterly judging large aerospace firms on Orders, Sales, and EBIT, companies insist their program managers meet quarterly Orders, Sales, and EBIT targets. 
• Cost Plus Award Fee (CPAF) is the preferred contract vehicle for development contracts. Using this contract vehicle, the Government agrees to pay the contractor for their costs. Then periodically during the contract (at least annually), the contractor’s performance for that period will be judged. The resulting Award Fee (AF) score will dictate how much of each period’s award fee pool the contractor keeps as profit (e.g. 90% AF score would earn the contractor 90% of the AF pool for that period). This contract vehicle allows for easy and straightforward government contract scope changes because the contractor’s costs are covered regardless. Customer intimacy tends to be high with this contract type since the contractor is incentivized to work closely with the government to solve even small problems – growing the work scope and contract size in the process.
• Most development programs are CPAF which means if contractors performing a CPAF contract identify a way to save the Government money, such savings would reduce the contract’s costs which will reduce the company’s Sales and maybe reduce their fee. Saving money on a CPAF contract would reduce at least one (and perhaps two) of the three primary ways Wall Street and upper management judge a program manager and in aggregate, judge the firm.

Background – Government:

• Future budgets for Government programs are often based on current year spending. If you are not spending enough as a Government program manager, the perception will be that you don’t need as much money the following year. This may or may not be true. But such reductions, when they do happen, are usually seen as a bad thing within the local government program office. 
• Politically, it is often better for a large development program to be "Low-Risk and High-Cost" rather than "High-Risk and Low-Cost." Cost saving ideas that increase risk to program execution will often be resisted. I am not saying government programs want to overrun. I am saying the penalties for programs that do not achieve their performance objectives are often greater than the penalties for overrunning programs. Dollar savings at the cost of increased program risk is rarely a gamble government program offices feel incentivized to make.
• As a general rule, corporate profit-making is perceived in a negative light by government personnel. Many within the government feel that profit is the waste in the system.  If profit can be removed, optimum efficiency will be found.  This mindset is changing, but slowly.

5 Ways to Make Government Contracting Cheaper:

1. Stop using Sales as a method for evaluating company performance. Change Wall Street’s focus from judging the industry on Orders, Sales, and EBIT to evaluating the industry on Orders and EBIT only. I believe the volume measurement that the "Sales" category provided is a faulty measurement anyway, and does not necessarily measure company health.  Orders and EBIT do measure company health.  Wall Street, focus on these. 
2. Split cost savings between contractor and government. There are examples of this type of contract clause in use today – although it is used sparingly. The concept is this: If contractors can identify a method to save money on a contract and then demonstrate those savings for XX months, then all future savings could be shared equitably between both parties.
3. Ensure that the government's portion of the cost savings can be kept locally either on the program itself for later enhancements or within the local command as a hedge against future risk. The Secretary of Defense is promising similar treatment of cost savings found in his recent DoD Overhead cost savings efforts. 
4. Change the perception within the Government that profit is bad. In fact, I argue, the profit motive will drive cost savings. The more you can link cost savings to higher profits the more interest you will garner from for-profit companies.
5. Increase the rigor of government proposal auditing. The government already evaluates development contract proposals. These auditors are very thorough, but if we start offering contractors the opportunity to make more money through cost savings, the cynics among us will complain, “if we make it possible for contractors to share in cost savings, contractors will simply pad their initial proposals and then a year later, identify their original proposal padding as 'cost savings'. Such behavior will not help the Government save money at all.” Cynic, I hear you! By ensuring optimum contract sizes to begin with, you will lessen the ability of the unscrupulous to cheat this new system I am proposing. Tough up-front proposal audits are key to maintaining a fair system that rewards heroes, not villains.

