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?
00:47:34 · Chris Power
[00:47:34] S1: Oh, yeah. I mean, the first eighteen months of the company, for sure, we raised $1,300,000, and then decided to build $200,000,000 worth of software and yeah. And then definitely in the last nine months. But I think I'm much better at it now. And I can self judge like, wow you know that team is actually doing really good and I just fucking blew them up like I'm pretty sure I haven't slept, you know. It's like drinking too many beers. Right? By the time you had the sixth beer, you're not gonna be able to judge whether it's a great idea to like leave your keys at home or not. The only way to do it is write down a rule that is once I have my third beer, no matter how confident I'm feeling, the keys are staying, know, put aside. Because when you're tired, or when you're manic, or when you're winning or losing or whatever, you actually degrade your judgment so much. So you have to write down a series of what I call Ulysses contracts with yourself. Because when you're in the state of sleep deprivation or or hype, and actually actually I think it's more hype, is is what kills people. A great phrase a big hedge fund investor told me is, and this is how I think about it is, why do real estate cycles exist? Real estate cycles exist because all new real estate investors are 25 years old and have not felt the physical pain of losing their shirt on real estate bets, And therefore, the cycle continues because they they literally don't emotionally feel like they're in a real estate bubble. So... Which which is obvious because... Why is the market growing? Because the market is a poor proxy for mania and depression. So... And the new wave of real estate investors are going like this. And it's it's not the fact that there's a risk book that says you're over leveraged. It's that like you have not felt the gut punch of losing your shirt. Okay. So if you're really serious about it, then there's a couple of things... There's a couple of rules you don't break. And the point of it is you have to write them when you're clear headed so that when you're tired or over your skis or whatever, you don't you don't suddenly decide that the rules are no longer valid because you're incapable of nurses do this very well. You know?
00:50:02 · Ty Morse
[00:50:02] S0: Earlier today, you mentioned that when you started the company or even three years ago, you just didn't know almost anything, especially on, like, the government sales side and how that worked. But then you also have this thing where you're like, but you just fucking do it. Sure. And how do you kind of, in your mind, decide what is worth just fucking doing versus, like, oh, I don't know that, and I'm probably not going to know that?