YouSaid · the spoken record

Chandler D. Smith

lines on the record: 64
first: 2026-03-27
most recent: 2026-03-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I can imagine this already having the technical basis and going and growing into the fundraising, all of this other stuff that I didn't know how to do. Like this is already hard. I could not imagine at the inverse, like going in and being going and needing to figure out all of the technical chops that I have up to this point or at least enough to be successful in what we're trying to do would be very, very difficult. So I'm not sure.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that maybe the last thing I'll say is that you'll never actually be fully trained to go and start a company, right? It's not like you stay there for there's no recipe. It's not like you stay somewhere for 10 years and then you go and you work on you go and start a company. And so there's always going to be a when do you feel yourself confident to go and take a risk and different people are going to have different perspectives on like when do they feel ready to go and do it? But I generally think that you want to have as strong of a technical basis before you go and have to learn all of the company building side of things. And so making sure that you're kind of like over indexing on the technical side before you go and kind of sign up for figuring out how to hire and figure out how to fundraise and figuring out how to build all the ecosystem around a company and the infrastructure around a company that has to be built because you are going to keep learning as once you go and start something. But being hyper focused on building that strong technical basis is the key.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not an internship limited thing. That's a forever thing. I'm still doing it today. But I think, yeah, a lot of how I approached it and how I think people should approach it generally. Not just if they're going to a SpaceX or a Tesla, but they should really approach this from a, how can I surround myself with the best people in the world and work on a project from start to finish and do those reps like what Turner was saying? I will caveat that though it's hard, right? If you're a fresh coming out of school, you may not know what that looks like. So maybe some actionable recommendation is lean on lean on your network, lean on people you know both in school peers who may have interned elsewhere and seen other environments or if there's professors, other people in your life that you can have meaningful conversations with about perspective on certain companies, missions, products, that sort of thing. Like go do that thing because it can be hard. It can be kind of scary. You don't know because you haven't already done it. You don't know if what could look like.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm trying to think about again Turner and I live the same life just he's a little a couple years ahead I started SpaceX when I was 18 years old like that was when I first entered the doors into the fun candy land OS SpaceX and it was the dream right and I told myself from day one that I'm going to be a sponge like I want to be the biggest sponge I possibly can to absorb as much freaking information from all these amazing people as I can um”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would say that I wouldn't go and start something until you have been able to sit around a project that you have seen go end to end and then done that multiple times that enables you to see how much better can you get with a generation of like from concept through to deployment and getting that getting to do that with like”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say if you're at a company that has really, really high talent density and you're in a position where you feel like you're constantly learning and every day is kind of like a growth opportunity. And you get to see projects from like the messy phase, the early messy phases through the middle messy phases through the kind of deployment messy phases. That experience is incredibly valuable.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The project teams, doesn't matter which. So the formula C's, the whatever drone UIS stuff, but Raka teams too. I actually found specific Raka team in the country that works on rockets with the same propellants that we're using, which I did not know existed because it's a little bit more rare, but I'm targeting that school. Get them all out. Get them all out. Get them on a bus and bring them over here.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find that I get a lot out of I always start with one sort of broad question and dig into a lot of things, but I really open it up to allow myself a playground to punch and jab and go around their problem set. But I effectively ask, walk me through a problem that you solved. And whenever they walk through that problem over 20 minutes or 15 minutes, I know very quickly whether or not they're good or not good. And usually I'm okay enough no matter what the discipline is to kind of jab and punch around that problem set a little bit to feel it out. But I find it's pretty hard to get past my screen there with people who are not true. But for the full-time process, we're doing two, three screens and then a panel interview. And a large part of my framing too is very much, I want to introduce you to the team. We have a very small team that you're going to need to live with effectively. And we want to make sure that we're happy with you and you're happy with us. And this gives you the perfect forum to do it. So that's usually how we finish our full-time process. But for interns, we're figuring out right now. It's a shorter process.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Internship one summer. I almost walked out of school to say, but they said we couldn't do that anymore. It's not the old days. I think the overwhelming population of folks that are doing so much of the critical work on Starship Dragon, Falcon even, are intern conversions. And I think that program is so freaking crucial to the eventual engineering population because it gives people a real chance to go and demonstrate that, yes, I am a killer, right? I am badass. I can do this thing.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gives a three month trial period to these people. And people that crush stay all the time. And I find that myself included. I interned in SpaceX four times. I couldn't leave. Like it was the dream. I started sophomore.