00:12:38 · Karthik Gollapudi
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. You wanna be careful to not go somewhere, spend a decade, and if that company shuts down, you don't know what that company did that was successful or not successful. That's why it's good to go to a place that has, like, some level of success that has momentum and it's continuing to grow. So, like, SpaceX was really awesome in that regard. They were actually... Around the time I landed was the first time the Falcon Heavy was launched. They already had rocket... Falcon nine rockets that were launching. They already had the Dragon one program, but there's still a lot more there they were planning on doing. They weren't just, like, sitting and resting. That's what I would optimize for. The reason I call out the procedure is, like, I would completely remove the procedure. Like, if you really wanna do that, go do that. The reason I call that out is because a lot times people will go into that career purely for the sake of the saying, like, it looks cool. You can go tell your aunts about it, but are you gonna learn as much? Are you doing
00:13:31 · S0
Ad[00:13:31] 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 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 on lowe's.com for details.
00:14:00 · Karthik Gollapudi
[00:14:00] S1: Like, hard skills. Are you actually working on the problem, or are you completely abstracted away? Are you just multiplying the grunt work that's being done? So, like, are you actually gonna ownership of things, or are you just, like, being the grunt work multiplier for someone else that's more senior? So the reason I recommend people to join a company, doing something hard and, like, seeing what great looks like, it's very difficult to strive for greatness if you've never seen what greatness looks like. Cool. You can go watch as many podcasts as you want. You can go see what... Some blog posts, but it's kinda like Instagram. Right? You only see the best of someone's life. You only see, like, a very curated version that's in, like, a blog post. But what were the decisions that got the company to that place? What were the nine failures they had for that one success? That's what you learn by actually solving hard problems. You don't get that by spending one, two years at, like, six companies and then saying, I'm gonna go do an MBA and then go start a company, for example. And you just really have to work deeply on a hard problem with smart folks. And that hard problem, by the way, can be different problems. Like, you don't necessarily have to go build rockets. Even just, like, growing, like, a software startup, there's a lot of challenges in building that company. Honestly, like, I don't think it's a complete reflection on the other person not being smart. I think just that what's the right role for the person? Like, for somebody to join your company, it's, like, it's a pretty big risk. It might be very different than somewhere else that they've been very successful at. Someone who might have been very, very successful, like a Salesforce, they might struggle in a much earlier stage role. Like, I wouldn't hold it against them. It's just a process. Like, don't feel as bad about it. Everyone does it. Everyone struggles. Everyone finds it hard. But as we were talking about iteration rate, you wanna kiss more frogs. You'll see what's good, what's not a lot faster than sitting there trying to grind through a bad decision. The best things that I learned while working at SpaceX, very, very strong focus on first principles thinking. You can just keep asking why.
00:15:30 · Karthik Gollapudi
A lot of times, people push something off, and they say, oh, well, we're waiting for this person before we have that meeting. It's something scheduled for two weeks from now. And it's like, well, why does that person even have to be in the meeting? Well, can we go around and still move? Let's say something's not working. Instead of just saying, like, oh, that's not working because it's just broken, or it's like a thing that you can't do. Like, people say you can't land rockets. Like, why? Why can't you land a rocket? We fly and land planes all the time. People are like, oh, because of this or this technical reason. And it's like, well, it's not actually blocked by physics. It's just that nobody's ever done it before. Basically, you keep asking why till the point physics is the reason you can't do it. I think that's what I would consider first principles. But it applies everywhere. It's like, I think a lot of times we have a tendency to just say, oh, the hardware team says we can't do this. It's like, well, who on the hardware team? And you go talk to that person, you realize they actually can do it, but it's just, like, some other thing that they also need. And if you... As long as you get that, then you can actually get this thing a lot faster. There's actually... This plays into a lot of, like, risk as well. Wernher von Braun, who used to run NASA back in the... During the Apollo era, he noticed that, let's say, some engineer identified a risk, and then they told their manager about it, the manager would downplay that risk. It would go from saying, oh, this is fatal when you stop the mission, to the manager saying, hey. This is a really high risk. That person's manager says, oh, we need to go look into this. By the time it reaches Wernher von Braun, he would actually just basically... Someone that says, oh, everything's good to go. He actually implemented this thing called, like, weekly notes. So what he would do is he had every individual engineering squad or team write notes, and his team would compile them into a book. And he would actually review all of them, so he basically sees ground truth, and he can actually make decisions from first principles about what's holding up the program. And, basically, that's how we put a person on the moon. Those rockets probably have the compute power of, like, a t I 84 calculator.
00:17:04 · Karthik Gollapudi
You can do some pretty cool things when you actually dig into why.