Rebels with a Cause: Carrie Marshall with Tim Hsia
Carrie Marshall, co-founder and CEO of Rebel Space, chats with Tim Hsia, co-founder and CEO of VetraFi on episode 45: Rebels with a Cause.
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Episode 45 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Tim Hsia, co-founder and CEO of VetraFi, a fintech company offering financial tools specifically designed for military personnel. He chats with Carrie Marshall, co-founder and CEO of Rebel Space, a company developing autonomous cybersecurity software to protect spacecraft, ground stations, and mission operations. Carrie shares how her experience in cybersecurity and military background shaped her approach to operations in the aerospace sector. Carrie also discusses the challenges of modern space infrastructure, cybersecurity threats, and the critical role automation plays in space systems today.
In this episode, you will hear:
Complexity of space operations and the increased commercial involvement.
Rebel Space aims to automate space and cyber operations to reduce human errors.
The need for effective military-commercial communication in space and cybersecurity.
Growing threats from both foreign actors and everyday hackers in the space domain.
Challenges of training and supporting operators in a complex and contested space environment.
“Buy what you can, build what you must” approach to address issues and cut costs.
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:20 Tim: Hello, and welcome to the Venture Everywhere Podcast. I'm Tim Hsia, and I'm an Army veteran who has the honor to interview an Air Force veteran who has worked at SpaceX and Slingshot Aerospace.
00:00:30 Tim: Thank you, Everywhere Ventures, for letting us two veterans, Carrie Marshall and myself, talk about startups in space. Carrie, can you please share about your background?
00:00:39 Carrie: Yeah. So I started out, enlisted way back in the day as a Chinese Mandarin linguist in the Air Force. I found myself playing a lot more with equipment and signals than getting better at Mandarin. I think I could still order in a restaurant, maybe. And then ran off and got my electrical engineering degree to support that obsession.
00:00:55 Carrie: After 9/11, I was graduating from University of Wyoming. I landed back in the Air Force, this time as an officer, and by pure chance, worked at a Space Launch Complex, got into Space, and that's where I really got the space bug. From there, I kind of took this interesting path of finding all the ways that space systems could possibly be broken and protected and defended, working in things like electronic warfare and cyber.
00:01:17 Carrie: From there, got out of the military, got the call, went to SpaceX, worked for a former commander, which I'll probably talk about more later. And really found that there was a need for applying what I had learned in the military for how to do operations and how to conduct things in space in the commercial industry, especially as the commercial industry in space is just exploding.
00:01:35 Carrie: That was my interesting journey. I think I've spent a total of about 15 years in the military, nine active, five reserve, and even considering going back to the Space Force as a reservist, so it's been a big part of my past.
00:01:47 Tim: There's so much to unpack there, but I'm actually going to first start future-looking a bit, and that is, there's so many veterans that are in cybersecurity, and there's a lot of veterans in space, just given the whole national security connection, and space itself is something that the word contested is a bit too much, but NASA has a space in space, Air Force has a space in space, and Space Force has a space in space. And so my question is, of those three entities, how do they play well or not play well right now?
00:02:17 Carrie: Oh, don't forget Army. Army also has a space in space. It's an interesting dynamic. I think there's a lot of pieces there. The main thing I do day-to-day is I translate space speak to cyber people, cyber speak to space people, military speak to commercial people in space and cyber, and it becomes this translator function, right, because the operations that individually everyone does is very much the same, but nobody really speaks the same language. It's getting better, but that's really where I spend a lot of my time.
00:02:44 Tim: Can you share more about the work you're doing now and the impact you hope to make?
00:02:48 Carrie: Yeah. So we are addressing at Rebel Space this really important need that there used to be this –back in the day–when you did operations as a space person or as a cyber person, anybody doing ops, you got trained, you had time, you learned what was good and what was bad, what to be worried about.
00:03:04 Carrie: As a junior operator, especially, you know, things would go wrong. You'd be like, oh, I don't know if I should call for help. You know, you raise your hand and half the time a very grouchy analyst comes out and yells at you for, don't you know better?
00:03:14 Carrie: And so that whole process and that time it takes to train a person to understand what is going on in their environment and to make the right decision is hard. And then take a look forward. You know, you're also trying to deal with very complex things in space, right? Contested is not an unfair word. Things are complicated.
00:03:29 Carrie: And so you have fewer people, you have more complications, and you don't have that bench of people or that team in the back room to really to support you either as a junior or a senior person. So what Rebel Space is doing is addressing that.
