The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups

11:33Erin Price-Wright:It doesn't. So for us, it's a little bit easier, but definitely top of mind as we grow the team really quickly to not let it get out of control because you just waste a bunch of resources.

11:41Turner Caldwell:Maybe in terms of like practical or tactical advice, like what is a specific process or rhythm that you've brought from Tesla and SpaceX into your companies?

11:52Erin Price-Wright:I can hop on this one first. I think the thing that I really like and may sound counterintuitive potentially is email updates. I think high signal, low noise email updates, particularly with things related to critical path, are extremely important. To do, one, give the information to a broader set of folks.

12:13Turner Caldwell:And these are email updates from you to the team or from the team out?

12:16Erin Price-Wright:Team out, anyone. So anyone really to the point of the fire teams is usually going to be one extreme owner who is driving that problem or driving that specific task to get it completed. And for that person to take ownership and send high cadence email updates to get through the not so good parts of the upset problem is extremely important, not only for the team to see and hear, but I think it's actually wildly important for the individual who's working that project to recall what happened that day. Write it down. And make sure you write it down. Exactly. Writing down things is freaking massive.

12:46Erin Price-Wright:I have a notebook in my pocket at all times. And I think in order to get that out and for them to write it down, see it and be like, I don't think I've made the most direct progress towards the goal in this particular day. Let's fix it for the next day.

12:57Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah.

12:57Erin Price-Wright:Second.

12:59Chandler Luzsicza:I think that, you know, there's like this natural thing that happens when you're very busy is that, you know, you don't have time to write things down and write reports. What we've tried to do is, you know, that when you're running a manufacturing process, right, and you have just a day-to-day operation, you have a pass down that happens between shifts that gets emailed out every day. And if you want to drive process development and R &D towards thinking about it as a manufacturing type process, the best forcing function is at the end of the day, you have the equivalent of a shift pass down, which is you say, here's what we did, here's what we were supposed to do, here's why we didn't do the things we were supposed to do.

13:34Chandler Luzsicza:And because that does become burdensome as the team starts to grow and as there's a lot of stuff happening, We've done our best to try to, like, if everything is going into the same, like, aggregated kind of, like, data backbone, you can actually auto-populate the bulk of those passdowns. And it puts humans in the position where they're really, like, reviewing a passdown.

13:52Turner Caldwell:Editing, maybe adding commentary versus having to write something from scratch.

13:56Chandler Luzsicza:And what we've found even in, like, large-scale operations, like, the passdowns are very manual. But all that data is being collected. And so instead of someone having to sit down and carve out an hour of their day to write down exactly what happened, we've put a ton of focus into like, how do we auto-generate all of those? But you still want people to look at it. You still want them to click send because like they should have ownership and accountability of like what is in it. The other big thing that we've tried to do, it's like a balance here of like you need to set like a drumbeat for the company.

14:24Chandler Luzsicza:And if you don't set a drumbeat for the company, people don't really know what they are moving towards necessarily. It's how you kind of take flat organizations and give them some structure. And everyone knows that decisions are going to roll up on some cadence. And you obviously have to be flexible because there's going to be super critical decisions that have to happen the day of. But you also want to give some structure and a cadence to the company that enables everyone to kind of be moving in the same rhythm, effectively.

14:50Turner Caldwell:Like a sprint.

14:51Chandler Luzsicza:Sprints we try to reserve for truly critical to the company type things. And the software engineering organization obviously runs in two weeks sprints. but if we're gonna if we have like a major milestone that we're trying to hit like drive towards then we'll we'll coin that a sprint and say like let the company like as a whole is sprinting towards this thing but the the drumbeat is a little bit different it's like got it you're because you're building if you're if you're if you're building large-scale infrastructure the like it is a 12-month project or an 18-month project and if you're this isn't the same thing

15:19Turner Caldwell:as you know shipping software to the cloud where you know you can do a release cadence every day if you want. Yeah. I think that's what a lot of folks who have spent their whole careers working in just software, sort of it's hard to mentally imagine what it means to work on something over a 12 to 18 month period.

15:38Chandler Luzsicza:It is a long cycle. Yeah. But like also the goal of kind of the cadence is like give yourself time to celebrate those like intermediate wins. Yeah. Because it's easy to like lose track of the fact that you're making a ton of progress over an 18 month period. Like you look back and you're like, oh, well, we built this thing. It's awesome. But you have to like, that cadence is also like, it's the reward function for the team that they are saying like, look, okay, I'm doing the right thing. I'm driving towards the right thing. And you get that calibration on some regular basis.