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very true on the full time, like, say, multi year experienced person who's coming to a SpaceX, like they're going through four or five, six screens, right? A panel interview to finish it off. I think the value that I can add here is particularly related to the internship funnel. Given the brand with Tesla and SpaceX, like literally it's been quantified. These are like the most applied to programs ever. And they've got this insane interest from the public, which obviously the double edged sword, right? It's like you get very good, but you also get very bad. It's a broad spread. However, I think looking at the impact of these internship programs on the eventual full-time candidates or the full-time employees.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have. And so it goes in both directions. I've always found that extremely rigorous and actually hard interviewing processes positively filter for people who are motivated by the really hard interview process Like, if you're a cracked engineer, you want to work with other cracked engineers and you want to know that other engineers have gone through this same process that you have, and like really hard interview process is pretty fun, but they're very hard to design. It's not for the faint of heart on the interviewer side.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. And like, it does it make the hiring process a little bit slower? Yes. But it is really important to do your darnest to make sure that the folks that are coming to the company are going to come in and be autonomous and able to balance authority and accountability, which means that they have to really, really have the deep technical understanding of the field that they're going into. We've mirrored that effectively and ensured that And it's harder when you don't have the brand that Tesla or SpaceX have, right? Of the folks who are trying to get a job at those companies, they're like, yes, I'll do a test. Yes, I will talk to as many people as you want me to talk to. And so you, you know, you do have to manage that a little bit with candidates. But for the folks who are really excited about the mission and the folks who are really excited about the company, who are the folks that you want to bring in anyways, they will go through that process. And we typically pitch it in both directions. It's like, look, if”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the key part of the hiring process at Tesla at least, and I'm sure at SpaceX, is the technical evaluation. It goes quite deep. And so you're going to talk to Six Engine if you're applying for an engineering role. You're probably talking to Six Engineers before you're getting an offer. You're almost certainly doing a technical test that kind of shows how you think through problems and are able to solve the problems that your resume says you're able to solve. And so that level of like technical rigor that goes into assessing folks that are coming into the company is pretty extensive. You're going to have eight to ten conversations before you get an offer. And we've, and that's a”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we had to do that. But then once you sign up for that, there's a question of how much of your part, like where do you do partnerships and where is there a rich enough ecosystem where there's enough competition to be able to have confidence that like the cost will come down on some subcomponent or the cost will come down on some part of the software stack?”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you've vertically integrated into something that's upstream, they have their own supply chain. They you now have to absorb. We made the decision to go and be a software company that builds and operates minerals infrastructure, mainly because software companies that sell to mining companies have a very, very hard time penetrating the sector because the issue is the rate of uptake of software and of technology is actually gated by what would be the customers if you were a pure place ask company. And so the question for us in that regard was always Does Mariana exist or not if we're not both a software company and a mining company? The answer to that was no. The company would not exist”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It shouldn't be in the early days. Like in the early days, when you have resources that are slim and you have to decide where do I allocate this team that needs to continue to grow, like all startups or like many startups. So when you're in that resource-constrained mode, you should only be vertically integrating into the things that have a binary outcome of the company exists or the company doesn't exist. Then eventually once you start to have a large team that can go and you're driving down unit cost, that's where the cost driven vertical integrations starts to become like an interesting and much longer decision, I would say, because now it's like on paper it can look great, but the risk transfer from a supplier to yourself is like the main thing that you have to be thinking about, right? Folks that do anything in your supply chain, they are carrying risk in those activities, right? And so whether it is, you're not eliminating a supply chain point, you're actually expanding your supply chain interactions.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the ultimate strategic decision driver. So you should not be vertically integrating just because you can save 5% or 10% or even 50% on a subcomponent that does not kind of check the box of like, does the company exist or not?”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think very clean integrating from the point of vertically integrating, to kind of echo what Chandler was saying makes any sense. I think every vertical integration decision, which there are thousands of them need to boil down to like one question, especially in the early days of companies, is does the company exist or not if you make the decision to, if you don't make the decision to vertically integrate? And so like if you boil it down to a subset of problems that are binary and like does Mariana exist or does Mariana not exist, that makes a decision easy where and that could be a number of drivers either the part doesn't exist, the technology doesn't exist or the cost is like so insanely high that the company can't exist by not vertically integrating into the thing and so if the and i call it the thing because there's many many things uh and and like subcomponents or parts of the software stack that you know if you don't go and do it yourself like the company just won't exist and so when you boil it down to that like it ties into like”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do this. And then you can actually start to analyze how intense the capital is to make it happen, how extensive the time is required to actually go and achieve on that. But it has to be strategic. I think a lot of the takes that were fully vertically integrated this were fully integrated that is just going to spend a lot of money, that's for sure.