30. Choosing Your Own Adventure with Michael Madrid

Brock Briggs  0:01  

Hello and welcome to the Scuttlebutt podcast. Today, I'm speaking with Michael Madrid. Michael is an entrepreneur fueled by the love of space. He's currently working at a company called Starfish Space who is looking to solve one of the many problems facing the future in space and that’s Satellite Servicing. He's also the co-founder of Project Buna, a specialty coffee company focused around community based experiences. This is a conversation for self starters. Michael talks about the mindset entrepreneurs enter the world with and the ways of thinking required in order to endure long periods of loneliness. One of the many joys of pursuing independence in this world. 

We also talk about the right approach to take when starting your own company, understanding product market fit and a step further founder fit or finding the problem you're uniquely suited to solve. Michael is incredibly inspiring to talk to. It's these types of conversations that remind me of why I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm confident of the fact that service members both current and former are uniquely positioned to solve big problems. 

It's really only a matter of finding that problem you're suited for and staying the course long enough to reach it. A programming note related to this conversation specifically, I'm always on the hunt for interesting service members solving big problems. If you are one of those or know someone, I'd love if you sent me an email to connect and have you on the show. It's stories like these that remind our brothers and sisters of what's possible and encourage them to take that first big step. Send me an email at scuttlebuttpod1@gmail.com. And you can find that email in the show notes. For now, please enjoy this conversation with Michael Madrid.

Brock Briggs 

So you've done some podcasts before already, sounds like?

Michael Madrid  2:11  

It's been a little bit but yeah

Brock Briggs  2:14  

Okay. Well, dust the rust off, you know. Michael, thank you so much for being here today. I really get a lot of joy in talking to entrepreneurs and especially in kind of the military veteran space. That's super empowering for me, and I think empowering for others. Do you wanna give me a little bit of backstory about how you got interested in entrepreneurship? It seems like you've been involved in the space for quite a long time. 

Michael Madrid  2:45  

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for the invitation. It's great to be here. I think it probably goes back a long ways. I was recently, had my dad out to visit and we were talking about stories from growing up different little business ventures in the neighborhood and things like that. And not that traditional lawn mowing, but some other different business things I tried growing up. And then I remember at the Academy, I ran a little coffee shop out of our dorm room for a little while there with my roommate. And I think the bug has always been there. I really got exposed to it while I was still a midshipman. And a good mentor of mine was a founder of this nonprofit kind of community based group called the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum or DEF. 

And he told me to come out to this inaugural conference they were planning in Chicago. And now that I'm out of the Navy, I can say I think I probably snuck out of the Academy for this, but went out one weekend. It was a long weekend to Chicago. And they really were a grassroots type of organization. They didn't even know if that many people would come to this conference they were planning but it turned out a lot of people did. And a lot of people were thinking about the same kinds of problems and struggles and it was how do we bring the principles of entrepreneurship and innovation into the DOD and into an organization that's pretty notoriously a bureaucracy and not necessarily a super fast paced startup type environment. 

And so I got exposed I think at that point and really have been passionate about it, as far as I can remember. I think in the last couple of years, I had, you know, some unique opportunities to get into it while still in the Navy. I started a coffee company with another Navy colleague back in 2019, advised and did some, you know, unpaid work for a couple of startups and had some advisory roles for a cybersecurity startup last year. And so and continue to be involved with DEF and we can talk about that but continually getting exposed to that world made me all the more passionate for it. And now that I'm out of the Navy, working at a startup right now and hope to found a technology startup in the future. 

Brock Briggs

It seems like so many entrepreneur stories always start the same way. You know, they're like slinging lemonade on the corner or whatever it is. Was that something instilled from your parents? Are they in entrepreneurship or kind of encouraging that type of role? Or where do you think that that came from? 

Michael Madrid 

I don't know. I don't know that, necessarily. It was that my dad definitely works in business and as passionate about, you know, operations and about people and business processes, but not a traditional kind of startup per se, startup environment, per se. I think I'll probably just connect it to a broader theme that I hope to share the audience around the idea of building and just being passionate about building things. And you don't have to be at a startup to be that type of, to have that type of passion or engage in that type of activity. We could talk about intrapreneurship, which is the idea of having entrepreneurship in a big organization. And that can be in the DOD or in the government or that can be in a really big company. 

But really, I think it's, you know, when I do the personality assessments and those kinds of things have always consistently had a lot of the exploration or explore type of bent to my personality. And I think that there's, you know, some innate drive or to do things that are new and that haven't been done before and to do it with really great people and great teams. And so being a part of that as my passion for space, which we can also talk about, that's definitely a frontier that's being explored. But I think startups in general are a chance to build and create something out of nothing and create something that didn't exist before. And that's just inherently thrilling. 

Brock Briggs  6:34  

Yeah, yeah, that is, it is very thrilling. And I definitely do wanna kind of dive into the love of space. And we're gonna have plenty to talk about on that front. I want to kind of flesh out something that you're just saying there. And the idea of building something and kind of creating something. Is that something that not everybody gets, because I think that if you were to talk to people, everybody kind of has an idea of what the future might or ought to look like. And you know, maybe some people are taking action on that as well. I think that if you kind of take that a step further, a common thread to pull in entrepreneurs or serial entrepreneurs, especially is they're really going after the problems that they love. Or not problems, I guess, but things that they really love. And you can tell just from how they talk about it, even just what you've said so far, you can tell that this is like what your passion is.

Michael Madrid  7:39  

Absolutely! 

Brock Briggs  7:40  

How are you just either struck with that? Or you're not? 

Michael Madrid  7:46  

You know, I think there's a lot of things we can unpack there. I think that yes, the best stories of entrepreneurship are usually start with people who are so fascinated with solving a particular problem or maybe not even a particular problem. But you know, serving a particular audience or a particular group of people in the world who need a problem solved, or working in a particular industry and pushing some sort of boundary forward. And it's the type of thing that can be all consuming, and it keeps you up at night in it. And you need that I think you need that to power you through and drive you through, honestly, very tough times, much of the time. 

And so I hope that, you know, everybody has, you know, can find things that they are passionate about like that, you know. I don't think that, you know, startups are necessarily for everybody. We could talk about, you know, what may or may not be an indication that this is a world you wanna jump into. But I do hope that, you know, people can find and connect with that urge or that love for building something, because we need a lot of builders and we have a lot of problems to solve in the world. And we need people to work in real things and atoms and bits and to work in hard tech and deep tech and space and climate and bio, and there's all these things that, you know, we need to push forward. 

And so as much as I can I try to recruit people into this world and startups in entrepreneurship is one way to tackle it. And it's the way that I'm super excited about. But I think it takes, you know, probably there's this concept of like definite and indefinite optimist. I wish I heard Chris Powell talking about recently. He's the founder, CEO of Atrium. But I think originally it traces back to Peter Thiel's Zero To One and it's this idea that you can be a definite optimist where you think that the future will be better because of the actions you take. And you have this sense of agency. And then indefinite optimist would be, you know, you think the future will be better. And even if you don't know how, and there's sort of this sense that it's out of your control, but you think it will be better. 

And that comes from a pretty standard construct of like a two by two grid. So you can also imagine a definite and indefinite pessimist but to be I think entrepreneur and startups, you need to be both, right? You need to have the definite optimism where you think you can go out and take actions to make the world a better place. And then sometimes you also need to be an indefinite optimist, because lots of things will be out of your control. And a lot of the time, you will need to fall back on that, that even though you don't know exactly how the world will be better you believe that it can be.

Brock Briggs  10:24  

Do you find yourself identifying with both? Or would you place yourself solidly in one camp? 

Michael Madrid  10:30  

I think both. And I think you, I think it's great to be both. That was definitely the point Chris was making recently. And I definitely, I think, probably spent a lot of my mental space in the definite camp, where, you know, you have the ability or the agency to take actions and produce change or produce results in the world. But like I said, you know, that's a hard fight. And they're oftentimes where you will be at the mercy of randomness or at the mercy of things outside of your control. And I definitely know, I'm an optimist, that's always been true of either variety. 

