Rivian Founder RJ Scaringe Is Building The Future: Leadership, Mindset, Innovation, & His Mission To Decarbonize Transportation

26:51Well, one of the things that's been really big learning for me is being super intentional with how I spend my time. So in the beginning, like on day one, when it was just me, I would do everything. And often I would be doing things that weren't necessarily the highest impact. They may feel the most urgent, but they weren't actually the most important things for the business. And now I'm very intentional on making sure the things I'm spending time on are not only high impact, but there are things that I'm uniquely positioned to do well. Meaning on product or technology topics, I still think I'm uniquely positioned because of the breadth of experiences and because of my visibility to the whole technology stack, I can add a lot of value.

27:29But on our tax strategy or accounting strategy, those are not areas, there are people who are much more skilled than I am that I shouldn't spend a lot of time on those topics. And so I've designed the team and the company in a way that allow me to be more product and technology focused. I'm still our head of product and the product functions are poured up to me. But then in other aspects of the business and some of the like more GNA, the general administrative functions, I of course stay linked into and tied into those, but I'm not as in the weeds. Yeah. So like earlier today, I was reviewing, you know, electrical board designs and power electronics and the detail level down at the board level, which is like, I'm not doing the, I don't even know what that means.

28:17I'm not doing the parallel of that in let's say, you know, in some of our G &A functions. Yeah. The automotive industry is such an intractable, I mean, you gave these reasons why it's so complicated, so complex and why it's so capital intensive. I heard you say that the development of a car requires something like 20 to 30 million different decisions. Yeah, it's hard to estimate, but it's like, I mean, that's insane, right? Many millions of decisions, yeah. So what is the average person who's listening to this not kind of fully appreciate or understand when it comes to having this idea, like we're gonna make this electric vehicle and turn it into reality?

28:56What do you think gets missed and why it's so hard? I think there's two things. I think at the highest level, you said it already, is that the number of decisions is really large. And so the best products, and this is true not just for cars, but for just essentially every type of product is a product that has a really clear vision for what it wants to be. And in the case of a car, that's harder than, let's say, like a coffee cup, because the scale of the decisions and the breadth of the decisions is so broad. So it's not possible for me to have a really crisp vision and for me purely to go execute it.

29:32That vision has to be communicated effectively across many groups. So there's teams of people doing power electronics, battery design, motor design, chassis design, interior design, exterior design, materials design. And each of those teams need to be looking at it with the same mindset around how we make trade-offs between cost and features, between mass and cost. There's all these trade-offs that you have to make decisions where you can't get everything on everything. You can't make it the lightest weight, the lowest cost, the highest performance versus trades. And so across the many millions of decisions being made by thousands of engineers and designers across many functions, it's really an exercise in coordination and communicating and disseminating a vision that's easily understood and easily actionable.

30:26And not every single decision is going to align with every single customer need. And I look at like... And they're going to let you know. And the customer was like, you know, why did you do this? And they're like, well, it wasn't like it accidentally happened. How much time do you have to explain? But there's no accidents. I'll give an example. In the interior of our vehicle, in the R1, we decided not to have buttons. So the entire interface is through a touchscreen. And if you want buttons, you're not going to like that decision. And it doesn't matter what I say, but we optimized for the ability to have a completely updatable user interaction, user interface, that with software, we can change anything.

31:02And so that meant we drove everything to a touchscreen, a multi-touchscreen. And that singular decision means that it has like long-term repercussions. It also means that the vehicles can get better over time. But there's so many decisions like that, that we had to make trade-offs. And we try to make them in a way that both feels consistent to the vision, but also we think encapsulates something that's going to be highly compelling. but by nature of the cars being compelling and unique and pointed, you're not going to have everyone like everything. And so that's okay. I say that all the time. If someone disagrees, I say that's okay.

31:41That's why hopefully there's lots of great choices that you can choose from. This is one company's perspective on how to make this, call it, set of 30 million decisions. There's other companies that have different ways of making those decisions. Yeah, you're always quick to say like, we're at the very beginning of this huge mission. And I wanna hear you articulate what that mission is specifically, but as of now, what is it like, EVs are 10 % of the consumer transportation market, something like that. And we think like, oh, well, there's Tesla and there's you, it's late, it's not, it's very early.

32:16Like there's so much growth. And so you're always kind of like celebrating any kind of innovation in this space and not looking at it through a sort of competitive lens because when these other companies win, like you win as well, because there's lots of room here. But back to the mission, like if you have to say, what is the mission statement of Rivian or what is your mission statement with this company? Yeah, we actually look through that lens, through the lens of what are we trying to accomplish as our objective or as our mission in driving a vast majority of the decisions we take as a company.

32:47And for us, it's really helping to advance our whole society towards a climate neutral transportation ecosystem and energy ecosystem. And so that means moving towards sustainable energy. That means moving off of combustion and fossil fuels. And you're right, I do talk about this being the beginning all the time. And it's the beginning in so many ways. It's 8 % new vehicle sales are electric in the US. There's one and a half billion combustion powered vehicles on the planet. All of those need to be converted. There's thousands of coal power plants, thousands of natural gas power plants. so our grid is still in the United States about 60 % fossil fueled.

