YouSaid · the spoken record

RJ Scaringe

lines on the record: 82
first: 2022-09-12
most recent: 2022-09-12
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, it was at this point we did bring in a small amount of outside investment. So we had investors to think about. We had employees and everyone had poured their heart and soul into what we were building. But I just knew it wasn't the right thing for us. And I knew it wasn't solving the right problem. I said, look, we've got a shift. And that was the easy part. The hard part was that we didn't know at that point what we were shifting to.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that's about right. We really believe we could make something special. But I would say underneath the surface, and of course I can say this now, I wouldn't have said this to the team at the time. I had pretty deep concerns just around the. Around whether we were solving the right problem and were we working on the right thing. The kind of thing that you go to bed lying and bed thinking about, should we be building this? Is this what the world needs? Do we deserve to exist as a company? That was a question I would ask myself all the time. What gives us the right to exist.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, it drove in a video, it looks very real, but it was not a, there wasn't a supply chain built around it and there was not durability tested. It was”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, yeah. Is this probably often the case? We thought the task was easier than it actually is. This is not for the faint of heart. And I think in those days we had assumed we could do it with less time and less money than was actually realistic. And I often talk to people about this stage. And in some ways, it was helpful that we didn't fully understand how challenging it was because the steepness of the climb appeared less scary, so to speak. We didn't look at it and fully appreciate how hard it was going to be”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we do some assembly of it depending on the parts. Some of those parts will be put together in the Detroit area. But yeah, it was definitely a hand built process.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that time, we were really focused on how the car would be built. So we started with the process to assemble sort of what we think of as like the structure, the aluminum structure. So I was developing parts. I was designing parts in CAD. It was 24-7. We never had enough, even close to enough money to do anything the right way. So everything was sort of hacked.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly what we did. I rented a warehouse. It was actually a warehouse I rented from my dad. And that was what we worked out of initially. And then to make a prototype, we had to figure out how to do that. So started traveling back and forth to Detroit to meet with some of the prototype part fabricators. And as we were going through it, I mean, it was very scrappy. So we found people that could make things all over the place, whether it was in Florida, whether it was in Detroit area that could sort of make some of the parts.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So the late 90s summers, I work two full time jobs. I worked as a machinist during the day. And then I worked in a restaurant in nights and weekends. And my goal was to buy a house. So I saved up enough to buy a house.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. In the beginning, it was just family and friends, mainly my dad and I. And I bought a house when I was in high school in my Put that money into the business.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for very little capital, you can build your software platform, build your app, and show that there's market demand for it. And the challenge in starting this is if you're being honest with yourself and therefore honest with investors as you talk about the business, you have to say, well, we have to raise at least a billion dollars. If we had all that money right now, it would still take us several years. And do you want to be the first dollar in? So, it's a really, really hard investment. So, you have this classic chicken or egg. You need money to develop technology and product. But if you have no product and technology, how do you raise the money? So you have to sort of almost like will it to happen. You have to just start working on the problem and start slowly making progress.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At a PhD from IT And so I would basically go into meetings and say I'm starting a car company. And they'd say, Well, tell us about your factory or tell us about your team or show us the product. And I'd say, well, we don't have those yet, but we're going to build them. So it was looking back, it was an incredibly hard pitch. In starting a car company, it's different than most technology businesses or traditional venture-backed businesses because even the whole venture space is designed around the idea of being able to launch your minimum viable product. Yes, you can launch something quickly.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was in some ways the worst possible backdrop one could imagine for raising capital, walking up and down Sandhill Road and sort of knocking on doors and trying to get meetings.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was me to start And then hired one or two people in the first six months. But very slowly grew the company. We did not have a lot of capital.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in terms of the first product, it was even more crude and simple than that. It was let's build a first product that helps us build a brand. The idea was a 100 mile per gallon sports car and build a brand around efficiency and sustainability. And then from there, continue to develop more and more technology, different products. And so we started working on that.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Was, I think, the name for a couple of months. I don't remember exactly how long, but very short period of time. And then we came up with what we thought was the actual name, which was Avera, A-V-E-R-A.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I didn't have a good name. So I had to incorporate something. So I incorporated under a temporary name. And I used mainstream out as my dad's company was.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my last year, I should say, as a graduate student, I talked to a few professors about it. And Jim Womack, who's now become a close friend and a great advisor, I was in a class. He was giving on the future of automotive, which was in 2008 or 2009. And near the end of the class, end of the semester, I walked up to him and said, hey, I'm starting a car company. And he sort of looked at me and said, you're crazy. But other than that, I really kept it very much to myself. And then, of course, we graduated and I started the company the next day.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, yeah, yeah, very much so. But for myself, and I think in academia, there was never a question that electrification is the future. The question was solely around, what's the path to get there?”