The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:13:22 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:13:22] S0: I'm laughing because I I have a lot of the traits you have and my wife hates me for it. She's like, that's my feature and my bug. She's like, you're a robot. You need to just be okay with disruption and be okay with a bit of nuance. And I go, no. I need to be really organized. So [00:13:38] S1: Well, can tell from our prep call. It's like this guy cares a lot about... I mean, I think there's two sides of the same coin. Right? Being organized and thoughtful and and having in detail oriented is just another side of the coin of caring, just giving a crap about your work. And if you do, you will probably be detail oriented because you care about the details. Because if the details aren't right, then that's not good and that means you don't care. [00:14:01] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'll chat about this with base. I'd be curious how you've learned to manage this with your team. Right? Because there might be people that report to you that don't have that personality that are completely opposite to you and you've got to get the best out of them right and they've got to get the best out of you so that'll be an interesting one to come back to when we talk about base. So just to round out the upbringing, think when you were 18, if I met you at that age, you just finished high school, you're thinking of college, what would I have assumed you'd do with your life?
00:14:28 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
[00:14:28] S1: At that time, I had gone to SpaceX and saw the information for the internship, and I think I had sort of an idea that, okay, there's kind of two paths here. There's the work and life are separate things, I'll go live a nice life and I'll go have a decent career at a big company and all that. But I had this sort of spark of, okay, actually there's something else here. I could go work at SpaceX or Andoril or a startup They'd been, and started right at that time. They're starting like a year later, but, or Palantir or basically a quote unquote tech company versus a quote unquote, not tech company. And I would, I'm highly over generalizing here, but tech, you care about your work, you're mission oriented, you're engaged in what you're doing and non tech you're not. And I was like, okay, let me try tech because I think there might be something there. And so I was like, okay, let me go into engineering because that's the thing that I sort of grew up around and I'm interested in doing and go pursue, yeah, go pursue an engineering degree and see which path I wanna take basically. But I think if you asked me at the time, like sometime in the middle of college, I would have said, think I think there's an opinion forming that there are two paths here. [00:15:38] S0: Because I believe you did quite a few internships at college, right, before you landed at SpaceX? Yep. Like you were at Apple, I think you were like at a finance company. Tell me about that. Did that help you understand what you're good at and what you're not?
00:15:52 · Justin Lopas
[00:15:52] S1: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. High high school senior year and a freshman of college, I worked at what's now called Rocket Mortgage, but it was Quicken Loans at the time. Was just a direct based company. They're the largest home lender in The US on some like, I would say like software, quite remedial softwares like VBA and Excel, but they had me doing some like data analytics stuff. And I was like, okay, this is interesting. I'm terrible at software, but I do like data and engineering and sort of technical stuff and that's why part of the reason I went into engineering. Yeah. Then I was at SpaceX, Baker Hughes, Timken, and Apple. Timken is a big automotive supplier. I was in Ohio. Baker Hughes is a big oil and gas services company. Those two, would categorize as not tech, big, slow, boring, and, yeah, I mean, not to be rude to people that work there. It's just, like, not a good place for me to work. I mean, it did did not fit my my my personality or desires. And then SpaceX and Apple, while very different companies doing very different things, Apple is big. I was working on I can't say this publicly, but I was working on a secret project that never ended up going anywhere that was oriented towards what I was interested in at the time. And I was like, okay, this is cool. It's like a startup within Apple basically that I was working at. And it's like, this is exciting. You can build new technology and you can be really interested in what you're working on. And then I would say the same thing with SpaceX, so that's why I chose to... Those were the two companies I was looking at when I graduated. It's like, probably not Timken, definitely not Baker Hughes, rocking mortgage, Quicken Loans doesn't really make sense. And so... But I was very fortunate to have had these... A bunch of these internships to look at the cultures of the companies and then also the, disciplines. Like, I really liked big heavy industry and Baker Hughes and Timken had that. Timken's a steel manufacturer. And so it's like going into a steel mill is like the coolest thing ever. And so I was like, I love that, but I really don't like the culture and the method of working. And so when I was leaving Michigan, University of Michigan, I was deciding between Apple and SpaceX and ultimately chose on SpaceX.
00:17:45 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:17:45] S0: And I noticed in my research, correct me if this is not true, did you have a break in between Apple and SpaceX? Because I think you finished Apple in mid twenty fifteen and then you started at SpaceX in mid twenty sixteen. Is that right? [00:17:56] S1: No. I had... No. I had a... Yeah. No. Apple was... This a is long time ago. Apple was, like, my junior year, and then SpaceX, I started after my senior year. I did do... So the SpaceX internship, I took a semester off of college. And so Right. It was the second semester of my freshman year that was with SpaceX. [00:18:12] S0: Right. Got it. So as a SpaceX, I mean, now people know SpaceX like globally, right? It's a very mainstream company. But let's go into 2016. Wanna spend a bit of time in SpaceX, bit of time in Andrew, and then we'll come to base because I feel those two would have shaped you with a lot of your beliefs and ways of working now at base perhaps yeah 2016 take me until you've just joined SpaceX like tell me about what was in the air what was in the water what was in the conversations at that point that that made you go, this company might be different?
00:18:44 · Justin Lopas
[00:18:44] S1: Yeah. I mean, definitely would not have seen where SpaceX has gotten in the last ten years when I first started there and definitely when I was... 2013 as an intern was like, it was the sixth flight of Falcon nine. It was the first, I think one of the first memory serves, like commercial, real commercial flights on on the the Block four design. When I went there, what all I knew was like, there are clearly really good engineers here. This is like elite engineering. This is like clearly where the best engineers go. And I totally felt like a fish out of water because like, I was not a good engineer in the like very technical traditional sense. I thought it was like okay operationally and sort of program management y, but not in the technical sense, but I wanted to work around the the best of best. And that's what I thought SpaceX and I found out that SpaceX had to offer me. I'll be honest with you. I like didn't think that rockets were super cool growing up. I was not like one of those kids that like played with toy planes and rockets. I was like, I was a car guy and like through and through, still am frankly, but enjoy cars, but I was like, I can't ride on it. The launches are twice a year. And so I was just like, but I was there because I really loved the people and the mission and the sort of technicality of the work. And then as I got further into the organization, was like, wow, this is really good. Because I had the comparables from Appletonkin, Baker Hughes, etcetera. And I was like, man, this is a very unique culture and an extremely high talent density. When you walk in the door and you like meet people for the first few weeks, you're like, wow, literally everyone is extremely smart and extremely hardworking. And this is like a combination that you do not find almost anywhere. And taking that fast forwarding, I know we'll get to base power. But, like, if there's one thing that I took away from the SpaceX experience and really want to apply here, it is talent density. It's smart, hardworking, good to work with. Those are, like, the three things that, you know, matter basically at the end of the day, and SpaceX, like, almost everyone had all three in spades. Well,
00:20:39 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:20:39] S0: I mean, people say all the time, like, SpaceX folks, if they don't know the answer, they'll say, don't know the answer. And maybe that's the Elon influence where you don't want to stand in front of him and BS because he would probably rip you apart, I would assume. But I mean, one of the things people said in my research is they said, you've taken a lot of the SpaceX isms to base, but then you've also created a psychological safety, which I thought was like a really interesting comment, like maybe reflective of like some of the SpaceX culture. Again, we don't have to go into the critiques about SpaceX, but I'm curious how did you learn to filter talent because it's the best of the best at SpaceX, right? Like the 1% off the 1%. Do you differentiate that and then how have you taken that into