How did your experience at BCG, where you built and scaled new ventures for Fortune 500 companies, shape your approach to founding and leading K2 Space?
I started as a BCG intern in the summer of 2008, after my junior year in college, and started full-time as an associate in 2009. I did a few years in BCG Chicago, then a few years in BCG São Paulo, came back, went to INSEAD for business school, and then did about a year before leaving in 2018. BCG gave me the chance to build a pretty massive dataset.
The last part of my time there was specifically about setting up new companies within our Fortune 500 clients—getting the full zero-to-one experience. What I like to tell people is that starting your own company is really just a case of making a lot of decisions and building a dataset of which of those decisions are bad and which are good. Having that project experience at BCG allowed me to build that dataset really, really fast. With some of these ventures, we’d go from zero with, like, “Hey, this would be a really interesting avenue for growth for the client,” and then six months later, we’d actually have a digital business scaled up with an app and everything, launched in ten markets.
That kind of speed gave me the confidence to say, “Okay, I kind of understand what it takes to build new businesses within other companies.” The big jump was then going and doing that on my own.
How do you foster a culture at K2 Space that drives both breakthrough engineering and operational excellence?
What I always remember about BCG was the focus on intellectual rigor—being rigorous in our approach, pushing the bounds of what’s possible, questioning the status quo. Those were all incredibly important for building a company like K2.
We started this company on a contrarian bet: everyone in the industry was thinking the future for satellites was smaller, and we said no. Actually, the future for satellites is the opposite direction. They’re larger, and not just incrementally larger, but so large that the smallest satellite we’ve ever built and just launched is as large as the largest satellites that have ever existed.
What that takes is being able to go very quickly into a new industry, pull in all the data, pull in all the facts, and really come up with a differentiated perspective. Every engineer that joins K2 knows they should question requirements, think about how to do things differently, and operate in a world where they can propose creative solutions or new ideas—even if it’s completely new engineering. That’s the whole point. Curiosity and thinking differently aren’t just tolerated—they’re encouraged. That intellectual rigor is foundational to our culture.
Beyond that, the other thing that’s super important is off-the-charts agency. I still interview every single person who joins K2—I’m the last stage. We’re a smaller team for what we’re doing, and every single person has a big piece of the challenge they need to go solve. They know how they fit into the bigger picture, and we give them what they need to support them. But what that also takes is a massive degree of agency on their end—the mindset of “this is my challenge, I’m going to drive it". And I’m one of the tools in the toolkit they can use to help solve whatever problem. Our engineers are having so much fun—we just had this little celebration where a bunch of the team came up and said they were having the time of their lives at K2. I think it’s because we give people a lot of responsibility and a lot of support. There’s a lot of potential impact, and people love that.
What I like to tell people is that starting your own company is really just a case of making a lot of decisions and building a dataset of which of those decisions are bad and which are good.”
The space industry is becoming increasingly competitive and strategically important. How do you see the satellite and space infrastructure ecosystem evolving over the next decade, and how is K2 positioned to lead in that future?
We’re really lucky with our timing—to be building at this moment. With launch vehicle performance becoming what it is and becoming as frequent as it is, we effectively have the amount of mass to orbit going exponential. It’s as if we’ve just gone from the age of dial-up internet to broadband—and now there are all these businesses that are possible that weren’t before.
That’s how I equate what’s happening on the launch side. New launch vehicles coming online that are bigger, the frequency of launches going up. That means someone like K2 can come in and provide an infrastructure layer for the future of space. The reason we went bigger is that when we go bigger, we can deliver the maximum amount of power—and almost every application in space ties back to power. We can deliver the maximum amount of payload mass and deploy really large payloads from a volume perspective. We built our platform to be deployed in any orbit; it’s orbit agnostic, payload agnostic. It’s truly meant to be like the IBM mainframe of operating in space.
The level of space activity is going exponential, and the way I’ll evaluate K2’s success is, what percentage of total economic activity in space is built on a K2 satellite? The more we can be in the middle of everything, the more successful I think this company will be.
What I always remember about BCG was the focus on intellectual rigor—being rigorous in our approach, pushing the bounds of what’s possible, questioning the status quo. Those were all incredibly important for building a company like K2.”
At BCG, you advised a diverse set of clients on corporate strategy and large-scale transformations. How does stepping into the role of founder and CEO compare with advising senior executives—and what surprised you most about the shift?
Advising on the BCG side allowed me to build a dataset, but the dataset was quite skewed—skewed from a persistent, constant outsider-in perspective. That dataset didn’t have a lot of the details that go into the nitty-gritty of actually executing, which you don’t appreciate until you do it.
