Hi, I'm Tim Ellis, CEO and co-founder Relativity Space. And we are building the world's first robotically 3D printed
rocket launch vehicle. You can probably recognize the biggest names in space by
just using their last names. Bezos, Musk, Branson. But you might want to keep an eye on an up-and-comer: Ellis. In order to join Elon Musk's SpaceX in the race to Mars, Tim
Ellis' Relativity Space is building the world's largest 3D printed rocket. And if that sounds crazy, just wait. Thanks for taking out some time. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Of course. Excited to chat with you and share more about our
story. You've got a wild story. Tim spent five years working at Blue Origin before leaving
to start the first 3D printed rocket company with a $500,000 check from Mark Cuban. A few minutes after cold emailing Mark Cuban, we had a half
a million dollar commitment. But this isn't some hypothetical, futuristic idea. Relativity Space currently has two launchpads, one at Cape
Canaveral and another at Vandenberg Air Force Base. And at 31, this dude is just getting started. The three numbers to look out for in this story are
$100,000, the amount Tim had in student loans when he started Relativity Space. 1.4 million, the amount of square foot the company currently
holds. And $1.3 billion, Relativity Space's total outside
investment. Here's how a kid's love of Legos turned into a multi-billion
dollar startup. For CNBC Make It. I'm Nate Skid. This is Founder Effect. Tim grew up in Plano, Texas, where he says all the houses
look the same. He was hyper obsessed with Legos. I actually played Legos so much that my thumb on my right
finger is permanently bent backwards, literally from pressing the pieces together so much. In high school, he did the least amount of work needed to
get top grades. For him, it wasn't an issue. Tim says he got a near perfect score on the ACT, even though
he forgot his calculator. I literally had to remember how to do long division and
trigonometry by hand on the fly during the test. So STEM always came easy to Tim, but his passion was in
writing. In 2008, he landed at USC when a friend named Jordan Noone
invited him to join a student-led group called Rocket Lab. After witnessing a rocket launch in person, he was hooked. It looks like looking at a star. Like, video never captures what rockets are like in person. And the vibrations are so crazy that it makes the air soupy
and thick. Tim and his teammates launched dozens of rockets, eventually
leading him to an internship at a scrappy startup in the middle of the Mojave Desert called Masten Space Systems,
which was the first company to turn a rocket engine off and then relight it while in flight. The engine turned off. We all held our breath and then 2 seconds later, the engine
turned back on. It kind of like caught itself in midair and then came back
and landed and everyone was freaking out. Everyone being all six people. Jordan headed to SpaceX while Tim did three
back-to-back-to-back internships at Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. He made a name for himself by taking on incredibly ambitious
projects. Tim was easily the youngest and least educated intern at the
company. How much does an intern at Blue Origin make? I think it's, like, free housing and maybe a few thousand
dollars a month. It was, like, fairly well paid. It wasn't. It wasn't crazy. But yeah, it wasn't a lot of money. What was the interview process like for an internship at
Blue Origin? They would ask a lot of riddles and kind of... It was, it was almost like a... Almost felt like a Y-Combinator interview honestly where
just every... I think there were multiple people on the phone and it would
be a technical question and then a space history question. Like, how many people walked on the moon? And then, what's the lift over drag of an arrow re-entry
capsule? And how many golf balls can you put in a swimming pool? Like, it was just a bunch of topics rapid fire. It didn't take long for Tim to recognize the potential of 3D
printing on an industrial scale. I did the first ever metal 3D printing at Blue Origin
throughout these internships because it was physically the only possible way to shrink the manufacturing times and get
costs low enough to fit within an intern project budget. He thought it was a no brainer, that it was both faster,
cheaper and performed just as well as traditional parts. And so that was after my third internship. But then when I came back and worked there full time and
started six months later, after graduating with my master's, no one had done anything with it. His primary role was designing the rocket end line, thrust
chamber and reaction control system for the new Shepard capsule. But he couldn't stop thinking about the unlocked potential
of 3D printing. I mean, I remember as basically nine months of being told, "No, I'm wasting my time." You know, I was told no by my manager and my manager's
manager that they were never going to do 3D printing, but I still kept at it. And I was refining my numbers about how much cheaper and