Brock Briggs  11:06  

I think that that's the right way to live. I have one more kind of philosophical thought, I guess, for you, and then we can kind of talk about some of your history with coffee. I have really taken to entrepreneurship over the last couple of years. And I definitely put myself in that like one entrepreneur, kind of like trying to find out what I need to be working on sort of camp. And it's been a good thing, because I feel like, personally, my mind is being pushed to like, think about bigger and bigger problems and think about the things that I really care about. In some aspects, it's kind of a burden though because it's so if I find myself kind of like almost crushed under the weight of like these big problems. 

And another podcast that I listened to Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but he was talking about an idea with Jordan Peterson about entrepreneurs and how you're kind of if you already think a certain way, you're gonna kind of get there anyway. Like, it's kind of once you've like kind of unlocked that section in your brain, like the day to day like just holding yourself to the fire kind of almost hurts you and you're only gonna get maybe one or two more percent out of it. And you can't kind of like rush your destiny. Do you agree with that? 

Michael Madrid

That sounds like it could be right. It's definitely a world of the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. And so when things are working, there's no feeling like it. There's no greater thrill. And then there are absolutely long periods of grinding and you're pushing yourself perhaps like you said for that incremental, you know, 1 or 2 more percent. But you have to keep up the good fight. And I think that's where it helps if you are, like you said, you find that problem or that set of problems that you're really passionate about solving. 

And you know, in startups, there's something we call, you know, there's the widely known concept of product market fit. And there's also this concept of founder market fit and this idea that and you don't have to be a founder, but if you're working in a startup that's in a market, or solving a set of problems that you are innately suited for maybe because of your background, or your expertise, or because of the way you think, but also because of what you're passionate about. And then that might be the alpha that keeps you going in our times. 

Brock Briggs 

Absolutely. Well and I think that both of those concepts are big things talked about in the startup world. But that's just even if you aren't an entrepreneur of any sort, like that's still a question, I think that can be asked and isn't asked enough is like. Are you working on something or for a company that you even care about? And I think that most people probably aren't, which is kind of a bummer. It's gotta be done. But I think maybe that's that indefinite optimism like hopefully someday everybody can be working on something that they love, you know. 

Michael Madrid

Well I think like especially with regards to like, who are our audiences on this podcast, right? People who have served and I would encourage everyone that that sense of service or mission and contributing to something greater than yourself, you can absolutely still have that outside of the military. In fact, I think part of why I left was that I wanted more of that than I felt the military could actually offer me that the particular juncture and type of career that I was looking at. We can get into that, but I was looking to have, you know, the greatest amount of impacts on the frontier edge of the technology sector. 

And you can find that. You can find a mission driven company and like to your point, it doesn't have to be a startup but a company or industry that is solving big problems or shaping the future of this country or even of this species. And there are lots of examples of that. Like obviously I care a lot about space. But as I mentioned before, there's climate and there's biotech, and there's defense tech and Govtech. You can solve, you know, hard problems alongside great people and have fun doing it and have that sense of morality, I think a lot of us have been lucky to experience in the military. 

Brock Briggs 

Yeah, I think that that sense of like higher calling or whatever, you think that that is something that's unique to the military because there's this connection to service. And I'm serving this greater thing and especially joining so young. You're a Naval Academy grad. So I'm guessing that you went in very young and most people do. And you kind of, you get that sense of accomplishment and belonging and whatever. But that isn't something that's unique to military service, I don't think. 

Michael Madrid

It doesn’t have to be. 

Brock Briggs 

I like that answer. Let's get on. Let's talk about something that you and I think both cared deeply about. And that's coffee. You said that you started a little coffee shop in your dorm room. Is that? 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, that's an old memory. You know, we, for those who know the Naval Academy, you know, the dorm is Bancroft Hall. And, you know, there weren't a lot of coffee options on the yard to begin with. And there certainly weren't many. They were open late. And I liked coffee a lot and so my roommate. And we started brewing for folks who would come by our room in the late evening if you had to stay up late to study or pull an all-nighter. We were, I think we're known as a spa. You could come and get a caffeine fix and usually a pretty tasty one at that. But yeah, that wasn't, that's an old memory, a good one. And at the time, I definitely didn't think I would be having a coffee company all these years later. 

Brock Briggs 

Right. Yeah, I'd imagine that there's probably more than one all nighter at least one more. 

Michael Madrid

Yeah

Brock Briggs 

Were you guys doing the whole enchilada, like a specialty? Like espresso shots or just like a drip coffee out of your dorm room? 

Michael Madrid

I think we did. I think we did a lot of drip. But we did this specialty. I think we have seasonal drinks. 

Brock Briggs

Very cool

Michael Madrid

Experiment with different recipes

Brock Briggs

So many creative titles for drinks I'm sure you could come up with in that environment. Probably more colorful than not. So your coffee company that you have now, Project Buna. Is that right? 

Michael Madrid

That's it. Yeah! 

Brock Briggs

I'd love to hear a little bit about that. What was the initial kind of driver that you wanted to start that and kind of what is your offering now? 

Michael Madrid

Well, it's a good story. It starts on my second CTR in my second ship, which was the Donald Cook. And I met a guy there named Donny. Donny Brazeal and he was the EMO. I was the FCO which basically means you know, we were in the same department and we spent a lot of time together on watch. And I had been you know interested in coffee obviously, like we talked about. But my friends would say that my coffee cup was heavier than theirs based on all of the cream and sugar and syrup and other additives I would add, so I definitely wasn't, you know, a coffee nerd or connoisseur yet. 

But I did love you know, my wife and I. We would travel a lot. We would always go find like the local coffee shops and I was very interested in that and Donny had become so. Also he was prior enlisted ahead. So you know, coming up in the Navy, it's Maxwell House and it's burnt because it's been on the coffeepot for eight hours before you go watch that. You definitely hadn't had a good time. 

Brock Briggs

So bad

Michael Madrid

Yeah, so bad. But he had tried some really good coffee and kind of gotten interested. And so we started this informal group on the ship called the Coffee Buyers Club or the Donald Cook Coffee Buyers Club. And so we took the list of the top 100 registers in the states and divided up between us and each person ordered a bag of coffee from one or two of the folks on the list. So nothing crazy. But then we pulled it all together once it arrived at the ship out in Spain. And so we had this cabinet in the boardroom of the ship that at one point probably had 1000s of dollars worth of high end beans. And we brought on French presses and Chemex’s. 

And then we brought on a bird grinder and a gooseneck kettle and we brought on all this stuff. And it was a very social thing. We would get together, you know, as the wardrobe and try new coffee or try to bring new method, but Donny and I just really kept getting into it. And so he and I both ended up for shore duty in the DC area right after that ship tour. He got here a couple months before me. But when we were both here, we met one night for a beer and asked that quintessential question: Hey, do you wanna start a company? You wanna start a business? And I've 

Brock Briggs

Written on a bar napkin or something

Michael Madrid

I think there had to have been a bar napkin, but that sounds right. But yeah it was, that was that but we both wanted to start a business and just learn by doing it and coffee made a ton of sense because we were already really passionate about it, had spent a lot of time kind of self educating on coffee, and we still had a lot to learn. But that made a ton of sense. And so we would meet up I think, you know, maybe once a week for a beer or a coffee for a couple months, going through business ideas, doing our research, cycle through a ton of ideas. At one point, we would have been, you know, ready to drink cans of espresso or something like that. 

And we came around, again to the concept of being a coffee roaster and providing specialty coffee, whole bean coffee to consumers. Really around this idea that we had sort of started to get into the coffee industry. And once you're in, you talk about certain things. You're interested in certain things. There's, you know, a level of knowledge or familiarity with the industry, with the agriculture, with the preparation methods. And we just sort of had this revelation that there was still a ton of the population and a ton of our community that had not even had good coffee in the first place. 

And once you're in coffee, and you talk about third wave coffee, and all these industry trends, most of our major cities are pretty well saturated with, you know, third wave coffee shops and with really good coffee. But we, you know, maybe perhaps this is because coming from the Navy, we knew there were still a lot of people who had just never had that sort of gateway experience and realize that it could be a lot better than that burnt Maxwell House. And so we said, what if we built a brand and a company around helping people make that transition and discover that there's this whole world of coffee out there. You know, maybe we won't be the most specialty high end coffee for the absolute coffee nerds. 