16:05Turner Caldwell:Yeah. How do you think about setting milestones, Chandler?

16:09Chandler Luzsicza:As fast as you really possible.

16:14Erin Price-Wright:I don't know. I'm sure Turner has some impact on this, but there's Elon time always. And that's a hard one to battle with usually. I think, I definitely say I lean towards that in setting these. I mean, I can attest.

16:26Turner Caldwell:Knowing you pretty well by now.

16:27Erin Price-Wright:Yeah. I really try to think about it from, fortunately, I've been able to touch a lot of different parts of Rockets over my short but jam-packed career so far. And I have a decent gauge on how long things should take. And I think sort of to the effect of this drumbeat thing, but doing something sort of upfront to align the team to like, hey, this is how long I think these things are going to take. You as the person who's going to execute on it directly, like, does this sound reasonable? And then battle it there early and then set that schedule from the get-go, which is what we did. We all sat down and we set this very ambitious schedule to go get a rocket in the air by June.

17:05Erin Price-Wright:And we broke down the things we need to do to get there and they're very reasonable. And if we start straying from that path, then you start to be like, what's wrong?

17:13Turner Caldwell:I mean, I guess this is where having quite technical folks in leadership really matters. you're credible.

17:20Chandler Luzsicza:You have to have a sense of what is actually challenging but achievable. And the purpose of setting super aggressive milestones, which I think everyone should do, is it's meant to weed out what the actual critical paths are going back to the critical path. Instead of saying, okay, I've done this before, it should take 36 months. When Elon sets super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately and very deeply about what doesn't work in that type of thing. Like what actually doesn't solve for the aggressive timeframe? And then it gives you your priority list.

17:52Chandler Luzsicza:It's like, okay, there's a thousand things that have to happen. If we want to do it in six months, 900 of those things can be done in six months, but 100 of them cannot be done in six months. And so we have to go attack those hundred things. And attack can mean delete them too. Exactly. Like float those things to the top and then cut them. That's right. Yeah.

18:10Turner Caldwell:Both Tesla and SpaceX are famous for, you know, all-nighters, like a very intense work culture, long working hours, like these really hard deadlines where you're trying to do something at six months, which normally might take 36 months. How do you avoid kind of team burnout in those situations?

18:29Erin Price-Wright:A lot of this comes back to how mission aligned the company is or how strong the mission of the company is. It doesn't feel like working if it's fun. And particularly for folks who are so aligned with the mission of the company, Obviously, in SpaceX's case, making life multi-planetary, that's a fantastic mission to go stand behind and work your butt off to achieve. So it makes the long hours, the all-nighters, it makes it so that they don't really impact you that much. And I think a large, like a very high amount of thought on my end right now is going into, how do I really convince a lot of folks who haven't thought about defense before to be passionate about defense?

19:08Erin Price-Wright:Because the reality is, in my case, there's so much talent that's living in SpaceX. there's so much talent living in rock lab, firefly, and relativity that need to come work this problem set too. You know, it's how do you build that same fiery mission alignment that SpaceX has been able to achieve and other companies have been able to achieve with their workforce now in these, you know, new American dynamism focused problem sets that people just haven't been working on in a while. And then makes it all feel like fun and not like pain.

19:32Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, the mission alignment is definitely kind of like the core piece. I think the thing that actually causes burnout is churn. and like a lack of feeling like you're making progress towards a goal. And so if people are working towards something and they feel like they're actually like progressing towards it and, you know, if you're mission aligned, solving hard problems can be fun because you're, as long as you are like making progress towards that goal. And so there's a handful of things that can make like work not fun, which is churn can come from like, you know, erratic decision making that kind of like moves teams in different directions.

20:05Chandler Luzsicza:And there's always going to be a little bit of that, especially in startup companies that are moving quick and they're being very nimble. But the second is like politics in companies creates an insane amount of churn, data silos and kind of hoarding your Legos is what we call it can create an insane amount of churn. And when people have to deal with that and aren't able to focus on like, okay, I have a problem that I have to solve. The pathway is clear. The decision is clear. The priorities are clear. They'll work their butts off to go do it. But it definitely, it destroys kind of like the excitement.

20:36Chandler Luzsicza:if you have things that are around the team that are taking away from the core mission. Yeah. So people can get excited about impossible goals because it's like, yeah, we're going to go prove it.

