00:00:30 · Karthik Gollapudi
[00:00:30] S1: For people just starting their career, I have a bit of a different advice. I think a lot people say, go start your own company. Learn by doing. I highly don't recommend that route. I would recommend most people they actually go see what good looks like, and that doesn't necessarily... Part where I would talk about prestige is that, like, just because something prestigious doesn't mean the right place that you're gonna learn the most from. The thing that might have made that procedure might no longer still be relevant because the people who were there that got it to that state might not be as involved. It might be a much larger company. It might be a lot more processed. It's very much about, I would say, go look for the smartest people you can surround yourself with and try to work there. And don't just do, like, low flavor one year at a multiple companies. Like, you really wanna understand something from first principles, which really requires spending multiple years trying to work through some hard problem. You definitely wanna try to look for places that already had some level of success, and then you're gonna continue to build on a level of success. The reason I call that out is because there's some pretty interesting companies with smart people that seem smart from the outside. And as a 22 year old or when you're young, it's hard to evaluate, like, what is smart or not smart because everyone's smarter than you. Hi. I'm Karthik. I'm the CEO at Sift. At Sift, we're building the data tools to go build modern machines, and a lot of it is inspired by workflows and processes and how we built machines back at SpaceX where I spent the prior four and a half years before working on the Dragon flight software program. And Dragon was capsule that carried astronauts and cargo to the space station. So we have, seven publicly announced customers. We raised about 25,000,000. Most recently, the series a was led by GV, that's Google Ventures. Previous RC was led by two firms in LA, Quikka Ventures, focuses on a lot of enterprise SaaS. Riot Ventures is one of the best, like, hardware investing firms. I was born and raised in a little suburb outside of LA right next to JPL. So I was about ten, fifteen minutes outside of JPL. So I actually grew up going to industry days where you can just walk in.
00:02:08 · Karthik Gollapudi
There's a lot of photos of me actually with, like, playing with the Mars Rover and the Legos and stuff that they had at JPL. I would always grew up with Legos, but then, like, my first real, like, machines were Lego Mindstorms. You can build little robots, and you can make very simple programs with these LEGOs. I'd started that around nine, so was, like, fourth grade. Always had fun with that with my friends, and I also did this thing called FIRST LEGO League. So FIRST Robotics, they have these competitions. It's most known for the high schoolers that are building, like, these robots. They'll have, like... They'll be, like, three on three, and they'll have some sort of, like, theme saying, like, hey. We're building a moon base. So you have to build a robot that can go drive around on a slick floor. The floor will be all whiteboard material, and the wheels you have to use are basically like a whiteboard material. So it's, like, super slippery, and you'll some sort of competition where you have to, like, move these massive balls into a net, whatever it is. But they also have younger levels. It's Lego based. So that was kinda my background. It was, like, around engineering, but it wasn't, like, a hardcore engineering, like, STEM background. It was, like, I had exposure, but I had a lot of freedom to do other things. There's a little bit more nuance that I knew that the whole, like, PayPal mafia... So, basically, during undergrad, that's when Peter Thiel came out with zero to one. So that book zero to one, I liked it a lot, kinda more contrarian, very much promoting first principles thinking. Of that, I was looking at more of, the PayPal mafia companies, but PayPal was also, like, much later stage. I I didn't think it was the PayPal in the early days. But a lot of these other companies, Palantir, SpaceX, Tesla were really interesting. So that's what I was looking at as opposed to, like, the prestigious companies. I actually would... As part of advice, I would highly recommend people not optimizing for prestige. You know the etymology of the word prestige? The etymology of the word prestige is actually... It goes back to, like, the French word for illusion. And then it goes back to the Latin word for playing tricks, conjuring tricks. The whole concept, like, prestige and on a prestigious place actually a bit of an illusion.
00:03:48 · Karthik Gollapudi, S2, S0
You just wanna go to places that are, like, have results. They can, like, see people say it's great, but you can actually see with your own eyes on the ground truth. With SpaceX, was clearly visible. Ad[00:03:59] S2: Are you a tech startup founder building something cool? If so, listen up. EO has teamed up .tech domain to give founders like you a rare opportunity to pitch live directly to top VCs in Silicon Valley and get featured on this channel, viewed by more than three fifty ks subscribers worldwide. The only condition your startup must use a. Tech domain or plan to upon getting selected to pinch and erase less than $3,000,000 in funding. After all, if you're building in tech,. Tech is the most relevant domain extension to Ad[00:04:31] S0: Whoever said good things come to those who wait never shopped Black Friday early at Lowe's. Right now, get up to 50% off select major appliances, plus get free delivery, free hollowing, and free basic installation and parts when you spend $896 or more on select major appliances. Shop Black Friday early in store and online now at Lowe's. Valor through twelve two while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See associate on lowe's.com for details. Ad[00:05:00] S2: Get. It tells the world your website is all about technology, and, hey, it's cooler than a .com. Some of the coolest tech startups are already using .tech domains, and we've been highlighting their stories in EO's original interview series, Beyond Tech. Now it's your turn. Head over to www.pitch.tech or check the video description to apply now.
