Our second episode with Saharnaz Safari of SpaceRyde dives into space travel, satellites, and women in the space industry. Saharnaz tells an inspiring story of how grit and perseverance led to SpaceRyde launching the first affordable taxi to space. With the space economy projected to be in the trillions in the near future, SpaceRyde’s affordable taxi will enable this massive growth.
About SpaceRyde and Co-Founder Saharnaz Safari
SpaceRyde, founded in 2018, built the world’s first balloon/rocket launch system to launch affordable satellites and cargo to space without ride-sharing. This was achieved after fighting their way to get the first launch permit that Canada had issued for a rocket in 21 years in 2019. In the coming years, SpaceRyde plans to develop a two-way mode of transportation by putting assets into space and bringing back resources to Earth. They plan to leverage the growing satellite market that is expected to grow to $69 billion by 2030, up from the current $3 billion market in 2021.
Saharnaz Safari, with her husband Sohrab Haghighat, co-founded SpaceRyde to disrupt the space industry. Born and raised in Iran, Saharnaz went on to graduate with a master’s degree in bioanalytical chemistry from University of Waterloo and worked as a chemist until she moved to Silicon Valley to complete her Masters of Business Administration (MBA) at the University of California Berkeley. Married for over 13 years to her husband Sohrab, who has a PhD and a Master’s in aerospace engineering and was one of the early engineers at Cruise, the power duo have big plans for the future of Canadian space.
To learn more, visit spaceryde.com or contact info@spaceryde.com.
About Host Patrick McGuire
Patrick is a creative entrepreneur, team leader, and Altitude Accelerator board member who has focused on the sales and success of companies including: HR tech, fintech, sports tech, Software-as-a-Service, cannabis (CBD / THC), nutrition, health and wellness, fitness corporations, and business of all sizes with a love for helping business grow and scale from $500k to north of $50m. With an entrepreneurial mindset focused on team-building, his ethical leadership delivers win-win solutions for his companies and clients.
[showhide type=”transcription” more_text=”Show Transcription” less_text=”Hide Transcription”]
Patrick McGuire
Hey, it’s Patrick. Before we start, at the time of this recording, we went through a bit of a name rebranding from RIC Centre to Altitude Accelerator. With that in mind, we hope you enjoy the following interview. Welcome to the Startups Transformed Podcast. I’m Patrick McGuire, your host board member and advisor at Altitude Accelerator, where we help startups scale to new heights. We chat with phenomenal tech business leaders who climbed their way to success within their industry. Our guests delve deep into the lessons they’ve learned along the way so that you can get a head start on your next big idea.
Patrick McGuire
Okay, this is going to be an interesting session. I mean, we’re talking space. We’re talking space travel and satellites, and we’re talking with someone who you might not think would be in this space to start with. Somebody who came from a totally different industry completely. Somebody who is continuously striving to reinvent herself and business and the way that we treat others and the way we think about people in business. And I think that is absolutely amazing. And as you might have caught it, yes, I said she. She is in the space industry, and I’m really excited for it because it’s an underpromoted category for women in space, and we need more women in space.
Patrick McGuire
We need more women everywhere doing more business and doing great things. And Saharnaz is doing great things, and she’s doing it with probably the best partner she could have ever found if they don’t strangle each other first. And you’ll figure that out in a little bit. Saharnaz, thank you so much for joining us. I’m so excited. I appreciate your time.
Saharnaz Safari
Thank you very much, Patrick, super happy to be here.
Patrick McGuire
I mean, let me just talk to it first and foremost. Then I’ll get Saharnaz to actually elaborate on this, of course. But imagine you want to go from downtown Toronto to run an errand. What do you do? Pull out your phone, you Google somebody, you search somebody, you search Uber, you get on it and you go no big deal. But SpaceRyde is creating that same service and affordable taxi, if you will, for satellites. How do we get more stuff up there to do things and efficiently.
Patrick McGuire
So if you have a satellite that you want to send a space, you can easily buy a rocket and send it off with SpaceRyde. And that is pretty cool. You can send it to wherever you need to send it to. You could get it in orbit. You can basically have your own destination based private rocket. That is unbelievable. And before SpaceRyde, satellites would have to get on a bus. They’d have to be on a big rocket and they’d have to share a ride to a popular destination in space.
