Advice from the Top 1% of SpaceX Engineer | Sift, Karthik Gollapudi

Intro

00:00for people just starting their career I have a bit of a different advice I think a lot of people say go start your own company learn by doing I highly don't recommend that route I would recommend most people they actually go see what good looks like and that doesn't necessarily part where I talk about Prestige is that like just because something prestigious doesn't mean the right place that you're going to learn the most from the thing that might have made that procedure might no longer still be relevant because of people who were there that got it that state might

00:21not be as involved it might be a much larger company might be a lot more process it's very much about I would say go look for the smartest people you can surround yourself with and try to work there and just do like little flavor one year at a multiple companies like you really want to understand something from first principles which really requires spending multiple years trying to work through some hard problem you definitely want to try to look for places have already had some level of success and you're going to continue to build on level of success the reason I call that

00:45out is because there's some pretty interesting companies with smart people that seem smart from the outside as a 22y old or when you're young it's hard to evaluate like what is smart or not smart because everyone smarter than you hi I'm Kake I'm the CEO at sift at sift we're building the data tools to go build modern machines and a lot of it is inspired by workflows and processes and how we built machines back at SpaceX where I spent the prior 4 and a half years before working on the dragon flight software program and dragon was a capsule that carried astronauts and

01:12cargo to the space station so we have uh seven publicly announced customers we raised about 25 million most recently the series a was led by GV Plus Google Ventures previous rced was led by two firms in LA CA Ventures focuses on a lot of Enterprise SAS Riot Venture is one of the best like Hardware investing firms

From JPL To SpaceX

01:33I was born and raised in a little suburb outside of LA right next to JPL so I was about 10 15 minutes outside of JPL so I actually grew up going to Industry days where you can just walk in there's a lot of photos of me actually with like playing with the Mars rover and the Legos and stuff that they had at JPL I would always grew up with Legos but then like my first real like machines were LEGO Mindstorms you can build all robots and you can make very simple programs with these Legos I started that around 9 so I was like fourth grade always had fun with that with my friends and I also

02:00this thing called first Lego league so first robotics they have these competitions it's most known for the high schoolers that are building like these robots they'll have like they'll be like three on three and they'll have some sort of like theme saying like Hey we're building a moon base so you have to build a robot that can go drive around on a slick floor the floor will be all whiteboard material and the wheels you have to use are basically like a whiteboard material so it's like super slippery and we all have some sort of competition we to like move these

02:22massive balls into a net whatever it is but they also have younger levels it's Lego based so that was kind of my background I was like around engineering but it wasn't like a hardcore engineering like stem background it's like I had the exposure but I had a lot of freedom to do other things there's a little bit more Nuance I knew that the whole like PayPal Mafia so basically during undergrad that's when Peter teal came out with 0 to1 so that book 0 to1 I liked it a lot kind of more contrarian very much promoting first principles thinking of that I was looking at more

02:49of like the PayPal Mafia companies but PayPal was also like much later stage I I didn't think it was the PayPal in the early days but a lot of these other companies like paler SpaceX Tesla were really interesting so that's what I was looking at as opposed to like the prestigious companies I actually would as part of advice I would highly recommend people not optimizing for Prestige do you know the atmology of the word Prestige the atmology of the word Prestige is actually it goes back to like the French word for illusion and then it goes back to the Latin word for

03:13playing tricks Conjuring tricks the whole concept like Prestige and a prestigious Place actually a bit of an illusion you just want to go to places that are like have results like can like see people say it's great but you can actually see with your own eyes on the ground truth with space xile was clearly visible

Sponsership

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What I learned from SpaceX

04:24now I joined space act there is a lot of stuff to learn one of the Dragon missions as is coming back to Earth the Dragon capsule has four parachutes one of the four parachutes it didn't open until a pretty low altitude of course there's redundancy built in it was always going to be safe even though that parachute didn't open it wasn't an expected Behavior and the way that this works is these Dragon missions work on a scheduling is as soon as you bring these four astronauts back you want to launch another four immediately to get back on a space station our scheduled next

04:49launch was actually just one week behind but then NASA said hey this parachute didn't open how do we know this is not going to be a more problematic issue on the next mission and then they grounded the next flight until this result for us to actually figure out what was happening we need to see all the data that was collected from the vehicle but it's stored on this like black box on the vehicle just like I was an airplane has like this black box that stores all the data and the thing is that this capsule it lands in the Gulf of Mexico you don't have internet connection in

05:12the Gulf of Mexico to go debug this so at that time starlink was like a very experimental program so we like shot over and email the Starling team and we're like hey is there any way we can get internet over the Gulf of Mexico they activated some cells over the Gulf of Mexico upload this data from the Dragon capsule while it was sailing this is before like Starling was a thing so like getting High through put internet in middle of the ocean is not heard of we're able to send all the data back to the headquarters we able to run it through the whole testing Suite do all

