Fmr SpaceX CIO Ken Venner on Elon, Gwynne, & SpaceX Playbook

0:00Ken, thank you so much for joining.

0:02Ken Venner:Oh, my pleasure. I'm so excited to be here. We just had an amazing sit down with Jordan. We went through the company. We talked about you joining the team. You have a legendary career. You were at Broadcom. Then you were at SpaceX. Then you've done a couple of space companies since then. So just like I think it would be really interesting to maybe let's start first with why did you join Senra Systems? Yeah, I was really excited about Center Systems because cable harnesses is such a large, fragmented, unautomated business, and yet it's the backbone to everything that's being built today. There isn't an autonomous vehicle or high-tech piece of equipment that doesn't have sensors, actuators, and computers that all need to be connected together through a cable harness.

0:46Ken Venner:And most engineers, it's the last thing they think about and the last thing they want to build. And yet Jordan looked at this and said, this business is ripe for consolidation and improvement. And he's just making the right investments to scale up and scale out a business. And scaling up and scaling out are my core skills. So like when I was at Broadcom, I joined them and they were 1 ,000 people, 400 million in revenue. And the goal was to scale. And in the 11 years I was there, grew to 10 ,000 employees and 8.6 billion in revenue, did 52 mergers and acquisitions. So it's all about finding markets and growing reliable, repeatable, scalable businesses.

1:24Ken Venner:And I think we can do that again here. What's going to be your playbook? Playbook is get it defined, get it working consistently and reliably in such a way that you can now replicate it and then go out and replicate it multiple times. And then every time look for ways to improve what you're doing, make that improvement, and then move it across the entire organization. That's exactly how we did it at Broadcom. and it really worked well. And it was very similar to how we did SpaceX, which is bring automation to the table to help people do the right thing at the right time and have the system provide them the right information at the right time, and then scale the company without scaling all the employees linearly to how the company's growing.

2:08So both Broadcom and SpaceX are having a bit of a moment right now. I guess if we look back at Broadcom to your point, you helped scale that company up And it reached a massive inflection point. So what were the biggest lessons that you learned there?

2:26Ken Venner:Yeah. The biggest lessons is each size you are as you grow requires a different behavior from the company. When you're 10 people, it's a network of us just talking to each other. I need very little process or systems. It's smart people just doing the right thing. You get to 100, you need a little more process but not too much. And then you get to 1 ,000 and you need more process. But again, not too much because you can constrain a company by putting too much process in too early and stunt the growth. So you always have to assume smart people, stupid systems, let the right people do the right thing in the moment, but track them.

3:03Ken Venner:How they're doing it, what they're doing, and make sure they're accountable for the actions they're taking. And then you get to 5 ,000, 10 ,000. It's like everyone knows the piece they know, but they don't understand how a whole business works. but bringing that information together and presenting it to the top level people so they can understand how the whole company is operating together is kind of the focus. And that was both Broadcom's growth path. And when I joined SpaceX, it was again, about a thousand employees producing about one booster a year. And through the years of growing up Warp Drive, the custom platform we built there, we scaled it up to 40 boosters a year and 9 ,000 employees across multiple locations and it was just that continuously look at how people do what they do and then collect and present the right information at the right time.

3:48How did you make the decision to go to Broadcom to SpaceX?

3:53Ken Venner:Broadcom to SpaceX. So Broadcom to SpaceX was a pretty simple one. The company had gotten big enough that it wasn't really innovating anymore. It was kind of just operating and I get bored in those situations. I'm not really a true just run the system about continuously improving the system and And the CFO at Broadcom was at SpaceX was an ex-Broadcommer that I knew. He invited me up one day to just do a tour of the factory. I wasn't looking for a job, but he invited me up. I did this tour of the factory, which is in Hawthorne, downtown LA-ish. And here they are building big metal objects. It's supposedly cheaper than anyone else in the world in downtown LA.

4:30Ken Venner:And I'm like, well, this is crazy. But I have manufacturing in my blood. My entire career has been in manufacturing. I'm like, this is a pretty interesting place. No idea who they are. I don't know what they do for a living because SpaceX wasn't a name back in those days. And they're an hour at least away from where I live. So he offered me a job. I'm like, I don't know. I want to drive an hour up to this place. But it was such an interesting story that Elon was going to save humanity from itself by colonizing another planet because we're going to screw this one up and we need to keep humankind going.

