The rocket was emblazoned with the INSEAD logo and underneath that it said KacificOne, the name of our satellite, and a FORCE FOR GOOD and so it was the force for good logo from INSEAD.
Force for Food is part of the famous John Kennedy speech, when he declared that by the end of the decade he would send men to the Moon. I like that reference that space can be a force for good; money can be a force for good, capitalism can be a force for good and you can use money to do the right thing and to use the capital markets in the right way.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
I don't think I would change anything, I don't think I would be able to, honestly, I think fate has taken me where it's taken me.
After INSEAD, I was quite lost for about a year. In December 2004 I had a big wake up call. After a frivolous year of not knowing what I wanted to do, after a sailing regatta in Thailand I was caught in the Asian tsunami and laughing was over in a matter of seconds. I guess I lost the taste for partying at that point and I really wanted to change my life and do something useful.
It was a huge transformation I think, both INSEAD and of course this tsunami, that put everything in question again for me. So that took quite a bit of time to find my path, my way forward.
I'm here, a consultant on a bicycle, and I would need to raise 250 million dollars for this.
I needed to go back and convince my wife, which was probably the most difficult thing of all.
It took me five months to raise about half a million dollars, it took me another 6.5 years to raise 230 million dollars. So we snowballed that project from a little bit of money, and the more money I raised, the more contracts I got and then that was a nice kind of virtuous circle that we got. We bought a Boeing satellite in 2017 and completed all the financing and launched it at the end of 2019 on a SpaceX falcon 9 rocket.
And that was an amazing day that I'll remember for my life - it was like the birth of a third child, it was incredible.
Q: “What if the rocket blew up?” A: “It would have been a wonderful, a faithful firework and people would have clapped I guess.”
Raising money was a challenge but in the end I found a talent in me to be able to raise money.
ON TOPIC: Satellites and rockets, broadband, internet and more
There will always be, for I guess I don’t know how many thousands of years to come, this little satellite. And if nothing else comes out of this company, this little satellite will be floating in space and telling the story that this has happened and that I was the one starting this whole and putting this machine in space and it will be the testimony of the journey.
In remote parts of the world people want to be connected, people want to spend money, they just don't have the means. If you were to put fibre to all these places it would cost billions of dollars, but with a satellite you have the distribution system built into it, so that's the beauty of satellite.
We are providing sometimes lifesaving connectivity for critical cases that are seen in these regions, people live in very precarious conditions.
You can reestablish huge amount of connectivity in a blink, but we've also provided disaster response after many tropical cyclones, typhoons in the Philippines, Vanuatu, Fiji and even in New Zealand recently.
ON TOPIC: Entrepreneurship, start-ups, snowballing
The most difficult is to be lonely at times.
Raise more money than you really need because you'll need that money.
It's a bigger sandcastle, but it's still a sandcastle that the tide keeps chipping at it and denting it, tide after tide, and I'm on top of it, just piling up new sand on top of it to make sure it keeps growing. So it's an interesting journey.