The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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?
00:13:22 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:13:22] S0: I'm laughing because I I have a lot of the traits you have and my wife hates me for it. She's like, that's my feature and my bug. She's like, you're a robot. You need to just be okay with disruption and be okay with a bit of nuance. And I go, no. I need to be really organized. So [00:13:38] S1: Well, can tell from our prep call. It's like this guy cares a lot about... I mean, I think there's two sides of the same coin. Right? Being organized and thoughtful and and having in detail oriented is just another side of the coin of caring, just giving a crap about your work. And if you do, you will probably be detail oriented because you care about the details. Because if the details aren't right, then that's not good and that means you don't care. [00:14:01] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'll chat about this with base. I'd be curious how you've learned to manage this with your team. Right? Because there might be people that report to you that don't have that personality that are completely opposite to you and you've got to get the best out of them right and they've got to get the best out of you so that'll be an interesting one to come back to when we talk about base. So just to round out the upbringing, think when you were 18, if I met you at that age, you just finished high school, you're thinking of college, what would I have assumed you'd do with your life?
00:14:28 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
[00:14:28] S1: At that time, I had gone to SpaceX and saw the information for the internship, and I think I had sort of an idea that, okay, there's kind of two paths here. There's the work and life are separate things, I'll go live a nice life and I'll go have a decent career at a big company and all that. But I had this sort of spark of, okay, actually there's something else here. I could go work at SpaceX or Andoril or a startup They'd been, and started right at that time. They're starting like a year later, but, or Palantir or basically a quote unquote tech company versus a quote unquote, not tech company. And I would, I'm highly over generalizing here, but tech, you care about your work, you're mission oriented, you're engaged in what you're doing and non tech you're not. And I was like, okay, let me try tech because I think there might be something there. And so I was like, okay, let me go into engineering because that's the thing that I sort of grew up around and I'm interested in doing and go pursue, yeah, go pursue an engineering degree and see which path I wanna take basically. But I think if you asked me at the time, like sometime in the middle of college, I would have said, think I think there's an opinion forming that there are two paths here. [00:15:38] S0: Because I believe you did quite a few internships at college, right, before you landed at SpaceX? Yep. Like you were at Apple, I think you were like at a finance company. Tell me about that. Did that help you understand what you're good at and what you're not?