Between Two COO's with Michael Koenig

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 is here: https://betweentwocoos.com/65

In part 1, Joe Yaffe explained how an orbital data center works. This time, the question is

whether it works as a business.

In this episode, Joe and Michael discuss:

Why Cowboy Space measures itself in cost per GPU hour, not cents per kilowatt hour

Why a lot of new space companies are run by technologists who aren't asking if it's a business

What has to go right to raise the billions this needs beyond the first $365 million

Why the perfect rocket engine is designed to sit on the balance point of failure

How being your own only customer changes what a failed launch costs you

Six-year chip life, and why you stop caring that you can't reach them

The seven-year wait for a data center in Northern Virginia

Which agencies regulate an orbital data center, including the FDA

Why hiring, not physics, sits at the top of his list

The December 2028 launch date the whole company runs against

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 practicing 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.

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

Subscribe to Between Two COOs:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/between-two-coos-with-michael-koenig/id1596195041

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4OQY2oizo3rWUlwhmtdpSi

Newsletter: https://betweentwocoos.com

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

Subscribe to Between Two COOs:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/between-two-coos-with-michael-koenig/id1596195041

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4OQY2oizo3rWUlwhmtdpSi

Newsletter: https://betweentwocoos.com

Riikka Söderlund is the chief operating officer at Katana Cloud Inventory, a Finland-based platform that helps small product businesses run inventory, manufacturing, and multi-channel sales. She and host Michael Koenig discuss how AI search is affecting product discovery, why an out-of-stock product is invisible to an AI chat, and why she thinks marketing is an underused path to the COO seat. Along the way: six-week sprints instead of quarters, why Katana opened its API while SAP closed theirs, and the brand that discovered it had been selling at a loss.

Why marketing is an underrated path to the COO seat, and what narrative building does for an operator that sales training does not

The six-week sprint, why four weeks is too short and eight is too long, and how she bridges the gap between a key result and an actual plan of execution

Product metadata as the new SEO, and why an out-of-stock product does not get surfaced by AI search at all

The Shopify earnings-call number: AI referral traffic to Shopify stores grew 13-fold quarter over quarter

Why Katana opened its API to any AI the customer chooses while SAP closed theirs, and why she frames that as a values choice about who owns inventory data

The brand that did not know its cost of goods sold was negative, and the one that found $40,000 of inventory it had misplaced

Riikka Söderlund is the chief operating officer at Katana Cloud Inventory, where she runs the commercial side of the business. She spent two decades in marketing, starting in Helsinki ad agencies, then a decade in consumer marketing, before joining Katana as VP of marketing and later CMO. She studied communications, and she credits narrative building as the skill that carried across from marketing into operations. Katana serves merchants in over 70 countries, with more than $3 billion in gross merchandise value flowing through the platform.

Chapters

0:00 Cold open

1:04 Introducing Riikka Söderlund and Katana

2:12 From Helsinki PR to Vogue and Oprah

3:55 Why old-era marketing skills became rare

6:05 What COOs should learn from marketers

7:24 Storytelling, listening, and internal communication

10:37 Founder gravitas versus learned operator skill

11:53 Training to be a COO before the title

14:15 Running Katana day to day

15:22 Goal setting and the six-week sprint

19:16 Physical goods, SAP, and the market gap

25:01 The golden era of creativity and branding

30:35 Product metadata is the new SEO

33:44 AI search and the internet economy

36:33 Opening the API while SAP closed theirs

38:06 Training for product management

42:02 The brand that didn't know it was losing money

43:43 Harry Potter and the invisible inventory

Mentioned in this episode

Katana Cloud Inventory: https://katanamrp.com

Shopify: https://www.shopify.com

SAP: https://www.sap.com

Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com

Gong: https://www.gong.io

Lovable: https://lovable.dev

Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code

Cannes Lions: https://www.canneslions.com

Connect with Riikka

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riikkasoderlund/

Katana Cloud Inventory: https://katanamrp.com

Connect with Michael

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-koenig514

Building Helm: https://helmapp.ai

Subscribe to Between Two COOs

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/between-two-coos-with-michael-koenig/id1596195041

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4OQY2oizo3rWUlwhmtdpSi

Newsletter: https://betweentwocoos.com

Rick Marini, co-founder of Rails and former COO of Grindr, joins Between Two COOs to explain why he would rather be a great COO than a good CEO. He and host Michael Koenig cover the CFIUS-forced sale that put Grindr in play, the day-one culture reset that ended two and a half years later in a $2 billion New York Stock Exchange debut, the three-months-of-cash pivot that saved Tickle in the dot-com crash, and how he evaluates moats now that AI lets anyone stand up a company in a weekend.