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but where there's an electric motor to sort of help you. But sort of like that, yeah, with pedals. I realized that as cool and interesting as that might be, the reality is there's not a lot of scale. People are not going to want to buy that.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to move to a carbon free system. And so while I was at MIT, I was spending a lot of time. Thinking about what type of cart needs to be, what type of products are going to be necessary. And I mean, it was pretty wild. The beauty of a clean sheet, as you can think really broadly. So it was, we were thinking about her. I was thinking about everything from pedal-powered cars to... Diesel electrics to pure electric. But I actually was really sort of intrigued by this idea of pedal hybrid, like something with what we now see with e-bikes, but doing that in like a covered format.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The question we were trying to solve, and what I was focused on is how do we create a transportation system that will work in 100 years or in 200 years? The challenge we have as a society is our current transportation system is causing, without question, some of the biggest challenges we face as a society. So everything from almost all of our major cities around the world have severe air quality issues to a lot of the geopolitical conflicts we have around the world. Perhaps most challenging, not perhaps, I'd say definitely the most challenging, is we are fundamentally changing the composition of atmosphere.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you'd beat with engineers and research staff from those respective companies and be able to dive into their technical challenges. You'd get a chance to go visit and meet with them on their R&D centers. And what I realized is that the likelihood of me being successful starting a car company with no capital, no team, no technology, no brand, no facilities, no supply chain, I actually felt the likelihood of me having impact doing that was still higher than the likelihood of me being able to impact the trajectory of a large existing OEM. And the challenges, I would say, of holistic or system level innovation.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So at that point, this is back in 2005. Stanford did not actually have a very strong car program or vehicle program. MIT's was the best in the world. The Sloan Automotive Research Lab. And that lab was supported by and integrated with a number of different auto manufacturers.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was very close and in fact signed onto a position at Stanford, but ultimately switched a few days into that to MIT. And the reason was I was selecting the grad school based upon what I thought would best position me for starting Rivian.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason for that was really quite simple. I knew that we would need and I would need a lot of capital to start a business like this. And I felt that if someone were to invest in a company, a car company, which admittedly is an extremely high risk proposition, that demonstrating some level of intellectual rigor and intellectual capability through a PhD would be helpful in that regard. So I studied and worked really hard. I graduated number one in the school from RPI with a perfect GPA.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course, but when I say I was a car enthusiast, I was deeply embedded in just understanding the history of the automobile It was funny when I was growing up. I would say to my parents, I wish I was born in 1890 Because that was when all the excitement happened in the auto insurance. That's when it was all formed. And what's interesting sitting here today is I'm so glad that I was born in 1983 because I do think that the change is going to be larger over the next two decades than what we saw in the first two decades of the auto industry. You know, sort of the shift from a horse to a car as we now think about going from a combustion-powered non-connected vehicle, which is the majority of the vehicles in the road today. To connected electric and increasingly autonomous vehicles, it's a massive shift.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the senior description of what I wanted to go do, I said, I'm going to go start a company And then shortly after high school, I started to figure out what that actually meant in terms of what kind of company and the fact that I wanted to be a car company”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, just a neighbor. So I got very involved just through observation and through my neighbor in this case taking the time to really explain to me how everything worked.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I also was deeply enamored with automobiles and just an extreme car enthusiast from my earliest memories. It was fortunate to have really a premier classic air-cooled Porsche restoration expert that lived by chance close by to me where I was growing up.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, I knew from my earliest memory, I knew I wanted to be an engineer And it's sort of funny, even as a kid, I would be building these little businesses. So I had made these little business cards when I was probably seven or eight years old. And I said my name. And then I said, I polish metal. So I'd go around people's houses in my neighborhood and said, you need a metal polish. And I had a polishing wheel and polishing wax. And I would polish metal. So it was always just this perspective of let me go build something.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad and I are really close, so we would always talk about the business, and he's an engineers engineer, so he's the type of personality where he understands how everything works and if something's broken, he attempts to fix it. So that certainly... Was something that I grew up with, and as a kid, I would get very frustrated if I didn't know how something would work. So I would want to understand how everything worked. And I also always had this view that anything is possible. I mean, it really because of my dad. So incredibly supportive of me thinking about things that now I think back, imagine your six-year-old son says, Joe, I want to start a company. And he's like, yeah, of course you should definitely do that.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the things that is interesting with electrification is it completely changes performance boundaries that we previously accepted. So our pickup, I was on the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway in California. This was maybe three, four weeks ago. I pulled up to a light. It was early morning. And a brand new Ferrari pulled up right next to me. And the guy looks over me. I look over him and said, hey, you want to see what we can do here? And so we both accelerate quickly off the line. out accelerated by quite a margin. We get to the next light, and he says to me, I can't believe my Ferrari just got roasted.”
2022-09-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rivian: RJ Scaringe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT