00:37:33 · Molly O'Shea, Eric Romo
[00:37:33] S0: So I wanna talk more about the product development cycle. You were the thirteenth employee at SpaceX. Tom Mueller was the second. So I would assume this might be crazy that there might be some SpaceX DNA within the company. [00:37:46] S1: A little. Tom was officially in the payroll system the first. Really? He was one. [00:37:53] S0: So Elon's not even an employee? [00:37:55] S1: I don't know how that works, but it's a yeah. In payroll system, I mean, I think, you know, he he found Tom, and I think that was really the impetus for saying, okay. I actually think I could make a company around this, because, you know, the engines are the thing that that failed. They're the thing that's the hardest to build. They're the thing that's is always the critical path in the schedule. And so I think without Tom, I don't I don't think that company goes in the first days. And so I think, I don't know if that was part of the calculus for making an employee one of the payroll system or whatever, but, but that's that's officially the case. [00:38:27] S0: What was the hardest lesson that you learned at SpaceX in the very early days that has kept with you through this time and through the build of Impulse?
00:38:36 · Eric Romo
[00:38:36] S1: One of the really, really biggest things that I think we learned there that I watched happen that is definitely part of our DNA now is really about the iteration speed or the reduction of cycle time for development. So how quickly can you learn about this thing you're trying to build? And so I was there in the early days and I was an analyst on the propulsion team. So what that means is that I'm not real good at hardware or using machines or building anything. I kinda spend all my time in simulation land and Excel spreadsheets, which is funny because Tom is like super hands on, right? And when I first met him, he asked me all these questions about, you know, when's the last time you used a lathe and a drill press and, you know, how do you expect tubing on this thing? And I'm just like, dude, I have no idea. Like, I excel real good. And like, you want that? Like, I'm your guy. And so I was pretty sure he was not gonna hire me, but then luckily he did. So I was an analyst on the team, but the team was so small that I basically just had to like stay attached to Tom no matter where he went. And it was right around the time when I joined in early two thousand and three, the team started going down to the test site in McGregor in Texas for the first time. And at the time, the team in McGregor, there was one full time employee there and the rest of us would fly in and spend ten days there and, you know, work for ten days. And then we come back to LA for four days and we do that over and over and over again. And I did that for like nine, twelve months, something like that. I'm done that for years until the team finally stood up there and was built out. And what we were doing is we would bring hardware there to test. So was like, hey, we've got this new version of the engine, you know, build it up there. We're gonna test it there because testing it, you know, in LA, these things blow up. So, you know, you can't test them around here. And, you know, we would go down there and we'd bring our new hardware and then we'd get everybody to, you know, McGregor, which is, you know, well west of Waco, give you an idea of kind of where it is in the middle of Texas. And we would have brought the wrong part.
00:40:44 · Molly O'Shea
[00:40:44] S0: Oh no.
00:40:44 · Eric Romo
[00:40:44] S1: And it's like, well, I guess we're going home. And so sometimes we would, right? We'd get back and get on a jet and fly back air. At that time at SpaceX, the big philosophy, it kinda funny. I took away as a, you know, 20 year old kid, like I had two things that I remembered about like a strategy of SpaceX, and one was we're going to not rely on the government as a customer. We'd be all commercial, which is amusing to me because a few years later, NASA became the anchor customer, basically made the company what is they. And then number two was we're gonna outsource all manufacturing because there's such an amazing supply base here in LA that why would we make stuff internally when we could just rely on all these defenders, or these vendors, which of course, amazing because they're, you know, canonically so integrated now. But at the time we were outsourcing basically everything, right? So we did, we had a little tiny machine shop, basically anytime we would need some new part built, was okay, send the drawing to the vendor and get it built. And that would mean that, you know, you need some new piece to the engine built. Okay, we'll send in the drawing. And maybe two weeks later, if you're lucky, get this thing back. Oh, by the way, you got the wrong one and you flew to Texas to test it, Get on back and you wait two weeks to test that thing because you gotta go fix it. So we got through this cycle where we had a couple of vendors that we were really reliant on that were doing well for us, okay? And one of the ones was, you know, always the quickest and they're pretty cost effective and they're very communicative. So they were okay, we're really relying on this one. They're the ones that are helping us move fast. And I remember sitting in the bunker in Texas and underground, Tom and the team, and we get a call from that vendor and it's like, Hey, sorry, but we're shutting down. We're closing our doors. We can no longer, don't know what the heck happened, but you know, some internal dispute or whatever, I don't know. And they're shutting down. So we're like, We're screwed. This is our number one vendor. This is the vendor that's helping us move quickly, right? And we're sitting around having a conversation and we realize like, oh, we gotta go hire as many people from that vendor as we can.
00:42:49 · Eric Romo
And we gotta build up the internal capacity because that's what's gonna help us iterate. It's all stuff that seems like super obvious now, right? So most, you know, hard tech companies, the eCAPCOM, you walk around, they have a bunch of machine shops and lays and three d printers and all that sort of thing. But 2003, that was not so obvious at the time. And now it's so core to what we do here, that if you wanna move quickly, you absolutely must insource a lot of the development. You must build your own components. You must take as much internally as you can, which is not easy to do. These spacecraft that we build are really complicated. They have a lot of components. And so there is a, it's not the norm to build all this stuff in house. It's the norm from the primes to integrate from from other suppliers. They very proudly proclaim, like, hey. We have suppliers in 50 different states. Right? The reality is that that that those 50 different suppliers in 50 different states on their spacecraft create a ton of risk in their supply chain. And when they're in the development stage, where they're trying to build something new, it means that they're super slow because they have to wait two weeks for that next kabung to come back. And there are companies that are startups that it's hard to hire the level of technical talent that we have. And when you're trying to do something that has a broad range of technical competencies needed, you gotta hire smart people across all those ranges. And that's really challenging to do. Having Tom be a founder, the founding team that we have here, I think really helps us to bring in that talent and helped us to be able to do this. Whereas I think other companies are kinda struggling at sometimes.
00:44:23 · Molly O'Shea, Eric Romo
[00:44:23] S0: Okay, as we wrap up, I'll have some quicker questions, but you're gonna be hiring a bunch. [00:44:29] S1: Yeah. [00:44:29] S0: What roles are you hiring out for? [00:44:31] S1: Yeah, almost all of it is technical talent. It's either people who are gonna be working in the machine shop or in the integration facility building spacecraft or engineers who are helping design those components or engineers who are building test setups. Think when we look at budgeting for the company, it's typically, 85 to 90% is those people, and the rest is kinda overhead like me. But we really wanna continue to keep being focused on being a technical company. And I think what's a little different is that we tend to hire, we have something which you could talk to Tom about if you wanted, really around this responsible engineering mindset. So, who is the person that's ultimately accountable for the success of this part or this vehicle or this process? And we want people to be that single point of accountability. Whereas other companies takes more of a systems approach where it's kind of diffused throughout the organization. It's really important when people come in and say, You are gonna own this. Like, You're gonna be the owner of this thing. And I think that's really empowering for people to come in here, we need 200 more owners of important stuff. [00:45:37] S0: If you weren't president and COO, what role would you want here? Pick any role.