00:03:41 Carrie: We're trying to automate it. We're trying to give you the information and the knowledge that any operator can sit down and say, hey, look, this is a problem. I might be getting interference. I might be getting attacked. It might be a threat.
00:03:51 Carrie: Or maybe my system just isn't working correctly. And so that we can speed up that reaction time and not have failures and make sure that we all have a very resilient infrastructure that we rely on in space.
00:04:01 Tim: So are your customers government or commercial or both?
00:04:05 Carrie: We have been well funded from the government side, Space Force in particular, NASA really do see this need and are investing heavily, and we're starting to see the commercial market go in a similar direction.
00:04:16 Carrie: Like many typical cybersecurity companies, you get this, well, you know, I'm not being attacked now. I'm not seeing this threat in a way that's painful enough for me today. But I do recognize I don't have the operators I need. I would like to save money, and they would like additional sources of revenue for any type of analytics and things they're seeing.
00:04:35 Carrie: We're starting to see a transition to I am seeing things, I don't know how to talk about it, and I don't know what it's going to take to address it. And I think that's only going to continue in the commercial side as we progress into this new world of modern commercial space.
00:04:48 Tim: We're both fortunate and lucky to have Everywhere Ventures as investors. I'm curious, are there any other key moments or people that have helped you on your current path?
00:04:57 Carrie: Oh, I mean, too many to count almost. I'd like to, yeah, for sure call out Everywhere Ventures has been amazing. We're also backed by another veteran, a fund veterans called Task Force X and Garuda Ventures in Silicon Valley.
00:05:08 Carrie: I think from a personal perspective, my first commander as an Air Force officer was Lee Rosen. You know, I worked for him; I learned a lot. He eventually went to SpaceX and did an amazing number of years there. He was VP of mission operations, everything from commercial to crew to launch for about 11 years.
00:05:23 Carrie: And he was really instrumental in helping me move from the government to commercial space and then eventually into the startup world as an advisor for Rebel Space.
00:05:32 Tim: And Lee is at ThinkOrbital now, I believe.
00:05:34 Carrie: He is, yeah. It's kind of fun because he jumped in the startup pool and we have, so now we have a little more commiseration. I help him and it's a good relationship.
00:05:42 Tim: Speaking of commiseration challenges, what are challenges or opportunities you see in your industry, the space industry?
00:05:48 Carrie: Oh, you know, space is very big and ambitious. I think sometimes, you know, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, there's an infrastructure nuts and bolts piece of it that is really important.
00:05:59 Carrie: And I think what we do in terms of automation and cybersecurity, we do things like system observability, you know, isn't always the sexiest thing, but it's very, very, very important. And space is filled with a lot of amazing people that are super, super smart, and they're putting out some crazy capabilities.
00:06:17 Carrie: And I think that makes it one of the more interesting times in history where I've seen everything lately, like you see things from putting sunlight to power things on Earth, to in-space robotics, to deep space. I mean, it's just everything. And so it's an exciting time.
00:06:32 Carrie: It feels a bit like the Wild West, I imagine, but it is really important and that we need to do and pay attention, I think, to all of the pieces that are supporting the space industry as we go forward.
00:06:41 Tim: What's the future of Rebel Space and what's the big vision? How are you working to get there?
00:06:45 Carrie: Yeah, we are building a very powerful software platform that can be deployed at the furthest edge. Let's put it on that Mars rover, let's put it on that lunar lander, let's put it on every satellite, as well as the ground side. And so that we don't have to have people, humans in the loop trying to make decisions that are better made in other ways.
00:07:02 Carrie: And so we want that automation. We want that ability to adapt to your environment, to detect a problem, to see a threat and immediately know and trust that it's going to make the right decision to keep your operations running and that infrastructure in place, because we are just relying more and more every single day on space.
00:07:18 Carrie: I think GPS is what comes to mind for most people. You know, you don't want to lose GPS, you're flying in a plane. But now we're talking about, you know, a lot of our communications, a lot of our critical observations. Everything is starting to lean more toward space as being a very important part of that infrastructure and that network.
00:07:34 Tim: You can't help but read the news every day and feel like there's a cybersecurity attack, whether that is a foreign actor or a group. And so what keeps you up at night and who are the main threats to space cybersecurity?
00:07:47 Carrie: Yeah, what keeps me up at night. That's a deep question. We went, in the past, working space operations from it was very unique. Everything was a bit artisanal. You either had very expensive satellites that were handcrafted and they worried about certain sets of problems in cybersecurity, usually international assets, to everybody can put up a satellite.
