Main Engine Cut Off - T+334: SpaceX the Outlier, and Organization Leadership (with Matt Gjertsen)

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

I often talk about SpaceX being an extreme outlier in the industry and how many organizations have tried to replicate their approach, but very few (if any) have been successful. Matt Gjertsen of Built  joins me to share a take on what exactly it is internally that drives their results, how to apply it in other organizations, and to share some perspective on his time at SpaceX leading Training and Development, and from elsewhere in the industry. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Steve, Ryan, Matt from Built, Russell, Joel, David, Kris, Joakim, Fred, Pat, Matt, Theo and Violet, Natasha Tsakos, Donald, Warren, Miles O’Brien, Will and Lars from Agile, Frank, Jan, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Josh from Impulse, Stealth Julian, Lee, Joonas, The Astrogators at SEE, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics Built Leaders Minimum Viable Manager – Built Leaders Why Steve Jobs drowned the first iPod prototype | Cult of Mac The Show Like the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack! Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Follow @[e-mail] on Mastodon Listen to MECO Headlines Listen to Off-Nominal Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Artwork photo by SpaceX Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

And welcome Managing Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo. I've got an interesting one, especially topical for this week, IPO week, here for SpaceX. Matt Jertsen. He is someone I've had on Off Nominal before. He's got a rebranded organization called Built that works with leaders across not only the space industry, but other industries as well. Spent a bunch of time at SpaceX and elsewhere in the industry with a lot of interesting expertise in training and development and some of the leadership aspects, management aspects of these. companies. So it has a really interesting take on how these companies run internally. And we were talking over the past couple of weeks or months, we have an email thread going in my search for an answer on why is SpaceX an outlier. He's like, I think I have a couple of things I put together now. Better formed thoughts on what that is. So I wanted to have them on to talk through some of that today. I think it's an awesome conversation, very topical for the week that we're in here where I'm sure all you're getting is hype about the SpaceX IPO. But that's a lot. But that's a lot of is the world that we inhabit here as space nerds in 2026. So without further ado, let's give Matt a call.

Matt Jertzen, welcome to the Miko universe. You're graduating up from the off-nominal universe. I guess you've probably existed in this one longer as an executive producer. Yeah, I've been, yeah, exactly. I've been listening to it for quite a while, but really excited to make the jump as a guest as well. Well, it's been a tortured email thread as we've both, well, mostly my fault for having a schedule. But it's not like you have anything going on, you know, there's no news out there, you know, so. It's been a wild year, man. Yeah.

It's, 20206 has been my favorite year. I'll say that. I think of my life. So, yeah, it's a good time. And so you're on this show, ostensibly to run a theory by me, to answer my question that, I think we talked about when you weren't off nominal of why is SpaceX such an outlier in the industry? It's been a recurring theme in the past several weeks or months. It will continue to be a theme, especially this week. And you've lived it for a couple of years. You went out and saw a lot of the rest of the industry.

So you got the perfect kind of perspective that I want to unpack with you. Yeah, exactly. And you probably don't know this, but it was actually the line of thinking that led me to kind of my thesis that I have now was kicked off. by you, by a show that, a discussion that you were having on, I think it was on off nominal about Jared coming into NASA and some of the changes happening there. So, so yeah, yeah, I think it'll be, yeah, I'm excited. And the number one thing, like I said, pre-show is, I want to know if this is satisfying at all to you as an explanation, you know, so that's the big thing. You're taking your own road show this week. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, everything else going on. Let's also prime everybody out there,

that hadn't met you previously. Give me the elevator pitch of what you're up to these days and where you've been that led you to here. Yeah, exactly. So my name is Matt Jertzen. I run a company called Built that we recently rebranded. We were Better Everyday Studios. We become built.

And our mission is to train the next generation of hard tech leaders to build teams capable of solving the world's hardest problems. So we're definitely jumping in on the train of reindustrialize, hard tech, everything that's happening in the world today. How I got here is I started as an Air Force instructor pilot. I joined the Air Force because I wanted to fly the space shuttle. So I've been a space nut my whole life. When I had the opportunity to leave active duty, I wanted to get closer into space.

So I networked my way into SpaceX. And I led the training and development team at SpaceX for about four and a half years. I spent some time at the launch site in Vandenberg and then at headquarters in Hawthorne, had an absolute blast there. went to another startup, which is now called Adams. It wasn't called that at the time. This is Travis Callaghan's company. And so those two experiences, kind of in startup world,

just gave me a lot of belief in the importance of leaders, especially in helping companies get through this stage where they're trying to scale. And so with built, that's what we've been doing for the last four years, where we've been working with companies like vast space, doing a little bit with Hadry and things like that over the past couple of years. I'm sure you get some comments when you tell people, you help people understand leadership, and I worked under such leaders as Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick. Yes, it is.