Patrick McGuire
And the bus ticket might cost two and a half times, three times or more. So with SpaceRyde, why would you pay a higher rate for a bus when you can get to your destination with a cheaper taxi, if you will. Hopefully, I did that justice. But you tell me, what is SpaceRyde all about?
Saharnaz Safari
So we are all about utilizing space for a better life on Earth. We use GPS on a daily basis, and we forget that the reason that we have GPS is because we have assets in space because we have satellites in space and we can utilize space better. The bottleneck right now is launch. Satellites have gotten significantly smaller from the time in the 60s, there was Sputnik our first satellite, all the way to now, now, what satellites look like? They’re called shoebox satellites. They’re often between one to 4 kg.
Saharnaz Safari
They’re quite small, and these satellites are very powerful as well. They’re launched closer to the Earth. A bunch of them cover the Earth and they can do amazing things. They can provide Internet access to remote locations. You might have heard about Starling. I mean, Starlink satellites are slightly bigger than Shoebox, but they can provide Internet access. They can do remote sensing, for example, oil and gas leaks from pipeline. They can do climate monitoring. So if you’re worried about climate, which I think the majority of people around the world are, we can use satellites for that.
Saharnaz Safari
We can monitor what’s happening on Earth in terms of transportation, shipped goods, all that. And you see pictures of that ship got stuck in the Suez Canal and all that is happening with satellites. But these small satellites right now that they’re doing these amazing things, they’re going to be doing more amazing things as we have better sensors and better cameras developed. They don’t have a right to space. They don’t have their taxi to space. They have to sit and wait for a big payload, a big satellite or robotic arm or something like that that is going to a destination to book a rocket.
Saharnaz Safari
And then if they’re going to the exact same destination, yes, they can book spaces that are left on that rocket. That is how they get to space right now. And we want to change that.
Patrick McGuire
That’s crazy. I didn’t even think of that level of logistics like, you have to hope that somebody else is going to the same place as you on the same date that aligns with yours and all this stuff.
Saharnaz Safari
Exactly.
Patrick McGuire
Who wants to wait that long for a taxi?
Saharnaz Safari
Because taxis don’t exist. And this industry for small satellites is going to grow because we have realized what we can do from space and how we can utilize space to have a better life on Earth. But again, the bottom line is launch even right now, half of the market, half of the small satellites, when they get manufactured in the first year, they cannot find any right to space. They’re just sitting there collecting dust. And this market is even growing at a very fast speed right now, it’s 3 billion USD.
Saharnaz Safari
And by 2030, it would be 69 billion. So at 3 billion, we can only serve half right now with the bus system that we have.
Patrick McGuire
Wow. So what was the year on that again? You said $3 billion USD today, but it’ll be $69 billion by what date?
Saharnaz Safari
- So nine years fromnow.
Patrick McGuire
That is not long at all. And that is a massive industry. And from 3 billion to 69 billion projected, of course, by 2030. And even if you take a piece of that, that’s a phenomenal success story coming.
Saharnaz Safari
Yes. And I mean, we are not just going to send assets to space. We are also going to bring stuff back. We are going to bring back resources. And what we are trying to develop at SpaceRyde is this both way of transportation, going to space and coming back, putting assets into space and bringing back resources.
Patrick McGuire
That’s a great idea. Well, first, let’s talk about what you used to do. And then let’s talk about why you’re doing this.
Saharnaz Safari
So I graduated with a master’s degree in bioanalytical chemistry from University of Waterloo. So my life was in a lab as a chemist, analyzing things, finding smal
l quantities of pharmaceuticals in blood or other biological samples. And I went off to work at a Pharma company, then switched to Life Sciences. I had worked a year before in medical devices. And then I switched back to medical devices. So for ten years, I was part of the healthcare industry. And I started as a chemist in the lab. And then I graduated into managing product launches and what goes into software that controls life science instruments and so on.
Saharnaz Safari
And what I realized, I wanted to grow. And I kept changing the industry, thinking that, no, this is not the right fit. This is not the right fit. After a few years in each industry, and then I thought, okay, so I want to grow. I think I need more responsibility because every time I would ask for more responsibility, I remember one time I was leaving a company because I was moving to a different city. And my boss had announced something that they were looking for volunteers to learn a new thing.
