{"id":537018,"date":"2026-03-21T16:20:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T16:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/537018\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T16:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T16:20:11","slug":"two-drinks-with-bridgit-mendler-the-disney-star-turned-space-founder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/537018\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Drinks with\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Bridgit Mendler, the Disney Star Turned Space Founder"},"content":{"rendered":"

I admit it: I have a thing for tech CEOs who are trying to make America stronger and safer\u2014like Alex Karp at Palantir and Palmer Luckey at Anduril\u2014so I was excited to be in Washington, D.C. recently for a16z\u2019s American Dynamism Summit<\/a>. My goal was to interview another tech CEO I have a thing for: Bridgit Mendler, the founder of Northwood Space<\/a>, a space-satellite company that a16z is helping to fund.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re 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 <\/a>Bloomberg<\/a>, she was Teddy Duncan, the main character of the Disney Channel sitcom Good Luck Charlie. In my youth, I lived for that show.<\/p>\n

Mendler played a Goody Two-shoes who got upset when she got her first bad grade\u2014a B. Like me, she tried a rebellious phase. And also like me, her parents reacted with laughter rather than horror.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> or Larry Summers<\/a> suddenly had newfound respect for my journalistic career.<\/p>\n

But here was my question: How in the world did she go from being a Disney star to a space CEO? That\u2019s what I wanted to learn.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI actually don\u2019t think that I\u2019m very smart, and probably people that know me would think the same thing,\u201d the 33-year-old Mendler told me within two minutes of our meeting. Rather, she attributes whatever success she\u2019s had to one thing: determination. \u201cIf I want to do it, I will find a way to make myself do it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I admit it: I have a thing for tech CEOs who are trying to make America stronger and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[79,193],"class_list":["post-537018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}