An Ex-SpaceX Engineer on Elon Musk, Starship, and Building a $1B-Valued Startup (Scott Morton, Founder & CEO of Revel)

24:52Scott Morton:I would like to do that. I think, you know, we have to, I think in this stage, it's we're obviously still building it. So I think there will be a point in time when it's the right thing to do. Because at a certain point, you could imagine that becoming just such a powerful standard, and in the end, being extremely useful. But yeah, I imagine there's lots to figure out in getting things right. Yeah, I think we want to get it to a mature state. I think also it is, you know kind of a key part to the platform uh and so i think we want to make sure rebel gets into a good spot before we start to open source things yes that makes sense you mentioned that you you sort of had this transition from mechanical to software engineer but going even even further back what's the first thing that you remember building oh growing up yeah yeah wow yeah i i build all kinds of things with my uh my my dad so i grew up in wisconsin he had a workshop and we would just i got really into rc cars and we would i would build these like off-roading rc like mad max creations wow uh i really wanted to fully automate them but you know we didn't have rebel back then yes but yeah um was he an engineer your father no he wasn't um he worked in he worked for the state but he just was into this sort of stuff yeah he he did all kinds of like woodworking and things like that in his spare time so yeah built a lot of things growing up obviously yeah i had legos i built like an entire city uh even a space station in the basement uh of our house and yeah i i think there is there's something really it's actually what we look for in a lot of the people we're trying to hire at rebel is people that are fundamentally builders i think how you can look for that is is do they have side projects are they so into what they're doing that they're especially in college like are they also building things on the side yes and uh and that's kind of a key a key thing that if people love what they're doing uh they're going to i think just do a much better job at it um they're going to really care about the outcome it's also anything just a key to like early startups you need people that are really passionate about what they're building and see it as really uh kind of their life's work and their craft i love these proxies different founders used to find like who who is you know fit for their mission i like this side project idea what is the the history of your side projects like if you think about the sort of formative ones what what helped you level up bit by bit so i was into rc cars and legos and then i went into trying to build robots and stuff in my uh at my house and then i i didn't really know what an engineer was honestly i knew they built things and so it was really once i got into college that and then i was like I got access to this machine shop and just I went it was it was I had a lot I built all kinds of things I was to help start a few student groups and we had it was like one of them was to build a wind turbine that would um go to a community in Nicaragua uh that was super cool and yeah basically built wind turbines from scratch it was like you wanted to build it out of materials that were available in that location and so you're very much constrained because ultimately we wanted to let them um be able to to build these things yes and so that was a really interesting design constrained situation of like what materials can they get there what are the trade-offs you have to make for in nicaragua it's like engines certain engines or the magnets are hard to get so those would have to be sent there but all the rest you had to be machine you know basically to machine it out of just materials available there and i mean it was like we also made like a a solar it was like a solar panel um i forget exactly what they're called but they would basically hold the solar panel and point at the sun continuously throughout the day and we had to we built it out of just wood and like junkyard parts that's fine and then and then ultimately i ended up at a robotics lab um i always wanted to work at this robotics i finally kind of got into it my junior year and then i really really loved that experience like i was just yeah kind of similar to like building rc cars and stuff in the basement i was just but then i had like all these resources available to me i like actually had funding and i again had the the machine shop and i was building all kinds i actually yeah published a few of them did you have any you know i'm thinking of sort of the the paypal mafia building bombs in high school did you have any sort of close close shaves with things going going wrong yeah we did a little bit of that too my friends and i yeah we made like uh air guns that would you know we're actually like it would like shoot a pool cue actually oh wow like a like a harpoon well yeah we yeah all kinds of things like that yeah these are these are somehow fantastically good signals of someone being a good founder in my experience uh this sort of you know smart rule breaking uh tinkering slightly on the edge of danger were you thinking about being an entrepreneur in those days was that a like a concept you mentioned you didn't have the concept of an engineer really uh was a founder or something that you knew about honestly not really i i just knew i wanted to yeah i knew i just wanted to build stuff and if i could do it professionally that would be the best case scenario uh and so and then i did start following elon um and just what spaces was doing back in it was like sophomore year of college and just thought that was the most insane version of like that was like the ultimate at building things uh and i also just imagined they probably you know had the the best engineers to do it and so that's really why i was like okay i want to i want to try to get into space and me sneak into spacex is how i was thinking about it and yeah i ended up staying uh at minnesota a little longer than i expected i was i didn't i wanted to keep taking classes i kind of got into software side i was good the robotics lab i could you know build i could i could machine everything I could build the entire rocket design it, but I actually, I couldn't write the control software for it.