Why he says he is a good CEO but a great COO, and the honest question behind it: where do you add the most value?

The vision gap: great CEOs see ten years out, he sees two, and the COO executes

Buying Grindr for roughly $600 million after CFIUS forced the Chinese owner to sell

The day-one speech: equity for everyone, transparency, and earning a burned-out team's trust

Fight or flight at Tickle: the PhD-validated IQ test that turned three months of cash into the fastest-growing site on the internet

Moats in the AI era: network effects plus a product people will pull out a credit card for

Rick Marini has founded and operated consumer technology companies for 26 years. He co-founded Tickle in 1999, founded and led BranchOut to 800 million profiles and $49 million raised, and served as COO of Grindr from its 2020 acquisition through its $2 billion NYSE debut. He has been an angel investor in 60 companies, 15 of them unicorns, started Protocol Ventures, the first crypto fund of funds, and is now co-founder of Rails, a crypto perpetuals exchange.

Read more and explore related coverage at betweentwocoos.com/rick-marini-good-ceo-vs-great-coo. (update if slug changes)

Chapters

00:00 Good CEO, great COO

00:31 Introducing Rick Marini

02:00 Where do I add the most value?

03:59 The realization and what got better

08:11 The $600 million Grindr acquisition

11:00 Day one: earning a broken team's trust

12:49 The $2 billion IPO callback

15:17 CFIUS, TikTok, and forced sales

17:37 Tickle and three months of cash

21:31 Fight or flight: the IQ test

24:23 What repeats: team, TAM, differentiation

26:51 Moats in the AI era

29:47 Grizzled vets vs rookie founders

31:49 Crypto, Rails, and perps

34:29 Waymos, AI, and what's next

Mentioned in this episode

Grindr

Rails (confirm link before publish; press coverage cites Rails.xyz but the landing page is sparse)

Protocol Ventures

Waymo

Connect

Rick Marini on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickmarini (confirm before publish)

Rick Marini on X: https://x.com/rmarini

Michael Koenig on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-koenig514

Building Helm: https://helmapp.ai

Subscribe to Between Two COOs

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/between-two-coos-with-michael-koenig/id1596195041

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4OQY2oizo3rWUlwhmtdpSi

Michael Koenig talks with Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, about running the company for 14 years without a CEO safety net and without ever naming a COO. Wade explains why he thinks hiring a chief operating officer from outside a company is a coin flip, why Zapier put AI transformation inside the chief people officer role instead of naming a dedicated AI executive, and why he believes AI adoption is fundamentally an organizational and people problem rather than a technology problem. The conversation covers Zapier's “code red” response to GPT-4, the pricing decision that traded short-term revenue for long-term customer trust, and what changed in Wade's own leadership style over 14 years in the same seat.

Why Zapier has never had a COO and why Wade calls external executive hiring a coin flip

Why AI sits inside the chief people officer's role at Zapier instead of a dedicated AI leader

The 2023 “code red” triggered by the jump from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4

How Zapier decides when a workflow needs deterministic software versus AI judgment

Why Zapier delayed its mid-market and enterprise push, and what that delay cost

Advice for non-tech companies on building an AI adoption mindset without a hackathon culture

Wade Foster co-founded Zapier and serves as its CEO. Zapier is a workflow automation platform that connects thousands of software tools and now powers billions of automated actions each month. Under Wade's leadership, Zapier grew to roughly 850 employees and a multi-billion dollar valuation while raising only a small seed round after Y Combinator.

Read the full episode page at Between Two COOs: Wade Foster on why AI adoption is a people problem.

Mentioned in this episode

Zapier — https://zapier.com

Acquired podcast — https://www.acquired.fm

Y Combinator — https://www.ycombinator.com

Claude Code — https://claude.com/product/claude-code

Zapier MCP — https://zapier.com/mcp

EVE Online — https://www.eveonline.com

The Hard Thing About Hard Things — https://a16z.com/books/the-hard-thing-about-hard-things/

The High Growth Handbook — https://press.stripe.com/high-growth-handbook