Saharnaz Safari
And they kept announcing it because no one was volunteering. And I told him I was like, I’m leaving in a couple of months, you know that. But if no one is volunteering, you know, I’m always volunteering. And he laughs. And he’s like, I know about you, but you’re leaving. We need someone who’s staying. So that was always my attitude. I wanted more. And I was like, okay, I need to get an MBA, because that was what I saw in those big companies. I need to get an MBA to get to where I want.
Saharnaz Safari
So I ended up at UC Berkeley, got my MBA in two years. During that time, that area, Bay Area, you go and walk into grocery store. You can walk into Trader Joe’s and the people that are stocking shelves are talking about ideas they have to start businesses. Startups were very prominent there. And I got exposed to startups. I got to work with them. And then after my graduation, I got to advise them on the business side of things. And even then, I was still doing it with healthcare startups because that was my background.
Saharnaz Safari
And that’s when I noticed that my skill set, I don’t have to stay in healthcare, for example, it can be applied to other businesses. Space is also highly regulated, like healthcare industry. And so I’m using some of that expertise here as well.
Patrick McGuire
That’s really interesting. I’m just going to sort of remind everybody, you don’t have to stay where you’re at. You don’t have to be satisfied where your current living is or your current business is. You can change your path at any time. You are who you plan to be or make it to be. And that’s exactly what Saharnaz did. She said, hey, I’m not satisfied. I’m going to try this. Okay. Saharnaz, why space in Canada? Why are you one of the rare women who are actually making an impact in Canadian space?
Saharnaz Safari
I mean, I don’t know why I’m one of the rare women. I want more women. I want to hire more women. So that last question. I don’t know why.
Patrick McGuire
Hold on right now. Get in touch. If you got desires for aerospace space, anything that category technology. Get in touch with this lady. She wants more women to do great things in space. All right. Sorry, Saharanaz, go ahead. I apologize. But why did you get into space in the first place?
Saharnaz Safari
Yes. So I am married for over 13 years to my husband, Sohrab, who has a PhD and a Master’s in aerospace engineering and another Masters. But that’s another thing.
Patrick McGuire
So literally a rocket scientist.
Saharnaz Safari
Yes! I live with a rocket scientist. And now I work with a bunch of them as well. And we were in the Bay Area. He was one of the early engineers at Cruise, the self driving car company that General Motors bought in 2016 for over a billion dollars. And so he experienced working with Cruise’s CEO. Basically experienced hard growth, building his own team, growing it to over 30 engineers. And at the same time, I was learning how startups work and the business side of things at school.
Saharnaz Safari
And we both realized that our mistake was that if we wanted to start a company, we had to have our own money and we had to have a lot of it. We didn’t know anything about venture financing and angel rounds and anything about that before. And so through his experience and my experience at school, we realized that. Okay, let’s start something. And we knew we wanted to come back to Canada. We wanted to live here and we wanted to contribute to the Canadian economy. And we decided to do the move back from Bay Area, which is not very common.
Saharnaz Safari
Usually, Canadians move to Bay Area, and then they stay there. We moved back and we had a child in Canada, and Sohrab started with his idea of launching rockets from balloons to make the taxi affordable for small satellites. And I was just helping him on the side because I had other ideas that I wanted to start. And space was not under my radar because I was not an expert in it. So I was just helping him with how to pitch and what is the market size and all those business things that initially a founder needs to know and a technical founder might not even think about.
Saharnaz Safari
And at some point, because I was at home and caring for our infant, I was basically spending over 10 hours a day. Every time that my son was asleep, I was working on this. It got to that point. And so I was like, It doesn’t make sense that you’re not a co-founder here. We were a little bit worried that the investment community, they might not be open to husband and wife teams. We had heard that some people just don’t like to invest, and at that point, I was like, I don’t care. You’re the best partner for me on this. Let’s do it together. And we find investors that also have the same view. And we have fortunately found them.