20:47Turner Caldwell:Yeah, it's like the only thing that people do really get excited about if it feels impossible.

20:52Chandler Luzsicza:But that's the other thing that Chandler mentioned, which is as long as you're setting goals that are aggressive but are possible, like it has to be in the realm of possibility, then it doesn't, like if you go super, super aggressive on targets that have no actual technical path towards achieving it, like that can be demoralizing also. So it's a mix of like making sure the churn is gone to the extent that you can and making sure that you're setting goals that are motivating, not demoralizing. Yeah.

21:21Turner Caldwell:So maybe flipping it, what principle from Tesla or SpaceX has not worked for you in your new companies or patterns that you maybe needed to unlearn that didn't apply either because of the domain or because of the size of the company or something else?

21:38Erin Price-Wright:I think a fun one, it's not choosing not to do it. It's kind of delaying the implementation of. But the one thing that I definitely employed working Starship, a little bit on Dragon as well, is with the fantastic resource that SpaceX has behind it, you can do a lot of fantastic things. And in order to fight critical path, there are ways to do that that maybe are less efficient, I suppose, but ways that we'll go achieve the goal, parallel pathing a lot of things can be pretty resource intensive, both on a time space, but also on cost. And I think that's one thing that we are not able to do right now, given our size.

22:15Erin Price-Wright:But I think it's something that as we grow, like in order to hit speed, you need to do everything possible. And what possible looks like right now for us is growing very quickly, but is a different set of possibilities than maybe what SpaceX has right now. So I think kind of really keeping an eye on when that point is so that we can crank up the velocity even more. That's been in my mind.

22:37Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, I wouldn't actually say that there's any like one pinpointed thing that like, that at least at Tesla, at Tesla was, you know, a core principle that we wouldn't mimic. I would say that it's more like kind of massaging the implementation of those that is to address some of the things like churn and turnover and burnout.

22:54Turner Caldwell:Well, I mean, at Tesla, you were there as the company grew in order of magnitude. So you saw two very different versions of the company. So I imagine, you know, some lessons from when Tesla, you know, crossed 100 ,000 people are less relevant to you.

23:10Chandler Luzsicza:In the early days, the, like, it was flatter, obviously, as you would expect, because once you get to like 130, 140 ,000 people, you know, you have to start to layer in some structure.

23:23Turner Caldwell:I mean, you have massive, you know, groups of people who are working on factory floors who are less involved. Yeah. design decisions.

23:30Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, and so those organizations like stayed flat and nimble and still are to this day. But I, you know, I don't think there's any because like, I actually believe in a lot of in most of kind of how Tesla was running. I think that the it's just there's like little tweaks that you can make along the way that that enable you to make it like more sustainable for the for the teams.

23:51Turner Caldwell:So maybe switching gears a little bit, both Tesla and SpaceX are famous for approaching every problem with this kind of factory mindset. You know, everything is a factory. Everything, you touched on it earlier, Turner, everything kind of boils down to a manufacturing problem. So I want to talk a little bit about what that means in practice. Chandler, maybe starting with you, can we talk about iteration on Starship? So from V1 to V2 to V3, how did you balance system complexity and production rate?

24:20Erin Price-Wright:Yeah. Just to give some context, whenever I started in the Starship program is around flight three timeframe. So a little bit of V1 play in terms of full stack and then pushed all the way through the V2 development cycle and then started to touch V3 and kind of lay that out before I left the company. I think really what this trade for us came down to and what enabled kind of the speed and thinking with this factory mindset is, and really just production focus in general, is requirements. Like from the design side, if you can boil up all the requirements that sound stupid as fast as possible and then give yourself a chance to whack them out of the equation.

24:59Erin Price-Wright:You now leave yourself... Like what?

25:01Turner Caldwell:Give me an example, if you can.

25:02Erin Price-Wright:Yeah, there's one that's kind of interesting. It's kind of getting into the weeds, but we had the opportunity to pull some hardware from Booster. So Booster was a little bit ahead of the ship team in terms of their V3 design. They kind of skipped V2 for Booster. They went from V1 to V3. And they had some hardware design for the V3 vehicle that actually could have been plugged in the ship very easily. and we had very limited engineers to go design a ton of prop systems hardware and we identified that oh we can maybe use this and we kind of brought it over early which would have been an earlier implementation and booster and one of the things that popped up that sounds kind of silly is it was essentially a snorkel that lives inside the fuel tank and you could condense liquid inside that snorkel and the valves that were effectively inventing the tank there don't like liquid so when we were trying to go super fast we were like oh sweet we got free hardware we can skip a whole design cycle, let's go fast, we can just jump into production sooner rather than later.