33:26All of that has to be shut down and replaced. But amazingly, that's going to happen in our lifetime. So the world we live in today - The optimism is still there. It's just so, but it's just so amazing. Like imagine everything we know of in the world, like the room we're sitting and the lights that are in, the microphones we're speaking to, this technology was developed within the last few generations, meaning our parents, parents, parents. that string of four generations has built the world we know today. And the world we know today is so different than what it's looked like for the vast majority of human history.

33:58But of course, that was built with fossil fuels. And we uniquely, in this moment in time, are responsible for replacing that entire energy infrastructure and industrial ecology with something that's going to be sustainable for many, many generations to come. and we're running this whole world that we built off of a very finite fuel supply. So we could either say we're going to run another two, maybe three generations worth and then we'll be out, no more fossil fuel and recarbonize the atmosphere to such a degree that life as we know it is at high risk or we can make the transition much sooner.

34:35And obviously I think we should make the transition much sooner. And I think a lot of companies like Rivian need to emerge to recreate the industrial footprint. No one of these companies is gonna do it alone. It's just too big. In order to solve it, there's a vertical integration of systems in order to achieve that, right? So, let's just start with the climate impact of the sort of consumer transportation industry on the environment. Like how damaging or deleterious is that? And what is your sense of if you could flick a switch and everybody's driving an EV, we'll set aside like the power grid for a moment.

35:16Like what degree of improvement do we accomplish in doing that? Yeah, transportation is one of the single largest contributors to climate change. You know, between carbon emissions and then unburned hydrocarbons, things like methane, it's one of the most damaging. It also has the unique role that it plays in the air quality in our cities. So if you hear what we're sitting here in LA, we saw like a sneak preview at the start of COVID of what air quality will look like if we drive less combustion-powered vehicles. One of the first times in a long time where you could see across the city without smog.

35:52And so one of the benefits of moving to electric vehicles isn't just the reduction in carbon emissions, but we actually improve air quality across all of our cities. And that's super exciting. But this flick the switch point that you bring up, I wish that was possible, but it's really going to take a couple of decades. And that's maybe a slightly optimistic view to replace the one and a half billion vehicles on the planet, but it's, you know, we could say whether it's two decades or three or four decades, but it's, I characterize it as like my lifetime. But the time skills to do that are very similar to the time skills to completely clean up our grid.

36:30And that's turning off thousands of power plants that are running today. That's building many, many sites that are doing renewable energy, both solar and wind. It's gonna involve continued development of nuclear power. So we're gonna see a whole new grid emerge over that 40 to 50 year timeframe as well. When you think about charging infrastructure and the power grid, like most power grids are powered by natural gas, oil, coal. And I think there is this sense with the consumer that is this really any better? I'm plugging into the grid, it's coal, like it's kind of the same thing. it's actually not because of the law of thermodynamics.

37:13And there's a reason why it's still better that I'm sure you could articulate much better than me. So you're still doing a good thing by doing this. But yes, of course, the problem doesn't get solved until the power grid is powered by renewable energy. We should talk about that just for a second. I'm glad you bring it up. So if you think about what a power plant is, let's say a natural gas power plant, and you were to compare that to an engine in a car, they're very similar thermodynamically, except the power plant can run at very high levels of optimal efficiency. So it can run at, let's say, an average efficiency of 40 plus percent in terms of converting the energy in the fuel, natural gas, to actual mechanical power, which can be converted to electricity.

37:58In a vehicle, because the engine's much smaller, because it has to be throttled to run at lower speeds, And it's running at maybe on average 15 % efficiency. Something like 20 % of the energy from the gas is lost to heat. A huge amount of the energy is lost to heat. So you have, call it 15, maybe 20 % efficiency. So you have at least a 2 to 3x improvement just by using these larger centralized power plants. And of course, the energy to go from electricity to mechanical power and electric motor is very efficient. It's close to 97%, 98%, depending on the design. So you just have a very big difference in terms of energy efficiency between an engine and a vehicle versus what you're using at the grid level.

38:43Now, above and beyond that, the grid is not 100 % fossil fuel. We've already made some progress. In the United States, 40 % of our grid is carbon-free. Of that 40%, roughly half or 20 % of the grid is renewable. And the other roughly half, roughly 20%, is nuclear power, which is carbon-free. And so we're already on a journey. And the neat thing about an electric vehicle is every year, every month that goes, every month or every year that goes by, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. And so in year 10 of owning - And then there's the air quality aspect of it as well, just with the emissions aspect of it.

39:17You can do a lot more to control the emissions of the plant because it's large, it's centralized. You can use things like scrubbers. There's a lot of technologies to clean up the output from a plant. But the other point, which I'd say is more philosophical, is if we all waited until everything was perfect. If we said, I'm not going to switch out of my combustion-powered vehicle until the grid's 100 % green and held off on that. Or until battery supply chains are perfectly optimized, we'll end up waiting for forever. So we have to start making this transition. As we make the transition, the technologies will become better.

39:52The efficiencies will become better. I say this all the time, like that's our role. Our moment in time is that we're at the start of this transition. And so it'd be wrong to judge the end state by what it looks like in the beginning. Sure, it's gonna be messy for a while. I mean, that applies to battery manufacturing and lithium mining and all these other kind of like, you know, considerations that come into play. Like if the mission is decarbonizing transportation, like there are other problems that have to be solved. It applies to so many. I mean, if you were sitting, let's say, 1980 and imagining a world in which you have a computer in your pocket, you'd say, well, I don't want to start with that because I have these giant computers or the pain, so I'm not going to use a computer.

