00:39:07 · Chris Power, Ty Morse
[00:39:07] S1: So there there's a couple of things. The first thing is that our org design is is built around modular capabilities and programs with extremely strong engineering leadership that roughly have a maximum head count of 30 to 40. So the the problem that most people face is accidentally hiring bad people fast, or hiring great people that can't integrate into the company. And in in very large software teams, like you have a thousand back end engineers, objectively true. The way we run is that like the weld engineering team and the back end software team for weld engineering together are going from 30 to 70, which for two competent people, the chief world engineer and the chief software engineer, not that bad. So we have 80 of those. And if you get the leadership right, and you have the first five engineers have very high standards, and you just tell them like don't hire anyone that is not up to your bar. You can scale the output and capability of the company without running into these weird bottlenecks where like all of a sudden you have a 100 back end engineers and now there needs to be aid managers because you're fragmenting it across the board. What you have to do before that is fragment the APIs of the organization such that the world team doesn't even know who the scheduling team lead is because it's just APIs and you need so that's... Those are two things. The second thing is that you need to pick... You really need to pick what you don't care about. [00:40:57] S0: What does that mean?
00:40:57 · Ty Morse, Chris Power
[00:40:57] S0: What does that mean? [00:40:59] S1: So you need to care about... Most people start with, like, 10 cultural things that are really important that, you know, and you need to get down to two. And mostly because in their onboarding, you're gonna say, like, look. We're gonna fire you if you don't do these two things. And for us, they're very clear. The second thing you need to do is have extremely scalable testing where you're not reliant on a new engineering manager designing a great hiring process for a weld engineer. The company has spent a lot of time on the weld engineering interview test, and anyone who passes unless they're trying to be fraudulent is gonna be default good. But anything other than that is kind of false. Like you're not gonna like everybody. You're not gonna have the same execution culture. As long as you have the same pace and the same methodology and the same core product development principles, it's gonna be fine. And then, you know, the company looks very different every month and that's that's fine. You kinda gotta really really really pick the sacred cows and most companies have far too many of them. Or they're not specific enough. [00:42:12] S0: How do you decide which cows to axe in in your case?
00:42:12 · Ty Morse, Chris Power
[00:42:12] S0: How do you decide which cows to axe in in your case? [00:42:16] S1: Judgment. It's very nuanced. Some of it's observing, like hey we hired 20 people and they had these six rules and this kind of... It wasn't... The clarity of the writing wasn't quite there. Or it actually doesn't matter. You know? It doesn't matter. Like you know there's like luxury beliefs. Okay. Like a lot of cultural values and a lot of execution values are luxury beliefs. So like what are the two or three that you're really gonna care about? And are they your most... The most important thing, or is that a luxury of being small? And and then you, you know, it it... But it's it's it's it's much more art than science for sure. [00:43:00] S0: Let's say you're like a couple 100,000,000 of revenue right now, and you're going to scale very quickly into like the but your pipeline is growing even faster and your like opportunities are growing even faster. How do you decide which things to go after versus which things to just say no? Mission,
00:43:16 · Chris Power
[00:43:16] S1: first. We have a ton of commercial opportunity that we can't tackle because we don't have the resources. We care a lot about reindustrialization. We care a lot about defense. Point number one. Point number two is where are the where are the doors that are open and are gonna shut and never reopen again? So there are some programs that we work with the Department of War of the Primes where it's the first time a customer has ever let a contractor into their division in the last fifty years, and they're probably never gonna do it again. You know, and there's 20,000,000,000 behind it. There's a lot of impact behind it. So those are, because you're never gonna be able to, like, get in there again. As opposed to we're turning down a lot of factories as a service business for low cost interceptors. Makes perfect sense. There's a ton of people who've got great designs. They haven't scaled manufacturing. These things are not hard to produce. You can very imagine in your head a low cost interceptor factory with a bunch of different designs, and it's very efficient for the market. It's efficient for us. We print money. It's much more efficient for the neo primes because it's literally cheaper for them to go with us so we can load balance it than trying to... Okay. Yeah. But there are gonna be many low cost interceptor programs. So while I hate not being able to partner with those companies right now, it's it's below the line of mission or it's never gonna happen again. And then the fourth thing which is obvious is to deploy a factory, maximum LEGO bricks inside that factory are 50. We have a long r and d road map to do everything. Some programs our product team will say to deliver this factory, it requires 20 LEGO bricks, 19 of which we have already have. Okay. So we we might be five engineers worth of R and D risk. Some programs we need 20 LEGO bricks and we have one of them. Okay. But it's not R and D burn, it's more like company level execution risk. That... Those are the easy decisions to make because it's like how good is your HR software versus the requirements. Mostly it's mission and then, like, OpenShutdoors.
00:45:33 · Ty Morse, Chris Power
[00:45:33] S0: If you have, like, way more demand than you possibly, like, service today, what is the, like, bottleneck for deciding to grow faster? [00:45:43] S1: A very careful sense of how over the skis the entire company is. [00:45:48] S0: Does that kinda shift day to day or week to week? [00:45:50] S1: Yep. [00:45:51] S0: If you had to, like, think through the past year, what have been moments where you felt like you were over your skis versus, like, completely off on the brakes? [00:46:00] S1: I think that's slightly the wrong question. [00:46:03] S0: What's the right one?
00:46:03 · Ty Morse, Chris Power
[00:46:03] S0: What's the right one? [00:46:04] S1: I think as an individual, you have a near perfect understanding of where you're at in your own technical capability. What I find is difficult is that my judgment is based off my capability to rapidly hire engineers and build something never been seen before, or my 10 best people's capability. But what you have to realize is that the 10 people running the tenth program you've never met before. And you have to put aside your put aside your priors and let the organization show you where reality is at, and then judge off the worst case scenario. So like imagine if you're recording 20 podcasts, and you never wanted to make less than a b plus podcast. But you're... And you're doing seven a week by yourself, and you know when you get to eight, the the eight one is, like, a little bit wobbly because you're tired. Well, the tenth podcast interviewer you are is not gonna be you. But you're growing so fast that you're kind of like you're not gonna show the results of that bad podcast until until you see the YouTube numbers in month six. So how much how much... How fucked are you before you can see the results? That that is that is very intuitive and counterintuitive in your own judgment. [00:47:29] S0: Has there ever been a moment where you felt like you were doing 10 podcasts a week?