4:59Ken Venner:And it was another scaling opportunity. So I thought about it, talked to my wife, and in the end decided to bite the bullet, take it. It was a great move. And so you're a chief information officer there? Chief information officer working for Elon and Gwen. Yep. So I built all the systems and IT technology that drove that business. What was the day-to-day like? I just can't even imagine. They started at five o 'clock in the morning, driving up to Hawthorne, trying to miss the crowd, getting in by six, and then working with all the various groups in the organization to define how they were operating and making sure we were not only collecting the information, but we're presenting like design changes they were making up front and their impact on operations and making it very apparent very early what was going on so that you didn't get to a certain point and go like that design change just cost us five million dollars to implement they knew as it was going through so it was a very tightly coupled system that kept everyone working together and then just trying to scale the business and elon had hired me because they had a visual a purchased application he wanted to build the digital nervous system for the 21st century rocket company and i'm like i started that way at at &t early early in my career building because no purchase software existed and the opportunity to build it again i'm like this is either the smartest thing or the stupidest thing we've ever done and i have no idea right now whether this is smart or stupid and i'd say for the first two years i didn't think it was such a smart idea by year three when we really had the software working well and the company was really using and i'm like this man is a genius.

6:27Ken Venner:He figured out what we needed to do, how we needed to get it done. It became one of the major differentiators for how SpaceX could scale and keep all the information together and connected with each other. What do you think the key components of Elon's magic is? Number one is first principles thinking eliminate before automation is clear to what he's saying and remove before automate is an activity and then just holding people really accountable and driving them the whole concept of a responsible engineer is what I learned there and that person owned that part from first requirements all the way through to post flight there were no handoffs there's no finger pointing either you got it done or you are no longer employed and like that kind of accountability and that everyone else is serving you getting your part through the process really created ownership like and the people there worked 10 12 hours a day and didn't think about it Like, it wasn't like we were required.

7:24Ken Venner:It's just like, you're looking around at 7 o 'clock at night, and like, nobody's left yet. Like, I'm not going to leave yet. I need to still finish the thing I'm working on. And so, long hours, but really committed to the mission. And Elon was really good about keeping the mission as a forefront focus for what we were doing. And just kind of energized everyone to get it done. I know Elon is obviously a big spotlight of SpaceX. But I haven't heard many stories about Gwen and what it's like working with her. Oh, my God. What was it like? What are the biggest lessons that you learned from her? So Gwen was to Elon what Henry was to Nick at Broadcom.

8:01Ken Venner:Nick was the aggressive, make it happen, drive people to the very last ounce of juice they had. And Henry was pick up the mess that gets created, help people figure out really what they're trying to do, make sure everyone's safe as they go forward. I'd say Gwen is exactly the same thing for Elon. Elon is just very driven, very focused, very motivated, very hard to work for. Never worked harder in my life than when I worked for him. And Gwen was as driven as Elon, but in a nicer way that helped the company keep moving forward and not just burn everyone out as they went. But brilliant. Brilliant.

8:41Ken Venner:Knew where to focus, what to do. Kept things going when Elon would go up and focus on Tesla, the boring company, and that kind of activity. and she was like the glue that held it all together. With such a strong culture like that, how does that impact scaling it? Does it make it easier or harder? Yes, it depends how strong it is and replicatable. I'd say for the time that I was at SpaceX, they were able to sustain the culture as it grew up. So they hired, promoted, trained to keep that accountability culture in place and that outcomes-based culture in place while we're going there. I've been at other companies that did it really well when they were small, and as it scaled up, it didn't scale with the company.

9:28Ken Venner:And then the company became much more corporate-ish in its behaviors and characteristics where the outcomes weren't as important as the PowerPoint decks you created or the people that you know. Because SpaceX is now reaching critical stage with the IPO for wealth creation, and kind of the benefit back to the employees. I know that this has happened over time with secondaries and tenders, but this is one of the largest wealth creation events ever. Why are you still motivated to keep working? What would I do if I wasn't working? I don't know. Right, that's the question. I don't have to work. Having left Broadcom, I didn't have to work anymore.