Patrick McGuire
There’s a double commitment. What an amazing team. What a great story. But it is very rare. Oftentimes partners in business will say, choose your partners wisely, super amazing that you guys can do that together. And I’m so glad that he did decide, hey, it’s time that you’re a cofounder because you really are doing a lot of the business hustle. That’s amazing. And you guys are working well together and congrats for that. Very, very rare.
Saharnaz Safari
Thank you.
Patrick McGuire
I also want to call out that you went looking for investors that were aligned with this vision and this thinking. That it’s okay to have your best friend and your life partner in business together with you. So that’s a great compliment to you guys, because some people don’t know, and they just go chasing money instead of interviewing money. And that’s what I recommend for entrepreneurs to always be interviewing money. Looking for aligned partners doesn’t just mean they’re partnering business or partnering life in this case or both. But also the partners who are going to contribute to your success in your future. And that includes those venture capitalists and Angels that are out there.
Saharnaz Safari
I was going to say we do have, I think two or three couples that have invested as a couple in us as well. So husband and wife teams that are part of our investors. One of them develops Facebook Messenger together and sold it to Facebook and became Facebook Messenger. And the other one s
old their startups to Shopify. So, yeah, we do have a couple of investors.
Patrick McGuire
Those are big investors with great stories. And I love that they’re couples. And just like you, they’re doing great things together going through this. Who’s your primary audience? Who are you guys really trying to cater to become your customers? Help me understand that a little better.
Saharnaz Safari
We can carry between 82 to 100 kilograms to space. And so any satellite or robotic system that is going close, they call it North Orbit or Sun Synchronous Orbit, where they’re going there. Their satellite is smaller than that. We can carry it for them. The industries that these small satellites serve are telecommunications. As I mentioned before, remote sensing and Earth Observation.
Patrick McGuire
That’s a pretty interesting group. I mean, those companies are always investing in research and development, and they’re always looking for the next edge. And clearly being able to help from space is going to make a big difference and impact their business. But like you said, they might develop some tech that just sits in a warehouse for a couple of years before it can get deployed to space. You’re changing that game. That’s absolutely amazing.
Saharnaz Safari
And we do have great Canadian companies that could be our customers. They already have a few of their satellites up. Kepler Communications, for example, became the biggest satellite constellation owner recently in Canada.
Patrick McGuire
Wow. Yeah.
Saharnaz Safari
We’re doing great things in Canada. We just have to also have the launch capability, which we’re trying to do.
Patrick McGuire
So let me ask this. Tell us something about something that happened early on in your life. You’re originally not from Canada, I’ll let you share that in a moment. And I’d like to know something that’s impacted the way that you work today. Can you tell me a little bit about the story from there that changed the way you do things?
Saharnaz Safari
Sure. So I was born and raised in Iran, and there are a lot of human rights that you don’t have when you’re under an authoritarian regime. And especially as a woman, there are more rights that you don’t have. Simple rights, like what to wear, how to speak, what to speak. And I was brought up by my parents in a way that I was constantly fighting to get my rights back. And I did not realize how that had shaped me until I came to Canada because that was my life.
Saharnaz Safari
My life was constant fighting to get the simple things that other people have around the world, in other countries. And then I came to Canada. And because of how I was brought up, I don’t give up. So when someone tells me no, and founders hear no all the time on a daily basis from everyone, I don’t take no for an answer. I just do not give up. And that was how I was able to get the first launch permit that Canada had issued for a rocket in 21 years in 2019 for space.
Patrick McGuire
Right. That’s unbelievable. That’s the first license issued to send anything to space in Canada. It took 21 years. And you’re the girl that made it happen.
Saharnaz Safari
I mean, before that time, we were issuing launch permits. And then for 21 years, there was no system, no one was launching. There was no application process that was drafted. I had to knock on so many doors to get in.
Patrick McGuire
I mean, aren’t we the country that created the Canadarm that’s famous in space?
Saharnaz Safari
Yes! We are. We just don’t launch them. We have to rely on the US and the Russia and other countries to launch our assets for us to space. And to be honest with you, the whole vaccine situation that we are facing right now and Canada used to have the capabilities of producing vaccine. And we don’t have it right now. In ten years, they’re going to be assets in space and back and forth travel between Earth and other objects in space. And if Canada does not have launch capability, we’re going to get behind the same way that we are behind on vaccine production.