But we can, you know, serve this sort of mission of making specially coffee more accessible and understandable and affordable and available. So we launched the company a couple days, short of six months after that first beer, which we were pretty, pretty proud of. It's kind of a tight cycle there. And there were a couple of things that allowed us to do that. I remember going and meeting with all the coffee roasters in the DMV area, going to their cuttings or their events and meeting them. And we struck a partnership with one that helped us get off the ground as a bootstrap company, and we can talk about what that means. But no debt, no outside investors, we each put in 50% of the upfront capital, and we're able to get started right away. 

And so we started with, as an E-commerce company with whole beans, specialty roasted coffee, a seasonal menu, usually about three different coffees that kind of represented a spectrum of flavors or types. And from different origins and, you know, walk the journey of the E-commerce brand, trying to do marketing, trying to do customer acquisition or fulfillment. One thing we were always very passionate about was that we physically handled our own product. It wasn't, you know, one of the Drop Shipping type of methodologies where you kind of outsource the product fulfillment, but we were in the roastery at least once a week. And we were handling the beans and we were talking to the customers and fulfilling orders. 

And I think especially in the early days, like really being physically in touch with the product and with the market was super important. But it's been about two and a half years since then. And there's lots of things we could talk about in there. But I'll just fast forward to today. The company has been profitable since you know, its first couple months. And we sort of were in a unique position where we were both active duty and we got the clearances, you know, from our legal and ethics department, etc. But it was sort of that perfect advantage of being able to experiment and invest everything back to the company, while being you know, very secure of, you know, financially and for our families, because we were, you know, still active duty and still had a day job. 

And so we were sort of limited in how much time and bandwidth we had to invest in the company. But we also weren't relying on it to put dinner on the table per se and so just reinvest everything back in. And we launched a new sort of product line or business unit each year. And 2020, we started doing something called Crowd Crafted Coffee, which I could explain. And then the year after that, we launched a barrel rested coffee brand called The Treachery of Coffee. And Donny has actually since moved to your area, your neck of the woods down in the Hampton Roads. And so he runs a set of operations down there, and I still run our operations here in DC.

Brock Briggs

Very cool. Yeah, I think that starting a business, especially maybe in the last couple of years, especially with the whole venture space really being kind of front and center of like entrepreneurship or whatever. It's such a sexy thing to just be like, oh, you know, you read these stories or tweet threads or whatever, like, oh, I quit my job and just went all in on this. And like, it just is like this really kind of just mythical thing. And it's kind of like, I don't know, entrepreneurship porn almost. 

For people that are interested in the space, it's like, man, I just wish I could do that or whatever. But the reality is, you know, many people start these companies while they have a full time job and you kind of need to if you're, you know, not gonna be making a bunch of money right off the bat. What did, I don't know if you can share. How much money did it take for you guys starting out and what were kind of some of those first initial steps towards like, making that first sale? 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, I'll go ahead and say and it's kind of ridiculous in retrospect. But we each put in 500 bucks up front. And then we did a second round of another 500, when we were doing our first like, paid marketing, paid advertising campaign. So our sum total is 1000 bucks each. 

Brock Briggs

Wow!

Michael Madrid

And so that's pretty cool in respect, especially, you know, thinking about the return on investment, so to speak for ourselves so far. And we were really fortunate to have a great outpouring of support from our friends and family and networks. In those early days, we started with a big sort of pre-sale type of activity to get a lot of interest and a lot of buzz when we first launched the company. And so our first you know, production days were really huge filling all these pre orders. And a lot of the growth in those first years was organic was word of mouth, or, you know, us doing our own types of marketing advertising work. 

We were doing all around social media. We would, you know, try to get our own media. We would go and pop up at events, and some of them are typical, like farmer's markets. But then also, we always were looking for sort of asymmetrical kind of bets. And so we would pop up at local gyms that we're throwing an event or a party or apartment complexes that we're having sort of a residence event. And so we would look for those niche areas to kind of get our name out there. And, everybody who was trying our coffee was really happy with it. So I think we were lucky that word of mouth was a pretty decent engine for those first, you know, sales that you were asking about. 

Brock Briggs

Would you say that you found your product market fit, like right away? Was it pretty instantaneous? Or did there take some kind of gears turning around and some fumbles early on to figure out what that looked like? 

Michael Madrid

I think the product, I think the market is fairly well understood for a coffee register as a business. So I think that was relatively straightforward. One of the things that, you know, was a tough nut to crack was, you know, how to stand out especially when it is such a saturated market both here in DC, specifically, but just in general. And so it was always, you know, an interesting problem to wrestle with, how do we develop a brand that stands out? How do we create a product that is memorable and has people come back? And we were, you know, excited to get our retention rate up pretty high in those early days for people who would reorder after their first order. There's this concept of doing things that don't scale, which, if I'm not mistaken comes from Paul Graham essay. 

And so there were lots of things we did in the early days that didn't scale, but that we were doing to experiments and to try and drive a good brand. And so we this, we actually still do but we don't know if we'll be able to do it for much longer. We hand signed each bag on its way out the door. And we would number the batches that we roasted and serialize number of the bags and try to make it very personal. We did a whole set of things that wouldn't necessarily scale. But as we tried to find, you know, ways to impart a unique set of value. And then I think maybe what would be a more interesting answer to your question is the two business lines that I mentioned that we started doing in the years following, those were a little bit more unique. 

And so there was that question of like, we're bringing a more unique product to market and can we find a market that fits and so I mentioned the barrel rested brand. And there we had sort of had this experience of barrel-rested coffee, being just very, very overly boozy most of the time. And I'm not sure if you've had any but these are beans that were arrested in a whiskey barrel, for example or bourbon barrel. And so when you open the bag, you know, the smell hits you and it can be kind of a fun smell, but then you brew it and the taste is very strong and somewhat overbearing, and so most of the time after your first couple sips, it's not necessarily enjoyable. And we also were finding that that heavy level of booziness was masking, you know, probably not exceptional grade color quality coffee beans. And they also, you know, are sold at exorbitant prices you know, because of all of the marketing that goes into it. 

So we sort of identified maybe this gap in the market for an actual, an artful or a nuanced kind of approach where you know, we would use the same single origin high quality beans from our regular menu and we would do a couple innovative things with the resting techniques in the barrels so that when you had the final product, you would taste the coffee and you would taste the barrel. And we've done well with bourbon with Lowri Ardbeg Scotch. Right now we have a maple syrup, Ex-Bourbon maple syrup barrel that we rested Vietnamese beans. And we've pursued sort of this to thread the needle, where there's something that sort of artful and if you're a coffee nerd, you enjoy it. And if you're a bourbon or whiskey nerd, you enjoy it. And that is something that I think we've seen some success with finding a gap in the market. 

Brock Briggs

I certainly think that there is some kind of gap there. You talked about being in maybe kind of a saturated market in DC, which that may be true but at the same time like, you're probably not gonna find a large market for like specialty coffee. And like, I don't know, maybe like some small farm town in the Midwest, like, those guys are just drinking Folgers. And they're gonna be doing that until they die like and the Navy boats aren't gonna be ordering anything other than Maxwell House. Although you should probably talk with the supply officer on a ship and maybe you could get your coffee onto a boat, that would really be something. 

Michael Madrid

Well, that we have, we have gotten a little bit of more than a little bit of traction with the crowd crafted coffee I mentioned. And that was, you know, this sort of came out of an exercise that I would highly recommend, which is around New Years. Donny and I, its business partners, we sat down and we said if we had to close up shop, for example, we knew he was gonna have to PCs or move down to Norfolk because he's still active duty. And so we said if he moves down to Norfolk in the spring of 21, and we end up just needing to close the business down that point, is there anything we'll regret not having tried? Is there any crazy idea that we had, that we wanted to get to and we'll regret not having gotten to it. 

And so crowd crafted was one of these and essentially what we do is we bring a group of people together, and walk them through the process of crafting a coffee actually from scratch. So we teach them about the coffee producing regions of the world. And we walk them through the different continents, different countries. We present them with different lots of coffee from farms, and we tell them about those farms and the producers there who raised the crop and then we let them discuss and ask questions and vote and they pick a coffee. And then we go and custom contract that coffee and bring it in. And we roasted a couple different ways. And we say here's what it tastes and smells like as a light roast as a medium as a dark. 