30:43Scott Morton:Uh, and so then I was like, well, I can stay here a little longer and go. And my professor said he'd sponsor me into the computer science department. Uh, and so that's actually why I ended up staying a lot longer, uh, as an, and then I had to go back and take all the prerequisite classes to take the masters, the graduate courses. And so it's kind of funny. There's a full through path there of like uh couldn't couldn't do this in for the robotics in the in the robotics lab uh and then also kind of saw the exact same problem uh later on at spacex and then and then also at rebel yeah do you know the the sort of heuristic of the fox and the hedgehog the fox is you know someone who loves finding many problems and isn't you know sort of believes that no one idea can explain the world and the hedgehog is like one problem over and over intensively obsessively you've sort of found ways to keep solving the same problem it sounds like where you're you know encountering this limit of you know hardware control and uh you know building the language for these systems to work first in college then at spacex and now and now with revel it's uh yeah it's fascinating to see that come around yeah and i think it's interesting because i think really that experience in college and then switching into computer science and being able to really understand both engineers perspective the the hardware engineer but then also the software engineer and i think that's that's really what we've tried to create is something that the hardware engineer can use but then the software engineer can also jump in and it's it's very familiar to them it's a text-based language compared to some of the other approaches out there that are graphical i say it's like it's like programming with crayons yeah um and so yeah i think i think that background is exactly has really set me up well to to to to found revel where do you think your fuel comes from when you think about your your history like where does the drive emanate i i think for whatever reason i mean i've tended to just go after it's probably both the hardest thing but also where i thought i could have the most impact.

32:45Scott Morton:I mean, I, I joined SpaceX as a, as a 25 year old intern and I was like, I'm just going to go in and outwork everyone. And that was my mentality. I was like, I, I'm going to sneak in there. I don't, I don't, I didn't think I was qualified. Uh, but I thought I would learn the most and I would really kind of see what I was made of. Honestly, that chip on the shoulder of, Hey, I have to outwork everyone. Were you the, I don't know, were you a good student, bad student? you know, the last one picked, that impulse comes from somewhere, right? I wouldn't say I was the best student in high school. I was always in like advanced math, but otherwise somewhat disinterested.

33:26Scott Morton:I think I had the same mentality going into Minnesota, honestly, as I thought, you know, joining, actually, I don't know if they do this anymore, but they actually had us there like, look to your left, look to your right. Like two of you will not make it to the program. Wow. They actually said that at the beginning at the orientation. two of you won't make it through. Yeah, gosh. It's true. I looked at the statistics on it. It's actually true. So there was some of that sense of, okay, I haven't been the best student, so now I'm going to have to prove myself extra. Yes, 100%. You mentioned that Elon's sort of maybe superpower, what he really spikes on is this ability to take these big swings and give people the confidence to do something a little outlandish, or at least it sounds outlandish.

34:06What are the parts of his mode of management that you have chosen not to take with you, that you're like, this didn't work for me or it's not the way that I want to run my company.

34:17Scott Morton:Honestly, I think overall, Elon's a credible CEO. I don't have a lot. I think extremely intense. I think, yeah, again, not for everyone. I loved it. I thrived in it. I think being challenged and I think I also was very fortunate. I was one of the first people to join Star Show. I think it was the first software engineer down in Boca Chica, Texas. No, no, no, Starbase. Yes. and um and at that point the program was really kind of this like backwater kind of like not the you know everyone really wanted to work on falcon at that time and it was kind of one of the crazy ones that would go and want to go work on early starship you know at the very beginning and i think letting people do that was awesome i mean it wasn't it was kind of a volunteer scenario but then he got pretty involved and you know i enabling people i mean you fly close to the sun at spacex You know, you're going to have you're taking a lot of risk for sure.