00:05:25 · Karthik Gollapudi
[00:05:25] S1: I joined SpaceX. There is a lot of stuff to learn. One of the Dragon missions, as it was coming back to Earth, the Dragon capsule has four parachutes. One of the four parachutes, it didn't open until a pretty low altitude. Of course, there's redundancy built in. It was always going to be safe even though that parachute didn't open. It wasn't an expected behavior. And the way that this works is these Dragon missions work on a scheduling is as soon as you bring these four astronauts back, you wanna launch another four immediately to get back on a space station. Our scheduled next launch was actually just one week behind. But then NASA said, hey. This parachute didn't open. How do we know this is not gonna be a a more problematic issue on the next mission? And then they grounded the next flight until this resolved. For us to actually figure out what was happening, we need to see all the data that was collected from the vehicle, but it's stored on this, like, black box on the vehicle just like I was in airplane. It's like this black box stores all the data. And the thing is that this capsule, it lands in the Gulf Of Mexico. You don't have Internet connection in the Gulf Of Mexico to go debug this. So at that time, Starlink was, like, a very experimental program. So we, like, shot over an email to the Starlink team, and we're like, hey. Is there any way we can get Internet over the Gulf Of Mexico? They activated some cells over the Gulf Of Mexico, upload this data from the Dragon capsule while it was sailing. This is before, like, Starlink was a thing. So, like, getting high throughput Internet in the middle of the ocean is not heard of. We're able to send all the data back to the headquarters. We were to run it through the whole testing suite, do all the analysis, basically say that the next mission is good to go. It's very interesting. You have very smart people that are basically able to coordinate satellites to beam Internet when it was a very experimental program to go accelerate your physical space craft company at the time. So I think that that was just, like, a very cool experience. I think the biggest things I learned was just seeing what good looks like, which I know is, like, very broad because I actually noticed you were asking the question earlier about what advice would you give.
00:07:00 · Karthik Gollapudi
And I think one of the things is just learning from the smartest folks. And at SpaceX, I just saw a lot of people that were operating at a very high level. And sure, you can criticize that, like, maybe certain things in, like, management might not be what everyone else likes. But at the end of day, you see it with your eyes. It's like the largest rocket ever launched and brought back and landing until you you can, like, push the boundary and, like, show people things that have never been possible. And then you're, like, super proud of the work you do. You work really, really hard, but then you can look back and you're, like, super proud of what you do. And I think the key learning was just how to operate at that very high level. The things that stood out of operating that high level, lot of is just urgency. So it's just like high urgency, high iteration rate. You learn the most if you just have that urgency to move faster. It was mostly I just wanted to see what good look like. So I was interviewing companies I thought were really high performing. At that time, this is what, twenty seventeen ish. When I decided to join SpaceX, I was just pretty much looking for learning from very, very high performing companies. Because I knew eventually I'd rather be running a company or starting company or be in a high leadership position. Let me go see how it was done by the best. So I was interviewing companies that that were very, very high performing at that time. Stripe was one of the hot companies at that time. Palantir was, like, really interesting at the time. I just wanted to learn from people who are doing well. What's it about SpaceX? Like, the interview process was just very different than every other company. Nobody was pitching me on benefits. No one was pitching me on, like, work life balance. They were pitching me on mission and the work that you're doing here. There's a lot more spartan, but it's also something you can look back on and be very excited about. And you can, like, point to something great that you accomplished with another team that was grinding very hard. That was the main reason why I chose it. So while I was there, I learned a lot about how to build machines that are safer, more reliable, fault tolerant. I wanted to bring a lot of those ideas and practices to wider industry of people building machines.
00:08:36 · Karthik Gollapudi, S0
That's why we actually started Sift to productize some of this knowledge into tools for the rest of the hardware industry. I see Sift growing in, like, the vision that I would have for it or my goal. I want a percentage of the physical world to be operating on Sift. I want at least a percent of the trains, the planes, the automobiles, the drones, the aircraft, things that are out there. I want those operating on Sift, whether they're being designed, whether they're being manufactured. If they're out in the field, they're generating data, they need to be maintained. There should be at least percentage of the fis Roll it out. Ad[00:09:02] S0: Whoever said good things come to those who wait, never shop Black Friday early at Lowe's. Right now, get up to 50% off select major appliances, plus get free delivery, free haul away, and free basic installation and parts when you spend $896 or more on select major appliances. Shop Black Friday early in store and online now at Lowe's. Valid through twelve two while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See associate at Lowe's dot com for details.