00:08:06 Carrie: Everybody can get a radio. Everybody can access the Internet. And so the knowledge is out there, the technology is there. And now the commercial incentives, I think, are there in space for people to mess with it, or not just other foreign entities or geopolitical reasons, but just the everyday hackers.
00:08:21 Carrie: And this is a big part of Rebel Space that we have the same consistency in our networks in space and the same protections in our infrastructure that we have had to develop on the terrestrial side.
00:08:32 Carrie: But you wouldn’t even think about even standing up a small network in an office now, with worrying about your firewall, worrying about every piece of it, we should have those same approaches and that same regimented protection on the space side as well.
00:08:44 Carrie: But it's hard because things are moving at 17,000 miles per hour or greater. It's complicated. So, there's additional considerations and complexities of how we go about that.
00:08:53 Tim: What's one idea that experts in your field often repeat that you disagree with or strongly disagree with?
00:08:59 Carrie: It's not going to happen to me. I'm not seeing it, so it won't happen. Yeah, I think it's a classic security problem. I think that's changing. That is still a little bit of a misconception of why? Why should I worry about space? Everything's so far away.
00:09:13 Carrie: It's so far apart. Who can touch it? That is the key, I think, change that needs to happen is, hey, it's not that far away and, and it can be touched. So we should take it seriously.
00:09:23 Tim: What do you consider one of your superpowers or something that you're really well known for?
00:09:30 Carrie: Stubbornness, probably, persistence. You know, especially when it comes to this topic and what we're doing at Rebel Space, I've been very obsessed with and very determined on for a very long time. I think I first got this inkling that there was a need probably about 20 years ago.
00:09:44 Carrie: And I have just really dedicated a lot of my academic work, a lot of my professional work into solving it, even in the face of people saying, well, you know, is the timing right? Is it the thing to do now? And it's just been my one very persistent thing I wanted to get done.
00:09:58 Tim: In startups, that can be a superpower and sometimes, it can also be a hindrance, but superpower. What led you to found Rebel Space and how did your previous experiences, whether it be the Air Force or SpaceX, help shape your vision?
00:10:12 Carrie: Yeah. It goes back to that operator story. I mean, I have been the operator. I've been responsible for the communications and telemetry and things can talk to each other, that antennas can talk to satellites and ground stations and launch vehicles.
00:10:24 Carrie: And I've been there when things have gone wrong, when I've had to make that go decision, that no-go decision, and a lot of money and things are going to be impacted by that decision. And I never felt that I truly had the tools that I wanted to do that reliably and do that effectively.
00:10:40 Carrie: And that was really the impetus of starting Rebel Space. I experienced that in the military. I definitely experienced it at SpaceX when things were still going wrong pretty often, before they smoothed out. And decided that I should really figure out this whole startup thing. And so I dedicated time to go figure that out with some other companies and then launched Rebel Space.
00:10:58 Tim: How has the space cybersecurity evolved over the past years or decade?
00:11:02 Carrie: It is really changed. I think the only notional what to do in space for cybersecurity was put out by NASA. Very basic. You know, let's have some IP security. How do we protect and make sure things are locked down?
00:11:15 Carrie: I think it's evolving. I know that, on the administration side, NIST is starting to put out some direct guidance. A lot of that guidance is these are the kinds of things that can happen in space. Not a lot of what to do about them. But, hey, this is the kinds of things, you know, people can try to take over your satellite.
00:11:30 Carrie: They will try to interfere with it. They'll try to send bad commands. So we're seeing this change from, you know, we don't really have to invest in and worry about it unless we're doing something back in the day, very public government driven to a common standard.
00:11:44 Carrie: And if you're putting up something that people rely on, you have to take those measures and you can start to see that reflection in both NIST, we're members of the space ISAC now that stood up a few years ago. It's an information sharing and analysis center.
00:11:56 Carrie: We're also seeing a push to put a lot of that regulation like NIST guidance standards into the space industry. And that's an evolving thing that I think has really taken off in the last four years or so.
00:12:08 Tim: Related to that is with the increasing commercialization of space, how do you see the role of cybersecurity changing for both private companies and government agencies?
00:12:17 Carrie: I think government now, they want to leverage commercial investment and commercial activities to reduce costs, right? Because it costs a lot of money to run a service and to build everything yourself.
00:12:28 Carrie: So I think they're saying, buy what you can, build what you must, you know, this sort of mentality. I think that that is good. It's the right way to go. I think it also requires a little bit different environment where you do have this ability to buy things that meet the need, but are also revenue generating.
