The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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?
00:37:36 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal, Vidit Agarwal
[00:37:36] S1: Oh man, so I think a lot of the like culture and talent and hiring stuff at SpaceX. I learned and honed it at Androle, but definitely, I think I had a lot of that at SpaceX. What I think I would have missed is the practical experience or, frankly, just the watching a successful, highly operational business get built. Base Power is an extremely operational business. I think about how we are operating almost every second of every day. And I worked directly for for Matt Grimm, who's one of the co founders and the COO, and Andrew Ulm for most of my time when I was there. And I learned from the best how to build teams, lead an organization, set a culture, and all of the kind of not less fluffy stuff on like, how do you size your facility and where do you go put your manufacturing and how do you acquire an integrated business? Something we've somewhat recently done and and and they did, I think five times while I was there. And again, I was like a small part of all of this personally, but saw it be done and added a ton of that kind of more tactical, how to build a business skill sets from my time with Matt and the team that he built. How do you motivate a team around financial outcomes when they're mostly engineers? Stuff like that that I learned from Matt and the team there. [00:38:46] S0: I also found a funny story that... Did you find your military car on Craigslist? Does that have a connection [00:38:52] S2: to Androl? Tell us about that stuff.
00:38:52 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
[00:38:52] S2: to Androl? Tell us about that stuff. [00:38:54] S1: I was just I was interested in this sort of thing. Like my my car guy dumb has been mostly like weird stuff. So I have a '19... I actually had I had one in California. It's a different year. It's 1972. I have a 1975 six wheel drive Swiss troop carrying vehicle from the Swiss army. And it is totally impractical, totally useless for anything but having fun and going off roading whatever in. But, yeah, it was a purchase, I guess, that was inspired by Andrew in a way. It was a Craigslist, like some random guy out here in Dripping Springs had it. So [00:39:28] S0: That is so cool. And that is so Justin. Like, I can see you like that is you at your call. Just on the people and talent point, one of the interesting anecdotes that came up in my research from one of people I spoke to is they said you learnt a lot about how to have hierarchy. Thanks to your time at Andruil, apparently, like, when they would raise a round, like, they would bring in a lot of senior talent, but, the grinders would get levelled up and that would affect morale. Again, I don't know if that's true, correct me if I'm wrong. Can you just can you just reflect on that, like, what did you observe? Again, Andruil had a lot of success, so we're not trying to like shit talk Andruil here, but that is an interesting like specific anecdote that I'd love for you to expand on and how that influenced your team building approach to base.