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dream. Absolutely. And I think you have a lot of people who maybe haven't lived that pain to understand that the trade associated with going for that strategically. So I think how I think about it is we have to bring in the assemblies in-house that are going to bottleneck our supply chain as fast or bottleneck our production line as fast as possible. So I think what that looks like for us is some of the bigger weldments, like starting with that sort of thing, bringing in-house sooner rather than later is something that's relatively easy to do, but is a very complex thing that has multiple steps that if we can bring that in-house, we whack one mole on the table of getting to this 10,000 missiles per year number. I think there's, of course, many more challenges, or you kind of just, whenever you're looking at your in-state product, you need to go and see what are the things that are really hitting me on schedule. And for us, there's probably five of those right now that are screaming at us, like, please help. Please help. So those things are obviously going to be top of mind to like, how could we do this? Like, what is, what is the way we?”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The take, at least my read back on it was it needs to be strategic. Like this blank slate idealistic we're going to vertically integrate is like I think almost naive in a way. Vertical integration is not easy certainly not. It's very much not easy. And I think there's”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're tracking. It's about measuring and quantifying. Like, I think a lot of manufacturing, you go really deep on understanding because you're making thousands of parts an hour, depending on the scale of manufacturing process. And that level of measuring and measuring against goals and setting targets just doesn't happen in this large scale infrastructure ecosystem.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a subset of materials and equipment that are on site. You have a subset of people that are on site, and you have a set of tasks that need to be done. And today, that is like humans trying to like sit.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Daily basis, they'll go out to the field, they'll stand in a circle with the trades, they'll say, What are you doing today? What are you doing today? What are you doing today? At the end of the day, they come back. They say, what did you do today? What did you do today? And there isn't a lot of quantification. Regular basis. Like there isn't a lot of short interval control of construction operations. That is actually quantum.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Target for the month on a daily basis, they'll go out to the field, they'll stand in a circle with the trades, they'll say, What are you doing today? What are you doing today? What are you doing today? At the end of the day, they come back. They say, what did you do today? What did you do today? And there isn't a lot of like quantification that happens on a regular basis. Like there isn't a lot of short interval control of construction operations that is actually quantified. And so”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are actually torquing bolts and actually like welding out seams to build that up into what is the schedule actually need to be instead of doing like top down assessments of kind of how You're in mining operations, you also need to do super discrete tact time analyses of all of the discrete tasks that happen around a mining operat”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To specific subsets of tasks that are actually torquing bolts and actually welding out seams to build that up into like, what does the schedule actually need to be instead of doing like top-down assessments of kind of how long something is going to take to build? And then when you're in mining operations, you also need to do like super discrete tag-time analyses of all of the discrete tasks that happen around a mining operation.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that so does design for manufacturing is kind of like how you do product design and ensure that you can kind of scale that into something that can be produced at scale with very short tech times and all that”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It's like we, yeah, exactly, bespoke requirements. And I think we literally had a whole design for all this hardware before realizing, oh, crap, we should just go use that. Because then we can go start figuring out how to build these somewhat complex weld mints sooner rather than later and then build the production of those very quickly.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if you hadn't been focused, if you hadn't been thinking two steps ahead about production, you would have just designed something from scratch that was perfectly bespoke to the set of requirements. Exactly.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There to go use the same hardware. So from a company goal perspective, it was fantastic. And it was like the perfect direction, I think. I won't take credit for all of that ideation. Actually, another guy on the team is still there, kind of brought it to my plate. And I'm like, oh, man, that's freaking great. Let's do it. Let's go fast. But that's one thing. And it's really just staying super clear on this intention to question every requirement because what that does is it enables your requirement set whenever an engineer sets them to go actually design hardware to be enabled to design a very simple solution and simple as fast simple as cheap. So really, I think that whole part of the SpaceX mantra is very real and it is happening across Starship. It's even happening on fixes on Dragon and Felix.