The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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?
00:25:31 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[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? [00:25:45] S1: Yeah. I mean, toolkit largely is like what I was just mentioning around work ethic and mission orientation and desire to solve the problem and dogged determination to do so. I think one of more interesting things is the things to not take. One of the things that I did not do well at all at SpaceX amongst many was like self control around burnout and I would say emotional volatility associated with the project. So especially early on, there was like a lot of highs and lows. We had a, this is somewhat publicized, but there was like a big structure that was like the nose cone of the vehicle that we had on top for this like photo opportunity that we took off. We like didn't strap it down well enough and it actually like in a high wind scenario actually fell over luckily nobody was hurt, but that was like super low and like emotions tanked there. And so I think you have to have more emotional steadiness with respect to your program. Like if you're leading the program, you need to be the emotionally steady person, not the emotionally unsteady person. And so I did not have control over that at that time and the sort of burnout associated with that. I think [00:26:47] S0: the other thing that
00:26:47 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:26:47] S0: the other thing that [00:26:48] S1: I learned through that is the job of the leader is not just to get the absolute most out of everyone and drive them as such, but it is to have them do their most productive work, not their most higher... Highest quantity of work. And I didn't have the nuance at the time and have since learned the nuance between productivity and quantity or volume of work. And I like pissed off a good number of people on my team and other adjacent teams at SpaceX because I didn't have that, that clear in my head. And so, and I think if you asked me in the moment, I'd probably chalk a lot of that up to the like stress of the program and the tight schedule and Elon breathing down my neck every day and like all that other stuff. Like he has great leaders that have been there for decades now that have been able to manage that like external internal stress from Elon or or Gwen or others and filter that down to the team in a productive way. And I have no ability to do that and learned a ton from that experience.