I admit it: I have a thing for tech CEOs who are trying to make America stronger and safer—like Alex Karp at Palantir and Palmer Luckey at Anduril—so I was excited to be in Washington, D.C. recently for a16z’s American Dynamism Summit. My goal was to interview another tech CEO I have a thing for: Bridgit Mendler, the founder of Northwood Space, a space-satellite company that a16z is helping to fund.
If you’re under 30 years old, you undoubtedly know the real reason I was so eager to talk to her. Before she was the beautiful tech CEO who has been written up in Bloomberg, she was Teddy Duncan, the main character of the Disney Channel sitcom Good Luck Charlie. In my youth, I lived for that show.
Mendler played a Goody Two-shoes who got upset when she got her first bad grade—a B. Like me, she tried a rebellious phase. And also like me, her parents reacted with laughter rather than horror.
I was hardly the only member of Gen Z for whom Good Luck Charlie is an iconic memory. When I announced in Slack here at The Free Press that I was interviewing her, those of us under 30 (a sizable portion of the place) were starstruck. Friends outside work who had zero interest in my interviews with Bill Maher or Larry Summers suddenly had newfound respect for my journalistic career.
But here was my question: How in the world did she go from being a Disney star to a space CEO? That’s what I wanted to learn.
“I actually don’t think that I’m very smart, and probably people that know me would think the same thing,” the 33-year-old Mendler told me within two minutes of our meeting. Rather, she attributes whatever success she’s had to one thing: determination. “If I want to do it, I will find a way to make myself do it.”
