Why I Had to Go to the North Pole to Build My First Satellite

Rafel Jorda Siquier, an aerospace engineer from Mallorca, founded Open Cosmos in 2015. When they landed their first satellite contract, every university—including his own—refused to give them clean room access. So they went to the Arctic Circle to assemble their first satellite. Today, Open Cosmos has secured over €120 million in contracts in the last year alone, building satellites faster and cheaper than the industry thought possible—while actually turning a profit.In this episode, Rafael shares the unfiltered reality of building Europe's fastest-growing space company: how launching stratospheric balloons as a student led to an internship that showed him starting a space company was actually possible, why he walked away from a dream job at Airbus—Europe's largest aerospace company—to chase a purpose he couldn't ignore, and why Open Cosmos is now pushing AI capabilities directly into orbit.-----------------------------------------------Chapters:(00:00) Introduction(02:22) From Stratospheric Balloons to Life Purpose(09:55) "Is That Even Possible?" - Leaving Airbus at 25(17:06) Why I Chose Europe Over the US(21:11) How to Land Your First Contract in 3 Months(25:58) Convincing My CTO to Quit His Dream Job(28:53) Why We Assembled our First Satellite near the North Pole(43:40) Start Where You Have the Edge, Not Where VCs Tell You(46:40) How to Kill a Product That Doesn't Sell(48:28) COVID Hit. Everything Broke at Once.(53:21) How We Became Profitable During a Pandemic(55:04) How to Build Investor Trust(57:01) Companies Exist to Solve Problems, Not Raise Money(01:00:50) Get Traction, Sell, Then Raise(01:10:34) Advice to Young Founders-----------------------------------------------1) Naivety is your most powerful weapon as a founder - don't lose it: "Naivety is essential as a founder because few things are so empowering as naivety to take that first step."2) Companies exist to solve problems and earn money - not to raise it: "Companies are not out there to raise money. Companies should be out there to solve problems and to earn money on the back of solving those problems." Open Cosmos bootstrapped their first satellite and only raised when they needed to scale into a new product line.3) Find customers before you find investors: "Get traction, prove the market - sell and then raise. Guys, we did it with satellites. So if we've done it, bootstrapping a satellite, maybe there are multiple industries where this approach may also work."4) Don't start the company the sake of starting - do it for purpose and need: The entrepreneurial drive should come from seeing a real problem that nobody else is solving, not from wanting to be a founder.5) Start where you have the edge, not where the market tells you to start: "For me, it was very clear that we had to start where we had an edge. Our edge was we were good system engineers with good design capabilities with an understanding of supply chain, unit economics. So we started building probably the hardest bit - the hardware."6) Take care of yourself - the founder journey is a marathon: "Make sure you take better care of yourself because the journey as a founder, it's a marathon... Probably I could have achieved the same while not necessarily having to grind it so crazily."7) When everything breaks at once, speed of decision is everything: "In these situations, if you doubt during two weeks or three weeks or a month to take a decision, you've burned a lot of that extra time. So we took extremely prompt decisions." When COVID hit, Open Cosmos furloughed half the team within days and brought everyone back four months later.8) Pay your suppliers on time - especially when you can barely afford it: "During those COVID months, we didn't miss or delay a single payment to our suppliers because we didn't want that to be done to us. I know for a fact that many of the suppliers went through that period relying on our payment."