25:58Erin Price-Wright:We were like, oh, we're going to get liquid in this thing too. I don't know if the browser will like that. And what we did is we just spooled up the necessary resources to go prove that that's going to be okay. And what that did was not only allow us to go roll in this whole hardware design into production sooner, but it also enabled Bisher once they got there to go use the same hardware. So from a company goal perspective, it was fantastic. And it was like the perfect direction. I think I won't take credit for all of that ideation. Actually, another guy on the team is still there. kind of brought it to my plate.

26:25Erin Price-Wright:And I'm like, oh man, that's freaking great. Let's do it. Let's go fast. But that's one thing. And it's really just, you know, staying super clear on this intention to question every requirement. Because what that does is it enables your requirements set whenever, you know, an engineer sits in to go actually design the hardware to be, you know, enabled to design a very simple solution. And simple is fast. Simple is cheap. So really, I think that whole part of the SpaceX mantra is very real. And it is happening across Starship. It's even happening on fixes on Dragon and Falcon.

26:51Turner Caldwell:Like if you hadn't been focused, If you hadn't been thinking two steps ahead about production, you would have just designed something from scratch that was perfectly bespoke to the set of requirements. Exactly.

27:02Erin Price-Wright:It's like, yeah, exactly. Bespoke requirements, and I think, you know, we literally had a whole design for all this hardware before realizing, oh, crap, we should just go use that. Because then we can go start figuring out how to build these, you know, somewhat complex weldments sooner rather than later, and then build the production of those very quickly.

27:17Turner Caldwell:That's where information access really matters. Absolutely. Yeah. What about you, Turner? you know, you helped build Tesla's billion-dollar lithium refinery in Corpus Christi, which is, you know, up and running. What were some of the hardest challenges you overcame? How did you approach them with this kind of factory and production mindset?

27:37Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, I think that, so design for manufacturing is kind of like how you do product design and ensure that you can kind of scale that into something that can be produced at scale with, you know, very short tech times and all that.

27:49Turner Caldwell:Yeah, but I mean, people don't really think about a refinery as a product. Exactly.

27:53Chandler Luzsicza:And so what we spent a good amount of time thinking about, and then obviously we thought about when I was at Tesla, was when you're in construction, basically, the environment is, you're building a custom thing, right? And so you have to break that down into modular subsets that can be manufactured off-site and brought to site. And then you have to think, everything should have a tactile analysis associated with it, right? A what analysis? A tact time analysis, which is basically breaking down all the discrete steps required to build something effectively. And that needs to happen.

28:31Turner Caldwell:Is that a Tesla, a SpaceX term or is that an industry term?

28:34Chandler Luzsicza:No, that's an industry term.

28:35Turner Caldwell:Okay.

28:36Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, can't take credit for inventing tact time analysis. The key there is that like through the whole die chain from like R &D and like how your analytical labs run, you should be thinking about, okay, what are the individual steps that go from a sample comes into a lab to a result comes out? And so you need to run analytical labs, like little manufacturing processes. On construction, you need to boil it down into specific subsets of tasks that are, you know, actually torquing bolts and actually like welding out seams to build that up into like what does the schedule actually need to be instead of doing like top-down assessments of kind of how long something is going to take to build.

29:09Chandler Luzsicza:And then when you're in mining operations, you also need to do like super discreet tactile analyses of all of the discrete tasks that happen around a mining operation. And I think that the construction industry does not, some folks do this, but because of the like custom nature of each individual project, it takes time and effort. You have to allocate resources to be able to like build from the ground up of like how long it actually takes to do something. and as we start to think about like how do you run construction like manufacturing operations you know the way a construction site runs typically is a superintendent you know has been given their target for the month on a daily basis they'll go out to the field they'll stand in a circle with the trades they'll say what are you doing today what are you doing today what are you doing today at the end of the day they come back they say what did you do today what did you do today and there isn't a lot of like quantification that happens on a regular basis like there isn't a lot of short interval control of construction operations that is actually quantified.

