The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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.
00:40:15 · Justin Lopas
[00:40:15] S1: Yeah. I think... Yeah. They... One of the things that I saw at SpaceX was that the org structure was quite flat, both by numbers and just by how it felt. And they really, like, aggressively did not care about prior knowledge and experience in almost every role. Certainly in the engineering roles. And NAROL took a little bit of a different approach and like there's many paths in Nirvana and so... But it's a maybe tool in the toolkit that I've not taken from Andrew Roll necessarily, which is being more oriented towards past experience in the hiring process. And I talk about it sort of in math terms, but it's like slope versus y intercept. Like we hire here almost exclusively for slope. Where are you going? Not wherever you started. Y intercept is where the line crosses the y axis. And I think Andrel has weighed, or at least during my time there, it's now been four years from when I left, but weighed more of the y intercept component to it. And I think it's just a different business, right? Especially for folks that are facing like customer facing, DOW or allied government sales facing, experience does matter. And I just didn't see that there was a lot of that needed necessarily at SpaceX or at least the areas that I was involved with. And so, yeah, I think like I would, I've taken away more, at least in this particular domain, more of the SpaceX than the end role. And I noticed that there was sort of a index of people that had been hired in or that were being hired in when I was there that had great experience and they're great people, but maybe not as culturally aligned, or maybe they came from environments that were bigger and slower and more corporate and more bureaucratic. And some would rise to the occasion and change and others would not. And I think SpaceX would like beat into you though, you can't be, none of that big company ness here. I think Andro had a little bit less of a, I don't know, sort of an allergic reaction to that, so to speak, culturally. But it's... Again, it's like it's just two different two different paths, and it's obviously clearly worked extremely well for them and continues to do so, and they're a world class company. And so I I just think... I just have enjoyed more of the SpaceX version of that than the Adderall version of that and taken more of that to base power.
00:42:21 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:42:21] S0: Yeah. I thought that anecdote is quite interesting. And, I mean, I mean, I'm sure the Androm guys have a very clear view on why they've done it that way and to Totally. Work. So... [00:42:28] S1: Yeah. Yeah. And, like, well, they're building... Have built a way more successful company than Basepower, and I'm still in awe of their ability to lead and build a team. And so who am I to say that it doesn't work? It's just a different it's just a different path that I Yeah. Have sort of elected to to not take here at Base Power. [00:42:44] S0: Totally. I wanna come to the story of how Zach met you. I think that's an interesting story. But before that, one of the things I uncovered is I think you wrote an article on supply chains a while back and I think one of the things you say in that is manufacturing companies shouldn t push supplies to the lowest possible price, something like that, I think that was maybe one of the elements, again correct me if that s the wrong takeaway, Was that from Androl? Did you learn that from your time at Androl or SpaceX?