The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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.
00:35:26 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
And I was like, wow, I thought SpaceX was an anomaly, but maybe there's another one. And I interviewed with Brian and Matt and the team there. And similarly also was not particularly passionate about defense. I was like, well, still a car guy and rockets are now cool to me and tour planes, but defense I was not in the military and I actually didn't have much family besides my grandfather that was in the military. It wasn't a big thing for me growing up. I But was like, you know what? This is a really interesting mission. And the thing that I found very interesting was that, I think at Andoril, I had the opportunity to learn about the sort of business side of the business different than just the engineering side. SpaceX, it was like, if you're into engineering, you're working in engineering, you were all engineering all the time. And Andromole was a combination of small enough and just working in sort of a more diverse set of products that you could actually go and work on the business side of things or at least be aware of or tangentially involved in them. That was sort of a promise at Androl. And so decided to jump ship over there. Very glad I did and had a great experience and learned from outside of Elon some of the best operators that I've ever met in the co founding team of Androl. [00:36:32] S0: It's interesting on the car point that you didn't work at Tesla.
00:36:32 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:36:32] S0: It's interesting on the car point that you didn't work at Tesla. [00:36:37] S1: Yeah. I looked at Tesla, and I was like, well, it's probably gonna be something similar. I want something, like, a little bit different. And Right. Tesla had become, at the time, and definitely is now, like, they're a big company. They're bigger... They were bigger and still way bigger than SpaceX by head count. And so I wanted to try something relatively early stage. I thought that maybe at some point in my career, would want to start a company. And so seeing how a business is built from at least closer to the ground up, I'd started an Android at near three of the company, so it wasn't truly the ground up, but at least all of the things that are not engineering about building a business, which is like almost everything, hiring, talent, HR, facilities, like all of the things that seem boring but are super important, just like learning from the best is what I wanted to get out of my next experience, happened to be Andrew. [00:37:19] S0: So, Andrew, you're there for nearly four years, I think, and you were head of manufacturing. I'm curious if you think of your base role and you didn't have Androle, what would be the gaps in your toolbox that you got from Androle that you wouldn't have had if you didn't have that experience?