05:36the analysis basically say that the next mission is good to go it's very interesting you have very smart people that are basically able to coordinate satellites to beam internet when it was a very experimental program to go accelerate your physical spacecraft company at the time so I think that was just like a very cool experience I think the biggest things I learned was just seeing what good looks like which I know is like very broad because I I actually noce you were asking the question earlier about what advice would you give and I think one of the things is just

06:00learning from the smartest folks and at SpaceX I just saw a lot of people that were operating a very high level and sure you can criticize that like maybe certain things like management might not be what everyone else likes but at the end of the day you see it with your eyes it's like the largest rocket ever launched and brought back in landing until you you can like push the boundary and like show people things that have never been possible and you're like super proud of the work you do you work really really hard but then you can look back and you're super proud of what you

06:23do I think the key learning was just how to operate at that very high level the things that stood out of operating that high level La is just urgency so it's just like high urgency High iteration rate you learn the most if you just have that urgency to move faster it was mostly I just wanted to see what good look like so I was interview on companies I thought were really high performing at that time this is what 2017 is when I decided to join SpaceX I was just pretty much looking for learning from very very high performing companies because I knew eventually I'd

06:48either be running a company or starting company or be in a high leadership position let me go see how it was done by the best so I was interviewing companies I thought were very very high performing at that time stripe was one of the hot companies at that time was like really interesting at the time I just wanted to learn from people who were doing well what stood about SpaceX like the interview process was just very different than every other company nobody was pitching me on benefits no one was pitching me on like work life balance they were pitching me on Mission

07:11and the work that you're doing here there's a lot more Spartan but it's also something you can look back on and be very excited about and you can like point to something great that you accomplished with another team that was grinding very hard that was the main reason why I chose it so while I was there I learned a lot about how to build machines that are safer more reliable fall tolerant I wanted to bring a lot of those ideas and practices The Wider industry of people building machines that's why we actually started sift to productize some of this knowledge into

07:36tools for the rest of the hardware industry I see Sith growing in like the vision that I would have for it or my goal I want a percentage of the physical world to be operating on Sith I want at least a percent of the trains the planes the automobiles the drones the aircraft things that are out there I want those operating on sift whether they're being designed whether they're being manufactured if they're out in the field they're generating data they need to be maintained there should be at least percentage of the physical world running

Why A Customer-Centric Company

08:00on CFT process for acquiring cft's first customer was actually kind of Novel we actually just rented space parallel systems's office they're the autonomous rail company they were our first customer they have a pretty cool office and we literally just asked them if we can rent one of the rooms as we build out the product and that was just motivated by at SpaceX Elon always wanted the engineer on the factory floor so we said we should just be embedded with our customers let's go rent a room and then as we built the product we had new features we just go grab someone

08:28else in the office and say what do you think of this what do you want what do you not like our early road map was completely driven by them the evolution of our sales motion to the next first few customers it was a lot of it was like using things in network we were lucky that there's vibrant SpaceX Alum Community we also were able to reach out through existing investors our investors that were generally interested in Sith uh for introductions and also just even just reaching out on LinkedIn talking about this stuff that we so what we wanted to do showing the product but

08:52then also we had a competitor started around the same time as us we actually had a few of those bake offs in the early days the other companies knew that there's final customers do with their multiple companies in the space invited us to a bake off because it definitely added a lot of urgency on our team and we won all the bake offs that we've done to date that was actually a bit of a novel experience I would say compared to most companies I think some of the biggest lessons I've learned is that like it really all just comes down to people you have one life to live like

09:13spend it with the people you want to be around there's a lot of urgency I have very very limited time if I'm going to go spend my time with someone I want to be the best person I can spend that time with and that goes into everything whether that's work whether that's personal so choosing the best partner or that everything that you do is just inform other people that are into that the end of the day like CFT you can talk about all this Tech you can talk talk about this architecture you can talk about all this cool stuff that we do even our backgrounds or whatever but it

09:36really just comes down to people without the people we have at sift we wouldn't have the company to sift make sure you bring together the best team create opportunities for everyone to grow keep everyone happy to be there that's the main lesson I

The Hidden Truth About Careers

09:50learned and that's actually a big thing I would call out because a lot of the audience here probably it looks cool to get some person that's like oh the CEO or that person who it's like a really high profile sounds really you just get them as advisors but if they're not invested in your success significantly they're not going to be actually helping you they're not going to be doing interviews they're not going to help you on the trenches and you need to get people who are going to do that and in that process they're going to challenge you and get the smartest folks around so

10:12the best way to evaluate what is a good team or smart team honestly is just a kiss a lot of frogs maintaining that Talent bar and looking for people who want to do something challenging that they can be proud of they're going to work hard and they can think around like the same level or smarter than you even better for people just starting the career I have a bit of a different advice I think a lot of people say go start your own company learn by doing I highly don't recommend that route I would recommend most people they actually go see what good looks like and

