Should we put in a little bit of fake reverb in post so that it sounds like we were actually live, like at an auditorium?
That'd be awesome.
Live from the cavernous Ascend Auditorium.
Live from Spaceport America.
Welcome to Season 7, Episode 6 of Acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle.
And I'm David Rosenthal.
I'm an angel investor and independent advisor to startups based in San Francisco and.
We are your hosts Today.
We are coming to you live from Ascend, the event defining the future of space.
Over the next hour we will tell the fascinating story of Virgin Galactic and the swirling cocktail of the billionaires Richard Branson, Paul Allen and Chamath Palihapitiya and the aerospace pioneers including Burt Rittan and Peter Diamandis behind it.
We also thought it would be very timely because in the next week, Virgin Galactic expected to make their first flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico, followed by next year in early 2021.
Sir Richard Branson himself flying on their first commercial trip.
However, the news did break this morning that and this probably won't surprise longtime followers of the company.
They announced that this flight is delayed indefinitely.
And we'll put a link in the show notes to read that press release.
But for you regular acquired listeners, this is our very first episode covering a company that went public via a spac.
And we will unpack the business behind and hopefully ahead of the company and a few fast Virgin Galactic.
If they are successful in opening up space tourism, it will have a massive impact on the percentage of our species to go to space.
As pointed out in their S4, the SPAC version of an IPO prospectus, only 573 humans had ever been to space by August of 2019 and Virgin Galactic already has over 600 customers or as they call them, potential future astronauts who have prepaid deposits on their trip to space.