What is Molding Moonshots?
Welcome to Molding Moonshots!
My name is Aaron, and I’m in the business of moonshots! To kick things off, I want to write briefly about who I am, and what the intellectual project of this blog is.
As of this post going live, I’m an MBA candidate at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and an Investment Partner at Dorm Room Fund. At Dorm Room Fund, we believe that students are the best people to identify students founding startups with world-changing potential. Investment committees of students make decisions to fund founding teams of student entrepreneurs. We enable our peers to build incredible, inspiring companies. When I talk about moonshots in the sense of startups, I’m engaging with them right now!
But as with many things, a look at the past provides some interesting context.
I earned a BA from Columbia University, where I majored in computer science. As an undergraduate, I found that I was an okay programmer, but not a great one — but I had this deep passion for the aerospace industry. My summer at OneWeb as part of the Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship Program truly altered the trajectory of my life, in that it introduced me to the entrepreneurial side of spaceflight. I decided that I needed to broaden my horizons and spend some time working with hardware right at the start of my career to get some breadth and understand what makes spacecraft unique.
When I graduated in 2020, I went to work for what was then known as Tyvak (now it’s Terran Orbital) as an entry-level Assembly, Integration, and Test Engineer. I learned a ton about how satellites work, and how to prove that they do work as designed. My focus was on environmental acceptance testing for electrical components in satellites’ electrical power subsystem; guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) subsystem; and communications subsystem. When I had time, I worked on test data analysis software. I touched hardware that flew on communications satellites for the United States Space Force, a variety of missions with different types of payloads for commercial customers, and multiple Moon missions as part of NASA’s Artemis Program. When I talk about a moonshot in the sense of a spacecraft, I’ve been there and done that as well!
Over my three years at Terran Orbital, I worked my way up to Lead Engineer on the systems test team, and found that I love being on the bleeding edge of technology. The thing was, I wanted to have a broader impact on the world than I could as an individual contributor engineer, while continuing to participate in solving these problems with enormous societal impact. I thought the best way to accomplish that was to become an investor. So I prepared myself to return to school, with the stated objective of pivoting to venture capital. And so we’ve arrived back at the present.
Looking forward, the intellectual project of Molding Moonshots is to start putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) about ideas surrounding venture capital, and how I engage with moonshots of both types. In so doing, I hope to mature my perspectives on VC as an industry, as well as develop my skill as a writer. I hope to post approximately every week. I expect posts to take a number of different formats, including:
Perspectives about the way things work, or things I recently learned, about venture capital, entrepreneurship, or aerospace
Highlights of companies that I think are interesting in terms of technology or business
Literature reviews of texts that have given me insights as an enabler of breakthrough technologies
Questions about venture capital, entrepreneurship, or aerospace, and my attempts to resolve them
As with most things in life — and especially in new ventures— all of this is subject to change. I hope you’ll join me on the journey of Molding Moonshots!
P.S. If you’re a student founder and want to chat about anything, please reach out to me directly at aaron@dormroomfund.com!