40:33Tell me when it's ready to go in my pocket. It took us going through many iterations before we could get to what we now think of as like an iPhone or a Pixel or a small, amazingly powerful device that goes into our pocket. But if we'd gone back and just said we're going to wait until it's there, we would have never gotten there. How do you think about your customers? Like, what is the Rivian customer? How do you cater to that person? How do you think about that in how you message around, you know, this mission and the products that you create? So linked to this, just the overall mission around driving towards sustainable energy, sustainable transportation.

41:15One of the words we've talked about a lot in building the brand is the word inviting. And we want to create a brand that's highly inviting. And it doesn't tie to any specific demographic or age group, but rather it's inviting across a broad spectrum of people, personalities, backgrounds, what have you. So part of that is we wanted to look at it beyond just the effects that our products are going to have in a positive way on the climate. And so we really started to design the brand. And this was maybe six, seven years ago. We started to design the brand around enabling people to do the kinds of things that would connect them back to the world, to connect them back to the natural environment.

41:57And so we started to build this idea of a brand built around adventure. And when we talk about a brand built around the idea of adventure, and it really was going after this idea of there's an adventure in all of us. And your version of adventure may be different than my version. I may want to take a telescope out to an open field and look at stars at night. Yours may be running a 100-mile race, riding a bike 50 miles. It could be going to the beach with kids. Everybody has a different form of adventure. But we want to make those types of experiences both highly accessible, but also, and I'd say perhaps even more importantly, we want to help inspire those things.

42:34So we want to inspire people in addition to enabling them to do the kinds of things you want to take photographs of. When I think back, what was I doing 10 years ago? What was I doing 20 years ago? We rarely think about the things we bought. We rarely think about the clothes we were wearing. We look back and remember the emotions we had, the experiences we had. We look at the pictures of those things and that as a brand is what we're trying to embody. The ethos kind of behind this from my perspective is, you're somebody who wants the products to speak for themselves, which is very different from Tesla.

43:09There's definitely a cult of personality around Elon and that has its pros and cons, I suppose. I mean, his sort of like ascendancy into kind of everyone's consciousness, this I'm sure has a positive impact on Tesla sales, but the downside of that is, because he's very opinionated and has aligned himself, politically in a certain way, that ultimately could become an Achilles heel. And you're somebody who I see is very neutral. You're trying to create this welcome mat for everybody. Maybe it's a slower kind of like growth curve, But at the same time, like you're sort of more in the background and letting the work kind of like talk for you.

43:59Is that fair? It's funny when you think about building a brand or a company in the process, you do all this work envisioning the future. So you're like, what do we want to have happen? What are the types of outcomes we'd like to accomplish? And one of the things we spent a lot of time talking about was envisioning a world where our products would inspire people to go do things that they love, to do the kinds of things they want to photograph. But importantly, bring groups of people together to go create these experiences together. and like the I'd say the sharpest maybe perhaps most unlikely thing we envisioned was the idea of user groups forming that would help create opportunities for people to experience the world in different ways or in new ways and those user groups to be really diverse.

44:50Our team would put together these slides like groups of people going out and like checking out a trail or going on a hike together but getting there in the Rivians or you know and imagining that group of someone who's never been on an outdoor hike before and the first time doing it. And what's amazing is that's actually happened. And we have one of the most active customer bases that I'm so happy is so diverse. And in the world we're in now, where unfortunately sustainability and electrification have become politicized in ways that I really could have never imagined. We see people that are on the right, on the left, guys, girls, different, every orientation of everything you can imagine.

45:30that are aligning around this. And I think that's really good. And so we don't want to lose that. We want to maintain that. And we want to, as you said, be as welcoming as we can across such a broad spectrum. I think along with that, the products need to speak for themselves. So a big area of debate I had when I first started the company was whether the product wants to be like purely optimized for the most diehard climate focused customer or something that would be broadly appealing. And I did the summer before I started the company, as I was still thinking about what it wanted to be, I did an experiment where I tried to live carbon neutral.

46:11When I did that, I went full in. So no dishwasher, no clothes washing, no lights, no AC, like raw foods, I'm vegetarian, so it was like everything was raw. It was very, very low carbon. And I got through with that. And I'm like, well, I don't think that many people are gonna sign up to do that. And if we want to sell highly efficient vehicles, we need to create products that are compelling that meet people where they are. So like a teeny little car is probably not gonna sell that many. It may be really efficient, but it's not gonna sell that many. You got like Ed Begley Jr. and people like that who are all in, who will be your customers.

46:49But you're just not gonna have impact. So we decided to make the most incredible SUV and the most incredible truck. that regardless whether it's electric or not, it's just amazing. So it's quicker than a supercar 0-60. It's more capable off-road than anything you can buy. It's comfortable and premium in a way that you wouldn't imagine an off-road capable vehicle can do. And so we did all this work to create a flagship product that would, regardless of your orientation towards climate, is just interesting. And it's been really successful. So we have people that are buying it just because they love the product and then they tell their friends and say, look, I wasn't really super excited about electrification, but I drove this thing, and it's freaking nuts.

47:30It's so cool. The experience of driving them is just, I mean, it's just a better experience across the board. And so the more people that get exposed to that, it just self-perpetuates.