35:09Scott Morton:But enabling people to do that and give them a ton of agency and but also holding people accountable, I think, is the right recipe to do great things. Flying close to the sun at SpaceX means taking like a big swing on something and putting your name behind it with a lot of resources. And if that doesn't pay off, it's like, hey, then this didn't work. Is that roughly right? I mean, Elon says like you, I think he respects people that take big swings, but he also, you know, he tracks the batting average. Yeah, that makes sense. It's okay to have some misses. I think it's not okay to not like push hard.

35:42Scott Morton:If you think something is the right way to do things, you should say it. And if you, I think, kind of hang back and don't, and then it's like, it's then realized that you knew the right thing to do, but you didn't push for it. I think that wouldn't be seen very well by Elon. But yeah, I think there's high risk reward at SpaceX for sure. You're a couple of years in at this point. So I'm sure you're still sort of, you know, the CEO job is like you have to climb the skill curve every day, it feels like, I imagine. But as you think about the way that you prefer to lead, everyone interprets this job very differently.

36:18What are the places where you find you're sort of most uncompromising or maybe you want to hold the highest possible bar versus, you know, other folks that you've seen and maybe where there are places where you have more flexibility.

36:31Scott Morton:Yeah, I think the product has to be awesome. It has to do exactly what we say it will do. There's no, I have seen kind of in this space, people kind of forward selling capability or saying it can do certain things. And then that doesn't really pan out after a number of months. And that's when Rebel comes in to save the day. but yeah i think it's extremely important that uh we are very transparent with what it can do today what we plan for it to do in the future and then i think also uh i'm definitely pretty involved in making sure the product is what it it needs to be uh and uh it's still definitely best idea wins i mean i i change my mind when when there's no information all the time uh even when if i've like we just means an engineer or someone on the product side disagrees uh and then there's no information it's a clear like i was wrong i will admit it right away i mean i think that's a really really important like basically no ego is extremely important to to make the best decisions possible now i think i guess that is another thing i saw in elon is he would be extremely passionate but then presented with new information you'd be like well okay that was the quick switch that's it let's not go that direction anymore with the company we're definitely really trying to run a very tight engineering organization so i think i've seen yeah the proof is kind of clear with spacex what has happened and then you look at how the company was run and uh and it's really an execution machine i think we have to adapt some of that for revel uh it's not you know you don't have these launches that are really yes really powerful it's kind of aligning everyone we're going to launch on this day and then everyone kind of backs out uh their schedules and it's it's also a really nice tool to figure out what's actually the critical path.

38:18Scott Morton:It's a little different as a software company where you have a lot of things in motion at the same time. You have a lot of customers as well. But I think having a really strong engineering culture and that people join and they feel like, wow, I'm with the most elite. This is an elite team that has an incredible culture that is also moving really fast and delivering products. The best thing is when we deliver something for a customer and then they go and have some awesome test. Like they get through the entire hot fire on an engine and they always post it in our shared Slack channel. Like we get to kind of be part of their success.

38:55You mentioned these launches, that is something that from the outside, at least it feels like Elon does it so well as like finding these galvanizing moments, these, or sort of in some cases, maybe manufacturing even this thing that everyone has to run at, which feels like just ways of pushing energy into the system in a way. What is the version of that that works for you? Is it doing sort of the Gemba walk down the different tables and seeing what everyone's working every day? Is it something else?

39:25Scott Morton:No, I think it's some kind of customer milestone. Customer milestones, yeah. So there'll be some large test that a customer needs to do or maybe there's some new capability that they really need to do it well. So we'll kind of attach it to that timeline. and then i think the new one for us you know i think what's extremely exciting about where we're at right now is we've we're very competitive in the small scale testing world so small scale testing being like a benchtop test setup and normally with this these software for testing as you go from kind of small scale to larger scale you need different things small scale you want to be really fast, iterate really quickly, typically.

40:07Scott Morton:Larger scale, something like a rocket engine test site, which is a large facility on the desert. You want a little kind of more controls, you want more safety, but obviously you still want to move really fast. And I think what we really struck the array balance in with Revel is we're kind of both very fast to iterate with, but also still very performant and safe. And so what's awesome is we're doing very well in small scale very well in this kind of large scale facility and the next phase is industrials which is large scale systems and we're also so far we've we've seen that we are extremely competitive there as well and these are all of these different scales there's probably eight different types of software that are used and even inside of one company so at impulse they literally had eight different types of software wow and they have now uh fully standardized on revel and they're only of using Revel across tiny, even the smallest, like a circuit board testing system, all the way up to what they're using at this new site called Site1C, which they're going to use to test their entire stage.