30:08Chandler Luzsicza:And so what we have started doing at Mariana is breaking that down. And this ends up being like a data management thing, right? And a resource allocation optimization you have to do where you have a subset of materials and equipment that are on site. You have a subset of people that are on site and you have a set of tasks and need to be done. And today that is like humans trying to like sit between those three databases and decide like what is the task that's going to happen at the site. And we see a ton of opportunity there to do that algorithmically. That enables you, if you have all that data available, you can actually set daily hourly goals.

30:44Chandler Luzsicza:And then if you can automate the data capture that is happening at the site, like Boston Dynamics has the spot dog, that works great. It can kind of roam around the site, take 3D scans. You have to do a lot of work on the software side to be able to reconcile the 3D scans that have come in to the model. And then you can actually do short interval control on construction, which is effectively what manufacturing is, which is like super short interval control. Everyone has a dashboard that tells you, okay, how many parts are we trying to make today at this station? And they know whether they're trending towards their goal or they're trending behind their goal or exceeding their goal.

31:16Chandler Luzsicza:And like measuring the things that matter in construction, in mining, in refining, like that is actually the like cultural thing that needs to shift. And then we did a good amount of, tried to do a good amount of at Tesla, but ultimately you have to invest in the software backbone that enables that.

31:35Turner Caldwell:For few founders, I've heard as often we are ahead of schedule and under budget than you, Turner. Well, we're trying.

31:43Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, we're trying. It's about measuring and quantifying. I think a lot of manufacturing, you go really deep on understanding because you're making thousands of parts an hour depending on the scale of manufacturing process. And that level of measuring and measuring against goals and setting targets just doesn't happen in this like large-scale infrastructure ecosystem.

32:04Turner Caldwell:Maybe talking a little bit about vertical integration. It's one of the most obvious and talked about Tesla and SpaceX principles. It's also really expensive, really hard. There's been, you know, various debates. TVPN had a good session on this recently. You know, should all tech, hard tech startups vertically integrate? Where and when do you vertically integrate? How do you guys think about it? how do you balance speed with capital intensity and operational risk? I'd love to hear your thoughts on vertical integration. Maybe Chandler, why don't you jump in?

32:39Erin Price-Wright:I was talking with Mike Venciato about this directly. It caused quite a stir. It sure did. We had a good back and forth. I'm largely in support of the take that was on there. I think -

32:51Turner Caldwell:Maybe for the people who didn't see it, what was the take?

32:54Erin Price-Wright:The take, at least my read back on it was it needs to be strategic. Like this blank slate, idealistic, we're going to vertically integrate is like, I think, almost naive in a way. Like vertical integration is not easy. Certainly not. It's very much not easy. And I think there's, we're coming from places that have made it look easy for sure, but it's not. It's really not easy. From the outside. From the outside. From the outside, it looks super easy.

33:22Turner Caldwell:Yeah, it's a very romantic dream.

33:24Erin Price-Wright:Absolutely. And I think you have a lot of people who maybe haven't lived that pain to understand the trade associated with going for that strategically. So I think how I think about it is we have to bring in the assemblies in-house that are going to bottleneck our supply chain as fast, or bottleneck our production line as fast as possible. So I think what that looks like for us is some of the bigger weldments. Starting with that sort of thing, bringing it in-house sooner rather than later is something that's relatively easy to do, but is a very complex thing that has multiple steps that if we can bring that in-house, we whack one mole on the table of getting to this 10 ,000 missiles per year number.

33:59Erin Price-Wright:I think there's, of course, many more challenges or you kind of just, whenever you're looking at your in-state product, you need to go and see what are the things that are really hitting me on schedule. And for us, there's probably five of those right now that are like screaming at us, like, please help, please help. So those things are obviously gonna be top of mind to like, how could we do this? Like, what is the way we would do this? And then you can actually start to analyze how intense the capital is to make it happen, how extensive the time is required to actually go and achieve on that.

34:29Erin Price-Wright:But it has to be strategic. And I think a lot of the takes that are, we're fully vertically integrated this, we're fully integrated that, is just, it's going to spend a lot of money. That's for sure. Yeah, I don't think vertically integrating

34:43Chandler Luzsicza:for the point of vertically integrating, to kind of echo what Chandler was saying, makes any sense. I think every vertical integration decision, which there are thousands of them, need to boil down to one question, especially in like the early days of companies, is does the company exist or not if you don't make the decision to vertically integrate? And so like if you boil it down to like a subset of problems that are binary and like does Mariana exist or does Mariana not exist, that makes the decision easy. And that could be a number of drivers. It's either the part doesn't exist, the technology doesn't exist, or the cost is like so insanely high that the company can't exist by not vertically integrating into the thing.

