The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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.
00:30:31 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:30:31] S0: This is so interesting. I mean, we can kind of jump around here. One of the things I was thinking about leading up to this in my prep is your title at Base Power is COO, but most people would say you're an engineer. You are the engineer's engineer. You are very in the weeds. You're a tinkerer. Was that a conversation like you and Zach had about, like, he's going to be CEO and you're going to be COO? Because some people say COO doesn't capture all the things you do. [00:30:56] S1: Yeah. I mean, we had a conversation like whatever it was four years ago or three and half years ago, and we honestly haven't really talked about it since. I think titles are helpful for organizing who is responsible for what generally, and the sort of unfortunately necessary, but definitely required piece of like people want to build their resume and they want to be recognized outside of compensation. And so for the longest It time [00:31:21] S0: helps the customer It helps the customer
00:31:24 · Justin Lopas
[00:31:24] S1: Totally. Yeah. And so for the longest time, honestly up until somewhat recently, we didn't really have we have some people had titles. Zach and I had established the titles early on just because it was convenient and was helpful for the first pitch deck, honestly. And I mean, split a lot of the work up. Zach is responsible for kind of the mission and the vision and the strategy. And I'm responsible for the, a lot of the execution underneath that. He does a lot of the execution as well. He has very close relationships and direct reporting with engineering, with finance, with growth. He thinks a lot about the sort of customer and customer experience. I think a lot about... He thinks a lot more externally. I think more internally. So factory, how we do deployments and installs, how we're managing our material pipeline, all that stuff is are the things that I spend time on. In terms of engineering, we don't... We have two really strong leaders in this category, Dino and Jared. Dino leads hardware for us and Jared leads software. Jared was our first hire and kind of founding engineer. And look, those guys are like, they're a million X engineers if I'm a... And I'm a one X engineer. Yeah. Know my way around CAD drawing, a two d CAD drawing, but can't A, can't code to save my life and B, like those guys are just so much more capable than I am. And so we have them owning technology. Dana as well, who leads deployment. She has a big engineering function outside of the traditional engineering function. And then Andy, who leads manufacturing here in the factory, has manufacturing engineering. And so here we have the engineering concept sort of distributed, and I like to be in the weeds on them, but all the people that I just named are way, way better than I am, and so they should be owning it.
00:32:54 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:32:54] S0: I want to come back to your career and the transition point. So 2020, I think you've been at SpaceX now three years, just about three years, you said 2016, so it says three years give or take. Where were you at that point in your career? We talked earlier about you grew up in the Midwest, you had a very humble upbringing, you didn't know about these companies and you didn't know about tech in in the same way maybe Zach did, given his upbringing was very different. But in 2020, you've been in SpaceX for a while, you talked about some of the learnings you've had, you've probably built a bit of equity in the business. Where were you at? Take me inside the self dialogue you were having with friends and family at that point.
00:33:30 · Justin Lopas
[00:33:30] S1: Yeah. I mean, I had super excited about what SpaceX was doing. Clearly, it was not the... We'd done the first hop of Starhopper, which is the first vehicle that's sort of precursor to the actual flight version of Starship, And super excited about that and happy, and it was, like, very clear that this was not the end of the excitement at SpaceX. Ten years later, it is still not the end of excitement, and there's some really big interesting opportunities there. I had frankly had a little been a little bit burned out by some of the early, and again, the lack of sort of self control around this point, early Starship time and... But I built a very good team and had really great managers and mentors. I worked directly for Elon for a little bit of time and Bill Riley, was my manager and still is at SpaceX, was just an incredible mentor to me. I learned a ton from him. And I was like thinking about getting married at the time and I was living in Brownsville for the most part traveling back and forth to Hawthorne and it was becoming very clear it was either going to be her or Brownsville. And so I had a tough choice to make and I was like, okay, well let me think about kind of both internal SpaceX and external opportunities just to see what's out there. I've been at SpaceX for four years and again, I really liked it, but... And so I started looking elsewhere and and also internally to the company. And internally to the company sort of felt like maybe, I don't know, starting over and to be perfectly honest with you, nothing was gonna be as exciting as Starship. Starlink is awesome, extremely impactful for the world and has built in frankly independently more successful business in a way than Starship has for SpaceX, at least to date. But as I was looking externally and I was like, oh man, there's some interesting companies out there earlier stage. I started in 2016 and SpaceX was founded in 2002. So what is that? Fourteen years in. I wasn't early at SpaceX. It in retrospect felt sort of early, but it was not early at the time. And, and found the guys at Andrew Rolland had a just really interesting dialogue with them. And it was about, when I was interviewing, was probably 150 people, maybe 200 people And saw a lot of the same cultural elements and talent density that I saw at SpaceX and Androle.