And we let them vote on the packaging and get to design custom labels. And so at the end of this, you know, one to two month process, they have a physical tangible product in their hand that they had a voice in creating that they got to be involved in the creative design process. They've learned about coffee. It's a fun, you know, team building morale kind of exercise to do as a group. And we found that anytime you have a group of people that would like to have some sort of swag or some sort of you see where I'm going with this. I’m some sort of like unit and memorabilia, this works very well. And so the beta for this idea we ran with our old wardroom, actually with the group from Donald Cook that we had that Buyers Club with. 

And since then we've had a couple of different Navy units just informally come together as a unit as a squadron for example, or a group of instructors and do their own craft. And they, you know, they'll get to make their very own coffee and they'll brew it at the office or they'll give it to friends and family around the holidays as a gift. And talk about product market fit with, that was something that we felt was truly unique that we were developing that we didn't see any other coffee resto are doing. And there's been a lot of interest. You know, we coming from the military could think about all the unit type dynamics where you would want to do something like that where it'd be fun. But teachers associations, nonprofits who do it as fundraisers. There's all these different types of environments where groups of people would like to come together and do something like that. So we've been excited to kind of roll that program out. 

Brock Briggs

That is super unique. And like you mentioned, a cool way to you're kind of not just have like this shared experience with other people that you maybe care about. But there's kind of a tangible product or even, you know, once you get through it with the beans, you have the bag and you can kind of put that up on your wall or you know, it's like a, like we have in the military just coins and patches and kind of memorabilia type items. 

Michael Madrid

Donny calls it the consumable command coin or challenge coins. 

Brock Briggs

I like that. Get them on a recurring revenue. 

Michael Madrid

There you go. 

Brock Briggs

I like that. There's probably a large section of people out there that and I would put myself in this camp that maybe have an idea and are looking to kind of just get it off the ground. Get that first kind of step taken. What or how would you encourage people to get that first step like get that just tiniest amount of momentum that kind of propels you to the next step? Because it seems like you can almost get stopped before you even start. You know, there's kind of waiting around in the idea pool and not like either committing to something or just being stuck. What do you think is something that people can do to kind of get that momentum back?

Michael Madrid

Yeah, I think some of the traditional wisdom would sort of center around doing some early experimentation and some early prototyping, but iteration to kind of understand if you really are identifying a problem that exists. And, you know, traditionally, if you're gonna start a business you're looking for a problem that you can provide a solution for, that people will pay for. And then eventually enough people will pay for that would support your business. And so that sort of tranche of advice usually comes from folks who are trying to help counter the or prevent you from falling into the trap of building a widget, or building a gadget that you think is really cool. 

And then you go out into the world and try to sell it, only to realize you've built something that you know, people don't really need or people like but they aren't willing to pay for. And so you have this idea, if you try to experiment and try to take something to market and see if you can get some traction, see if people are interested early, you kind of test some of those assumptions and hypotheses early. And I think if you engage in that type of activity, it might be inherently exciting and give you sort of that excitement to keep moving forward. And you'll certainly learn some things very quickly, hopefully, that either help you pivot and go in a different direction or that build conviction that you're really onto something. 

And I've had a couple of chances, you know, so far to have an idea and to do a little bit of something about it, and to feel that rush of conviction that there really is something here. And that you know, somebody should do it and why shouldn't it be, you know, me or us. And so, to do a little bit of that, really testing is helpful. And then the other thing I would say is the people you surround yourself with and you know, there are exercises that are recommended, you know, to vets who are transitioning. Or these ideas of the 1000 cups of coffee and these ideas that you should get out there and network and build your network. Definitely, you know, recommend doing it in a meaningful way. 

And there are people who you can surround yourself with who will encourage you, who will you know, be a sounding board, give you honest feedback, honest advice, who will hold you accountable if you have a good idea and they think you should do something about it. I have people like people like that in my life who messaged me and say, Hey! Why aren't you doing this yet? I really think you should do this. And so that's, you know, it's a wonderful bit of encouragement. 

And I think, especially for people who transition and are breaking into a world where they haven't been in yet, it's good to remember that people are actually fundamentally helpful. It's at least my own lived experience, especially in the startup space. It can be positive, some a lot of the time people genuinely do for the most part want to help. And so if you reach out to folks to get you know, another opinion on your idea, or to help build your conviction or to help you gain that momentum that you were talking about, I've been lucky to have people in my life who have done that for me.

Brock Briggs

Well, I think that you with Project Buna is such a good example of, you know, you put something together and you immediately go. You've got this huge pool of you know, military friends and family and say, hey, look, this is what we're doing. And they naturally want to kind of support you. They may not be like your target market, or whatever. But that's kind of where your kind of product market fit can kind of come in and certainly touch on the finding people that are interested in what you're doing and getting honest feedback. People talk about entrepreneurship as a lonely road, like it really is. And there's not a lot of people, sometimes it's easy to feel like, maybe you're misunderstood and you kind of don't really have anybody that is kind of on the same mental wavelength as you. 

Michael Madrid

It can be. It definitely can be, you know, I'm grateful to have done Project Buna with a co-founder. So there's always kinda two of us. And there have been plenty of times where I was down and he was up and he helped pull me up and there were times where he was down and I was up and I helped pull him up. And there of course been times when we were both down. 

Brock Briggs

Yeah

Michael Madrid

To go on that journey with someone is immensely valuable. And even if you don't necessarily have a co-founder to be around other people who are walking the same type of journey. You know whether or not they're necessarily in the same industry or working on the same set of problems, but people who are going through that journey and you find a lot of common struggles or a lot of common ways to relate. You know, you can lift each other up and keep each other going.

Brock Briggs

One last kind of closing comment slash question here on Project Buna, just kind of a fun exercise. I'm sure that you've gone through before but it'll be fun to do it for a recording. Five years from now, Project Buna is extremely successful much more so than now. What is it that you have done to get to that point? And what does that look like? And then if it's not successful, and it's failed by that point, what would have driven that? 

Michael Madrid

Excellent prompt. I think that, you know, I really would love to see a scale up this crowd crafted coffee offering because it does feel like something unique that we do in the market. And the groups that have done it so far have loved it so much. I would really love to see us scale that operation up. We have thought, you know, some about, you know in the tech world, in the startup world. You'll hear a lot of talks about vertical integration, vertically integrating, and we've, you know, thought a little bit about how we might bring some operations in house to make ourselves more effective. 

And so in five years, I would love it if we had our own, you know, custom packaging and printing shop. We just did. We just pulled that part of the supply chain in house, it'd be great. I think what has been a throttling function for our growth and development for the last two and a half years, and what may continue for a little bit longer is just our own personal bandwidth. You know, we've had people approach who were interested in investing, and we've had that conversation. But we've stayed as a bootstrap company because the capital actually was not the limiting factor at those junctures. 

It really was the bandwidth and the time and energy and effort we were able to devote, which was sort of a strange conundrum, you know. It’s strange to kind of know the things that you need to do, or at least have pretty good ideas about the things that you need to do for the business. You simply haven't gotten to them. And, you know, that's where I would say, like, kind of to one of your earlier points in our discussion. If you have something that you're high conviction about and this is what you wanna work on for your life, then yeah, you probably do quit and go all in on it. And, you know, for me, I feel that's the primary focus is the space sector and the technology sector for aerospace. 

But you know, I love this company and I love coffee. And so, you know, hopefully, what we're able to do to get ourselves to that five year mark is bring in some help in a variety of different ways we could do that. But I love to, you know, be involved in the business and strategy and operations. And I find myself sometimes running out of time to go to the roastery and do the actual production. So if we could scale our ability to do production, that'd be helpful. And so I think that might answer both of your questions, sort of the positive case in five years. And the negative case, sort of depends on how we approach it. 

Donny has come into the, he's actually already past 20. So I think he's retirement eligible now. And so there's a world in which, you know, he gets out of the Navy and he is able to focus on this full time. But as you can remember, I'm sure right now he's on a ship and that ship has thankfully not gone out under way on patrol. But it is definitely an all consuming type job. And so that leaves him fairly limited. And I'm gonna start up and that leaves me fairly limited. So that's our current struggle. 