So here is a short story of my proposed system in action:

Acme Aerospace signs a Cost Plus Award Fee (CPAF) contract for $100M to provide ISR equipment maintenance on the XX military installation for the next five years. Although the company grumbled at the length and intensity of the government proposal audit, they knew this was a needed step. In the first year of the contract, Sally, the program manager, built a strong relationship with the local program office and organized her team to efficiently and effectively honor all aspects of their contract. At the beginning of her second year, working with her now experienced team, Sally identified several maintenance steps that could be streamlined to eliminate two people on her team, a savings of $200,000 per year ($100K each for easy math). Sally approached her counter-part in the government program office highlighting these potential savings. The government liked Sally’s ideas. The program office authorized Sally to make her staffing reductions as a part of a three-month trial.

After three months of monitored implementation, the staffing reductions had, in no way, adversely impacted maintenance efforts (consistent with Acme’s predictions).  The government program office agreed the probationary period was over. 3.75 years worth of cost savings (the amount of time left on the contract) equal to $750,000 ($200K x 3.75) were split evenly between Acme Aero and the US Government. Some within the government complained that Acme just got paid for “doing nothing”, but the program office reminded these critics that the government also got paid for “doing nothing” and encouraged all parties involved to find more savings of this type. Acme got a check for $375,000 which was recorded as EBIT and included in their upcoming quarterly update to Wall Street. Sally remembered a day when achieving such cost savings would have made her miss her quarterly Sales target, and was grateful for the changes in the way Wall Street measured her company and her program. The US Government directed the government’s portion of the savings ($375K) to be retained on the contract to be used to benefit the war fighter at the program office’s discretion which they used to perform a tech refresh on old ISR servers and equipment that were badly out of date.

If we do nothing…

Without such changes, you will continue to see the CPAF contract vehicle and Wall Street reporting requirements incentivizing contractors to spend every penny of each contract which will continue to leave no reserves in case of unexpected technical challenges which will continue to drive overruns.

But by making these changes (and other ideas not mentioned here), you unleash the power of commerce on the problem. I cannot think of more powerful tools than creativity and self-interest to help reduce contractual costs and save NASA and the DoD some money. 

MBA Monday - Week 8

MBA Monday - Week 8

Sepatuads.com   Maret 26, 2010   Comment  

Here is a quick list of Fred Wilson’s weekly posts called MBA Monday. Fred, the Venture Capitalist, takes a step back and connects the dots for those just developing their business acumen. 

Each post takes only a few minutes to peruse but includes hundreds of comments if you really want to understand the finer points. I have learned something new each week (usually from the debate that ensues after Fred completes his post). Here is a complete listing of Fred’s MBA Monday series.  Highly recommended!

The Balance Sheet
The Profit and Loss Statement
Accounting
Piercing The Corporate Veil
Corporate Entities
The Time Value Of Money
The Present Value Of Future Cash Flows
How To Calculate A Return On Investment

Both Sides of the Table

Both Sides of the Table

Sepatuads.com   Maret 22, 2010   Comment  

Both Sides of the Table is the exceptional blog from Mark Suster who has lived both the life of the entrepreneur and now the life of the venture capitalist. Mark has some great advice for both the Startup and those seeking to Raise Venture Capital. Just remember, his advice will be focused toward the high-tech entrepreneur who can bring his product to market for less than $10M (maybe much less). You aspiring Moon Base entrepreneurs should sift his advice appropriately. Below are links to some of my favorite posts.


Startup Advice includes 44 recommendations. A few of my favorites pieces of advice are :

• Flipping Burgers
• Most Common Early Mistakes
• Founders, Ownership and Prenuptials

Raising Venture Capital includes over 30 recommendations.  My favorites:

• Do You Really Even Need Venture Capital?
• A 6-Step Relationship Guide to VC 
• The “Triple Play” of VC Presentations

I love this quote from Mark:

“If you’re in the more likely situation that you can see how to get your business from $1 million this year to $3 million within 3 years and maybe $8 million within 5 years then VC may not be for you. VC’s aren’t looking for companies that are doing $15 million in sales in 8 years from their investment. In this scenario I advocate a combination of bank debt, venture debt, small equity raise ($1-2 million) from high net-worth individuals. These people would be thrilled with a company that could potentially double or triple their money. VC’s would not be happy with this outcome.”

For more on Angel Investing, here is own of my recent posts.