Saharnaz Safari
And we don’t want that. We want to be able to be at the forefront of space and we don’t want to be left behind.
Patrick McGuire
I can see that it makes sense. I love the fact that you said, I don’t give up and you have to do that. You have to have that attitude. All entrepreneurs have to have that attitude. And I try and remind everybody that founders have to fight. You’ve got to fight for what you believe in, and you got to keep going until you either succeed, burn out or you fail, and you fail successfully in a weird way. But it’s true. You guys just keep knocking on the right doors and you just don’t quit.
Patrick McGuire
And, well, you’re getting assets out there, which is really cool. And when I say out there, folks, for anyone watching you’re seeing my hand go up through the roof, it’s out to space. So when was SpaceRyde founded?
Saharnaz Safari
- We started in September, hiring three engineers.
Patrick McGuire
Wow.
Saharnaz Safari
At that point from May to September. So I tried to get money and no one gave him money. So I convinced him that we should put some of the Cruise money that he earned, our savings, to start this. And so you see how I was hooked by then?
Patrick McGuire
Yeah, you definitely were in.
Saharnaz Safari
We had three wonderful engineers. Two of them are still with us. And another one is doing his Masters right now, back to school. And we started going with designing a prototype because no one believes that you can actually launch a rocket from a balloon and it’s feasible mid air. And we wanted to show them that we can do that. So that’s how the company got started.
Patrick McGuire
Interesting. Spinning on that. I know how you got started. We know that you’re putting small taxi Rockets in space and dropping assets up there. Tell me what one of the worst things or experiences you’ve had or what have you learned from that bad experience? Worse decision ever made, that’s how I would say it.
Saharnaz Safari
Both Sohrab and I have made- I mean we do make our hiring decisions together. Every candidate that we want to hire. At some point, both of us have spoken to them. But generally, he oversees engineering and I oversee business and operations. And so on both sides, we have made mistakes of hiring the wrong people. I don’t mean incompetent people. I just mean people that were not a good fit for an early stage start up. It’s very different working in a big company and in a small, early stage startup.
Saharnaz Safari
And the culture is very different in big companies. Everything is ready. You have a big support system. In early stage start up, you are the one. You have to make it happen no matter what. And so if one day the janitor doesn’t show up. You got to get the garbage out. If that is not good for you because you have a degree, then you’re not a good fit for a startup.
Patrick McGuire</ b>
Yeah, absolutely.
Saharnaz Safari
Before we developed a very concrete hiring process, we’ve made some mistakes in hiring wrong people.
Patrick McGuire
Excellent. I think that’s great advice for all entrepreneurs. Hire fast and fire faster. If there’s not the right fit, we can all get swooned by great people and things that they could do and the things that we think they could do. But the reality is, if that’s not what they want to do, they’re not going to fit no matter how hard you shove that square peg around hole. What’s the most important thing that’s led to your company’s success?
Saharnaz Safari
Besides not giving up? We don’t give up. No, we don’t. But I have to say our skill sets are complementary. And the other interesting thing is that a lot of things go wrong all the time. And things that annoy me and get me upset, don’t annoy him as much and the other way around. So we are able to calm each other down and get on with it because for some weird reason, things that are more problematic from my perspective are not as problematic. Or he can see the light at the end of the tunnel from that perspective. So we help each other out.
Patrick McGuire
It’s very good. It’s very rare. You found your life partner, right? Great guy, works hard, but he complements everything you do, and you do the exact same, if you will, for him in family life and in business. Now, I’m not sure how the heck we could even have a conversation about the work life balance with you two. You’re a different breed of teammates. Most people say, yeah, I got to have work life balance. I’m like, yeah, but your work just went with you to work, and your wife went with you to work, and then you went home together and your husband went home with you and work never left.
Patrick McGuire
How is that for you guys? Is that difficult at times?
Saharnaz Safari
It is very difficult. We have to put rules where whenever we are with our child. So typically, Sohrab brings our son to daycare in the morning, and I bring him back home. This allows both of us to be at work most of our time. And in the morning, he spends time with our son. In the evening, I spend time with him. And then at some point, both of us are doing the bedtime routine and all that. And during the times that we are with our son, and together we are not working.