People, a couple different reactions. Some people obviously are really excited about it. Some people are not. I had one person. I definitely remember a person responding to a post of mine on LinkedIn who said, you were exactly the wrong person to be training leaders because of your experience. But, you know, I'm a believer, and there's plenty of things I agree with both of them on. plenty of things I disagree with both of them on. But I think it's important to step back,

regardless of how you feel about the proclivities of a particular person or where they stand politically, you know, like SpaceX for sure, you just can't argue with what they've done. And so it would be a mistake to not try to unpack, like, well, how did they do it? And do I want to do any of those things? Or maybe there's mistakes that they made that we could do differently, you know, things like that. Yeah, and there's, I think the part that we always try to unpack in the space world is what decisions in there are decisions about the work and what decisions are about the people. And those, I think a lot of times people can, you can learn different lessons from those different ways of working. And we've heard stories all the time of, you know, we've had, have had people

from Stoke on or people from Blue Origin on that were at SpaceX and we're like, I left because I wanted X, Y, or Z out of life. And this was a spot that filled my bucket. And I think it's reductive elsewhere that isn't as deep in terms of knowledge about the space industry. It gets reduced to like a top level Steve Jobs as an asshole kind of take versus here's the things that these leaders are really good at. Here's where they're not so good. That's why there's other people in the organization are there to balance them out. It's so much more layered, but you really only get that understanding when it's an industry that you have familiarity with so that you can pick apart the work. And I don't know.

So that's kind of been my framework to judge it on is when I look around the industry, I look at the way others approach problems or even the way they approach the company organization. And that's always been the thing is that some people have tried the let's have a super grand vision that people get behind. No, that alone didn't really work. Let's overwork people so much that they only work here from when they're 20 to 23 and then they burn out and go somewhere else. No, that didn't really work either. And every little version of that has shown up elsewhere, but no one has gotten the full thing. together in the way that SpaceX has.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is true because there's also nuance in how every company does it. And that's when we get through kind of the three points. It's more about the culture that you want to build and less about the tactics that you need to employ to build it. Because in every organization, like the tactics that you use are probably going to be a little bit different. I always say, I remember, you know, SpaceX famously at certain levels, like it does churn through a certain number of people for sure. And, you know, like any organization, I don't think that only works for them because they're SpaceX and because every job opening has a thousand applicants. And, you know, they're always going to be able to replenish their stock. And that's just not going to be true everywhere, nor can it be true everywhere. And also to lay on the table, another one of my biases, I have a really strong allergic reaction

to other people telling other people how and what job they should have or why they should or should not take or leave a job. So I have an extreme allergic reaction. And this is, I have so many examples of us. I've, you know, we all went through a phase where we're like, yeah, the NFL is kind of a crazy thing to subject people to. And then on the other hand, I'm like, there's a lot of dangerous jobs in the world that are dangerous. Like, Bering Sea crabfishers are dangerous for a totally different reason, but we don't like have a huge, you know, op-ed culture around we should not be out there in the Bering Sea fishing. There are people that are like, you know, the versions of Amazon's building a new warehouse or delivery infrastructure somewhere.

And oh, this sucks for the people that are going to go. And it's like, oh, there's a lot of people that work there that are like, this is the best economic opportunity for me. I'm going to take that step. I just always try to inject agency to the people that are actually working somewhere, that it's the right fit for them where they are, their time of the life, what they want, what they were doing before. You don't know so many of those variables. So when the conversation gets into, I think this was a bad decision for the way that

they structured this company because I think these people were making the wrong decision for having been there. That's where I'm like, I can't do this conversation. And that's been a huge bias of mine as well in the SpaceX world that there are some people that have worked at SpaceX forever, literally forever, right? And there's others that are there for a year and a half. So you're going to have all of that if you get a sufficiently large company. And I just try not to judge individual cases in a way where I don't know their full story. Yes. Yeah, I think that's 100% right. And as, you know, with the caveat of everybody's eyes are

wide open, you know, as long as an organization is fully transparent of like, and SpaceX clearly is that, you know, this is how we work. You know, Navidia, most companies these days, I feel like are kind of leaning into the this is how we work so that they attract people who will succeed there. Yeah. All right. Let's crack into it. Lay this out for me.