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49:27When you reflect back to the early 2010s and you think about EVs, this is sort of the purview of the NPR tote bag wearing coastal elites, that's very much changed. To me, it's just only a matter of time because the product is so much better. But I'm curious around your sense of the consumer marketplace and like, where is this going? There is some sort of market stagnation. The growth is slower than I'm sure you would like at the moment. And I think the marketplace is dominated by players who are creating products that are essentially like luxury products, right? Inaccessible to a lot of people.

50:12And I know you're moving in the direction of affordability and scale allows you to do that. But from your perspective, of like, how do you win the hearts and minds of all of these people who are either skeptical or thinking like, you know, this is like not for me. Like, why is this a little bit stagnant right now? Set aside regulation and, you know, political climate and all that. I think the biggest driver of this is there's a lack of choice. And so today, if you wanna get a highly compelling, well-engineered software first, product that's sub$50 ,000 or very, very few choices. I'd say less than the number of fingers on my hand.

50:56It's obviously a Tesla Model Y, Tesla Model 3, great products. But if you're in the market for something that costs less than$50 ,000, you have to make big compromises today around form factor, up around brand and brand presentation, what the brand stands for. And you also have to accept that there's a single player, Tesla, that has so much market share that it's a great product, but a lot of people have the same thing. So it's becoming more and more ubiquitous. And I think in order to see large-scale adoption of the magnitude that is the global automotive market, so call it 80 to 90 million electric vehicles per year, it's going to need more than two or three choices.

51:36And you could argue that it's more economically optimized for everybody to buy the same thing. But that, without exaggeration, And that has not happened in any part of human society, meaning it'd be way cheaper if everyone wore the exact same pair of clothes. And we had six factories across the planet that made all the world's clothes. But there's probably 100 people on our campus right here. I bet you no one's wearing the same shirt. And so we have a desire as a human species for personal expression. We have a desire for differentiation. And I think the same is true in vehicles. So we need lots of great choices.

52:13We haven't had those. It's one of the reasons we're so excited about our, as you've called it out, our more affordable products, our R2 and our R3. And it's one of the reasons why I'm constantly reminding people that like, it's not gonna be just R2 and R3 and Model 3 and Model Y. We need a lot more great choices. And yeah, I've heard you talk about how, you know, you wish these other companies weren't like just trying to copy Tesla. Like we need creative differentiation in here as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so I take our R1S. As you said, it's an expensive product, but it's been very successful.

52:48And in terms of vehicles priced over$70 ,000, it's the most popular SUV in California. And not most popular electric SUV, just most popular SUV over$70 ,000 in California. So it outsells any of the incumbent traditional internal combustion vehicles at the premium, you know, within the premium segment. And so our hope is we can translate that success that we've had in a premium segment to something that's in the more, call it, middle of the market, around the price of what an average transaction is in the United States, which is under$50 ,000. It wasn't that long ago, three, four years ago, you're in this very challenging position.

53:29You've raised billions of dollars. You buy this former Mitsubishi plant in normal Illinois, and you invest like$1.5 billion in equipment to install and retrofit this plant to produce Rivian vehicles. Pandemic happens, COVID, supply chain disruption. You've got hundreds and hundreds of suppliers. And you're also like new, you had to like convince these suppliers to work with you in the beginning. You know, like just leading up to that is, you know, case studies and overcoming obstacles. But now you're faced with having to like deal with, you know, problems you couldn't have even foreseen. You know, it's sort of amazing that you navigated that and have come out the other side.

54:14So, I say all that just because I'm curious around like how you think about and manage like obstacles. Like I'm sure a day doesn't go by where you're not presented with some insane challenge that you couldn't have imagined two weeks earlier that you have to figure out a solution to. So how do you problem solve in those situations? How do you like maintain your equanimity and stay focused on, you know, kind of moving forward on your mission? I mean, we were talking about before I started the company, how I didn't talk about what we were doing to very many folks. And at that point, the risk was enormously high.

54:50And I contrast that with today where, you know, everyone, we're a public company. So our, you know, like every quarter we put our financials out and you called out just some of the challenges that happened that were linked to COVID, supply chain crisis, multiple vehicles being launched at the same time. There's all those challenges. And, you know, as I look at our situation today, people say, are you stressed? And I say, of course I'm stressed. I'm like incredibly focused on what's in front of us. But the risk profile today is so different than what it was before. In fact, I said to my dad that I've never been more confident in Rivian than I am right now.

55:26And if I would just contrast today with 15 years ago, we have built a world-class brand. The last two years in a row, we've come out in a bunch of independent brand studies as the number one rated brand, the highest rate of repurchase, the highest level of customer satisfaction. We launched a flagship product that's the dominant market share player, depending on how you categorize it, a number of ways. and we're about to launch our mass market product, which means we're spending a tremendous amount of capital to develop that, make sure that from a technology point of view and a product point of view, it's among the best in the world.

56:03But before we launch that, we have all the costs associated with building that business. We're forward investing in service, forward investing in our retail and sales infrastructure, but that's all really visible to us. And so we have real clear line of sight to what's to come. And so we're really excited about that. But the difference is a public company is it's very easy to look at this from the outside and say, boy, you're losing money today still. Looks like you're having to invest in technology and spend a lot of money on your R &D. And I look at it and I say, of course, this isn't easy, but we're so focused as a team, so focused as a company around what we have to do.

