Ari Rosner broke into the industry explaining space tech to VCs.
After a stint as a mechanical engineer at NASA JPL following his graduation from Caltech, Rosner became interested in startups. To get his foot in the door, he reached out to the seed fund Riot Ventures, offering to help with due diligence.
“The challenge with venture capitalists, especially in the space industry, is they’re investing, typically, in technology they don’t understand,” Rosner said. He spent two years evaluating “hundreds and hundreds of pitches” and working with founders, but one team stood out.
Anomalous founders: “These four guys had just come out of the military, and they were inexperienced on the venture capital side, but they knew the customer and the technology and the problem better than any other founder I’ve ever seen,” Rosner said. “I turned to the partners at Riot and said, ‘We should invest in this’…but I also turned to the partners and said, ‘Hey, I want to go and join them.’”
That’s how Rosner wound up the second hire and head of product at True Anomaly, the space domain awareness company working to update the military’s approach to space conflict.
Customer relations: “My job specifically is the intersection between the customer and the engineer, making sure that the customer is able to tell us exactly what they want,” Rosner said. “I get to see the reaction on their face where they go from using this stuff that was written in MS DOS or Windows 98 and software that’s older than me, to being able to deliver them solutions to make them better at their job.”
Rosner’s main focus is Mosaic, software designed for Space Force Guardians to operate spacecraft in contested environments.
“My job, on a day-to-day basis, is [to] take stuff out of [CEO Even Roger’s] head and put it in software, right?” Rosner said. “He has all these things that he wished he had when he was in the military, and it’s just flowing it in.”