Saharnaz Safari
We are not talking about work. We are dedicating our attention to him. Now it’s hard to stick to the rule because sometimes things go wrong and you automatically start talking about it. But our son has a good way of reminding us that he’s there.
Patrick McGuire
Wow.
Saharnaz Safari
Then it gets back, too.
Saharnaz Safari
But sometimes other people have to tell us. My mom was helping us out during the first lockdown when they closed daycares, and she was taking care of her son while we were working. And she was like, you guys don’t even realize that you’re constantly working, even when you come home.
Patrick McGuire
It’s hard.
Saharnaz Safari
You talk about work.
Patrick McGuire
Yeah, and that creeps in. But if you love what you’re doing and you love the people you’re doing it with, which clearly you do, it’s not that difficult to be able to live that lifestyle, whereas other people just don’t get it. They can’t do it. They’re not entrepreneurs. They’ll never understand that. Let me think about a couple of things here. So thinking back to younger, pre-entrepreneur Saharanaz. The young lady who’s thinking, I’m in health tech. Now I’m thinking about entrepreneurship. What are three things that you would have told your younger self about this journey you were about to take?
Saharnaz Safari
So the first thing is something that you pointed at. Was that what you study at University or where you end up in your career does not dictate where you have to spend your entire career. You can change that as I did. So don’t feel like you’re stuck. You chose wrong. This is something that I would have told myself.
Patrick McGuire
You still might have been in space, but you would have just done it sooner, perhaps.
Saharnaz Safari
I would have definitely had started a company sooner, if not space. The other thing is, it goes back to not giving up. Everything is possible. You just have to find a way to do it. So don’t take no for an answer. Don’t respond to people that say, oh, this is impossible. If you think it’s possible. If the math is correct. In our case, the math and physics has to be correct. Otherwise, obviously, then it’s not possible.
Patrick McGuire
You have to be just a little accurate.
Saharnaz Safari
Exactly. If you’re convinced that this works, make it happen. And the other thing that I would have told myself is if something is not working. For example, if you’re at a job and comes a day that you feel like I do not want to go to work, you have to move on, move on, quick, make the decision. Don’t stay in, because I stayed. And I was hoping, okay, maybe they will give me more responsibility. Maybe if I do this, maybe if I ask that. And the fact of the matter was I was in the wrong size of the company, the wrong stage of the company.
Saharnaz Safari
For every company that I worked for ten years, I chose incorrectly. And if I had realized that sooner, I would not have spent all that time. So, yeah.
Patrick McGuire
I would say this. Did you choose correctly or incorrectly? Or did you choose correctly? Because all those little steps got you to where you are today. But entrepreneurship is sometimes contracted like a disease, like a virus. And sometimes it’s in your DNA. And you are, well, Iranian Canadian woman in space, you probably just checked a whole bunch of first boxes. And you’re doing a fantastic job at it. Being that this is the RIC Centre Startups Transformed podcast. How did you come into connection? Do you remember who or why you found RIC Centre and tell me a little bit about that?
Saharnaz Safari
Absolutely. So one of my classmates at UC Berkeley was a Canadian that had worked at RIC Centre. He came to UC Berkeley one year after I was there, and he was working at RIC Centre before. From the beginning, he knew he wanted to do entrepreneurship. I didn’t know. I started, I was like, I’m going to get an MBA. I’m going to go back to healthcare industry, but now in a more responsible role with more responsibilities. So my first year basically got kind of wasted going in a different direction.
Saharnaz Safari
I did an internship at a big medical device company, and I was like, I’m going to kill myself. I cannot go back to this. And then I started working with startups, and I loved it. And it was the second year. So he started working together in the entrepreneurship things that happen on campus. And so I knew him through that. And when I decided to start to come back to Canada and start the company, I remember that he had worked in entrepreneurship. So he should know the entrepreneurship scene of Toronto.
Saharnaz Safari
In Silicon Valley, I knew the accelerators. I knew where to ask for help and
that sort of thing. I didn’t know anything about Toronto because when I was in Toronto, I was just working at a big company. So I contacted him and he was like, I used to work at RIC Centre, and they helped entrepreneurs. I was like, oh, can you put me in touch? And then Sohrab got in touch with Pam. And they were like, oh, we love what you want to do. And so that’s how we got connected.