56:41And I said this to a group of our leaders the other day, like we need to be successful. We must be successful. And society needs multiple versions, multiple companies like us in transportation, in energy, in consumer goods, in agriculture, to be disruptive agitators that are changing the way these industries work. And they need to be not monopolies. They need to have multiple different companies that are driving through competition, better products for customers. You have this vision. You know the trajectory you're on. you can like see the path to profitability. You understand that it's long and labor intensive and capital intensive and all of that.

57:22I get that you have the patience and I'm sure your teams do as well, but that kind of version of playing the long game isn't always simpatico with like, being a publicly traded company. Yeah, I know. And the pressures that come with that world, right? Like it's quarterly earnings and it's like, where are we right now? Now, it's the antithesis of patience, right? So, do you feel that pressure? I mean, it's pretty common, not necessarily in the automotive industry, but it's pretty common for founders who are visionaries, who figure out a way to create something real and solve like a problem and create a huge business around it, go public, grow, and then get to that place where the board feels like maybe it's time for a change.

58:14like let's bring in the real operator. You can be the visionary guy in the face of this, but like we need, we're at a place right now that's outside of your depth, right? So how does that work with your board and how do you kind of maintain, you know, Amity amongst the board members so that you kind of avoid that situation that befalls a lot of people in a sense, quite common. We talked about it before, the skills that I need to have to run Rivian have evolved a lot since I started the company. And there are certain moments where there was like step changes in how I need to look at the business and how I would look at what I even do.

58:52And one of those was the launch of our products. We went from a company developing products to a company suddenly selling products and actually having customers. Another was the build out of a large service infrastructure and go to market infrastructure. But one of the biggest was us going from a private company to a public company. And for me, it was a lot of, there was a lot of learning in the first year of being public of there's going to be lots, especially a company that's public. That's not, it's not like we're doing enterprise software or something that's obscure. That's not, people aren't paying attention to this is, we sell products that you like can see on the road and it's very relatable.

59:31And you've recalled that already there there's natural comparisons that one will want to draw between our products and Tesla products or our products and incumbent vehicle manufacturers. It's unavoidable that there's going to be, it's going to be a complex environment to manage externally. And really core to that is that it's important that in my role as CEO, that I have a really close relationship with our board, that we have active discussions around the challenges we're up against, that we're consistent and aligned on how we approach these challenges in terms of balancing the short-term focus, the long-term focus.

1:00:09And then that we as a leadership team can manage the choppiness of a share price that is highly volatile. And so it's taken some practice, it's taken some learning. And I think I've certainly feel like I'm much stronger at managing both the emotional ups and downs, but also the types of relationships necessary across investors and analysts and stakeholders like suppliers as a public company than I was just a couple of years ago. But the beauty of a high functioning board is that it's not just a fiduciary function, it's also an advisory function. So it's an opportunity for me to get great counsel and advice from the board that we put together.

1:00:54So I'm really pleased with that. You know, it's lots of learnings. Like a weekly board memo goes a long way to keeping everybody aligned. I really enjoy a weekly board memo. I like to write it. our board enjoys it. So there's like these little - Okay, yeah, just in case they're listening, let's make sure they know that, okay? But this idea of taking counsel, a big part of the Rivian ethos is collaboration. Like you have all these partnerships, you've got this incredible partnership with Amazon and you're creating this fleet of commercial Amazon delivery vehicles and now your own kind of commercial vehicle for multi-purpose, right?

1:01:34And this new deal with Volkswagen that was recently enriched even further,$5.8 billion, that's gonna allow kind of your technology to find its way into the Volkswagen suite of vehicles, which include Porsche. And that's very exciting and gives you kind of like - It speaks to our mission, big time. Yeah, some nice capital. And you can see the benefit, like you're a technology company that manifests its technology in automobiles, right? These other companies, legacy automotive companies, they're automotive companies that have figured out how to like incorporate technology. There's a, they're upside down of each other, right?

1:02:16So there's clearly like a synergy there, but on this piece around like collaboration, I'm interested in like what you've learned as a leader, you know, from these relationships, like what was that first meeting like with Jeff Bezos? And what did you learn from him? and what is the counsel that he's providing you? I mean, Jeff, having among the friends and advisors that we've accumulated as a company that I've built over the last 15 years, Jeff's been really interesting because he's been through, he built one of the most valuable companies in the world. It was not a straight line journey. And he famously wrote an annual shareholder letter around the importance of focusing on the long-term versus the short-term.

1:03:02And that opening passage of that shareholder letter is something I've probably read 150 times. And so he's been a great advisor and someone that, particularly when there's hard decisions around trade-offs between short and long-term, hard decisions around technology and how we invest in technology in our current state as we're scaling, it's been really valuable. Um, and so that's true in the case of Jeff, that's true in the case of a number of other leaders across other businesses that we've partnered with or worked with. And I think one of the, one of the really key parts of that, that I deeply believe is important for our success.

1:03:44And for that matter, success, success of our society is that we need to be able to work together. And it's easy to say, let's work together and be collaborative when things are easy. it's actually really hard to work together. It's naturally hard to work together when things are difficult and when there's not an easy or obvious solution. And so that's true within our product teams. That's true within our business. That's also true with our corporate partners and relationships. And so one of the things that has me very excited with Volkswagen is we didn't just sign this deal after like all over the scene.