35:22Chandler Luzsicza:And so if the, and I call it the thing because there's many, many things, and like subcomponents or parts of the software stack that if you don't go and do it yourself, like the company just won't exist. And so when you boil it down to that, like it ties into like, that is the ultimate strategic decision driver. So you should not be vertically integrating just because you can save 5 % or 10 % or 20, even 50 % on a subcomponent that does not kind of check the box of like, does the company exist or not? If we don't -

35:50Turner Caldwell:So it's not primarily a cost thing.

35:52Chandler Luzsicza:It shouldn't be in the early days. Like in the early days when you have resources that are slim and you have to decide where do I allocate this team that needs to continue to grow like all startups or like many startups. So when you're in that resource constrained mode, you should only be vertically integrating into the things that have a binary outcome of the company exists or the company doesn't exist. Then eventually once you start to have a large team that can go and you're driving down unit costs, that's where the cost-driven vertical integration starts to become an interesting and much longer decision.

36:25Chandler Luzsicza:I would say, because now it's like on paper it can look great, but the risk transfer from a supplier to yourself is like the main thing that you have to be thinking about, right? The folks that do anything in your supply chain, they are carrying risk in those activities, right? And so whether it is, you're not eliminating a supply chain point. You're actually expanding your supply chain interactions because if you vertically integrate into something that's upstream, they have their own supply chain that you now have to absorb. We made the decision to go and be a software company that builds and operates minerals infrastructure, mainly because software companies that sell to mining companies have a very, very hard time penetrating the sector because the issue is the rate of uptake of software and of technology is actually gated by what would be the customers if you were a pure place-ass company.

37:11Chandler Luzsicza:And so the question for us in that regard was always, does Mariana exist or not if we're not both a software company and a mining company? The answer to that was no, the company would not exist. And so we had to do that. But then once you sign up for that, There's a question of like how much of your like part, like where do you do partnerships and where is there a rich enough ecosystem where there's enough competition to be able to have confidence that like the cost will come down on some subcomponent or the cost will come down on some part of the software stack.

37:39Turner Caldwell:So something that both Tesla and SpaceX are pretty famous for is the caliber of talent that they're able to hire. And, you know, part of it comes back to this mission, this mission problem, this mission alignment that you guys talked about before. Part of it comes down to, you know, people who people want to work with other smart people and learn from other smart people. But it's, you know, it's pretty remarkable how many excellent engineers and founders have come out of these companies. So how does hiring work at these companies? Like how do they get such excellent talent and excellent engineers in the door?

38:14Turner Caldwell:And how do you bring that, some of those lessons into the companies that you're building today?

38:21Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, I think the, like the key part of the hiring process at, you know, Tesla at least, and I'm sure it's SpaceX, is the like technical evaluation goes quite deep. and so you're going to talk to six engineers. If you're applying for an engineering role, you're probably talking to six engineers before you're getting an offer. You're almost certainly doing a technical test that kind of shows how you think through problems and are you able to solve the problems that your resume says you're able to solve. And so that level of technical rigor that goes into assessing folks that are coming into the company is pretty extensive.

38:55Chandler Luzsicza:You're going to have eight to 10 conversations before you get an offer. And that's a feature. 100%. And does it make the hiring process a little bit slower? Yes. But it is really important to do your darndest to make sure that the folks that are coming to the company are going to come in and be autonomous and able to balance authority and accountability, which means that they have to really, really have the deep technical understanding of the field that they're going into. We've mirrored that effectively and ensured that. And it's harder when you don't have the brand that Tesla or SpaceX have, right?

39:32Chandler Luzsicza:Of, you know, the folks who are trying to get a job at those companies, they're like, yes, I'll do a tech test. Yes, I will talk to as many people as you want me to talk to. And so you, you know, you do have to manage that a little bit with candidates. But for the folks who are really excited about the mission and the folks who are really excited about the company, who are the folks that you want to bring in anyways, they will go through that process. And we typically pitch it in both directions. It's like, look, if you're going to join, you're joining a startup that has, you know, inherently has high risk, and so you should also get to know the team that we have.

40:03Chandler Luzsicza:And so it goes in both directions.

