The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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.
00:27:44 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:27:44] S0: Well, it sounds like you've taught a lot about people management and talent and culture building. Right? That's... And I think that's a big part of your job at at at BASE being a co founder alongside Zach. How have you learnt that? And we can again connect Andrule here and I also want to talk about the transition to Andrule, if you think of SpaceX Andrule, both very different cultures, both very different trajectories, both very different leadership, But maybe a more specific question would be like managing up and managing down. I mean I mean, at base, you're managing down in some ways. I mean, maybe you're working with the board and things, but I think that's more Zach. How did you learn how to manage up and manage down from SpaceX and Androle? Can you share any specific examples? [00:28:31] S1: Yeah. I mean, I'll go back to sort of what I was saying earlier, which is on the manage... I don't love the framing of managing up, managing down. I appreciate what you're saying, and I think it's a good way to frame the question. [00:28:40] S0: I mean, would you frame it? This is actually interesting. How do you think about it internally?
00:28:44 · Justin Lopas
[00:28:44] S1: Yeah. I mean, like, managing up just has a negative connotation in my mind, which is, like, looking good for your boss kind of a thing. And I'd like to think that I've gotten okay, probably not excellent, but okay at seeing through that basically. This is one of the things that I think Elon does quite well and his leaders, which is if there's not really like a chain of command. So if there's a topic about the design of something, our battery module enclosure, I don't want to just hear from our head of hardware, Dino. Like, I want to talk to the individual engineer who's owning that. And Dino maybe can help frame things or prep the discussion or give some guidance or whatever else, but, like, he should not be talking for the engineer. The engineer should be talking to me. And so I think that this like managing up and down concept, can sort of break through that if you just have direct communication from the like person that is doing the work to the person that is reviewing the work or adding, helping out in some way or adding context or whatever else or guiding the work or steering the work or whatever else, which is you would think a manager or a leader, myself included, should be doing most of the time. And so I just don't... I don't like... Don't want the framing of managing up versus managing down, and I really don't like being managed up too. And I think that's really... Can get toxic, and this is like back to the General Motors or Boeing or whatever else. Like, that's the culture that those guys have and adds to this sort of like hierarchy ness. I've also found that I've not worked in high finance. I've just been adjacent to high finance. And I'll let I'll let Zach speak on on on this as he worked in high finance, but I get the sense that industry is very hierarchical also. It's... You have a conversation with an LP or whatever, and it's like, they're only looking at the partner, they're only talking to the partner, that's not the expectation is that the analyst or associate isn't talking. And like, that's just weird to me. Like, never want that for our culture here at Base Power.