41:06You mentioned it sort of in these steps of small scale testing, large scale testing, industrial systems. This is a very naive question, but are the industrial systems more complex versus a test because it's sort of continuous versus discrete or more inputs? Like what adds that as sort of a discrete step in your mind?

41:24Scott Morton:It is just many more, they call them tags, but they're just telemetry channels. Okay. Sort of input of some kind or another. So we're actually now deployed at a 250 ,000 channel system. Wow. 250 ,000 channels. Yeah. And so each of those channels is bringing some form of data from the system, whether that's heat or pressure or whatever that might be, across oil and gas or whatever it might be. Is that right? Correct. And that's not even, I think some of these will go up to several million channels. Okay. I don't have good calibration of what to imagine there, but that sounds extremely hard. Football field or several football field level.

42:06Yes. But just like complexity wise, like it sounds insane. Yeah.

42:10Scott Morton:It's a lot of systems. It's cool. Yeah. We just had a bake off, which I don't know if you know, it's like you kind of try two systems out and there were two engineers that were very familiar with these platforms. And so they kind of gave them the same assignment, one with the traditional approaches that they'd been using in this company. And it took them a week and then completely cold to revel, had never even seen the platform. They did it in one day. And they had been using the kind of old way of doing things for several years. And so that's when we, that kind of happened a few months ago. And that's where we're like, okay, we have something in this space as well.

42:48Scott Morton:We're both competitive, clearly in the test space, doing very well there. And then now it's clear we also have something that is extremely compelling in the industrial space as well. Do you have to convince some of these large companies that you're going to be around for a while? Because I imagine they're so used to someone, you know, this company's been around 20 plus years. You're around two years. You know, they want to know you're going to be around for 20 years, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that was part of the strategy in the latest funding round as well is that clearly we are going to be around for quite a while.

43:18Scott Morton:You know, there's no way we're going to run out of money. But I think it also comes back to the product just needs to be extremely compelling. Like I think that that's another trait is like the product is compelling enough. They will still at least try it out. And then you move from trying out, oh, it is extremely good. And then you move down the stages of. Yeah. Keep taking more off their plates in a way. Very cool. Wow. That's wild to think about. I think you've talked before about your position at Revel almost like a mini VC because you have to sort of bet on which companies to sort of resource and dedicate time to getting set up.

43:51What is the process like of taking a company in cold and saying, hey, you know, you're now ready to sort of run your next launch?

44:00Scott Morton:Yeah, I mean, this is something I think has been extremely surprising to me. We essentially can deploy our system in one day. Oh, wow. We actually have really never one actually was that very large system. It took two days. But otherwise, we have done fully same day or even like a few hours being fully deployed. So when you look at Revel the company as a machine at the moment, where do you see the big bottleneck? currently uh definitely hiring um we're i think we have at least my my bet on the company is that we need to keep an extremely high bar and uh that just propagates all the way you know until revel is you know 200 500 people if we can maintain that and which is i think uh another kind of lesson from spacex is i think they have they've done a great job at this and we need to replicate that at revel um you want to still be at 500 people everyone looks around like wow this is an incredible company all these people are are awesome to work with that's you know maybe harder for us a little bit and that we don't have the the name brand of of spacex quite yet but that's essentially the biggest the biggest bottleneck in that we um i mean demand is totally outrun the current uh size that we're at uh which is i think a great problem to have yes um even with the same day deployments my prime prime focus right now is hiring and building out the team when you say keep a high bar every company wants to do that right what does that mean for for revel specifically like what is uh and how do you find those people in a in a distinctive way you know i've heard you know the the largest array of different ways people find a little bit of edge in in the market like have you found a few pockets where for whatever reason we're extremely good at taking Midwestern, you know, tinkerers and turning them into, you know, the world's best engineers or whatever that might be for you?

45:53Like, what is what is your playbook?

