When Jamie Gull graduated from Stanford College in 2007 with a grasp’s diploma in aeronautics, there was one place he wished to go subsequent: the desert.
The Mojave Desert, to be particular. An organization referred to as Scaled Composites had spent years growing experimental plane out on that arid land, and Gull wished in.
He might have tried to get a extra conventional aerospace job, however Gull was apprehensive he’d “work 5 years on a latch” — a standard joke about these greater, slow-moving corporations. However at Scaled Composites? “I knew I might construct one thing, and I might do it rapidly, and I might be a university graduate who would personal an precise consequence,” he stated.
Two years later, Gull jumped to SpaceX, the place he helped make the Falcon 9 rocket reusable — a serious milestone in that firm’s historical past, and the muse on which it has constructed an enormously useful enterprise.
Now, Gull is gearing up for a brand new problem: launching an early-stage deep tech fund referred to as Wave Function Ventures. Simply final week, he closed Wave Operate’s first fund of $15.1 million, and he’s already off and operating.
Gull has made 9 investments in startups that span industries like nuclear vitality (Deep Fission), humanoid robotics (Persona AI), and, in fact, aerospace (Airship Industries). He advised TechCrunch he expects to do about 25 seed or pre-seed investments out of this fund. (Gull declined to call the anchor LP, and stated the remainder of the fund was stuffed by high-net-worth people, with help from different funds and “giant household workplaces.”)
Wave Operate’s emergence comes at a time when deep tech funding is on the rise, buoyed partly by the elevated consideration on fields like aerospace and protection. It’s sufficient of a development that earlier this yr, a brand new Silicon Valley-based deep tech fund referred to as Leitmotif broke cowl with $300 million in capital from the Volkswagen Group, a part of a bid to elevate up {hardware} and manufacturing startups in the US and Europe.
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It’s the type of surroundings that appears ripe for somebody with a background like Gull’s — and never simply his previous as an completed aerospace engineer.
Close to the tip of his time at SpaceX in 2016, Gull began angel investing, making bets on corporations like Increase Supersonic, K2 Area, and Varda. He additionally co-founded electrical vertical takeoff and touchdown (eVTOL) startup Talyn Air as a part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, and have become a enterprise accomplice at YC’s Pioneer Fund — a place he nonetheless holds. (Talyn was acquired in 2023 by one other eVTOL firm, Ampaire.)
Gull needs to place all this assorted expertise — doing fast prototyping, founding a startup, angel investing — to make use of at Wave Operate.
“I can actually leverage that to assist all my founders get by way of these early levels when issues are like essentially the most unsure, after which assist them construct their corporations,” he stated.
Gull additionally believes deep tech goes to be a spot for large returns within the subsequent 10 to twenty years. Startups on this area might require extra capital up entrance, he stated, however they’ll leverage non-venture funding (like authorities contracts or asset-backed lending) to scale and set up a extra strong moat than software program corporations.
Attending to these huge returns will take time and Gull is okay with that. Whereas he started his profession as an keen builder, he additionally is aware of the worth of endurance.
When he was at Scaled Composites 15 years in the past, one of many tasks he labored on was Stratolaunch, the biggest aircraft on this planet on the time. It was such an enormously complicated plane that it remained in improvement lengthy after Gull moved to SpaceX and past.
It wasn’t till 2019 when Gull and his Talyn co-founder Evan Mucasey had been planning to move to a “fly-in” (assume: automotive present however for cool planes) on the Mojave airport that he received a touch he would possibly see the enormous airplane fly.
“I referred to as a good friend and stated, ‘what time ought to we be there for the airplane present?’ And he stated, ‘6 a.m.’ I used to be like, that is mindless,” Gull stated. He didn’t know what his good friend was hinting at, however he believed it could be definitely worth the early flight.
Positive sufficient, as Gull and Mucasey approached the airport, there was Stratolaunch, parked on the runway and prepped for flight. They landed and, per Gull’s recollection, Stratolaunch took off quarter-hour later.
“I believe it was virtually precisely 10 years after I had labored on it on a pc display screen,” Gull stated. “It was wild.”