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they had some hardware design for the V3 vehicle that actually could have been plugged into ship very easily. And we had very limited engineers to go design a ton of prop systems hardware. And we identified that, oh, we can maybe use this. And we kind of brought it over early, which would have been earlier implementation and booster. And one of the things that popped up, that sounds kind of silly, is it was essentially a circle that lives inside the fuel tank and you could condense liquid inside that circle. the valves that were effectively venting the tank there don't like liquid so when we were like trying to go super fast like oh sweet we got free hardware we can skip a whole design cycle let's go fast and we can you know just jump into production sooner rather than later we were like oh we're gonna get liquid in this thing too i don't know what the bows are going to like that and what we did is we just split up the necessary resources to go prove that that's going to be okay and what that what i did was not only allow us to go roll in this whole hardware uh design into production sooner but it also enabled booster once they got”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can. Yeah, there's one that's kind of interesting. It's kind of getting into the weeds, but we had the opportunity to pull some hardware from Booster. So Booster was a little bit ahead of the ship team in terms of their V3 design. They kind of skipped V2 for Booster. They went for V1 to V3.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to give some context, whenever I started in the starship program, it was around flight three timeframe. So a little bit of E1 play in terms of full stack, and then pushed all the way through the V2 development cycle and then started to touch V3 and kind of lay that out before I left the company. I think really what this trade for us came down to is and what enabled kind of the speed and thinking with this factory mindset is and really just production focus in general is requirements. Like from the design side, if you can boil up all the requirements that sound stupid as fast as possible and then give yourself a chance to whack them out of the equation, you now leave yourself like...”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't think there's any, because I actually Believe in a lot of kind of how Tesla was running. I think that it's just there's like little tweaks that you can make along the way that enable you to make it more sustainable for the teams.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I wouldn't actually say that there's any one pinpointed thing that at least at Tesla at Tesla was a core principle that we wouldn't mimic. I would say that it's more like kind of massaging the implementation of those. That is to address some of the things like churn and turnover and burn”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's one thing that we are not able to do right now given our size. But I think it's something that as we grow, like in order to hit speed, you need to do everything possible. And what possible looks like right now for us is growing very quickly, but is a different set of possibilities than maybe what SpaceX has right now. So I think kind of really keeping an eye on when that point is so that we can crank up the velocity even more in my mind.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a fun one that's not choosing not to do it, it's kind of delaying the implementation. But the one thing that I definitely employed working Starship, a little bit on Dragon as well, is with the fantastic resource that SpaceX has behind it, you can do a lot of fantastic things. In order to fight critical path, there are ways to do that that maybe are less efficient, I suppose, but ways that will go achieve the goal, parallel pathing a lot of things can be pre-resource intensive, both on a time space, but also on a cost.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's the other thing that Chandler mentioned, which is as long as you're setting goals that are aggressive but are possible, like that has to be has to be in the realm of possibility. Then it doesn't like if you go super, super aggressive on targets that have no actual technical path towards achieving it, that can be demoralizing also. So it's a mix of making sure that churn is gone to the extent that you can and making sure that you're setting goals that are motivating not to more likely.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The decision is clear. The priorities are clear, they'll work synergy to go do it. But it definitely destroys kind of like the excitement. If you have things that are around the team that are taking away from the core mission.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the mission alignment is definitely kind of like the core piece. I think the thing that actually causes burnout is churn and like a lack of feeling like you're making progress towards a goal. And so if people are working towards something and they feel like they're actually like progressing towards it and if your mission aligned solving hard problems can be fun because you're as long as you are like making progress towards that goal. And so there's a handful of things that can make work not fun, which is churn can come from like, you know, erratic decision making that kind of like moves teams in different and there's always going to be a little bit of that, especially in startup companies that are moving quick and being very nimble. But the second is like politics in companies creates an insane amount of churn, data silos and kind of hoarding your Legos is what we call it can create an insane amount of churn. And when people have to deal with that and aren't able to focus on like, okay, I have a problem that I have to solve. The pathway is clear.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of this comes back to how mission aligned the company is or how strong the mission of the company is. It doesn't feel like working if it's fun, and particularly for folks who are so aligned with the mission of the company. Obviously in SpaceX's case, making multiplanetary, that's a fantastic mission to go stand behind and work your butt off to achieve. So it makes the long hours, the all-nighters, it makes it so that they don't really impact you that much. And I think a very high amount of thought on my end right now is going into how do I really convince a lot of folks who haven't thought about defense before to be passionate about defense because the reality is in my case, there's so much talent that's living at SpaceX or so much talent living in Rock Loud Firefly in relativity that need to come work this problem set too. It's how do you build that same fiery mission alignment that SpaceX has been able to achieve and other companies have been able to achieve with their workforce now in these, you know.