45:54Scott Morton:We're pretty open to where people are coming from. But I think you just have to have a really good, a really solid process for assessing talent. And I think generally, like you kind of know when you see it, our process is, I think, quite good at this point. And yeah, we have the best engineers can usually determine if they're an engineer sitting across the table is going to be a good fit on the team. And so we rely pretty heavily on that. Talking about this sort of mini VC role that you have in a way, you get to have an interesting front row seat into the amazing pieces of hardware and companies that people are building.

46:33What do you think the world looks like in five, ten years from now when some of these different customers that Revel is serving flourish? what do you see that maybe others haven't realized fully yet this is one of the best parts of being at revel i think is that you get to in one day you can go to a nuclear reactor company you can go to

46:54Scott Morton:this like the most cutting edge satellite manufacturer uh and then you can go to like a hypercar company it literally they're all it's pretty cool in la there's a lot of them there so i think as an engineer that is really great and also i think revel has a unique position that it's It's like a one-to-many platform. So if you work inside a company and you're a software engineer, you're going to work on just that company, only get exposed to that company's hardware they're building. And then at Revel, you get to be part of all of these missions. But I think what's really exciting, I think the small modular reactor space, I think, is really cool.

47:28Scott Morton:I think there's definitely going to be, what I'm seeing is they're making great progress. And I think the regulations are also kind of clearing the way for them. Obviously, I'm very excited about the future space economy with Starship doing extremely well. And then all the companies betting on having low cost access to space. Hypersonics are also really cool. I think that's, yeah. So we're now working with a couple of the best companies there. It's awesome. One of them was actually very hard to get into. It actually took a year for them to finally say, okay, we're going to try Revel out. As soon as we got into one place, it just spread throughout the company.

48:07Scott Morton:uh it was like on the order of a month it went from one to like 20 systems wow what was the hesitation like for is that is there something that you learned from that this is a critical part of their operation uh and um they tried one approach before and they were kind of trying to see if that was going to pan out and then they're like okay this let's let's give revel a shot and uh we're able to very quickly prove ourselves and then also deliver on the you know we say it's 5 to 10x, it's going to increase your cadence of test. And then the first one we did, it did exactly that. They had like, their engineers became like application engineers.

48:45Scott Morton:They had to write a lot of Python. And then there had a lot of safety issues with that. Where like, you know, if you have Python, a big difference between Revel code and Python is that the runtime safety. So Revel, if it compiles, it cannot crash. So you may have these 12-hour long tests. In Python, there's no guarantee of that. And so you may have this simplest mistake that's probably most common is like a string interpolation error. And that will just kill your runtime system in the middle of a test. And then you have your system left in an unsafe state, may have even broken hardware. And then you also need to go and redo your 12-hour test.

49:24Scott Morton:And then whoever was waiting for the results is also upset. And so that first deployment fully demonstrated all the capability. And then we had people at other sites asking about it and then it kind of just took off. Wow. You know, I feel like it's almost axiomatic that every great company has to have at least one near-death moment. Have you had yours yet? No, I mean, I really can't complain on the trajectory of Rebels so far. See, that's what it looks like from the outside. I'm like, it looks almost too good. 23 months in, i i think it is though going back to talent i think it all comes down to to that i mean we've been very fortunate and we've gotten just an incredible set of engineers and and product folks jess winzinger joined from palantir who is i think you know we at spacex we really knew how to execute uh on the engineering side and she just brought a lot of product and kind of customer facing experience.

50:22Scott Morton:And so it truly is just getting an incredible group of people together. And a lot of people that have just a lot of experience in the relevant places that we needed. What's been the hardest week of running the company? I think honestly, the last month has been a little more frustrating in that we have, we just need more engineers on the team. Like we have an extremely clear vision of the future. it's a very good position that demand is so high so we've set up an fte team recently so that's kind of the biggest bottleneck and we're really focused on you know how do we hire great ftes it's obviously not something that spacex had so it's something that i'm personally having to learn a lot about but that frustration obviously is just like it's a it's a great problem to have we talked a little bit about ai building software uh and and the ways in which you know you can leverage that.

51:12To what extent do you have to build the system to accommodate for agents as almost users? Like, is that something that is already happening at some of these companies? Is that something that you imagine will start to happen more or because of the need for precision control, is that sort of less likely?