10:06Ken Venner:I left SpaceX, really didn't have to work anymore. I like interesting problems with interesting people trying to make a change that benefits mankind. And so Senra was just that unique opportunity for me to come in and take a dormant market that I think is critical to what's about to happen in the U.S. economy or the worldwide economy and really make a transformational change. And Jordan gave me that opportunity. And I've been here six weeks. And friends ask. And I'm like, every day is a great day at work. I feel blessed to be working with this group, creating what they're creating. like to me this is the second example of building what they built in redondo and until you built it three times you don't know if what you built will replicate itself so number two is just the beginning of all the things that worked at redondo that don't work down here say that model doesn't really work because it was locationally oriented so now we got two we got something as soon as we build the third one i think we'll have a rinse and repeat model and then games on like we're just going to this industry, increase the speed, reduce the price, up the quality.

11:12Ken Venner:I think it's just a very exciting time. This is obviously a little bit of a reach, but maybe it's not. When we just recently had Tom Mueller on, and we were doing a tour, and he was like, oh yeah, it only takes three versions of an engine to get it right, and so maybe it's the same with the manufacturing facilities. It could be. I mean, the law of threes, it could just be the third time you got it, and they're in different locations forces as I think Tom would to the engine it's like three different versions of the engine the first one just got you going the second one you learn from the first but not enough and then third one it's like all right I fixed finished fixing this and then just incremental tweaks from there I think in what we're doing it'll be the same thing here because the industry has significantly changed with AI and automation the way you scale businesses now is dramatically different than before of throwing more headcount at it but now we're throwing really talented headcount at it and then also automating some of that back end with you know technology AI all this kind of stuff that's happening so how do you imagine companies now scaling up with this new mix versus just purely people yeah something like SpaceX and Broadcom AI didn't exist and so It just took longer and it was harder to build the systems and the documentation and figuring out where the automation opportunities were and to digest the data to figure out where the trends were.

12:48Ken Venner:At SpaceX, I had grown up to having a team the size of about 175, building the core platforms. I've got a team of six here. I don't really think it's going to scale much more than maybe one or two more people. and I think I'll be able to do exactly what I did at SpaceX with only six because AI drives most of what we're doing and AI is now starting to enable things we weren't even capable of doing for at SpaceX so that's one of the areas and then you just look at machine automation or robotics and the ability to cost effectively apply it like AI is just driving the cost down and the speed up associated with finding unique ways to apply technology to help humans do what they're great at and getting the mundane boring tasks out of the work that we do what do you think of the name senra i have no opinion one way or the other i don't know how jordan came up with the name so he just told us oh so like you should tell me that story because i actually don't know the story they took the the word harness okay they took off the h no this is what they did they took the word harness they flipped it backwards they took the h and the s off because they don't like horse shit and all that's the name wow yeah i had never heard that story good way to come up with a name names are so hard to come up with like i've got a winery and getting the name for the winery was incredibly difficult no way where's the winery up in sonoma so if you're up in the area please come visit it's a tour wines so we're both in heelsburg and in downtown sonoma what kind of wine is it?

14:20Ken Venner:Pinot, Chard, Rosé of Pinot, and Sparklin. That is so fun. It is such a great business to be in. How long have you been doing that? Since 2009. Oh my god. For a while and we're just starting to scale right now so it's a great time. It's both a great time and a terrible time to be in the wine business. It's a shrinking market but we're growing share in a shrinking market. It's a good side project. That's the other reason I work. Wineries are not cheap and I need some money to fund the winery. I guess people always find something to do. They find some side hustle to go do. Well, awesome. Okay. So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months working with Sunra?

15:02Ken Venner:I'm looking towards the scalability of the company and the simplification of it and the ability to show how a dormant business can literally apply technology to be a transformational change in this particular industry. Amazing. Well, Ken, thank you so much for walking through your legendary experience, why you decided to join Senra, and of course, really excited about your winery. So everyone, go check that out. Please do. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you.