1:04:17I had like a fun weekend meeting and said, Hey, hey, let's do a$5.8 billion deal next week. It was, there was a year of rigorous work that our teams got to know their teams. We worked through challenges, you know, for us to deploy our electronic stack and our software across their whole portfolio of vehicles. It's not like, you know, inserting and uploading a new software package. It is a deep set of changes that have to happen to their vehicles to do that. And so the work of seeing our teams come together, collaborate, disagree, challenge each other, ultimately arrive at solutions where both sides are equally excited to move forward in the deal is really, I think speaks volumes to the kind of culture that we've worked so hard to build within Rivian.

1:04:57And the same is true in our relationship with Amazon. The same is true in our relationship across our own business within, between, let's say our manufacturing teams and our engineering teams or our go-to-market sales teams and our product teams. But it's not a skill that's, it's not like a naturally equilibrium point. It's something that takes constant focus, constant attention. And that means you need to have the right leaders in place. If you have the wrong leaders in place, it's incumbent upon myself and other leaders to make changes. The right types of behaviors need to be identified and rewarded and the wrong types of behaviors also need to be identified and actioned on.

1:05:34And so it is a constant active gardening of the culture, active work of how it looks and how it shapes up. When I asked you about navigating COVID and the supply chain issues at that time, you said something along the lines of like, well, that was like the least sort of risky time, like amongst all the obstacles that you faced and overcome, like you feel like, you know, the company isn't under threat through these, like it has been in the past and you had to get over these sorts of things. The byproduct of which of course is like, you know, you're building this resilience to like meet these challenges.

1:06:13but was there ever kind of an existential threat to the company where the obstacle was so dire that you thought like, this is it? Like, I can't do it. How are we gonna wake up in the morning kind of thing? Like what was the most intense crisis that you faced? I mean, there's been so many. The obvious one is along the way, there's many times we almost ran out of money. And so - How close? Oh, like way closer than I would have ever wanted the teams to know. Like days, weeks? Yeah, like a week or two before it could be payroll. It is early, early on. Early on, yeah. And that was like just, that became just the norm that we were essentially hand to mouth for so many years.

1:06:53But I'd say in more recent times that you talked about COVID. We were planning to launch our first product in 2021. And so to do that, there's obviously the product engineering, but there's a buildup of hundreds of suppliers that can make all the components and tool all those components. So, you know, like a fascia or a headlight, the supplier has to build it, but they also have to build the tooling for it. And so that was our first time turning on our supply chain. And in each case, we had to go through the really painful process in 2018, 2019 of negotiating deals with these suppliers from a position of weakness.

1:07:30The brand wasn't known. We didn't have a balance sheet that looked particularly robust. It wasn't clear whether customers wanted to buy electric trucks and SUVs. And we were unproven as a company. And so we had to pay. And by the way, the auto industry was at its peak. So it was like high times. It wasn't like the automotive supply base was desperate by any means. So essentially, we had to pay a pretty significant premium just to get all these suppliers to work with us. And it wasn't as if we had a choice because it was just such a lack of leverage that we had. But the assumption that I made was that after launching, we would be able to negotiate meaningful cost reductions off the success of the product and continued volume growth.

1:08:15And what we didn't predict was first that COVID would happen, and that would make setting up a plant, not just our plant, but all these suppliers getting tooling set up and coordinated and tested and quality loops worked through, really difficult from 2020 to 2021 when we were supposed to launch. But then subsequent to that, setting up the plant and installing equipment, that the supply chain would have such a hysteresis of capacity, like just constrained for so long. And so rather than us being able to negotiate cost savings, those same suppliers came back and said, if you still want to keep getting parts, you have to keep paying us.

1:08:52And so there was this, I won't call it extortion, but it was almost like we had no choice but to pay whatever additional fees were on top. This is why you're still having to subsidize like every sale. And so that, we had to really work through that. And it was, we launched the other thing. We decided to launch three products at the same time. So we launched a truck, an SUV, and a commercial van all at once. And so if things were going well, that would have been a really positive thing. In that environment, it made it immensely complex. And just to illustrate how hard this is, people get two things.

1:09:26The install of the equipment at the plant. We had hundreds of truckloads of equipment that was sitting outside our plant in 2020 with no ability to install it because we couldn't get contractors to work outside to do the electrical drops and all of the above. To actually install the equipment that you paid a billion and a half dollars to have delivered. So we had to come up with all sorts of crazy schemes to get the equipment installed. We had multiple different colors of shirts for different teams so that they wouldn't walk by each other and exchange COVID. It was very complex. Wow. Once we got through that, when our supply chain was ramping, any single supplier can stop the plant.

1:10:04And I think the focus is always on the single supplier that stops the plant. What's not appreciated is the other suppliers keep sending stuff. So we would have insane stockpiles of the stuff we did have enough of, and it overflowed all of our warehouses. We had to rent additional warehouses. there were times where we would have a hundred semis lined up at one of our warehouses because there's nowhere to put the parts because a single part was stopping production. So we couldn't build vehicles to consume the other parts. And so the pain and the complexity of learning for the first time, how to run a complex supply chain across not just one vehicle, but three.