Patrick McGuire
That is awesome. Yeah. Pam Banks, obviously, anyone that talks to Pam Banks that wants to be in entrepreneurship. If they’re still thinking about it, Pam will help you flip the switch and fall off the cliff if you want. It’s a great feeling when you know you’ve got people on your side, that know the path to get you where you need to go. Pam is one of them. And I just want to remind people that, hey, RIC Centre is research, innovation, commercialization. It is a center that breathes excellence, collaboration, community helps guide entrepreneurs.
Patrick McGuire
If your goal is to go to space or go beyond the moon and the stars, RIC Centre can help you do it. SpaceRyde is obviously one of them that has taken advantage of it. What I would also remind you is that if you have a dream, just go for it. Don’t give up. Don’t say no. Don’t let anyone else say no to you. And Saharnaz has done that. I already told all the ladies, but all the guys too to get in touch with you. To reach out to you.
Patrick McGuire
How do we learn more about SpaceRyde? How do we get in touch with you? What’s the best way to do that? Help share that information with us.
Saharnaz Safari
Absolutely. So spaceryde.com is our website. We have a careers page. We receive resumes at spaceryde.com and ride is misspelled with a Y. You can follow us on LinkedIn. We’re very active on LinkedIn. We talk about our open positions there. We put pictures, we highlight our staff. So you know, if you’re interested in applying, who you would be working with, who are these people? What are their backgrounds, they’re amazing Canadian talent. We have Twitter and Instagram, Instagram we use for whenever we have fun activities, we take some pictures and put it up there.
Saharnaz Safari
So if you want to know the vibe of SpaceRyde and how it is to work there, you can follow us on all these channels. If you have a satellite you want to launch or anything else, you want to launch, info@spaceryde.com, we will get back to you.
Patrick McGuire
That is awesome. And I’ll tell you folks, I’ve obviously trolled through their social media. There are some cool pictures and videos. I watched one of the test flight videos that you had where you basically had the big balloon and you had the propellers on, I would call the world’s largest drone and you were testing out the control system. So if you guys want to see some images of activities and Rockets, things that will inspire you, just get in touch with these guys, visit their social media, visit their website.
Patrick McGuire
I think it’s amazing. As we’re about to sign off here, my one question for you, given back the hindsight and the forsight that you have now, given the opportunity to be an entrepreneur all over again, starting from scratch. Would you do it?
Saharnaz Safari
Absolutely 100%.
Patrick McGuire
That is conviction. Now, I didn’t ask her if she’d do SpaceRyde again. I just said, Would you do it again? And the answer is yes. So I have no doubt in my mind that this woman is going to do something absolutely incredible for SpaceRyde, for Canadian space, for Canadians, for women, for international women. And she’s going to do whatever she wants when she wants and she won’t say no, and won’t give up. And whatever your next venture is will be awesome. But I can’t wait to see so much more success from SpaceRyde.
Patrick McGuire
Saharnaz, it’s been a pleasure. So excited for you. Congratulations to your husband and you. You found the perfect what I would say soulmate and sorry if I’m romantic that way, but I am and you’re an awesome inspiration to everybody, to every culture. So thank you so much for joining us on this session.
Saharnaz Safari
Thank you very much, Patrick. I hope that the audience enjoys it. And we have heard from so many Canadians that used to drive to the US to watch Rocket Launches. Hopefully you can see it here in Ontario happening.
Patrick McGuire
That’s incredible. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Was a pleasure.
Saharnaz Safari
Thank you. Same here.
Patrick McGuire
That was SpaceRyde. And that was a heck of a ride with Saharnaz. Have yourself a great day, everybody. We’ll talk soon. Take care.
Patrick McGuire
Thank you for joining us on Startups Transformed Podcast. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the conversation, a rating or review goes a long way. Recommend the show to a friend. Find us at altitudeaccelerator.com where we we can help you begin your startup journey with access to our workshops, advisors and mentorship opportunities. Be sure to tune in for our next episode.
[/showhide]