The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:07:13 · Justin Lopas
And the whole sort of like startup mission oriented sort of culture just does not exist or almost exclusively does not exist in Detroit and Chicago and places I grew up. And so when I went to SpaceX, I was like, okay, well, I'm going go there and hopefully it'd be a good career and kind of do the thing my dad did is make a living and have a good life and all that. But then I realized there's lot more to it than that. Like work and life are not separate things. Done well, are very well mixed. And that was something I think I learned from my childhood that I had to unlearn very quickly in 2016 when I started at SpaceX. And even before that, when did the internship there and internships at other places that I felt were exciting. There's a big gap I think I've learned between General Motors or Boeing or Walmart or, I don't know, just pick an old industrial or retail company and like startups that are doing something exciting. There's a huge gap in, like, the reasons that people go to work. I'm very glad to have found SpaceX and then Andrew Roll and now started the company Base Power because otherwise, I think I would have done the... Worked for one of the big three as they're called in Detroit and had a somewhat successful, hopefully, career, but it would have been totally different.
00:08:18 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:08:18] S0: It's so interesting you say that because as I'm Australian, and I think one of the things Australians and people from the Midwest care in common is we're pretty no BS, put your head down, do the work kind of people. And I think when I spoke to a lot of the people that know you really well for research, they said that's one of your really endearing qualities is if you don know the answer you just say I don know whereas whereas there s like a big culture in tech is like to act like you know all the answers and act like you s smarter than you are like reflect on that like how much of that Mid West upbringing has allowed you to do the work you've done today, like just being grounded and no BS performance based upbringing? [00:08:58] S1: Yeah, I mean, I think that that is where the sort of, using your word here, high flying sort of tech companies and Midwest work ethic ethos and grounded sort of approach to business and life, frankly clash a bit. And my view is like you sort of let your game do the talking. This is something that my co founder Zach says a lot actually. And what I have, I'd say disliked honestly about sort of the Silicon Valley culture, even though we're not Silicon Valley, we're here in Austin, same difference. [00:09:26] S0: Yeah.
00:09:26 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:09:26] S0: Yeah. [00:09:27] S1: Is exactly what you said. It's like the sort of fake until you make it or like embellishing what you're doing or talking a lot more about the future than the present. If you ask me about how many batteries you're making, I'm gonna tell you how many batteries you made today. And then I might be like, and we're planning for this, but not, well, we have capacitized the factory to x y z. It's like, no, I'm gonna start with today. What literally happened? And did it go well or not? I think that's... There's some Midwest in me about that when you talk to... We have a bunch of suppliers up in the Midwest, and when you talk to them, they're very sort of down to earth and realistic. It's like, here's the number that we produce for you today. Here's our plan. It's not like some big embellished thing, and then you have to peel back the layers of the onion till you get to the truth. Honestly, look for that in candidates too. It's... Just tell it to me straight. If I have to dig to find the truth, then it's like a bad outcome. I wanna know the truth, know exactly what's happening, and then we can also talk about the future, but know the truth and what's happening today now. [00:10:21] S0: Tell me if I met your high school teachers and asked them to describe the young Justin, how would they have described you?
00:10:29 · Justin Lopas
[00:10:29] S1: That's an interesting question. Probably quite insular and and... What's the right word? Nonsocial... Antisocial. Growing up, especially high school is a good example here, like, quite an antisocial kid. And not because it was like I was like a... Maybe I was... Maybe you can accuse me of being a nerd or whatever, but it was not like in the traditional sense. I just like really did not find value in interacting with other people, which I later have in life have learned is it was extremely stupid and like totally the wrong approach to life. But socially, think that was what they would say. I'd hope they'd say I was smart, had good grades, and like extremely focused on one thing. So in high school, I did this robotics competition called First Robotics. It's like, I think global now, but definitely in The US. And you basically like work with a team to build a robot to play a game to compete against other high schools. And like I did literally nothing else except for go to class and do that. And then funny enough in college, I had basically the exact same experience. We did Baja SAE, basically build this like off road race vehicle and go competing against other colleges. And I did literally nothing else but that and go to class. And so I have zero ability to do more than one thing. Like, wasn't like, oh, I did wrestling for a little bit in high school and ended up dropping that to focus on robotics. Like, I can't do multiple things. Like, I don't think I could ever run two companies at once. Like, I'm inspired by people that could, but it's like you gotta put all of your eggs into the one basket. And I did that in high school, especially as you're asking with with the robotics team.
00:11:53 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:11:53] S0: And people, everyone I spoke to say that you're very meticulous with everything. You're very routine oriented. You're very organized. Very like one, two, three, four, five. Were you always like that?
00:12:05 · Justin Lopas
[00:12:05] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I like... You can only fit so much in your brain. And if you are able to remove distractions on the day to day, meaning, like, figuring out your schedule or, like, figuring out what to eat or where to eat or if you're gonna go to the gym today or whatever, like, you you just definitely can't have other things in your brain. And I want to have as much like real society benefiting things, like building the company in my brain. And so I work out every single day. It's for the exact same amount of time and Mondays are shoulders, Tuesdays are legs, Wednesdays are chest. And it's like, and I just don't, I can just recite that to you so I don't have to go into the gym and just figure out what I'm doing in that day because that's another thought that has to enter my mind that could be a better, more productive thought. And so on the routine side, yeah, I think I've found that to be very effective for health in particular, for me personally. And then yeah, the meticulousness, like I think it's less about yeah, maybe detail orientation and more just about if you see something in your work or in somebody else's work as a leader now that you think is not good or could be better, like, why not tell them? And I think you can come off as nitpicky or micromanaging, and I think that's just a delivery. It's just a different way to deliver the feedback. But if there's something on a slide that is like lack of... That isn't clear to me, I'll ask the question and then ask someone to change it. If it rises to the level of needing to be changed, like why not?