The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:02:12 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:02:12] S0: SpaceX was your first job out of school? Wow. [00:02:15] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Went there full time. I had internship. I'm sure we'll get into some of that. But Yeah. Did an internship there in my sophomore year and then decided to join back full time. [00:02:23] S0: And what year was that? [00:02:25] S1: 2016. [00:02:27] S0: Right. So ten years ago. Ten years ago. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Ten years ago. Yeah. Nice. And Justin, as you know, the purpose of this show is to reimagine the concept of a high fly, to go beyond people's shop titles and celebrate their human story. Is there a person you know who you feel hasn't got the recognition they deserve? [00:02:43] S1: Well, maybe this is a little bit too close to home, but my wife Connie, I would say has not gotten the recognition she deserves. She's... So she started a company called Refi about six months, maybe twelve months before Zach and I started Base Power. And it's a really cool company doing some stuff in the real estate space. I'll let her tell her story at some point, but I just to answer your question, I think she has built something very cool and has done it on extremely limited resources with her co founder and this sort of, yeah, built a really impressive operation in addition to being an awesome person. [00:03:13] S0: Very cool. And I've heard a lot about her parents being the pseudo chefs for Base Power.
00:03:13 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:03:13] S0: Very cool. And I've heard a lot about her parents being the pseudo chefs for Base Power. [00:03:19] S1: Yeah. They have up until the... Over in the next few months where where they're going back into retirement, but we told them they had a Chinese restaurant in Chicago for many years. And I was complaining one day to them about DoorDash and just being unhealthy. They're like, we'll just cook meals for you. And now they cook meals for whatever it is, six, 600 people here in the Austin facility, 500 people every day with a few helping hands in a rented kitchen down the street. And so it's been a good ride so far. That's right. [00:03:43] S0: That is incredible. Every day. Wow. That is a commercial operation. [00:03:46] S1: Lunch lunch and dinner. Yeah. About 500 people here in the factory and then over in the HQ building.
00:03:46 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal, Vidit Agarwal
[00:03:46] S1: Lunch lunch and dinner. Yeah. About 500 people here in the factory and then over in the HQ building. [00:03:53] S2: Back to the episode in a moment. Something I've heard a lot from business owners and leaders is that speed only matters if you still feel confident in the output. And it's particularly an important point in this world of AI. Answer to that is Accountable Intelligence. AI that shows you what it's doing and works from your own real data and is designed to keep you in control before anything happens. As Xero puts it, most AI asks you to trust it. Accountable intelligence shows you why you can. And that's how it works with JAKS, Xero's in platform AI finance partner. So whether you're running the business, advising the client, or working with your board, JAX ensures that you get the upside of automation without giving up any of the control. If you want to see this practice, head over to xero.com/highflyers for 90% off your plan for the first six months. Terms apply and go to the website. That's xeroxero.comhighflyers. Now back to the episode. [00:05:03] S0: Let's wind back to the clock and go to your sunrise as I call it, your childhood, your upbringing. This one's fascinating because you haven't really talked about this much in a public sense. You mentioned Michigan, you mentioned Detroit, the Midwest. Tell me about your memories. What are your memories of growing up there?
00:05:19 · Justin Lopas
[00:05:19] S1: Yeah. So I was... Like I said, I was born in Southfield, which is just a suburb just North of Detroit. Actually, I only lived there till I was one years old, and then we moved to Evanston, Illinois, suburb also north, but of Chicago. I lived there until I was 13 and then back to the Detroit area in a different suburb, but very close by for high school and college. And upbringing my upbringing was honestly kinda average and middle class and boring Midwest suburbs. I was just actually back there last last weekend and it always reminds me of what feels like home. But my... Both my parents are from the Chicago area. Actually, wife's from Chicago also. And dad was in the auto industry for his whole career, as you'd imagine, being from that area. Worked in various different roles in sales and finance and supply chain. And I was an engineer earlier on in his career and sort of inspired me to go into engineering. And yeah, I was always sort of tinkering with stuff growing up. My dad's really into cars, still is, I am as well. And we'd be working on cars and going to the track or doing house projects. We did an addition on the house and my dad loves architecture and building stuff. And so we did basically all the work ourselves and just got a sort of firsthand practical understanding of working with your hands, sort of the practical side of engineering. And that's why I ultimately decided to go into engineering later. One interesting thing that I think you probably haven't talked a ton about though is... So my dad worked for different companies in the auto industry. Chrysler when I was born and then various different auto suppliers and truck suppliers. And we, he, these are like big old slow companies that were like not innovative or at least not particularly innovative and didn't have great corporate cultures. I remember that one week he told me they're allowing us to wear jeans on Fridays, and it was like a big deal. It's like everybody's talking about jeans and jeans, Friday jeans at the office. And so because of that, didn't really like work. He was never into work in a totally different way than when I went to SpaceX. Was like, oh, man. People are into work. They enjoy it, they're here for a mission, they're motivated, they're thinking about and talking about work outside of work.
00:07:13 · Justin Lopas
And the whole sort of like startup mission oriented sort of culture just does not exist or almost exclusively does not exist in Detroit and Chicago and places I grew up. And so when I went to SpaceX, I was like, okay, well, I'm going go there and hopefully it'd be a good career and kind of do the thing my dad did is make a living and have a good life and all that. But then I realized there's lot more to it than that. Like work and life are not separate things. Done well, are very well mixed. And that was something I think I learned from my childhood that I had to unlearn very quickly in 2016 when I started at SpaceX. And even before that, when did the internship there and internships at other places that I felt were exciting. There's a big gap I think I've learned between General Motors or Boeing or Walmart or, I don't know, just pick an old industrial or retail company and like startups that are doing something exciting. There's a huge gap in, like, the reasons that people go to work. I'm very glad to have found SpaceX and then Andrew Roll and now started the company Base Power because otherwise, I think I would have done the... Worked for one of the big three as they're called in Detroit and had a somewhat successful, hopefully, career, but it would have been totally different.
00:08:18 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:08:18] S0: It's so interesting you say that because as I'm Australian, and I think one of the things Australians and people from the Midwest care in common is we're pretty no BS, put your head down, do the work kind of people. And I think when I spoke to a lot of the people that know you really well for research, they said that's one of your really endearing qualities is if you don know the answer you just say I don know whereas whereas there s like a big culture in tech is like to act like you know all the answers and act like you s smarter than you are like reflect on that like how much of that Mid West upbringing has allowed you to do the work you've done today, like just being grounded and no BS performance based upbringing? [00:08:58] S1: Yeah, I mean, I think that that is where the sort of, using your word here, high flying sort of tech companies and Midwest work ethic ethos and grounded sort of approach to business and life, frankly clash a bit. And my view is like you sort of let your game do the talking. This is something that my co founder Zach says a lot actually. And what I have, I'd say disliked honestly about sort of the Silicon Valley culture, even though we're not Silicon Valley, we're here in Austin, same difference. [00:09:26] S0: Yeah.