The View From The Top with Flavia Tata Nardini

Flavia is connecting everything on earth via sending toaster sized satellites into low earth orbit.

In the second episode of Wild Hearts, host Mason Yates speaks to Fleet Space co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini and Blackbird Partner Niki Scevak about the rocket science company that is connecting everything on earth.

Key topics covered:

1. How the next industrial revolution will be in space.
2. The unique challenges facing space start-ups.
3. The small data revolution.
4. The importance of having a focused market.
5. What Fleet did to shorten their customer feedback loop.
6. Why a CEO has to be everywhere.

The best of Flavia Tata Nardini:

• "Focus is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in the startup world.”
• “A lot of people talk about big data, we hated the word, it was just bullshit. So we called it a small data revolution. Just get a little piece of data. The smart data.”
• “The [space] industry has got ninety percent awareness of everything that’s deployed. They just make decisions in a way that is not right. We want to change this, we want to give [everyone] full visibility. The problem has always been that connectivity was not present or super expensive.”
• “We decided to fire all our customers that were tiny and focus like crazy in working with big energy companies and others.”
• “You need to be a believer, you need to believe [in your product] in the first five to six years like crazy.”
• “You cannot let people build you a product [and think] they will build it for you the way you wanted it. You have to be there. You have to do it. You have to show them the path.”

Niki Scevak on Flavia Tata Nardini and Fleet:

• “The ability to do something you could not do before to this huge industry, and to make it a hundred X cheaper was incredibly exciting."
• “As much as it was about space, it was about the opportunity to build a telecommunications network for a tiny amount of money.”
• “When you compare space startups to software startups, the disadvantages are around feedback loops."
• “How Flavia in particular has wrangled people from around the world … I think it’s just incredible coordination and project management to get things to happen with not a lot of money and certainly with not a lot of structure."
• “You have to divorce the outcome of something from the weighted probability of doing it.”
• “You need to keep shooting. Luck is a process, you have to expose yourself to be lucky.”