faster it was going to be. And then ultimately, I remember getting a very brief meeting
with Jeff and he essentially, like in the room was like, "Tim, I'm one of the richest people in the world. Of course we can do this." And I was like, "Yeah, that's
what I've been saying." And so then we, I bought the first metal 3D printer at Blue
Origin and then started taking off the 3D printing division. Did you learn anything specifically from working closely
with Jeff that made a big impact on you? Yeah. I mean, I feel like I'm still, still learning from him. Like, it's great to set a North Star that fundamentally you
don't think people are ever going to want rockets slower with more parts, with more manual labor and
less automation? Like, there's no world, whether it's one year,
ten years or 100 years, where anyone's ever going to say, "You know what? I actually want more fixed tooling and less flexibility. And I want it to take longer and cost more and have more
parts and more complexity." So it almost sounds kind of obvious, but it's not so obvious
when you're really thinking about innovation. Tim saw the impact 3D printing could have on an industry
saddled with millions of square feet, dedicated to antiquated tooling and a cumbersome supply chain. If he could drastically reduce the price of building
rockets, the cost of space travel would decrease as well. There's just these giant factories full of fixed tooling,
building products one at a time by hand with hundreds of thousands to millions of individual
piece parts with almost no automation. And that paradigm is just as true 60 years ago as it is
today. Tim thought if we as a species are ever going to get to
Mars, we need to develop an intelligent 3D printer capable of everything from building rockets on Earth to servicing
them on Mars. As I realized, you know, for that future to exist, someone
was going to have to found a company somewhere that built an industrial base on Mars. I felt 3D printing was really inevitable. Like, you need a small, lightweight factory that you can
launch on a rocket to another planet that can build a wide range of products with very little human
involvement. And so I thought all of those North Star parameters
described an intelligent 3D printer. And then I just thought, "Well, if we get started today,
maybe we could be the person to start this company." Tim left Blue Origin in December 2015. He knew some combination of 3D printing and artificial
intelligence was the future of space exploration, and at just 25 years old, he was willing to go all in. So he got together with his old friend Jordan, who had
recently left SpaceX, and the pair began plotting their next mission. And then we very quickly met up at a Starbucks, and I kind
of wrote on the back of a Starbucks napkin this idea of 3D printing being inevitable for
existing on Mars. And that 3D printing really was an automation technology and
it was about part count reduction, fix tooling reduction, speeding up the rate of progress and
learning. Because the faster you can 3D print, then of course, the
more you can build a product, test it, improve it, and keep iterating. And so I just kind of drew out this
diagram linking everything together at the high level. But there was only one problem. They were flat broke. In fact, Tim had about $100,000 in
student loan debt. How much did you guys have saved up to, like, invest in this
company? From an investment standpoint. Like I mentioned, I was 25, Jordan was 23. I had over $100,000 of student debt. That was my one money mistake was doing a master's and I did
not have a scholarship for the masters. And I didn't do a TA'ship because I was so hooked
on Rocket Lab. I'm from Texas. I had heard from one friend at USC that Mark Cuban actually
responds to cold emails. And so I just, as the very first email I ever
wrote with my Relativity Space email address, wrote Mark Cuban a cold email. I actually guessed his email. So I put 20 different permutations of Mark.Cuban@gmail.com. MCuban, you know, Mark@Hotmail.com. And then I had the message subject line of: Space is sexy 3D
printing an entire rocket. And then I laid out I'm from Plano. I worked at Blue Origin. Jordan north at SpaceX. Here's what our experience is. And then 5 minutes later he said, "Well, what do you want
from me?" We're raising half a million dollars for our seed round. You know, I was making numbers up. Like, I didn't really know at the time what we were doing
because we were so new to it, you know? I said, "Well, hey, do you want to put in $100,000? We're raising half a million dollars." And then he replied back probably 30 seconds later and said, "You know, I'll actually do the entire thing. I'll give you the full half a million dollars." And so just like that, you know, kind of a few... A few minutes after cold emailing Mark Cuban, we had a half
a million dollar commitment. And I haven't told Mark this since, but he was trying to