00:12:46 Carrie: And I think that is an interesting space where those two things don't always go together, especially when it comes to defense. And I think we can think of other examples that are not space. There's not a huge market for tanks in the commercial market. So how do you do that? And how do you do that equivalent in space?
00:13:00 Tim: Leadership is so critical, whether it's space, military, startups. What are some of the key leadership lessons you've learned through your time in defense or space?
00:13:09 Carrie: I've worked on a lot of teams and led teams that are doing some really crazy and ambitious stuff. I mean, whether it's SpaceX or in the government. And no matter how crazy or how ambitious or how hard or honestly how simple, everybody works for the person next to them.
00:13:21 Carrie: And I think we learned that in the military, that is something that carries over into commercial world, maybe not taught, you know, you don't get the canny leadership training that we get as officers.
00:13:30 Carrie: And so building up that team, having people recognize it, and recognizing and supporting in an environment where you are working for each other and bringing up people behind you to take your place, teaching people to be managers, teaching them how to interact with other people, I think is really the big things that I've taken away from my time.
00:13:47 Tim: What advice would you give to aspiring founders, entrepreneurs looking to either the space or cybersecurity industry?
00:13:54 Carrie: Oh, I would say, if you found a company, specifically, you've got to stick to your vision. I mean, it's good to be open. You will get a lot of input and you will get a lot of feedback and it will pull you in every possible direction.
00:14:08 Carrie: And I think this is probably true for space and cybersecurity, actually any startup, right, that you really have to stay to your core and you have to believe in the core thing that you're trying to do and just stick to your guns. I think that is really important.
00:14:20 Tim: What has been your most rewarding project or accomplishment in your career thus far?
00:14:24 Carrie: That is a hard selection. Aside from the obvious, which is Rebel Space, which has been an amazing journey so far. I would say it has been the things that were hard to do, I think getting the hard things done.
00:14:35 Carrie: And at SpaceX doing launch, again, it was the team and getting through those launches after failures and getting things done is just always the most rewarding thing.
00:14:43 Carrie: And the military as well. Right. I mean, the things you do that people like that, there's no way, you know, you go through it with a group of people and you're bonded for life and those are the experiences I enjoy the most.
00:14:53 Tim: I have some speed round questions. What's a book you're reading or a podcast you're enjoying besides this podcast? Or what's your favorite book?
00:15:02 Carrie: Oh, that's good. I am coming into startup world as an engineer, hired a sales coach, Paul Gassee. He’s been amazing. He recommended a book called Challenger Sales, which just unlocked a lot of entrepreneurship and business stuff that I didn't have coming from an ops and technical background.
00:15:18 Carrie: You know, I'm surprised because, you know, some of those books I feel are hard to get through, but I really ate it up. It was amazing. I think more than a personal thing, I like the Trevor Noah podcast What Now?
00:15:28 Carrie: It is surprisingly insightful into what is going on day to day in terms of technology and AI and pairing that with what's going on in society. And I find that very insightful for what is my day to day experience interacting with all kinds of people in all kinds of tech and investment roles.
00:15:44 Tim: If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:15:47 Carrie: You know, I live in Southern California. It's great. It is sunny all the time. I would not be upset with a year in Scotland. I do love it there. A little bit of hiking. Little break from sunshine for a while. Makes me appreciate it more when I came home.
00:16:01 Tim: Not a year on the International Space Station?
00:16:03 Carrie: No, thank you. I've heard about the facility. I'm good, thanks. I love building stuff. I am totally the backroom engineer that will build you all the cool things. But no.
00:16:13 Tim: What's your favorite productivity hack?
00:16:14 Carrie: You know, I have learned over the years, probably the hard way, that multitasking is terrible. And I try my best not to do it. So context switching between projects, you know, trying to do everything at the same time just makes you do everything very badly.
00:16:27 Carrie: That is, I would say, my main productivity hack. It saves time in the long run and you can just get a lot more done if you're very regimented on doing one thing at a time.
00:16:35 Tim: Where can listeners find you?
00:16:36 Carrie: LinkedIn, probably best. Don't have a podcast, but maybe one day. Yeah, probably LinkedIn. I'm active on there and respond to messages. And of course, we have a website. But yeah, I think LinkedIn's best.
00:16:47 Tim: Amazing. Carrie, Everywhere Ventures team. This has been really fun. I learned a lot from an Air Force veteran, despite my Army roots, and this has been delightful. Thank you, Carrie.
00:16:57 Carrie: Yeah. Thank you.
00:16:59 Scott Harley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.