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you have to have like, you're credible. You have to have a core. You have to have a sense of what is actually challenging but achievable. And like the purpose of setting super aggressive milestones, which I think everyone should do, is it's meant to weed out what the actual critical paths are going back to the critical path comment of like instead of saying, okay, I've done this before. It should take 36 months. Like when you on sets like super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately and very about what doesn't matter what doesn't work in that, like what actually doesn't solve for the aggressive timeframe. And then it gives you your priority list. It's like, okay, there's a thousand things that have to happen. If we want to do it in six months, 900 of those things can be done in six months, but 100 of them cannot be done in six months. And so we have to go attack those 100 things.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah I really try to think about it from fortunately, I've been able to touch a lot of different parts of rockets over my short but jam-packed career so far. And I have a decent gauge on how long things should take. And I think sort of to the effect of this drum beat thing, but doing something sort of upfront to align the team to like, hey, this is how long I think these things are going to take. You as the person who's going to go execute on it directly, like, does this sound reasonable? And then battle it there early and then set that schedule from the get-go, which is what we did. We all sat down. We set this very ambitious schedule to go get a rock in the air by June. And like we broke down the things we needed to do to get there and they're very reasonable. And if we start starting from that path, then you start to be like, what's wrong?”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a long cycle Also, the goal of kind of the cadence is give yourself time to celebrate those intermediate wins because it's easy to lose track of the fact that you're making a ton of progress over an 18-month period. Like you look back and you're like, oh, well, we built this thing. It's awesome. But you have to like, that cadence is also like it's a reward function for the team that they are saying like, look, okay, I'm doing the right thing. I'm driving towards the right thing. And you get that calibration on some regular basis.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sprints, we try to reserve for truly critical to the company type things. And the software engineering organization obviously runs in two weeks sprints. But if we have a major milestone that we're trying to hit drive towards, then we'll coin that a sprint and say, let the company as a whole is sprinting towards this thing. But the drum beat is a little bit different. It's like, because you're building, if you're building large-scale infrastructure, it is a 12-month project or an 18-month project. And if you'ren't the same thing as a...”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write something from scratch. And what we found even in like large scale operations, like the pass downs are very manual, but all that data that's being collected. And so instead of someone having to sit down and carve out an hour of their data, write down exactly what happened, we've put a ton of focus into like, how do we auto generate all those, but you still want people to look at it. You still want them to click send because like they should have ownership and accountability of what is in it. The other big thing that we've tried to do, it's like a balance here of like you need to set like a drum beat for the company. And if you don't set a drum beat for the company, people don't really know what they are moving towards necessarily and how you kind of take flat organizations and enable like give them some structure. And everyone knows that decisions are going to roll up on some cadence and you obviously have to be flexible because there's going to be super critical decisions that have to happen the day of. But you also want to like give some structure and like a cadence to the company that enables everyone to kind of be moving in the same rhythm effectively.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, second I think that there's like this natural thing that happens when you're very busy is that you don't have time to write things down and write reports. What we've tried to do is when you're running a manufacturing process, right, and you have just a day-to-day operation, you have a pass-down that happens between shifts that gets emailed out every day. And if you want to drive process development and R&D towards thinking about it as a manufacturing type process, the best forcing function is at the end of the day, you have like the equivalent of a shift passed down, which is you say, here's what we did, here's what we were supposed to do, here's why we didn't do the things we were supposed to do. And because that does become burdensome from like as like the team starts to grow and as there's a lot of stuff happening, we've done our best to try to like if everything is going into the same like aggregated kind of like data backbone you can actually auto populate the bulk of those pass downs and it puts humans in the position where they're really like reviewing a pass down editing maybe”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team out anyone. So, anyone, really to the point of the fire teams, there's usually going to be one extreme owner who is driving that problem or driving that specific task to get it completed. And for that person to take ownership and send high cadence email updates to get through the not so good parts of said problem is extremely important not only for the team to see in here, but I think it's actually wildly important for the individual who's working that project to recall what happened that day. Write it down and make sure, write it down, exactly writing down things is freaking massive. I have a notebook in my pocket all times. And I think in order to get that out and for them to write it down, see it and be like, I don't think I made the most direct progress towards the goal in this particular day. Let's fix it for the next day.”
2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source