Brock Briggs

I wanna kind of use that to segue into Starfish Space and your love of space. Is there a point coming possibly that you may have to choose between coffee and space? I know that that's a big, those are two kind of very different subjects. But do you foresee that happening? 

Michael Madrid

We'll see. We'll cross that bridge if we get to it. I definitely, you know, I wouldn't let, I would say I wouldn't let Project Buna limit what I'm able to contribute or do at Starfish. So to the extent that I can keep it as something on the side and you know, often what that means is nights and weekends but like I said it'd be great to sort of transition into a strategic and business side of Project Buna. And that would help balance or help with the hours it takes. 

But you know, one thing that I think is unique about the team in Starfish is there's actually a very high percentage. I don't recall the exact number. But it's very high of the team that has been founders, either of currently existing businesses or businesses in the past and a wide range to not just aerospace. And so that's something that I thought was really wonderful about the team when I first met them, and we'll see how long we can keep that ratio up. But I think it speaks to the types of personalities and mindsets of the folks on the team. And surprisingly though, I'm one of the only coffee drinkers and so 

Brock Briggs

That should have been a red flag for them. They got your priorities messed up. 

Michael Madrid

There's a few others who enjoy the beverage, but not as many as I might think. So I'm definitely the resident coffee nerd. That's true. 

Brock Briggs

Somebody's gotta do it. It's an important job. A little bit about your background, if I have this right. You studied Aeronautical Engineering. And I mean, you've got your “Occupy Mars” shirt on like your full fledged space. Do you wanna talk to us a little bit about just space and what you're doing at Starfish Space? And maybe I guess what the company is generally. 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, I'm extremely passionate about space. If you're listening to this, please consider coming and working in the space industry. So I'll just start with that. And I'll end with that too. So I did do aero at the academy. I grew up actually wanting to fly fighter jets. I grew up watching Top Gun and Top Gun 2 came out on the day I left the Navy. So that was sort of ironic or  full circle. 

Brock Briggs

Was the second one as good as the first? I still haven't seen it yet. 

Michael Madrid

Oh, it's good. You should go see it. It’s good. I'm willing to go on record and say I enjoyed it immensely. But yeah, so I studied aero. I ended up changing my mind going surface warfare, which is a different story we could talk about, but I was definitely passionate about aerospace. I did a little bit of aero and aerospace type work in the Navy. On my second ship, I was a, I mentioned that acronym earlier FCO or fire control officer basically, in charge of the air defense and ballistic missile defense missions of the ship. And so on that tour, we actually did shoot a missile out of space for a joint exercise with NATO and with MDA. 

And, you know, there was a physical ballistic missile target launched out of the Hebrides range, and we accomplished a kinetic intercept with one of our missiles shot off after the Donald Cook. And so there's a little bit of space stuff there. But you know, on this, my last year in the Navy was a pentagon staff job, kind of a program manager for enterprise workforce policy. Not necessarily technical in nature, not related to space. But I knew that when I got out, I wanted to go into tech broadly. I knew that and I knew it would be a sort of emerging tech or frontier tech type of space. And eventually I figured out it would be an early stage company instead of a big tech company. And we can talk about sort of the things that go into that. 

But I was looking at all these different technology sectors. And I mentioned the chance to support a good friend who was founding a cybersecurity company, specifically looking at industrial control systems. And that was fascinating. I had, you know, there's a lot of fascinating things happening in technology. But when I really started looking at the state of aerospace in the space sector right now, there was definitely sort of this aha moment where it'd be coming full circle, as I said in school. But that it is an amazing time right now and sort of inflection point or second golden age. Some people will call it for space. 

There's a lot of trends that are converging right now. Huge number of companies that are being started and funded to tackle different problems. And so it's an incredible time to jump into this industry. And I gained some very high conviction that this is where I wanted to go. I could talk about that all day. And about the strangle there. And you mentioned the shirt. Yeah, I've been a SpaceX fan for a long time, right? So this is definitely where I want to go. And there's a lot, you know, we could talk about how to think about the different tranches of work happening in space industry, different types of companies, different problems that are being solved. And I'll use Starfish to, as an example of one of them. Starfish, we are building something called the Otter Space Tug. It is a spacecraft that can do satellite servicing and orbit. 

And so it's both hardware and software. And the goal is to be able to, for example, do a life extension mission for geostationary satellites. These are really big communications or broadcast satellites up really high in geo that are very expensive. And their payloads often work much longer than they have fuel. And so they'll run out of propellant to sort of do station keeping maneuvers. But if a space tug, like the otter can come up and dock with it. We can provide those station keeping maneuvers much like an actual tug and keep that satellite in its orbital slot for another couple of years. 

And it will continue generating revenue and providing service to Earth for its owner. And in low Earth orbit, there are a variety of applications and the one that we sort of focus on is debris removal, specifically if you have you know a satellite that died and you're not able to get it down out of orbit yourself but it poses a risk to the rest of your constellation perhaps. It's a you know, it's a piece of debris or junk that your other satellites might hit or that you have to expend a lot of fuel to maneuver and avoid. Then it can be an on-call sort of service to come into your orbit that dead satellite for you and get it out of the way. 

At the end of the day, it's very versatile spacecraft. And the technologies that we're building in order to bring it to market are the sort of core technologies required for a whole range of activities. They're often referred to as either RPOD or OSAM and ISAM. And so RPOD stands for rendezvous proximity operations and docking. So you can think about two spacecraft coming together flying around each other and coming in to dock and physically connect. And then OSAM or ISAM can stand for on-orbit or in-space servicing assembly and manufacturing. 

So this whole suite of activities that we hope to see happening in orbit as we kind of commercialized or industrialized space, underpinning all of those sorts of activities, if you imagine, you know, factories and space. And you imagine things being ferried back and forth. Maybe we can recycle some of the debris in space and turn it into new things. At the core of all that you need to be able to safely and reliably and hopefully autonomously rendezvous conduct proximity operations and dock. And so the software and hardware, we're developing kind of fuel all of that feature. 

Brock Briggs

I have to imagine that the opportunity set for just space generally has got to be massive, right? I mean, there's so many things that we'll possibly need. Is there really any limit to the amount of kind of problems that need to be solved when it comes to space, I guess?

Michael Madrid

I'll say there's no limit. There's lots of problems to solve, come out and come out and help solve some of it. Yeah, that's it. There's a huge market. You know, there's studies and forecasts that describe, you know, six plus billion dollar markets for these types of activities. I will say, I think one of the other unique things about sStarfish that drew me to the team and their approach is a crystal clear focus though on the near term revenue generating opportunities in the real business case to build a sustainable company. 

And so a lot of the time, what you find is there's, you know, by the nature of it, there's a lot of hype. There's a lot of excitement. And there's, you know, we all love science fiction, and we all have great imaginations. And so it's easy to imagine that big future in that $6 billion future. But what's very wise from a business point of view is to understand what the near term opportunities are and to build something that will be sustainable in the sense that you'll actually be able to generate revenue in the near term. 

And it's not sort of predicated on other startups succeeding. It's not wholly predicated on a future market evolving that is, you know, still somewhat uncertain. And so those two missions I described and particularly the life extension of satellites in geostationary orbit, that is a near term well understood, actionable, sort of business case. And I thought that was really appealing about how the founders kind of approach building our company. 

Brock Briggs

Can you talk about where the company is from like a development standpoint? And are there people knocking at your guy's door for your product? Or, I guess where are you guys at in kind of the lifecycle of the otter?

Michael Madrid

Yeah, that's still pretty early stages, which is again, was a really attractive thing to me. Company's about two and a half years old at this point. Our two co-founders, their names are Trevor and Austin. They work together with Blue Origin, but left to start Starfish back in fall of 2019. And they went through a couple of accelerators and raised some pre seed money in the early days. They raised a seven and a quarter million seed round last year. The team is at about 20 people right now. 20 full time employees right now are growing and growing quickly. 

