WSPEC 2025: Our First Year in Focus

To our amazing team, partners, and friends:

As we close out our very first calendar year, it’s the perfect moment to hit pause and look at everything we’ve accomplished and are building. It’s been an incredible start, and the progress we’ve made comes down to one simple thing: this incredible team.

Building at this scale, speed, and effectiveness is truly something to be proud of. We have gone from a concept to our current standing in only six months. Before we take a short but much-needed rest over the holidays, it’s time to take a step back and appreciate our progress and plans.

Our greatest strength is the global, diverse group of people who have come together, all aligned with our core mission. The fact that we can collaborate so effectively across different time zones, backgrounds, and perspectives is our superpower, and is the reason we have and continue to build something truly special.

This is a complete overview of what’s happening across the entire organization for everyone to see what’s being worked on and for a clear, transparent look at our progress.

So, let's dive into the five pillars of our organization and see what's cooking.

1. The Image Pillar (Our Brand, Marketing & Story)

This is all about how we tell our story, grow our community, and share our mission with the world. We’ve gone from just an idea to a real, active brand.

• Broadening Our Public Presence: We launched with a splash, including a local Fox interview at our debut event at ISDC Orlando. Since then, we've grown our social following from zero into the hundreds, launched our official Discord server to connect our global community, and secured targeted physical placements, like a poster featured in the Deutsches Museum Nürnberg alongside a space elevator exhibit.

• Proving Our Outreach: We ran a test ad campaign that blew past expectations, reaching nearly 400,000 people and generating over 8,000 clicks for our recent workshop. This proves we have the know-how to effectively find and attract new teams as we need them.

• Building Our Digital Home: We successfully built and launched our website. This professional, streamlined resource is the central forward facing hub for our mission, acting as the main touchpoint for partners, media, and new team recruitment.

• Creating Key Resources: We're in the process of producing a new YouTube series that explains how to start a team. This is a core part of our mission to lower the barrier to entry and it doubles as a great marketing tool. We've acquired strategic footage from our recent competitions to help future teams truly understand the systems and planning needed to start.

2. The Operations Pillar (Logistics & Building Our Ecosystem)

Operations isn't just about running events; it's about building the whole support system for our teams to thrive, whatever their location and background.

• Our First Co-Hosted Competition: We have successfully co-hosted our first competition with the Japan SPEC organization. This was an incredible "test run" that saw 11 teams compete. We've learned a ton about what it takes to run a large-scale event, which will be invaluable for our global competition next year.

• Expanding Workshop Access: Our first workshop in Mongolia was a success, with over 40 participants from diverse backgrounds learning how to start teams. We’re now planning additional workshops in new regions to make this knowledge accessible to even more people, optimizing the curriculum based on what we learned.

• Planning for the Main Event: We have officially begun the large-scale planning for our first truly global competition in 2026, where we are aiming to host 20+ teams from all around the world.

• Building the Tools for Success: We are literally building tools to help. This includes developing a custom chip to help new teams get started and exploring an online shop with partners to make it easier and cheaper for all teams to find key components.

• Thinking Big (And Long-Term): We're exploring a venture studio model designed to help incubate and grow spin-off companies based on technologies that come out of our competitions. This will create an amazing cycle of innovation and increased value to both participants and partners.

3. The Financial Pillar (Funding Our Mission)

This is the key that enables everything else. We’ve spent this year building the solid, professional foundation we need to grow.

• Building Our Financial Engine: We’ve built our financial systems from the ground up, securing our 501(c)(3) status (making us an official non-profit) and establishing professional accounting and management for our finances.

• Active Fundraising & Sponsorship: We have launched our initial push for partners. This includes a dedicated trip to Japan centered around a week of high-level meetings with potential sponsors, as well as our successful sponsorship party to connect with and present to key supporters.

• Tapping into New Funding Streams: We have established a grant-writing capability and are actively pursuing grants. A key focus is a $30,000 travel fund, designed to provide grants to a few key teams. This tackles the largest bottleneck preventing talented teams from competing.

• A Huge Strategic Win: We have finalized a deal to get a license to use a large helium balloon (a ~$30,000 asset). This is a game-changer. Instead of paying a massive rental fee for every competition, we'll only have to cover transporting it. This saves us a ton of money in the long run and enables us to host more frequent and larger-scale competitions.

• Creating Future Value: The chip, shop, and venture studio from the Operations pillar are all being developed as future revenue streams to help truly make our organization self-sustaining.

• Developing a New Model: Being a non-profit, our value isn’t revenue generation—it is the direct value we create through ideas, motivation, and purpose. To that end, we’ve developed a 2-year model based on the value we create through our work to ensure we can generate increasingly more value than our spending. This is a major milestone on our path to full self-sustainability.

• Our Next Step: As we hit our financial goals this year, this will also allow us to begin transitioning our core, proven team members to part-time salaried roles, enabling even greater focus on the mission.

4. The Advisory Pillar (Our Credibility & Expert Brain-Trust)

This is about surrounding ourselves with the smartest people and organizations to guide us. While knowledge can be learned, experience needs to be lived. We’ve spent our first year building a rock-solid foundation of proven credibility to help guide us into the future.

• Strong Strategic Alliances: We’ve built fantastic, two-way relationships with key players in our field, including the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), Etheria, the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA), and the WARR student group in Germany.

• World-Class Expert Validation: We’re actively building and expanding our advisory board that includes true pioneers in this field, both supporting and guiding us on our mission. This kind of validation is priceless.

• Targeted Recruitment: With these core partnerships in place, our focus is now shifting. We're actively recruiting individual technical experts in specific fields, like power beaming, robotics, non-profit management, legislation, and more to join our advisory team and guide our organizational development.

5. The Organization Pillar (Our Internal Engine)

This is the glue that holds it all together. It’s how we run ourselves and build a company that lasts.

• Our #1 Asset: The Team: This year, we built our entire organization from scratch. We have grown into a core team of dedicated volunteers and advisors, operating across 3 continents and 6 time zones. Our remote-first, global model works, and it lets us bring together amazing people. We’ve proven systems like this can succeed even in the early era of remote work culture.

• Building it Right: We’re not taking shortcuts. We’ve professionalized our structure this year, bringing on legal counsel to ensure all our contracts, partnerships, and operations are scalable and legally sound.

• Solid Internal Systems: We’ve established our internal workflows (on Google Workspace, etc.) and have our accounting systems, software, and CMS in place. This ensures we operate smoothly, transparently, and professionally.

So, What's Next?

That’s the 100,000km view of where we are. We've built the brand, the team, the legal framework, and the key partnerships. We've proven our ideas in workshops and have co-hosted a competition. 

Our mission for the year ahead is simple: Execute, Fund, and Scale.

We’re going to run our events with excellence, focus on solving our funding goals, and use those resources to scale up our impact. And ultimately lead us to full self-sufficiency.

It’s been an amazing start, and the next stage is going to be even more exciting. Together, let's turn these plans into even greater impact. And truly from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much to everyone who made this possible. Let’s keep moving and changing the world. 🙏❤️