51:30Scott Morton:I think something very exciting that we're seeing is I think a lot of companies are trying to add AI into their product and kind of push on their customers and like see what's basically just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks with AI. And we have people are actually already using AI with our product. And I actually think we found that our code is the best possible format to generate, you know, control software from an AI, because the code has, that's again, going back to the qualities of it, it's highly performant, highly accessible, and high and runtime safe. And so if you're going to generate code, those are the exact things that you'd want you wanted to maintain accessibility meaning you can still read it and totally understand it so whatever you generate is still very easy to easy to grok what's happening and then the runtime safety is also really if you're if you're going to generate code and you're kind of like maybe it's less critical at least you know that if it gets to the compiler stage it's not going to crash so those are two two asterisk language i think are just make it the best possible thing to use with ai a lot of customers are already doing that yeah It's not something we're necessarily supporting directly, but they are already heavily leveraging AI with the platform.

52:43When you think sort of like very long term about what Revel becomes, you know, let's say five, ten years from now. If I extrapolate it out, it feels like there's like all these really fascinating things that you can do, whether that's, you know, creating an industry standard around some of these coding language, this coding language you've developed or, you know, aggregating demand across different industrial companies to sort of help them procure in different ways. Like there's sort of feels like a dozen different interesting things. Like what's your sort of vision for what this might look like?

53:16Scott Morton:The mission of the company is twofold. you know i've sat in the seat of many of these engineers and i was a hardware engineer and then at spacex i wrote a lot of control software a lot of test software as well and obviously that scaled up to starship uh so i feel like i have deep empathy for the engineers that are day-to-day just trying to get through their testing uh write the code they need to write and so we really want this you know today i'd say the tools they use they really feel like a bottleneck on their processes we want to give them something that feels like an accelerant and it is truly an accelerant.

53:49Scott Morton:The other side of it is if we do that at scale, what does that mean for all the companies out there going after these incredibly ambitious missions? Many more of them will be successful. They'll get through their testing campaigns way faster. You can test 50 times in a week instead of five times in a week. You're going to ship your product sooner and you're going to ship a much better product. And so that's what I'm extremely excited about long-term is that we deliver that kind of twofold mission of like for the engineer, but then also what does that enable across all these great companies. I always like to wrap up with a thought experiment or a question or two.

54:22If you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment that you would like to run?

54:29Scott Morton:I watched so much Star Trek growing up. Huge TNG fan, Jean-Luc Picard. And I just want to know if, you know, humans going to be out there, you know, maybe are we going to go to another galaxy someday? I think just, are we going to be propagating around our galaxy? Like, is that actually, you know, Is that going to happen? Yeah, I think. I think we are obviously running the experiment. That's what I was super excited about working at SpaceX for 10 years. But I just really want to I want the answer to that question. Is that like I thought Star Trek was just like I was watching as like a, you know, in a middle schooler.

55:05Scott Morton:And it just blew my mind. It was like, wow, you know, we could be out there exploring all these other solar systems. And I would love to know. If you could assign a book to everyone on Earth to read, do you have one you'd want everyone to have read once in their life? And you get the assurance that they're going to understand it also. I reread this book. It's Our Mathematical Universe. I don't know that book. Who wrote it? I'm trying to remember it to get back to you. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think it really helps me put things into perspective. It just kind of chronologues all the physics discoveries up to today.

55:51Scott Morton:And it presents this explanation of the universe that it's really just a mathematical model. And that's it. And I think, you know, whatever is going on at Revel or in my personal life, it's like, I listen to this and it's just like, I think it really gives you like, it's like the most zoomed out perspective you could possibly have on everything. Yes. and there's something that gives you peace in that in a sense yeah i think it yeah i think it's always like i think the hard part and running a company is always i think seeing the seeing the forest instead of just looking at the trees and that it's like i i listen to it you know i usually when i'm trying to fall asleep and it actually helps helps a lot just to like it's like literally the most zoomed out view of the forest you can imagine like from a universe the the perspective of the universe.

56:39I love that. Well, that's a great, great place to end. Scott, thank you so much. Thank you.

57:09See you next time as we continue to explore the future.