40:04Turner Caldwell:I've always found that extremely rigorous and actually hard interviewing processes positively filter for people who are motivated by the really hard interview process. Yep. Like if you're a cracked engineer, you want to work with other cracked engineers and you want to know that other engineers have gone through this same process that you have. And like really hard interview process is pretty fun, but they're very hard to design. it's not for the faint of heart on the interviewer side

40:30Erin Price-Wright:I think to not just repeat what he said it is very similar but the distinction I'll make and I think the value I can add here is very true on the full time like say multi-year experienced person who's coming to a SpaceX like they're going through four or five six screens a panel interview to finish it off I think the value that I can add here is particularly related to the internship funnel I think given the brand with Tesla and SpaceX, like literally it's been quantified. These are like the most applied to programs ever. And they've got this insane interest from the public, which obviously is a double-edged sword, right?

41:07Erin Price-Wright:It's like you get very good, but you also get very bad. It's a broad spread. However, I think looking at the impact of these internship programs on the eventual full-time candidates or the full-time employees, it gives a three-month trial period to these people. and people that crush stay all the time. And I find that, myself included, I was a, I interned in SpaceX four times. I couldn't leave. Like, it was the dream. I started software.

41:36Turner Caldwell:You were like, oh, maybe I'll try something, try a different internship one summer. I almost talked out of school to stay,

41:40Erin Price-Wright:but they said we couldn't do that anymore. It's not the old days. So, but there, I think the overwhelming population of folks that are doing so much of the critical work on Starship Dragon, Falcon even, are intern conversion. And I think that program is so freaking crucial to like the eventual engineering population because it gives people a real chance to go and demonstrate that, yes, I am a killer, right? I am badass. I can do this thing.

42:08Turner Caldwell:So at Galadine, like you're a small team still. You're growing your team.

42:12Erin Price-Wright:We just launched internship. I was just going to say. We just did.

42:14Turner Caldwell:How are you thinking about that and designing your both internship program, but like broader interview process to get the best quality people in the door?

42:23Erin Price-Wright:Yep. So we're still very small, so it's not really saying much, but I'm, of course, talking to every person. I don't know if you still are. I'm sure you are. Multiple times. Exactly. Yeah, multiple times, coercing them over the phone, convincing them that—

42:35Turner Caldwell:Are you doing both kind of the behavioral interviews and the deep dive technical interviews?

42:41Erin Price-Wright:Yeah, I find that I get a lot out of—I always start with one sort of broad question and dig into a lot of things, but I really open it up to allow myself a playground to punch and jab and go around their problem set. but I effectively ask, walk me through a problem that you solved. And whenever they walk through that problem over 20 minutes or 15 minutes, I know very quickly whether or not they're good or not good. And usually I'm okay enough, no matter what the discipline is, to kind of jab and punch around that problem set a little bit to feel it out. But I find it's pretty hard to get past my screen there with people who are not true.

43:15Erin Price-Wright:But for the full-time process, we're doing two, three screens and then a panel interview. And a large part of my framing too is very much, I want to introduce you to the team. Like we have a very small team that you're going to need to live with. And we want to make sure that we're happy with you and you're happy with us. And this gives you the perfect forum to do it. So that's usually how we finish our full-time process. But for interns, we're figuring it out right now. It's a shorter process, admittedly. But what I'm really looking for for this first wave of missile engineers is passion. Like I need people who are going to come in and crush.

43:46Turner Caldwell:And what backgrounds of interns are you hiring for?

43:50Erin Price-Wright:Project teams, doesn't matter which. So the Formula SEs, the whatever drone UAS stuff, but rocket teams too. I actually found a specific rocket team in the country that works on rockets with the same propellants that we're using, which I did not know existed because it's a little bit more rare, but I'm targeting that school.

44:10Turner Caldwell:Get them all out to Austin.

44:11Erin Price-Wright:Get the whole team, get them on a bus and bring them over here.

44:16Turner Caldwell:Maybe wrapping up, given we're talking about hiring interns and young talent, Both of you started your careers at Tesla and SpaceX, you know, relatively young. What advice would you give to a young SpaceX or Tesla engineer, or in fact, just a young engineer overall, who's thinking about maybe one day leaving to start a company? How should they be thinking about that journey?

44:38Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, I would say, you know, if you're at a company that has, you know, really, really high talent density, and you're in a position where you feel like you're constantly learning and every day is kind of like a growth opportunity. And you get to see projects from like the messy phase, the early messy phases through the middle messy phases through the kind of deployment messy phases. Like that experience is incredibly valuable. Seeing something through end to end. End to end. So I would say that I wouldn't go and start something until you have been able to sit around a project that you've seen go end to end and then done that multiple times that enables you to see how much better can you get with each iteration of like from concept through to deployment.