And in terms of development, product development milestones, we have some of our software already on orbit for testing already in space. Our hardware, our capture mechanism that we use to sort of dock and capture a client spacecraft that's inside a 900 pound vacuum chamber at our headquarters right now as we speak, going through some vacuum chamber testing. And what we're really excited about and a lot of companies focused on is a demo mission next year, demonstration mission in the first half of 2023. And so what we're doing there is we are incorporating those core technologies into a subscale prototype of the spacecraft. 

So it's a smaller version of the otter but it's obviously full scale, the software and the capture mechanism, that's full scale. And that all the components are under contract. We've got a launch lined up and that will fly to Leo, again in the first half of next year and do a docking, demonstrated docking between itself and another spacecraft. And so that's a really big milestone. First to prove out the technologies and second to kind of build confidence and trust with our potential future customers. And then from there, we hope you know, if things go well and when things go right, we hope to have the full scale otter available for commercial services in 2024. That's what we're building towards. 

Brock Briggs

That's quick. I had never heard of the company prior to stumbling across your profile, but that sounds like such an interesting problem. I feel like a lot of the headline news is it's all space travel, you know. That's what everybody cares about is like, oh, you know, I wanna go for this space trip or whatever. But I don't think that that's and maybe this is just from somebody who's not involved in the space industry like. These are the type of companies that aren't really making headlines. And they probably should be. 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, at a high level for those who are not yet space nerds that are listening, but hopefully will convert.

Brock Briggs

We're getting there. 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, we're getting there. Eventually, every company will be a space company. You can sort of think of the industry in a couple of broad buckets, there are a couple of different ways to analyze it, actually. But for the sake of conversation, you know, you have a lot of launch companies, a lot of rocket companies. SpaceX, obviously, as we've already mentioned. And so there's all the companies that are doing launch and that's, you know, obviously physically getting things up to up to space. 

And there are a couple of different differentiating factors between these rocket companies, but there are a lot of them. Then there are sort of the satellite segment. We have, you know, we've been doing satellites for a long time as species, but there are more and more developments in the technology every day. And so you have satellites that are used for communications, a lot of these broadband internet constellations. And then you also have a large set of satellites that are used for Earth observation. And they use all sorts of different payloads. It can be optical, synthetic aperture, radar, sar, thermal, and so those can be used for market intelligence, obviously. 

There's a lot of national security implications or applications, monitoring climate change, there's a lot that can go into that. And then there's, you know, the industries that feed that with all the subsystem components and integration, things like that. And then there is this tranche of companies, you know, focused on Satellite Servicing and sort of the logistics and infrastructure in orbit. And a big part of that is actually commercial space stations. We all know the ISS International Space Station, but there's no less than three major initiatives to build commercial private space stations in orbit. 

And then there's companies that sort of do orbital logistics, moving things from point A to point B. There's companies like Starfish who are going to service the satellites that are in orbit. There are tons of amazing ideas out there. And then, and then you get to the far out stuff that's fun to talk about too, asteroid mining and lunar settlements, and getting to Mars and things like that. So there's a wide variety of problems to work on and interesting hardware and software types of applications.

Brock Briggs

What do you think of Elon Musk? I don't think that we could talk about space without talking about him. I am a real big, like fanboy. And I think that his vision of the future as, may be a little bit out there at times but I think that we need people to think radically. And maybe he's just like, the most public example of somebody who thinks really radically. Do you have any particular opinions about him? 

Michael Madrid

A question I did not prepare for. He can be controversial and he's not a perfect human. But I followed him for a long time and followed SpaceX for a long time and Tesla. And I'm a fan of a lot of the work they've been able to do. And there are lots of things about how Elon approaches building these companies and his worldview and how he thinks about the future and what he can do to increase the odds that the future will be good. A lot of those things have been formative to my own worldview, and how I think about technology and building companies and approaching risk and big opportunities and then space specifically. So there's lots of books I could recommend about Elon or about SpaceX that I've read and enjoyed. 

I actually am working on a short piece with a friend from Twitter, Jeff Burke about this sort of really valuable second order, third order effect of SpaceX and of Tesla and these things that Elon has built, where we are seeing people eventually leave these companies and go become founders of their own startups, or go and be early employees at startups. And so there's this sort of proliferation of talent. You know, we are familiar with the term that Paypal mafia, perhaps there's a SpaceX mafia, or just this sense that the alumni kind of learn all of these, you know, incredibly valuable things at SpaceX or at Tesla about hard tech and deep tech about solving you know, big problems about process and risk and entrepreneurship. 

And then we're seeing them go start, you know, amazing companies in all sorts of fields and not a lot of them in space, but not just space, a lot of climate and a lot of just all across the board. And so one of the great effects of SpaceX and Elon, and we're not the first person to have first people to have this idea. But this is what we're thinking about writing. One of the greatest effects will be, you know, all the ripple throughout the rest of industry and the rest of the startup ecosystem. All these people who've been trained or had, you know, formative years had a mindset that was shaped by these experiences, going out and solving hard problems in the world. 

Brock Briggs

Yeah, there's certainly a large cohort of famous companies that we've heard of, and probably use every day that are founded by people that kind of spun out of other really great companies. And something about the, something in the water probably is getting them, feeling them into the next phase. You mentioned this and it was actually something that I had written down to ask. Where should people go to watch or read, if they're not already Space Fans? Where can they go to kind of like, learn more about the opportunity in space, a good movie, a good book, anything like that? 

Michael Madrid

There's so many, and I would say we'll put them on the show notes for there's probably too many put in the show notes, either. So here's the first thing I'll say is just find me and we'll talk and I'll send some things your way, if you're listening. I am on Twitter a lot. And this piece of advice I heard a long time ago, I think from Delian at Founders Fund was you. And this is sort of advice, good advice in general, if you wanna sort of immerse yourself in a new network or ecosystem that you haven't been a part of. 

It really is just go immerse yourself in that, put your place to yourself deliberately in the stream of commentary, of discussion, of headlines, and it will not make sense at first. It will be overwhelming and it will not all make sense. But it will start making sense sooner than you think. And as a very tactical example, on Twitter, there's probably, you know, 10 accounts that you could follow. And I think I've actually listed them out somewhere. And instantly, you know, overnight, your feed will fill with the things that are happening in the space industry and like smart analysis and headlines and coverage. And again, there'll be a lot of names you don't recognize on day one. 

But after a couple of weeks of that, you'd be surprised at how you start to get a sense of what's happening in the industry and how people think. I'll probably you know, I have some friends that will love me for this. I'll show their newsletter. There's a startup called Payload Space, that is building a sort of a new media company to cover the new space industry. And they do a fantastic daily newsletter on weekday mornings, that is quite literally the only email newsletter I actually read every day or actually read at all. 

Brock Briggs

And we hit newsletter, peak newsletter fatigue, probably six months ago or so, maybe even earlier. 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, this one is short, snappy, and very funny. And I do actually read it every day. And so there's a handful of hacks like that there are some great books, you know. There's a great book just to the right of me on my shelf by Eric Berger called Liftoff that covers the early days of SpaceX. And if you read that and you don't get goosebumps and you don't wanna jump into this, you know, I have questions for you. But you know again, if people want to get into this and I can give you a lot of other recommendations offline, so just find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. And I love bringing people into this world and I'm super passionate about it. 

Brock Briggs

Wanna kind of step back and compare. You've just kind of described two experiences that you've had and are currently working through one with a bootstrapped startup and one with a venture funded startup. Can you kind of compare and contrast that from your perspective? As to maybe the not just the pros and cons, but I guess pros and cons for you personally, as somebody who's either a founder or like an early employee, and then what that kind of tells you about the future of the company and the development and opportunities when capital is either very accessible or not as accessible?

Michael Madrid

Yeah, this is a great thing to talk about. Because I think in the broader discourse we often can conflate small businesses and startups. And it can sometimes be an important nuance or distinction to make. And so, you know, obviously, like a small business is what it sounds like. And I think the key differentiator between a startup and a small businesses is that startups are meant for scale. They, you know, they may start as they are a business and they may start small, but they you know, there are big ambitions of growing into a big company and being a startup is meant to be a temporary organization or a temporary phase, as your organization learns and develops and accelerates toward this bigger envision. 