The big jump I made in 2018 was leaving BCG. I knew I wanted to do something early stage, so I just joined an early-stage machine learning company and said, “I’ll do whatever.” I ended up building out the commercial business, scaling it up, working with founders who had built a really cool technology, and we sold that in 2021. That was the precursor—it got me fully appreciating all the stuff I had no idea about. There’s just so much nitty-gritty, day-to-day running a business that you do not appreciate as a BCGer.
There’s this idea of meta-knowledge—your knowledge of the limits of your knowledge. I don’t think I even had knowledge of the limits of my knowledge at that point, until I jumped to the other side and was actually executing. I don’t think I became a truly decent operator until I had seen both sides: the advising from the outside and actually doing it from the inside. It’s such a different set of challenges that I look back and think, how was I perceived to be credible without having this set of experiences? If I could go back, I would have tried to get that experience a little bit sooner. It probably would have made me a better consultant too, and given me a better appreciation for how big that gap is when you’re just sitting in BCG.
Life is long, and it can be a winding journey—and you should just be okay with that.”
For aspiring entrepreneurs looking to enter frontier industries such as aerospace and defense, what advice would you offer? How should they prepare to navigate long development cycles, regulatory complexity, and high-stakes innovation?
The first thing I say is, the only way you can really start learning how to build a business is by going and building a business. The stuff I did at BCG was foundational. It helped me build a toolkit to a certain degree and get some of the dataset. But at the end of the day, I really learned how to build a business by starting to build one, failing, making my own mistakes, and learning. My big advice for people who want to do it is to start doing it—or set up scenarios where you can go execute or operate for a year, working on something and building something. It’s not until you actually go build that you understand how hard it is.
At BCG, we were very, very good at coming up with a perspective and a point of view externally—that’s kind of what made us special. But I don’t think we were as good at understanding how that fits into the context of an operating company. You just won’t appreciate that from within BCG.
I’d also say there’s a perspective some people have where they think, I did all of this at BCG, so now I should have this role at a startup. That’s probably the wrong mindset. When I left, I had that for a bit—and then I was like, actually, a lot of my skills are not right for an early-stage startup. The second I said, “I don’t care what my role is, I’m just going to go help build a company,” the opportunity that opened up was amazing.
You have to be ready for it to be a costly jump—a title that doesn’t match what you want, the realization that spending time with CEOs as a principal doesn’t matter in the startup world. You have to go in with the mindset that it’s going to be a bit of a reset. But if you accrue those experiences, you’ll end up being a phenomenal entrepreneur a few years later—with a combination of nuts-and-bolts execution at the most granular level, plus everything you learned at BCG.
Don’t force it. Don’t rush it. If you’re working hard at something, you’re just building your dataset and your toolkit—regardless of where it leads.”
Looking back at your journey—from BCG to INSEAD to startup leadership—are there any principles or leadership philosophies that continue to guide how you build teams and make decisions today?
The first is, life is long, and it can be a winding journey—and you should just be okay with that. When I left BCG in 2018, I spent all of my transition time talking to space companies because I wanted to join an early-stage one. At the end of that six-to-eight-month period, I came to the conclusion that there were a lot of interesting science projects but not that many interesting businesses, and nothing that really excited me. Rather than force it, I said, “Life is long, let me go build a set of experiences executing and building a business, and I’ll come back to space later.”
I met the founders of that machine learning company, built an awesome dataset, built credibility with investors, and came back to space after selling in 2021—this time with my brother, an ex-SpaceX engineer. The timing was perfect. Everyone says, “You guys had the perfect contrarian perspective at the perfect time.” We got a little lucky, but it was also about being patient. Don’t force it. Don’t rush it. If you’re working hard at something, you’re just building your dataset and your toolkit—regardless of where it leads.
The second is, there’s so much value in being curious and pursuing your passions. I’ve always been passionate about space. When I started in 2009, the only way to do something in space was to make a lot of money somewhere and then burn that pile of money working on it. Things changed over time, and I just kept staying plugged in. The timing eventually worked out. I very clearly left the safe path at a certain point in my career, chose to pursue things that excited me, and I’ve never regretted it.
And then in terms of decision-making, as you start building a company, you realize how important speed is. Speed of decision-making. You can always course-correct, but if you spend too much time overthinking something, you’re going to lose. Make a decision, understand the data that comes back, and move. Speed of decision-making becomes such an important part of building a company and moving fast.
