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

  1. “I can hop on this one first. I think the thing that I really like and may sound counterintuitive potentially is email updates. I think high signal, low noise email updates, particularly with things related to critical bath are extremely important to do, one, give the information to a broader set of folks.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think the latter for sure, like we have right now, our team is six people. So it's relatively easy to control that game. But it's still very important how we've structured a lot of the initial team is disciplinary based or sort of domain based. So it may not make the most sense for aviatics engineer to go troubleshoot a engine design problem that's literally blocking the position of said problem.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Easy, right? It's easy for folks who aren't getting constantly aligned to kind of fall into the height because it will seem like the hottest thing in town whenever that's happening because it's like, oh, wow, this is literally blocking a rocket launch. This is literally blocking the production line. And people are like, oh, I want to help. I want to help. It's like got to focus resources so that you're right. The next thing doesn't actually become that critical path sooner rather than never, I suppose.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I've got one of you. Go for it. You can't play like second grade soccer That's like sometimes how it feels if you are narrowly, narrowly focused on the critical path side of things, right? And secondary great soccer basically means that everyone swarms the ball on the field. And so you have to set up systems that enable you to mobilize core groups of teams to go after critical paths while also not letting the next decision kind of fall behind. And a lot of that is around having little SWAT teams that are able to independently attack things that are in parallel or attack things in parallel that enable you to kind of keep the thing that is not on critical path right now still moving without diverting all resources over. That's how we think about that.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Totally can. It's a critical path to being the thing that's driving schedule. So, really, the schedule driving task or procurement activity that needs to happen in order to unlock either the next phase or get you to the end goal. Although we are very young at Galadine, there's a lot of chasing critical path in playing this constant game of whack-a-mole to really get yourself to that next phase or get yourself to that next milestone.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So everything is like web app posted. Their access controls are basically gone, at least internal to the company, when it comes to being able to see the core engineering information. It does not live on a hard drive somewhere. It does not live in an email that gets sent to a specific group of people and it then needs to be forwarded for it to get to everyone. We've really focused on building that integrated.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Solving like the discrete technical problems is hard. You're solving kind of first of a kind problems in many cases, but then getting large groups of people to work together towards solving those first of a kind problems actually starts to like, that's where the churn starts to appear between teams. And even if you try to have fast accelerated decision making, even if you have everyone talking to each other, you need to make sure that the vectors are aligned and everyone is kind of working in the same direction towards the same thing. And that's a big part of why as we've been building Mariana, we've been focusing on like how do you democratize access to information between teams so that you avoid kind of data silos that form between entities. And that doesn't really happen in teams of 10, 20, 30 people, but it does start to happen once you get into teams that are 100 people or more. And seeing that growth of teams that are trying to build large scale infrastructure, those pockets of information, those data silos really do form naturally, even if the executive teams are saying there should be no pockets of information.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Decisions, right? And oftentimes you won't find out if a decision is correct or not until you've made it tried it and then iterated really quickly on you're not always going to make the right decision, but you're always just trying to maximize your percentage that you did make the right decision. It's all bets. It's all making bets. But speed and excellence in execution, those are the two things.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So that's hypercritical and is a big piece of how we've been building the company. I think another part of that may be a part of making that successful, or at least from my experience, is you need leaders across that flat org that are able to make decisions really quickly. I think decision velocity without using a buzzword is very, very important with high conviction leadership who can make strong decisions. You increase the pace of development, increase the pace of production cycles, everything goes faster, even from a like flying people to space perspective, there's a lot of risk, right? And by having high conviction leaders who can go make really fast decisions in that space too, it helps absolve a lot of risk from the lower level, more junior engineers, and really just lets them go fast. I think if you have a junior engineer who's just now starting out of SpaceX or a Tesla and they're like worrying themselves, I'm making this crazy big decision is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars. Like, what if I mess up? If the leader can come in and remove that concern from the junior engineer's mind by just making a decision and saying, go, then you go way, way faster. You can't wait to have all of the information available to make.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I think Flat Orgs is hyper critical, right? You need information to flow as quickly as possible. You need to democratize access to information. And that's really the purpose of Flat organizations, because if you do flat organizations wrong, it can get chaotic, right? Like the purpose of flat organizations is really about information flow and collaboration. And so any junior engineer should be able to go to any senior member of any executive team at any point in time and talk directly to folks that are making decisions, as well as collaborate with teams that are within the company kind of without having to funnel information through managers and then back down into their teams.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And what we've landed on is that you have to go full bore, kind of like leveraging the advances in autonomy, in automotive and humanoid robots to go and apply that to refineries and to mining operations.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, so I spent about a decade at Tesla and got to run around the battery supply chain. Most recently was spending a lot of time on the minerals and metals side of things. And a lot of our focus was trying to identify how do we de-bottleneck that part of the supply chain and make sure that the minerals that batteries need could keep up with battery production. And similar to what Chandler was saying, this is an industry that the major players are 50 to 100 years old and that way of doing things. Companies like that are large and conservative really gets set in that way of doing things. And so as we were engaging or as I was engaging with those companies and as we were building infrastructure in that space at Tesla, what became very apparent is that the industry is massively software deficient and a lot of the challenges that come up when you're trying to build this infrastructure is the coordination layer, the orchestration layer. How do you manage a large complex refinery with a talent pool that is shrinking? How do you manage large complex mining operations again with a talent pool that's shrinking?”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, I think being somewhat foreign to the missile industry until the summer of last year, right, as I jumped into it, I realized we don't have enough. They cost too much and we can't make them fast enough. It seemed like everyone in the industry is kind of doing it the same old way. And I think in order to get drastically different results, you have to do things drastically differently. So with my background being purely in liquid propulsion across SpaceX and even at UCLA launching liquid rockets, there's a very real way to apply this technology to missile systems, and we're going to go do it.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You on sets like super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately. There's a thousand things that have to happen, but 100 of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those hundred things. Being somewhat foreign to the missile industry, I realize we don't have enough. They cost too much and we can't make it fast enough. But my background being purely liquid propulsion across SpaceX and even at UCLA launching liquid rockets is a very real way to apply this technology to missile systems where you can go do it.”

    2026-03-27 · a16z Podcast · The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source