The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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
00:21:23 · Justin Lopas
[00:21:23] S1: base? Yeah, mean, would break it out in basically the sort of more traditional nature versus nurture. There are some things... I am a big nurture believer. I think there are, say, average people that that would... In an average organization would perform average, but that same exact person could be extremely high performing in an organization like SpaceX or like I would hope you could say SpacePower is. And so when you're interviewing someone, you're looking at nature, not energy. Right? What they are today because that's all you have to go off of. And there's a few different traits, but the... Honestly, the the main one that matters to me the most is do you really care about what you're doing? Are you genuinely interested in your craft? If your craft is accounting or it's manufacturing engineering or it's IT or whatever, it's like, you interested in it? Do you think about it outside of work? Have... Do you have examples of thing... Projects that you've built personally? If you haven't done that, then you just think about your work as a job. I'm not interested in having you on the team, honestly. If you're like, man, I... We hire folks to do algorithm development and it's... Was... Did math competitions in high school or whatever else. You just have some indication that you care and that you're genuinely interested in the craft. That that goes a super long way. Then there's some other stuff. There's obviously examples of strong work ethic that obviously oftentimes comes sort of downstream of the first one. Are you smart and can think on your feet and can solve really hard problems? Are you optimistic? Are you good to work with? Like, all these things obviously matter. Those are more traditional traits, and the... And a big trait that really matters to me is is do you really care and you're genuinely interested in your craft, whatever your craft is?
00:23:01 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:23:01] S0: Well, I've I've heard you say in a lot of the other interviews that I listened to as prep for this is you were given quite a bit of responsibility as a relatively junior inexperienced engineer, I think those were your words. Can you reflect on that? Like how did you stand out from your peers in a very performance driven culture, and, like, how did your managers or people like Elon, what did they see in you that gave you their responsibility early on?
00:23:28 · Justin Lopas
[00:23:28] S1: I mean, you have to ask them, be honest with you, and I think a lot of it was right place, right time, and being lucky, to be perfectly honest with you. But if I had to sort of pinpoint a... I don't know, maybe a thing or two, it's like the ability... The desire to take on a hard challenge. So you guys given the opportunity to lead part of the early team down in Brownsville, Texas that was building up what is now called Starbase on the sort of manufacturing side. And the only reason that I was given that opportunity was because I raised my hand when there was a question of who's going to go down to Brownsville. Didn't even know where Brownsville was. It's like, Texas, I've heard of that place, but like Brownsville, it turns out it's really far from LA. And I think the thing that... You'd have to ask Elon on this, but I I would imagine that he saw in in in me and I saw him seeing other people that he gave a lot of responsibility to is the, like, like, I don't know the answer, but I'm sure he's gonna only gonna try to figure it out. Or, yeah, I'm not ready for this. I know that. I know where my weaknesses are, and I'm gonna try to improve on those weaknesses as fast as humanly possible. And then just the ability to grind through it. Like, frankly, like a lot of what we did early on in what is now Starbase is just like grinding difficulty. It's like, okay, we need to go figure out how to build a tall steel tube that we can strap a rocket motor to the bottom of and have it take off. And I was like, well, I've never made a big tall steel tube before. Who makes big tall steel tubes? Well, drove by a water tower yesterday and it's like, well, those are steel. I bet you the construction companies that build water towers could be helpful. Then we just called up ones like I've never built anything in steel, a a stall... A tall steel tube structure in my life, but these guys have. Let me learn from them. And so I think that's one of the character traits that I've always, again, look for in people, but also encourage in people that are already here is, like, you're gonna have... You're gonna come across a problem that either no one on the planet has ever solved or certainly you have not solved.
00:25:19 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
And, like, the only way for you to solve it is to sort of pattern match to other things, tall steel tube example, and take the best from those and then combine a bunch of that information to go figure out how to solve the problem. [00:25:31] S0: Tell me about, like, if we think of your toolkit, and we can come to Andrew in a second as well, what were some of the skills from SpaceX you think you took during your time and you still apply? And what were some things that you had to discard?