1:10:44And to do that in that environment was, you know, we like had to go zero to highly capable really quickly. And so we're just now coming out of that. So we renegotiated and resourced about half of our vehicle on R1. But as I said, like the linkage to how that started still remains. It's still there. The hangover is still there. The hangover is long. But on R2, it's a totally different supply chain. So the cost structure on R2 is, it's like, I'm so excited about it. It's so much cheaper than what we did on R1. And it's just starting from such a different position. The supply chain stuff is so interesting because it's not like you're getting, you're waiting on a part, you're waiting on in many cases components.

1:11:28And so when there's a piece that's required for your supplier to create that component that's missing, they have their supply chain issues. So it's sort of like it's a domino effect all the way down the line, takes a very long time for that to repair itself and get back on track. Meanwhile, you've got 100 ,000 pre-orders and you've got all these customers waiting. Like when did we do that panel in Denver? Do you remember with Alex? That was before the pandemic, it must've been 2018, something like that. And it was a big dog and pony show. You had the vehicles there and it was like, we're on the precipice.

1:12:06Everybody's gonna be getting this soon. Yeah, and then boom, yeah. And it would be like three years later, right? I mean, and you're trying to manage like, making sure there's no customer revolt amidst all of this. Like I can't even imagine. So when you look back on all of those experiences, what do you tell your younger self? Like, had you known all of this going in? I mean, you strike me as somebody who would be like, yeah, I'm still doing it, like sign me up. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, it wouldn't have changed. I probably would have spaced out the three vehicle launches. Like I wouldn't have compressed so much complexity.

1:12:46So probably would have launched R1S first, then the truck, then the van, instead of all within the same six month window. But in some ways the pain, the world has not yet seen it and it hasn't been realized yet, but R2 is going to be so much better from a cost point of view and a supply chain robustness point of view because of the beating that we took on R1. and I actually think the pain that we went through on R1 is leading to R2 being a better product. And so the R2 is like the aggregate result of all of our experiences as a company. And so those experiences are valuable. They helped inform how we operate.

1:13:27They informed our culture. They informed how we negotiate with suppliers. And so I'm, you know, it's like, I could certainly wish some of those things were less painful, but it's going to make us stronger in the end. You seem like a very grounded, calm, equanimous person by nature. And I'm just trying to imagine you in the center of the firestorm and how you kind of maintain that level of calm so that you can make good decisions. What are the lifestyle habits that you kind of deploy to kind of maintain your sanity in a very insane life? Hmm. I think everybody deals with challenging situations differently.

1:14:10There's no right or wrong answer. For me, what I find is that as the situation becomes more complex and more pressurized, I'm at my best if I'm consciously staying calm. So if you were to look in my notebook at the hardest moments in Rivian's history, you'll find written on pages, stay calm, or I often write the calm person wins. And it's a reminder to myself that you just said it, but we make better decisions. We can process things more thoughtfully, or at least I should say I can make better decisions. I process things more thoughtfully when I consciously stay calm.

1:14:53and that's easy to say sometimes hard to do, but it's the reason I write it down sometimes to remind myself. Do you have a practice though to do that other than just a reminder? Like, are there things that you do or is there a way that you set up your life that makes it more conducive to remaining calm? There's three things I think that can help. So I eat very healthy. I'm vegetarian for a long, long time, I'm plant-based for also a long time. I like to exercise. And even if it's, when I say exercise, I think we, like our minds often go to like being in a gym, but exercise is walking, hiking, biking.

1:15:33Rivian style exercise. Yeah, it can be lots of things, but it's being active. It's getting your body moving in a way that you may not solve something on a walk or on a hike, but your brain, at least I find my brain can reset and look at the same exact set of constraints and problem in a different way. And then the third, which I don't do a great job of, is getting enough sleep. I think if you do those two things well, you're in your best position to make great decisions. That's some of the advice I've had from other founders or along those lines, which are, particularly as a company scales, in the beginning, your job in running a company is to do everything.

1:16:06But as it scales, a big part of my job is to make as strong and robust of decisions as possible. I'm no longer the person that's gonna design every part, but I need to be making like the hard, big decisions. And to even know what the most important decisions are to make so that your attention and your focus is being placed in the right. And often the big decisions that are easier, the ones where the answer is obvious, the big decisions that are hard are the ones that are unpopular. So they're either high risk or they're ones for which the whole leadership team is like, Arjit, what are you thinking?

1:16:41And it's like, well, I'm really convicted on this. So you're not gonna be 100 % right as well. So you have to recognize that you will get some things wrong. But I think on the really big, you know, one-way door decisions, I try really hard to make sure we're thinking about those in the right way. And so what is your advice to the young founder or somebody out there who's tackling a big problem or has an audacious vision for how to change the world from your experiences and all the things that you've learned? I think first and foremost, I say this all the time, it does take a lot. It takes a lot of time.

1:17:15You have to, maybe it's possible. I can't imagine a way to do it without, you put it as being obsessive. Obsession. Yeah, like being really dedicated to the thing you're working towards. And this whole concept of work-life balance,

1:17:35your whole life is integrated into your work if you're really doing something big. And if you, I think following a model similar to what I followed. So it's just everything you're thinking about in some way relates in. And then as your life becomes, as in the case with me, as your life becomes, has more things added to it. So in my case, I had kids, like finding ways for your kids to be part of it is important, but there's no way to avoid that this is gonna take a tremendous amount of focus and time. And you have to love it. You have to deeply love it. You have to be passionate about it. You have to be in it for the right reasons.