And so I wouldn't articulate so much in terms of pros and cons, but just it depends, it's different contexts. They're both fantastic. And you know, this country is built on small businesses. And so I'm not saying that there's that one is better than the other or that there are pros and cons to the advantage of one or the other. It just depends on what you're looking at and thinking about doing. And you may hear people say, this is a venture scale idea, or this is a venture. You know, this is or isn't a venture type of opportunity, thinking about in terms of these big scales. 

And so, you know, it's safe to describe project units today as a small business, it very much is. It's Donny and I and we're based here in Virginia, and we're doing, you know, this the level of sales and work that we're doing. But I think I know that Donny and I have always approached it with the type of ambition and goal of growth that would be more characteristic of a startup. And then Starfish absolutely is, like we've talked about a venture backed startup, I think, at the end of the day, you know, capital markets, and whether money is easy or hard to come by. 

I very much like the refrain that I've seen from some smart thinkers that you know, that the time that we're recording this the market’s down. It's a bear market and, you know, there's panic and gnashing of teeth, but builders are going to build. And if you are a builder, it doesn't matter what the market is. You're going to go out and build the things that you see in the future that you think need to be realized. And it's always smart to operate with funding discipline. 

And it's true, sometimes there'll be easier to raise and sometimes it'll be harder. And there are schools of thought about you know why it's sometimes good to have tough capital markets because there's XY and Z reasons we could talk about why that might may or may not be a good thing. Obviously, it's tough when these companies have to do layoffs or companies will not be able to fundraise and keep going. But at the end of the day, that's not the thing to focus on. Focus on building, focus on creating value. 

Brock Briggs

Well and I think some forethought as well into kind of what it is that's important to you, and what it is that you're looking to accomplish is an important question to ask early on. Because, you know, like, like you're pointing out with bootstrapping versus a venture thing, understanding. And I appreciate that distinction that you made there between a venture scale startup and a small business. But you know, you may not need to go out and raise a bunch of money to just make a lifestyle business. 

Michael Madrid

Yes

Brock Briggs

Like, if you're just looking to, hey, I wanna start my own coffee company or do this or that. You know, you don't need to go out and raise $5 million to do that. You can do it with, you know, 1000 bucks. Go ahead. 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, you're exactly right. There are dangers of over capitalizing. And there are different types of capital out there that do or don't make sense based on your goals and the type of company or business and so. Like something you said earlier, you know, venture capital can be sexy. And it can be, you know, fun to read the headlines of these, you know, multimillion dollar series A's or to talk about fundraising. But that has a type of application, the dilutive capital, you're giving up equity and bringing investors on board. I mean, you have to answer to investors, that is a world and so it is important to think about before you jump into that, if that's what makes most sense, if that's what you need. And the answer won't always be yes. 

Brock Briggs

I want to kind of come back to Starfish for just a moment and talk about an opportunity for active duty slash veterans as a whole. You actually started out with them through a SkillBridge Program, correct? 

Michael Madrid

Yes, absolutely. That's a good topic. 

Brock Briggs

I would love to kind of dive into what kind of the lead up to the SkillBridge look like maybe talk about SkillBridges, just generally for anybody early on in active duty and maybe unfamiliar. And then we can kind of dive into how that came about. 

Michael Madrid

Yeah so if you're unfamiliar, SkillBridge is a DoD program that allows servicemembers to spend up to their last six months on active duty working at a private company, or working in a variety of settings, actually. But it's meant to, you know, accelerate or help with the transition process. You're still, you know, on active duty. You're still paid by, in my case, the Navy, for example, the private company that's hosting you is not paying your salary and is not paying the Navy anything either. But it's meant to, again, you know, give you an opportunity to learn some skills for the private sector. 

Maybe try a company and see if it's good match, and then there's no guarantee on either side, but if things go well, they're typically, you know, full time offer made at the end of a skill bridge. And if it's a good fit and people accept that and that's great. So it's a really good program. It can be hard to orchestrate, at least in my personal experience because you do end up. You know, in some cases, for example, gapping a billet for a couple months. When you go to do steel bridge full time, you're not working your military job. And so that might be difficult for your command to sustain, you know, having your absence and so that will just have to get hashed out on a sort of an individual basis. 

But if you can get the approval to do it, it's a fantastic opportunity. And it's also fantastic for the companies who are hosting transitioning service members. And so you know, if you're listening, if you're coming up to transition, I definitely recommend thinking about SkillBridge. If you are at a company that would like to, you know, host military service members for a couple of months at the end of their transition and have them working at the company full time and then have the option to hire them or not at the end, that's a pretty sweet deal. And it's actually pretty easy to join as a host, as a hosting company. 

And so specifically, I, you know, had the great fortune to meet Austin and co-founder Starfish through a mutual acquaintance in the fall of 21. We had a great conversation online. I thought what they were building was really fascinating and wanted to talk to Austin about it. And I think at the time, he was also looking to make some sort of non purely technical hires. And he invited me to go through the interview process. And at the end of that, we both felt like it was a good match. And I was still probably eight to nine months out from my separation from the Navy. And so we actually sort of have a conversation of how can we start working together sooner than that. And that's what led us to SkillBridge. 

And so I asked them if they wanted to join the program. And luckily, Austin was willing to do some paperwork. And I think relatively speaking was actually not that hard and didn't take too long for them as a company to be added to the list of authorized organizations. And then I set it up on my end, and I got about four to five months of SkillBridge. And so the other thing that I would tell transitioning service members or that as you tell them is within, you know, think of SkillBridge as a broader sort of structure or authority. And there are a variety of programs within it that sort of help provide additional structure and run these opportunities. 

And so you'll come across Hiring Our Heroes and a handful of other activities that utilize the SkillBridge Authority and run cohorts. And so they have a list of companies you could go work with and start dates and end dates. But maybe that timeline doesn't work for you, maybe you're not lined up against that timeline, or maybe there's a company that's not on that list, or a set of companies in an industry that you're curious about that aren't on that list. I tell people to choose their own adventure. 

And if you start working on this early enough, you might be able to partner with or ask a company to, like I did, ask a company to join the SkillBridge organization so that they can host you. Or you can, you know, if there's a company that's already authorized, you know, you can reach out to them directly and try to set it up. And so the possibilities are pretty broad. And I think it's a great program, if you can make it. 

Brock Briggs

I absolutely love that. That is like totally taking kind of control of your own future and refusing to kind of take no for an answer. And I'm sure that there's a lot of different companies that people can go and work for. But you're the first person I've talked to that said, hey, well, this company is not on the list, but we're gonna get them on the list. How important was that SkillBridge to your transition out?

Michael Madrid

I think, very important. When I was approaching it, I was thinking in terms of, you know, how can I make these months or this time period as valuable as possible? How can I use it to sort of accelerate the transition, accelerate, you know, learning across multiple different dimensions? And you know, what's sort of the best possible use of time. And beyond that, it was also a wonderful opportunity to, you know, check culture fit, which you know, can be sometimes hard to gauge in an interview process, or if you're trying to move, you know, move fast through your transition.

But we're getting to work with the team and embedded fully in the team for four to five months. I mean, no better way to get to meet everybody and understand the culture of the company they're building and I could be a part of that. And so, you know, came out of four or five months of SkillBridge, you know, having high conviction that this was a company, a team I wanted to be part of, and, you know, we discussed the official offer, you know, closer to about one month out from the transition. But yeah, I think it was, it played a big role. Absolutely. 

Brock Briggs

It sounds like you really we're actively preparing for your transition out, you know, at least I mean, you've met them and you are kind of like getting the ball rolling on that early. How do people prepare for that transition? I mean, you kind of knew that you wanted to do this. Maybe people are in a similar position, but don't know what they wanna do. What kinds of things have you learned that would maybe be widely applicable that people can do actively to prepare for that transition maybe even earlier on in their career? 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot we could talk about. But I think what's probably the highest leverage thing to do is to spend some time as early as possible now. You know, regardless of how much time you have before your transition. You know, thinking deeply about your values and the kinds of organizations and environments you thrive in. And when I say values, I don't mean necessarily, like honor, courage and commitment. And I don't mean that like, you know, integrity, like your core values. What I mean is, what are the characteristics or traits of a job, of a role, of a team, of an environment that make you thrive, that bring out the best in you? 

