00:28:10 · Ty Morse
[00:28:10] S1: One thing I've noticed over the past probably twenty years is Elon's way of building companies has drastically shifted. Like, even 2008, 2009, SpaceX and Tesla were near bankruptcy. Same thing with, like, 2018 production hell that brought Tesla close to the brink. I think for a very long time, Elon didn't wanna run multiple companies. Talulah Riley, at one point, said that he was, like, waking up in the middle of the night throwing up and stuff, trying to basically survive. What was kind of the evolution of the way that he operated over that time frame?
00:28:42 · Scott Nolan
[00:28:42] S0: I would say, yeah, when I when I started there in, let's... Full time 2004, the pace was fast. Everyone was working hard. But I think the lesson that's been learned since then by everybody at SpaceX is just the the feeling of urgency Mhmm. Of how long these projects can take if you allow them to and how close survival might be to the line and how you just don't know where the line is. And instead of letting things get to the brink with, like you said, two companies that were on the verge at the same time trying to survive that, nearly impossible. Instead of getting to that point, let's work harder up front. Let's go faster up front. Let's have higher you know, expectations of ourselves to avoid ever letting it get that close ever again. I think that that is the lesson I would draw from that is people were probably too comfortable. We all were very optimistic. We all believed it was going to work, but it did turn out to be close. And so we probably should have been stepping on the gas even harder on day one. And so maybe that's one lesson, I think. Yeah. There's probably many, many lessons learned over the years about how to how to maintain a really strict meritocracy, how to reward the best people, how to attract the best people, and how to just have extremely high standards around all these things to to actually achieve the long term mission. Because if you allow any drift, you're very unlikely to actually make a huge impact. And so you've just gotta be extremely strict, extremely focused on what you're trying to achieve. And then, you know, today, we're... I guess we're about twenty four years into SpaceX. And so you realize these these things can take a very long time, and so we should try and go as fast as we can so we can really get it done.
00:30:28 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:30:28] S1: What was the feeling internally when the first three rocket launches, like, failed? [00:30:33] S0: So I was there for the first two. The first one was... I think people were pretty discouraged. That was... You know, we had obviously hoped it would get to orbit. And we did get off the pad and got some altitude, but then there was a fuel leak in the engine area, which caused a fire, which led to the rocket not making it to to second stage ignition or separation or even max q. And so that was pretty discouraging, but we knew that the first one... Like, it's almost like in The Matrix, no one ever makes their first jump. Very unlikely for our first rocket to actually make it. And so we knew, okay, that's... We should expect that this was a coin flip on the first one, and so that's why we have enough funding for three. And the second one really was very close. It was a... It was... The second... Two and three were very, very close. The second one had a fuel slash instability that led to spiraling and then eventually air and, you know, gas ingestion, which made the [00:31:31] S1: engine burn out. Just not in in the fuel tank. There wasn't these, like, stoppers to stop the slashing of the fuel.
00:31:31 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:31:31] S1: engine burn out. Just not in in the fuel tank. There wasn't these, like, stoppers to stop the slashing of the fuel. [00:31:37] S0: Yeah. There were no... There weren't sufficient baffling. There wasn't sufficient baffling or there weren't sufficient baffles inside the second stage tank to prevent that oscillation from having a positive feedback loop. And so, yeah, eventually, the the engine ingested gas, and and then, you know, that was it. On the third one, it was a really fluke thing where one component changed, and then that created a a time delay and some gas release. And then the two stages bumped just as the second stage was trying to fire off, which which caused an explosion there. But after the first launch, it was really close. It was just these little things that came up two more times. But I left thinking that after the second launch, okay, we've absolutely got this in the bag for the third one. We're in good shape. Let's go try and do other things. But, obviously, there was a twenty year history after that of doing way way bigger, more amazing things with land, like reusability, the Starship. And so that was really just the beginning. But as someone straight out of school, you don't always realize that. [00:32:41] S1: Coming out of SpaceX, how'd you kind of decide to figure out what you wanted to do next?
00:32:46 · Scott Nolan
[00:32:46] S0: That is that is the important question that is often very hard to answer, what to do next. I left thinking that the next step was really to learn, to gain experience in, quote unquote, the business world. And so I did just under two years of consulting at a management consulting firm, thinking I would learn a lot from many existing businesses and how they operate, how to make them better, that this could be really useful in the future for working at another company, whether it was my company or someone else's company. And then you learned that actually many of these big companies are just doing things the way they've always done them. There may have been a moment in time where they came up with these processes, they thought from first principles, but now they've been around for decades, and the way they're operating might be out of date. And so let's go rethink these things. But the moral of that story was just that you can just think things through and figure it out. And so basic tools like the ability to just analyze systems, whether it's a business system or an engineering system and sort of an engineering or math background, was really useful for thinking this stuff through. And often, the people on the ground didn't have any really unique, special insight into why they were doing things the way they were doing, and there was often a better way to do it. And so that was probably the main lesson drawn out of that. But knew I didn't want to stay in that industry forever and was thinking about what was next and ended up, yeah, thinking, okay. Maybe I will go to another tech company or even could go back to SpaceX at some point. And then actually met Peter from Founders Fund who convinced me, hey. You know, don't join startup XYZ. Join our startup in the venture capital space. And that was 2011.
00:34:36 · Ty Morse
[00:34:36] S1: What did Peter say to you when he was trying to convince you to join?