Part 1 of 2. Part 2 drops later this week.

Joe Yaffe had climbed as high as the ladder goes. Fifteen years at Latham & Watkins,
then Skadden, managing partner of the Palo Alto office, 31 years advising founders and
CEOs. By his own account, his idea of a midlife crisis was moving from one mega law firm
to another. Then Baiju Bhatt stepped away from Robinhood, Joe asked what was next, and
the answer was space lasers.

In this episode, Joe and Michael discuss:

• Why switching law firms counted as a midlife crisis, and what that says about risk
• The three traits Joe saw in every successful founder across 31 years of client work
• The easy button for a lawyer, and why he calls it second grade lawyering
• One way doors and two way doors, with a real one from Cowboy Space
• Getting to an undergraduate understanding of rocket science in about a year
• How data centers in space actually work, explained without an engineering degree
• Why the second stage of the rocket becomes both the data center and the radiator
• Why none of it breaks the laws of physics

About Joe:
Joe Yaffe is COO and chief legal officer at Cowboy Space, which is building data centers
that run in orbit. He spent 31 years practising law in Silicon Valley, fifteen of them at
Latham & Watkins and the rest at Skadden, where he was managing partner of the Palo Alto
office. He studied ancient Greek in college.

Chapters
00:00 Cold open
01:11 Introduction
02:27 Thirty-one years, and a very small midlife crisis
04:03 Meeting Baiju Bhatt
05:13 "I thought I would die at my desk"
05:31 Space lasers
06:34 "If you do it, I'll come join you"
07:32 What twenty years beside founders teaches you
09:13 The eight billion people rule
11:46 Second grade lawyering
13:26 Tapping the brakes and hitting the accelerator
14:33 One way doors and two way doors
17:14 "Be careful with the rations"
18:13 Zero to rocket science in a year
19:45 "I'm the liberal arts guy in the room"
22:03 Acronyms, and blowing a fastball by you
23:27 Advice for anyone standing at the fork
26:37 The best advice he got before he jumped
29:29 How Cowboy Space works, explained for the rest of us
31:05 Asimov wrote about this in the 1940s
35:27 Turning the second stage into the data center
36:30 The radiator epiphany
37:50 Cheaper than Earth, or it's a science project
39:29 Why they're building their own rocket
43:54 Chips, cooling, and NVIDIA
45:54 "We're not breaking any laws of physics"
47:50 Four companies at once
50:37 Nuclear reactors on the moon

Resources mentioned:

• Cowboy Space: https://cowboyspace.com
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, which collects "Reason", the 1941 short story on beaming power
  from orbit: https://www.amazon.com/dp/055338256X

Connect with Joe:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephyaffe/

Connect with Michael:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-koenig514
• Building Helm: https://helmapp.ai

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