And conversely, what are the traits that great against your core and your personality? Because if you are operating in an environment where the values are counter to your own, you are in a drained state, and you just feel yourself being drained and you find yourself miserable or certainly that you're at least not getting satisfaction or fulfillment. But if you're in an environment where those things are aligned, it's a blast. And you're running fast and you feel like you can make a lot of contributions. And so there's, you know, again, a handful of resources that we can put in the notes. Or I can tell people, if they can act, one of them was the Commit Foundation. 

And I found it extremely valuable. And a good friend of mine, Jason recommended that I check it out. And there are a lot of transition organizations out there and a lot of opportunities. Commit uniquely was a very high touch program that offered me a lot of different things that we could, you know, I could share, but some of them were some coaching sessions and some content and some, you know, they have resume coaches. And they actually have workshops that all bring you out to work through different things. And it's an unparalleled network. 

But one of the things that made me aware of is that it was important to do a lot of early deep work on understanding your personality and your values and what you cared about. Because that sort of flowed out to everything else. And I think, before that I would go on, I would find an interesting company, and I would go on their jobs page, and I would look at the jobs. And I would say, yeah, I mean, I can see myself doing that. And you know, I think I line up against that set of qualifications. But I never quite felt it click.

And I think part of that is, you know, me specifically, I wasn't really looking for the type of role where there was a clear job description posted on the website. I was looking for a startup where you could shoot on almost everything. And you know, it's not really about lanes. It's about coming together as a small team and doing something crazy. So that was personally what I was looking for. But going through a lot of commits. A lot of the work with Commit helped me understand why that was the case and what types of environments and teams I would want to work in. 

And so that I think, it's easy to sort of skip past that or underestimate how important that is. But once you kind of crack that, it will help, I think everything else in that transition make a lot of sense. Because there are a lot of programs. There are a lot of companies. There's even a lot of places you could get SkillBridge and there's lots of different types of roles, but to understand truly the type of work that you want to do with your life. That's sort of the first step. 

Brock Briggs

Well, in the SkillBridge is such a good way to kind of trial out and say hey, am I cut out for this type of thing? Once you've kind of got that idea, you can really put that to the end of the fire and see what stands. Something that I tell people regularly. And something I'm kind of still learning and practicing myself is really you need to find out the quickest way to find out if you're right about something. 

Michael Madrid

Yes

Brock Briggs

And very you kind of were talking about this with Project Buna a little bit but like the lean startup mentality as such, kind of actually a life characteristic as well as like, find out try something that takes the least amount of resources that will give you the most amount of information about whether or not something is good for you. And people go off and get degrees and stuff that oh, I'd like this job or whatever. But they don't even know that they would like that as a career. You know, do you actually wanna be doing that? Have you talked to anybody that does that? Have you read a book on it? Any of that? 

Michael Madrid

Yeah, yeah, I think there's even a book with this as its title, but it's like design your life for prototype experiences. Find ways to trial different environments or different contexts and see like, literally just go and test it out. And like, quick anecdote is, while I was still on active duty last year, a good friend of mine who also used to be in the Navy. He was starting this cybersecurity company I mentioned earlier, and it's called Galvanic. And I was watching what he was doing. And I said, hey, this is, I love watching this. If there's anything I can do to help, you know, let me know and help in any small way. 

And he said, I don't even know if he was serious at the time, if he's listening to this off to tell me. He was like, hey, if you go get the paperwork done that says it's okay. Like, yeah, I'll give you some hours per week. And so, you know, two to three weeks later, I had some signed documentation from our legal department that said, you know, no conflicts of interest, they are not selling to the government, and you know, only in my free time and off hours, etc. And so I would go to this dingy little attic in Old Town, Virginia, Old Town, Alexandria, with him and his two co-founders. 

And I showed up on day 18 of the company and worked with them, did some work with them. And they were going through that precede raise. They were, they had already done about six or seven months worth of customer discovery, like really deep, hard work, understanding different parts of the industrial control system, you know, a cyber cybersecurity problem and different ways to approach it. And, you know, just spending a couple of months with them. And with my friend Josh was, you know, a huge signal that, yes, like startups and venture backed startups are absolutely what I'm passionate about. 

And this is something this is a road I want to travel many times and as the founder myself, and so if you can work out, you know, and I was very lucky to be able to do that. I was lucky that I got permission from the Navy. I was lucky that I had some free time. You know that things were definitely, I was very fortunate. But if you can similarly find ways to try all these little experiences, then it's a good way to build conviction about how you want to shape your life after the military. 

Brock Briggs

Trial your own adventure before you choose it, you know.

Michael Madrid

Yeah

Brock Briggs

You seem like somebody that's incredibly well read. I would love to hear about what you're reading or even watching a brain dump TV show, anything good that you're consuming right now. 

Michael Madrid

Oh, man. Okay. There's always a lot. I'll give you what's current and I'll give you a few favorites.

Brock Briggs

Okay

Michael Madrid

So I'm currently watching Peaky Blinders. 

Brock Briggs

Okay

Michael Madrid

Final season just rolled out on Netflix. I've also been watching Ozark and I'm a late comer to Ozark. I had tried it a little while back and hadn't gotten into it. And then after seeing a lot of recommendations from friends and honestly, folks on Twitter, I tried it again and I got into it. So here I am almost done with Ozark, way behind everybody else. But one of my favorite shows and this will be, you know, space centric is The Expanse based on a book series. As I understand it, you know, regarded as one of the science fiction or Space series that actually does a lot of work to stay close to what is true. 

And you know, in terms of Physics, what is possible and what might be accurate. And I hadn't really thought of this until someone shared it with me, but I believe they said, you know, one of the things that the writer was thinking about when he started this series was you know, there's we have a lot of writing and content about the the far off future and you think about, you know, worlds or storylines where the universe is already, you know, settled. And we're driving around at warp speed, you know, between different systems and things like that. But what is the path from here to there? How do we actually make that jump as a civilization? 

And so The Expanse is sort of more set in that sort of in between where there's plenty of technology that hasn't been invented yet. But we're really like colonizing this galaxy of the solar system for the first time and wrestling with all the politics and all the societal dynamics that go along with that. So The Expanse has always been a favorite in terms of reading. I recommend Cixin Liu and The Three-Body Problem series, but really everything he writes is incredible. And so this was a recommendation that came to me at a conference a couple years ago. And I read the first book and was absolutely hooked and now have a lot of his work on the shelf. 

And so that name is spelled CIXIN. And then last name Liu, is a Chinese science fiction writer, and The Three-Body Problem that specifically as a trilogy that is just mind bending and mind opening. And then he has a lot of anthologies of shorter stories and things like that. And so I'm a big sci-fi fan, especially like hard tech sci-fi, if you would call that a hard sci-fi. And so that's a book or series of books I'd love to share. 

Brock Briggs

You're not the first person to recommend that to me. So I think that I usually wait for something to be recommended maybe twice, three times and that just officially made it onto the list. So we'll get that on order. Michael, this has been fantastic. Where can people go to learn more about you? Project Buna? I know I'm gonna be ordering some coffee probably right after this. 

Michael Madrid

Ah much appreciate it. 

Brock Briggs

Anything you want a plug for where people can go to find you or learn more? 

Michael Madrid

Yeah. And I'll start with Starfish. If you're interested in that, it's starfishspace.com. Happy to talk a lot more about that and we are hiring. For coffee, it's projectbuna.com. Buna is spelled BUNA. Buna is the sort of the translation for the Amharic where the official language of Ethiopia, Amharic, the word for coffee is Buna. And we thought that that'd be a neat way to sort of tie in and respect the origin of coffee. It's widely understood that the origins of coffee are in Ethiopia. So we named the company that's a projectbuna.com And on all social media that handles just @projectbuna. I am on Twitter a lot. And so that would be the primary way to find me. The handles @buildingmadrid last name MADRID, building there if you haven't gotten that theme yet from our conversation. And if you're not on Twitter, then just find me on LinkedIn and always love to make time to chat with folks. 

Brock Briggs

Perfect! Michael, thank you so much!

Michael Madrid  1:26:23  

Thanks, Brock.