wire us money to a bank account that didn't exist because we didn't even have a company yet. How long from writing your business plan on the back of a
receipt to you guess Mark Cuban's email? Probably like a week, maybe a few days. I was technically, yeah, I was at my uncle's funeral when I
was writing the cold e-mails to Mark Cuban. So it was like, yeah, it was a very kind of crazy time. Why didn't you ask Bezos for that first seed funding? Why did you go to Cuban? Maybe I was just nervous at the time that if I asked him for
the funding that... I didn't know. I was working there. I just left. And, you know, I left on good terms and it all
seemed fine. But I don't know. It's a good question. I really hadn't even thought about
that. At the same time, Tim and Jordan were accepted into Y
Combinator, which meant they had three months to prove they could build the world's largest 3D printer and use it to
build a rocket. They made it. Just barely. And so I remember Jordan... While I was rehearsing the pitch for demo day, Jordan, my
co-founder, was in the lobby fighting to file the provisional patent and finish the
patent paperwork on the day of demo day as we had just gotten these parts in. And then, yeah, we filed it, did the pitch. I think we were the last presentation of the day. So we pitched off the record and anchored it because we had
some ridiculous number of customer contracts. Relativity Space sells room on the rockets it launches into
orbit to companies like NASA, Telesat and the DOD. The same as what SpaceX does and other private launch
companies. And so we have a launch site at Cape Canaveral. We also have one at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Ellis says Terran 1 is the most pre-sold rocket in history. So I think it's definitely showing a lot of the customer
confidence in what we're doing. How much have you totally raised? How much square footage do you have? How many employees do you have now? So we've raised a little over $1.3 billion to date. We've got 700 employees now, so we're at 100 kind of right
when COVID started. So we've gone from 100 to 700 over approximately the last
two and a half years. So pretty fast scaling. As far as square footage, so we now have, I guess like 1.4
million square feet. In that ballpark. Netflix is actually the lease before us. And so you can actually see this building. I just learned this. You can see this building in Space
Force, the TV show, which is kind of hilarious that... Yeah, now we're going to build the
world's biggest 3D printed rocket in this new facility. Relativity Space is currently valued at just over $4.2
billion, making it the second most valuable space company. How do you run a company of 700 people though? I'm now realizing a lot of the things that I got made fun of
for growing up, whether it was researching every topic under the sun and following all
these threads and being hyper curious and picking up and pattern matching information. All of those skills have let me scale and run Relativity. We've been also very fortunate to bring on a lot of people
that led the first generation of private space companies. So we have the guy that led the entire Dragon
capsule program from the first person on the program to leading the entire thing over his 13 year career at Space
X. We have the person that led all of production launch. 3000 person team for the whole company. One of the CTOs and co-founders is an advisor helping us
design our next generation rocket engines. We've got, like, quite a lot of very experienced
people. I think across our whole 700 person team, we've done well
over 30,000 rocket launches in our prior history. The depth of knowledge that you have to have to not only be
a figurehead, but to actually be the highest level or one of the higher level intellects on the team. That's got to be crazy. Like, that has to be insane. Do people not understand that about Elon or someone like
yourself or like or am I conflating two things? I'm sorry if it's a clunky question. It's actually a really wonderful question. And I do think super interesting. So I can definitively say, I you know, I've met Elon. I've not worked with him, of course, directly, but from
everything I can gather, the guy is an engineering genius. There's no question about that. Like, he himself is very special and how hard he pushes,
where he chooses to be ambitious, you know, driving teams to see
this vision and really kind of come around to it being possible. And I think it's probably the same with Relativity. Like, yeah, for sure. I'm definitely plugged in to technical meetings, decision
making. Like, I could walk you through every single way our rocket
engine works. Why it was made that way. What the decision process was, the 3D printers, the material
science, the control algorithms. Yeah, I'm definitely... It's actually in many ways,
Relativity's a playground for me to continue to learn from. And the more great people we bring on to the team, then you
just learn even more because now you have some of the world's best people to learn from.