10:34that doesn't necessarily part where I talk about Prestige is that like just because something's procedes doesn't mean that it's like the right place that you're going to learn the most from the thing that might have made that procedure might no longer still be relevant because the people who were there that got it to that state might not be as involved it might be a much larger company might be a lot more process it's very much about I would say go look for the smartest people you can surround yourself with and try to work there and don't just do like little

10:56flavor one year at multiple companies like you really want understand something from first principles which really requires spending multiple years TR to work through some hard problems you definitely want to try to look for places have already had some level of success and you're going to continue to build on a level of success the reason I call that out is because there's some pretty interesting companies but smart people that seem smart from the outside and as a 22y old or when you're young it's hard to evaluate like what is smart or not smart because everyone's smarter

11:20than you you want to be careful to not go somewhere spend a decade and if that company shuts down you don't know what that company did that was successful or not successful that's why it's good to go to place has like some level of success that has momentum and it's continuing to grow so like SpaceX was really awesome in that regard they were actually around the time I landed was the first time the Falcon heavy was launched they already had rocket Falcon 9 rockets that were launching they already had the Dragon 1 program but there's still a lot more they were

11:43planning on doing they weren't just like sitting and resting that's what I would optimize for the reason I call out the prestige is like I would completely remove the prestige like if you really want to do that go do that the reason I call that out is because a lot of times people will go into that career purely for the sake of that saying like it looks cool you can go tell your aunts about it but are you going to learn as much are you doing like hard skills are you actually working on the problem are you completely abstracted away are you just multiplying the Grump work that's

12:05being done so like are you actually going to ownership of things or are you just like being the grunt work multiplier for someone else that's more senior so the reason I recommend people to join a company doing something hard and like seeing what great looks like it's very difficult to strive for greatness if you've never seen what greatness looks like cool you can go watch as many podcasts as you want you can go see what some blog posts but it's kind of like Instagram right you only see the best of someone's life you only see like a very curated version that's

12:28in like a blog post but what were the decisions that got the company to that place what were the nine failures they had for that one success that's what you learn by actually solving hard problems and you don't get that by spending one two years at like six companies and then saying I'm going to do an MBA and then go start company for example and you just really have to work deeply on a hard problem with smart folk and a hard Problem by the way can be different problems like you don't necessarily have to go build Rockets even just like growing like a software startup there's

12:52a lot of challenges in building that company honestly like I don't think it's a complete reflection on the other person not being smart I think just what's the right role for the person like for somebody join your company it's like it's a pretty big risk it might be very different than somewhere else that they've been very successful at someone who might have been very very successful like a sales force they might struggle in a much earlier stage role like I wouldn't hold it against them it's just a process like don't feel as bad about it everyone does it everyone struggles

13:14everyone finds it hard but as you're talking about iteration rate you want to kiss more frogs you'll see what's good what's not a lot faster than sitting there trying to grind through a bad

The First Principle Thinking

13:25decision the best things I learned while working at SpaceX very very strong focus on first principles thinking you can just keep asking why a lot of times people push something off and they say oh well we're waiting for this person before we have that meeting is something scheduled for 2 weeks from now it's like why does that person even have to be in the meeting what can we go around and still move let's say something's not working instead of just saying like oh that's not working because it's just broken or it's like a thing that you can't do like people say you can't land

13:49Rockets like why why can't you land rocket we fly and land planes all the time people like oh because of this or this technical reason and it's like well not actually blocked by physics it's just that nobody's ever done it before basically you keep asking why till the point physics is the reason you can't do it I think that's what I would consider first principles but it applies everywhere it's like I think a lot of times we have a tendency to just say oh the hardware team says we can't do this it's like well who on the hardware team and you go talk to that person you

14:13realize they actually can do it but it's just like some other thing that they also need and if you as long as you get that then you can actually get this thing a lot faster there's actually this plays into a lot of like Risk as well Warner Von Bron who used to run NASA back in the during the Apollo era he noticed that let's say some engineer identified a risk and then they told manager about it the manager would downplay that risk it would go from saying oh this is fatal when you stop the mission to the manager saying hey this is a really high risk that person's

14:36manager says oh we need to go look into this by the time it reaches Warner Von Brun he would actually just basically someone would says oh everything's good to go he actually implemented this thing called like weekly notes so what he would do is he had every individual engineering squad or team write notes and his team would compile them into a book and he would actually review all them so he basically sees ground truth and he can actually make decisions from first principles about what's holding of the program and basically that's how we put a person on the moon those Rockets

15:01probably have the compute power of like a ti84 calculator you can do some pretty cool things when you actually dig into [Applause] yapor engines we can see those chck [Music] let