45:27Chandler Luzsicza:And getting to do that with like the most awesome people in the world is like a very unique experience that positions you to be able to go and start something eventually. But I wouldn't like rush to leave and go start something because one, your credibility to, but really your credibility to attract talent because like the companies are ultimately like this assembly of like awesome people who are driven towards a mission that everyone's excited about. And so convincing people to join you on that mission, that's going to be painful, it's going to be risky. You have a lot more credibility if you have like been through the execution cycle multiple times.

46:03Chandler Luzsicza:No, have like the kind of embedded understanding of like how long does some part of that process take or how long does that whole process have to take so that you can credibly set targets that the team can then rally behind and go build to. And so I would say that getting, like having done that, take full advantage of like ecosystems and companies where you have the ability to do that and where they're insulating you a little bit from the risk that you have to be able, like be comfortable taking. And as long as you're getting authority and accountability and like the scopes that you're getting within the company and then you're getting like more and more of that, that is going to be an invaluable experience that will enable to set you up to be successful.

46:43Turner Caldwell:I see you nodding, Chandler.

46:44Erin Price-Wright:Yeah, I'm trying to think about, again, I think Turner and I live the same life. Just he's a couple years ahead. I started at SpaceX when I was 18 years old. Like that was when I first entered the doors into the fun candy land that was SpaceX and it was the dream, right? And I told myself from day one that I'm going to be a sponge. I want to be the biggest sponge I possibly can to absorb as much freaking information from all these amazing people as I can. That's not an internship-limited thing. That's a forever thing. I'm still doing it today. But I think a lot of how I approached it and how I think people should approach it generally, not just if they're going to a SpaceX or a Tesla, but they should really approach this from a how can I surround myself with the best people in the world and work on a project from start to finish and do those reps like what Turner was saying.

47:29Erin Price-Wright:I will carry out that though with it's hard, right? If you're fresh coming out of school, you may not know what that looks like. So maybe some actionable recommendation is, you know, lean on your network, lean on people you know, both in school, peers who may have interned elsewhere and seen other environments, or if there's professors, other people in your life that you can have meaningful conversations with about perspective on certain companies, missions, products, that sort of thing, like go do that thing because it can be hard. Like it can be kind of scary. You don't know because you haven't already done it.

47:56Erin Price-Wright:You don't know if - What good looks like. What good looks like, exactly. So I will, yeah, caveat with it's hard, but once you find that sweet spot of place to be, then just go be a sponge.

48:06Turner Caldwell:Yeah, I think knowing what good looks like and being able to develop an understanding and intuition for how exceptional teams build is pretty invaluable.

48:18Erin Price-Wright:Yeah, I don't think I could start Galadine without having spent a handful of years doing the things I did at SpaceX.

48:26Chandler Luzsicza:Yeah, I think that maybe the last thing I'll say is that you'll never actually be like fully trained to go and start a company, right? It's not like you stay there for, there's no recipe. It's not like you stay somewhere for 10 years and then you go and you go and start a company. And so there's always gonna be like a, when do you feel yourself confident to go and take a risk? And different people are gonna have different perspectives on like, when do they feel ready to go and do it? But I generally think that you want to have as strong of a technical basis before you go and have to learn all of the company building side of things.

49:00Chandler Luzsicza:And so making sure that you're kind of like over-indexing on the technical side before you go and kind of sign up for figuring out how to hire and figuring out how to fundraise and figuring out how to build all the ecosystem around a company and the infrastructure around a company that has to be built. Because you are going to keep learning once you go and start something. But being hyper-focused on building that strong technical basis is the key.

49:20Erin Price-Wright:Yeah, I can imagine. Like this already having the technical basis and going and growing into the fundraising, all of this other stuff that I didn't know how to do. like this is already hard. I could not imagine the inverse. Like going and needing to figure out all of the technical chops that I have up to this point or at least enough to be successful in what we're trying to do would be very, very difficult. So I'd much rather have this.

49:44Turner Caldwell:Don't try to learn how to build rockets on the job as a founder. That's good advice. Yep. Cool. All right. This was awesome. Thanks, guys. Great. Thanks.

49:53Erin Price-Wright:Thanks for listening to this episode of the A60Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

50:32Erin Price-Wright:Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.

50:52Thank you.