I first met Joe back in 2005, when we were section-mates in business school. At the time, most of my peers were dreaming of careers in finance, private equity, or real estate. Very few were interested in tech and entrepreneurship. And then there was Joe. He was an N of 1. His intention was to build an entire career focused on space, an industry I had never considered and had never heard anyone talk about aside from Elon Musk (this was about a year before the first attempted launch of Falcon 1).

Since then, Joe has been my go-to for anything related to the space industry. He has always approached it with technical depth and a futuristic lens, seeing around corners to the biggest and most transformative opportunities in the market. His career has taken him to leadership roles at both early-stage startups and large established players like Lockheed Martin.

So when Joe told me at a classmate’s birthday gathering that he was leaving Lockheed to start a new company, I knew I had to find a way to get involved.

Rendezvous Robotics was founded to solve a basic limitation of spacecraft: they have to get to orbit inside a rocket. This physical constraint means that spacecraft must either be designed to fold within a cylindrical rocket and unfurl once deployed, or be constructed in space by humans or robots. The result is significant cost, limited versatility and scale, expensive and difficult maintenance, and a whole host of other constraints.

Rendezvous Robotics challenges these limits by launching modular components that can self-assemble into a wide variety of spacecraft. Invented by Dr Ariel Ekblaw at MIT and developed over eight years of R&D and three test flights, this approach will enable vastly greater scale, performance, and versatility across a wide range of applications.

Congratulations to Joe and the Rendezvous Robotics team on their seed round. We’re excited to be part of the journey, and I’m personally very pleased to finally get the chance to work with an entrepreneur I’ve wanted to partner with for many years.