00:30:19 · Casey Handmer, Ty Morse
[00:30:19] S1: Like, boring company didn't... I mean, like, they're drilling holes. It's great. Yeah. Like, it seems like it incubated for a long time. Yeah. Now all complicated things take time. I should know that as well as anyone. We've at this for over four years now, but maybe it's just, like, there's a minimum, like, six year spend or something to do a new kind of thing from the ground up. I don't know. [00:30:37] S0: Elon, ten years ago or twenty years ago, would start off with a relatively small team, and the company would just take probably, like, six or eight years to bake before they had, like, a real, you know, good product to... That they wanted to ship. Like, I think it took that long for Tesla. I think that took roughly that long for a rocket to make it to orbit. I think it's the same [00:30:57] S1: thing. Beginning. [00:30:58] S0: Yeah. I think it's the same thing for Neuralink and Boring Company where they're starting to, like, they're starting to ramp on the Neuralink implants, and they're starting to ramp on the number of tunnels dug or, like
00:31:09 · Casey Handmer
[00:31:09] S1: Well, think neural link, they... Yeah. I think for neural link, there was a fairly well understood, like, set of steps that have to be gone through to get approvals to do, like, you know, stage three trials in humans and then and then scale up. It's hard to say. I I suspect that for the projects that are not, like, obviously on the critical path, they probably don't get, like, priority access to talent. And it it really matters having the right people on the job. Like, it's kind of a strange thing. People people might assume from the bottom looking up... Actually, I think Sean went on about this for a while that, like, you know, two or three steps above my level, like, talent saturates. But it doesn't. And this is... If you watch sport, it's intuitively obvious that that at the higher levels of anything, separates, you know, and it differentiates. And so, you know, the the three best people at at SpaceX to work on getting Starmind up and running made that project possible. And previously, they had fully staffed the project with talented, well regarded engineers who were making progress, but they they weren't gonna ship, and Elon fired them all. So it makes a huge difference. There's essentially... Like, I think... Particularly, like, lot of talented people come through school, and they're like, yeah. I got, like, you know, 98% plus in all my exams. Pretty much saturated the metrics. Like, nope. Like, in the real world, there's no upbound. There's no there's no there's no, like, limit to the upside. You know? Like, you're 10 times better than the next person. Good. Why don't... Why aren't you a 100 times better? But what what what would a 100,000 times better look like? What what does it take to get there? You would see this in podcasting as well. Right? It's parallel distributed. I think so. And the best the best are really good. Yes. Chris Power said you've gotten better. I don't know if I can see it. We'll have to wait and see.
00:32:56 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[00:32:56] S0: I was having a conversation with one of one of my founder buddies last night, and we were kind of talking about the evolution of Elon over time. And he didn't believe that, you know, twenty years ago, Elon would go into a room and then just, like, fire an entire team and walk out. But he kinda does that today. He does some other things today. [00:33:14] S1: Your founder friend believes that now? I believe so. Yeah. I I learned pretty early on that... And, actually, it's the same with parenting as well, that there's no upside in being, like, highly finessed when it comes to solving problems. Right? If you're... If you wanna motivate your team to solve the problem and not escalate it to you, they have to believe that, like, if they don't solve the problem and it escalates to you, it's gonna be messy. And it will be. You know? And that's just part of it, I think. But I don't have a recruiting team here. Right? Whereas Elon Elon has very prestigious companies, and there's always hordes of people who wanna come in and work really hard. And he just takes in a lot of talented people and and gives them steadily graded increasing difficulty of problems, and it's up or out. You know? And that's how you surface talent. Like, it's not like you can do some exam at the end of high school and be like, oh, you're destined to be like like, one in a million project manager. The only way you find out is you find 10... One in a 100,000 project managers, and you give them the next level problem of difficulty, and you see who succeeds.
00:33:14 · Casey Handmer, Ty Morse
[00:33:14] S1: Your founder friend believes that now? I believe so. Yeah. I I learned pretty early on that... And, actually, it's the same with parenting as well, that there's no upside in being, like, highly finessed when it comes to solving problems. Right? If you're... If you wanna motivate your team to solve the problem and not escalate it to you, they have to believe that, like, if they don't solve the problem and it escalates to you, it's gonna be messy. And it will be. You know? And that's just part of it, I think. But I don't have a recruiting team here. Right? Whereas Elon Elon has very prestigious companies, and there's always hordes of people who wanna come in and work really hard. And he just takes in a lot of talented people and and gives them steadily graded increasing difficulty of problems, and it's up or out. You know? And that's how you surface talent. Like, it's not like you can do some exam at the end of high school and be like, oh, you're destined to be like like, one in a million project manager. The only way you find out is you find 10... One in a 100,000 project managers, and you give them the next level problem of difficulty, and you see who succeeds. [00:34:16] S0: If you look at Elon over time, he becomes more and more raw, it seems, not only, like, publicly facing on social media and x, but also, like, privately. It feels like he just makes decisions faster.
00:34:16 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[00:34:16] S0: If you look at Elon over time, he becomes more and more raw, it seems, not only, like, publicly facing on social media and x, but also, like, privately. It feels like he just makes decisions faster. [00:34:29] S1: I'm not sure. I think I think there's more exposure now, but I I know a few people who worked with him in PayPal days, and I think he he also shot from hip then as well sometimes. [00:34:37] S0: I think I think he did. I just don't think he did it in the same way. And do you think do you think [00:34:40] S1: that there's any advantage? He didn't have [00:34:42] S0: Yeah. [00:34:43] S1: You know, a 100,000 people to deal with his messes. So [00:34:45] S0: Do you think there's any advantages to being, like, maybe a little bit more coarse like sandpaper?
00:34:45 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[00:34:45] S0: Do you think there's any advantages to being, like, maybe a little bit more coarse like sandpaper? [00:34:50] S1: Well, there is a chat... There is there is a kind of a question here, which is I think a lot of managers or startup founders or whatever will reach a point where where they can't really scale to the next size of the business. Right? But Elon has been able to work effectively at organizations of a range of sizes. That's actually pretty unusual. The important thing is getting the message out, and it's it's crazy how easy it is to be misunderstood on even the stuff you think is the simplest. And I've been coaching my managers here to, like, boil it down, boil it down. Like, your message is getting lost. Like, one bit of information, like, a single bit of information is really all that needs to be transmitted. If you can transmit it well, that's enough. But, you know, you you don't have enough time in the day to, like, sit over all your report's shoulders all the time. They have to model what you're gonna say in their head so you don't have to say it. So it it... You definitely have to have a big personality or the appearance of a big personality to achieve that. [00:35:43] S0: Do you think that you suffer from Probably. Basically... Warren Buffett has this idea of, you know, there's, like, investing hurdles where sometimes you have to, like, be a genius and jump over this 10 foot bar and other investments. It's like this one foot bar [00:36:00] S1: and And he's talking to Jim Simons. Yeah.