1:18:08A different relationship with balance. Yeah. You can't get too unbalanced or you're not going to be able to actually fulfill the mission. Yeah. One of the things I learned a lot in doing this, and so I've gone through cycles where I've been not physically as healthy and I'd say not performing as effectively as I could have to where I am today, which is I've been much more intentional on how I find ways to make everything all fit together. And so I talked about being intentional with time. I'm really intentional on energy now. So I think about in the course of a week, what are the things that we're doing?

1:18:45Are there enough things that are creative, enough things that are like grinding out hard work, enough things that are collaborative and mapping out the timeline over the course of a week to say, make sure it's balanced and make sure the context switching is also thoughtful. So going from an intense negotiation where it's like a serious, hard negotiation to giving an inspiring all hands talk to terminating a leader at the company to your recruiting lunch, that's a bad flow of events to have happen in the morning, but you could arrange those same things differently across the course of a week and your energy levels can be much higher.

1:19:28So, yeah, I spent a lot of time looking at my layout of the week to think, you know, like what I did immediately before this was important that it wasn't something that put me in a really bad mood, for example, or not even bad mood, just like beat me up emotionally. And similarly, I know that after this, I'm going to be in a great mood. So I should go do something creative and inspiring. Our time is winding up. I got to let you go shortly. But I can't let you leave without some thoughts on where this is all going. Like if you cast your gaze and your vision onto a future, maybe 30, 40, 50 years on the horizon and assuming there are all these obstacles and it's not gonna go as planned and there's setbacks and the timeline gets stretched, what does it look like?

1:20:18Like what is the world that you wanna see that would match up to this vision that you have? This is where I think, I've said it before, I think we're at such a wonderful inflection point. We're at the early innings of this transition away from fossil fuels. So 30, 40 years from now, we should be in the late innings of that. And it should start to feel as if when we look back, almost unimaginable the way the world operated for the last 120 years. So just we'll look back and be like, boy, that was crazy how we used to do things. Can you believe we used to have these little teeny engines that would be on the end of a stick that we'd use to whack weeds in our backyard?

1:20:57Like, that actually happened. And we'll, like, look at that in the way that my kids look at, like, a dial-up phone and don't understand what it is. It's just going to feel so foreign. But I think one of the things we haven't talked about here, which is also interesting, I characterize the transition away from fossil fuels as more than once in a generation. It's a once-in-a-planet change. We as a planet, we had the benefit of this accumulated stored mass of carbon in the form of liquid and solid fuels that allowed us to industrialize the way we did. That's a one-time thing. We're going to reuse them to get to where we did from a technology point of view.

1:21:31We're now going to figure out how to get off of them. But that's it. Like in the history of our planet, that will be one blip, one really important but short blip. And so to be alive in that transition is a big deal. The other transition and change we're seeing is the birth of artificial intelligence. And there's no reason that these two happen to be occurring at the same time, but they are. And so the combination of those two is going to create opportunities that are even beyond what we might think of as science fiction. So things like cars that drive themselves, packages that are delivered to your house without any human involvement, manufacturing plants that are operated almost entirely through robotics.

1:22:14the elimination of like information asymmetry in making decisions around everything from traffic to what I want to eat for dinner. And so, I mean, we could spend hours just dreaming about what that future looks like. But the point is, is it's the whole fabric of our society is going to look very different in 30 or 40 years. And as we go through these massive changes, anytime there's a set of changes that impact society at this level, whether you're looking at the transition away from carbon-based fuels, away from fossil fuels, or looking at the birth of artificial intelligence, it's going to cause tension in society.

1:22:57And that tension is going to manifest for lots of reasons. It's going to manifest because there's incumbent businesses or incumbent ideologies or incumbent habits that are being challenged by that. So I think it's important that as society, as many leaders as possible work to find the common thread amongst us as a species. And it was one of the reasons early on in our life as a company, we start talking about our kids, kids, kids. And it's one of the, we actually have a shirt, it's a really cool shirt, kids, kids, kids, it's three different trees. But it's, I think it's the singular aligning mechanism that I found regardless of almost everything, religion, political orientation, country of origin, age, it's something that unifies us as a species.

1:23:45And I've had a chance, fortunately, to just travel a lot in life. And it's so consistent. We want a better world for our kids and we can debate what that looks like. And that often leads to some of these tensions. but a unifying thing is that there's a desire to create a world in which the generations to come are inheriting something that's as magical as it was for us so that's i think very important and i hope so yes what i think about for 30 or 40 years now there's technology there's changes that are like you're goosebump inducing beyond even our imagination i think we'll start to see but my hope is that the threat of humanity that has informed our society today continues.

1:24:28And in fact, we find ways to run towards that as opposed to away from that. Yeah, I share that optimism. It's an incredible inflection point, this decisive moment that we find ourselves in. I know as a kid, you used to say like, I wish I was born in 1890, because I used to say this all the time. Your great era of like automotive innovation, 1890s got nothing on 1983 or whenever you were born, like it is really a remarkable time in which we're living and the rate of change is only gonna escalate where at the very beginning of this and it's exciting to bear witness to that. And I'm very glad that you're somebody who is helping to steward that.

1:25:06So I have to let you go. I could talk to you for four more hours, but I really appreciate you sharing with me today. I think you're on a beautiful and laudatory mission and I'm a fan, mad respect RJ. So thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Cheers. Peace.

1:25:37That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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