Well, so first thing, obviously, you can't discount, and this isn't one of the three, but like you can't discount talent and people. And, you know, if you said, we want to recreate the late 90s bowls, it's like, well, we need Jordan, Pippen and Rodman. Like, it just is a thing, right? And so you can't discount just the somewhat happenstance of Elon and Gwen and Junkosa and like, you know, a couple of those key people who have been there basically the entire time of the company. So that's like a thing that is real. But there's when I step back and look at it, and like you said, because I get to work with a lot of companies generally in similar industries, what I tried to unpack as I looked at these companies is I'm working with some companies.

that are really succeeding in industry today and all the change today, and the change is almost accelerating them, and other companies that are struggling. And it's not always because one's young and one's old, or the size of the company or the capitalization of the company. And I just tried to look at it from a cultural level, like what was happening there. And so there's three different cultural things that I think need to be true,

that are definitely true at SpaceX, are definitely true, at least as far as I can tell, it plays as like Nvidia or Tesla or, you know, everything. And so the number one requirement is you have to have a process or a way. I say this in different ways, but basically it comes down to getting information and resources to the right people at the right time. And saying that a different way, I think it's like you have a hierarchy, but you ignore hierarchy when you need to.

Elon's way of doing this is very well documented through people like Mark Andreessen, who basically says the way Elon works is he just comes into work and he says, what's the number one problem at the company right now? And he just goes and sits with those people. And so he as the CEO has the ability to bring the resources of the CEO directly to the problem that's holding the company back. A few weeks ago, I got to interview Andy Lapsa and he was talking. talking about how at Stoke, one of the things they're really proud of is how people are willing

to help each other. They're willing to do whatever it takes to focus on the priority of the company at the moment. And so I asked him, well, how do you do that? How do you make, how does everybody know the priority of the moment? They said they have a week every Monday, they have a company all hands where they talk about this is what we're doing. This is what has to get done. And then they also kind of do the reverse of what Elon does, where they bring engineers into the executive team meetings. And so they say like, hey, where's the priority? Okay, who's focusing on that priority?

Let's bring them up to the executive team and say, like, what's the problem? What are the resources we have? And so those are examples of like there's different ways to do it. But it's a prerequisite for being able to move quickly, I think, especially when things are moving really quickly. I see why you're saying this was relevant to last week's off nominal, where we're talking about psyche, yeah, and how information flow there was. is a key aspect that broke down.

I wonder, too, how much is... So in the case of Psyche, it was that, you know, from reports and then from the sources themselves directly, there were engineers flagging issues in the GNC that wasn't making it up through the management layer in the middle to expose that up to the higher level leadership of the program. Yeah.

I wondered, and then the way you described that, though, sounded more like, in the Stoke example, right, focusing very much on the work and the subject matter in front of them versus I'm raising an issue which means I was bad at my job or my role so I am not as apt to raise that issue because I don't want to be seen as the problem.

Can you unpack that at all in terms of companies that are able to separate work from person and companies that are not able to do that? I do think it's a challenge because I mean an example of this because I asked, I also had the opportunity to talk to Hans Konigsman a couple months ago.

for my podcast and kind of ask them a similar question. It's like, how do you make it so that people are, so that you can focus on the work and people don't feel like raising a problem makes them the problem. And I do think that's really tricky. And there's, again, a number of different ways that you can do it. I think in the case of SpaceX, one of the ways that they do it is just like through like everybody just feeling super confident in themselves and competent,

you know, where it's like, at least when I talk with the folks, who've been there a little while, they're just so used to focusing on the problem. They don't even think of anything else. But I think it comes down to a lot of, you know, do you trust your boss? Do you trust the organization? What kinds of, does your, is your boss able to, like,

say what they do, what the mistakes that they make? Do you feel like your boss is going to have your back? So a lot of it comes down to, I think, just purely how much, trust versus how much politicking there is inside of an organization. And there's a clarity in what's being measured in that case too, right? Every time we hear public comments from SpaceX, there are very cold metrics of we're focusing on cost in this way and performance in that way. And if we can get those two lines to cross, then we have the solution.

So there's, you know, and that's like maybe why their work lends itself in that direction, whereas there are other portions of the space industry where that's not as clean, where it's like, you know, the business development team at a vast or an Axiom commercial space station organization is murkier. It's not as like, you're not fighting the laws of physics, you're fighting society and business and whatever else. So it's harder to do that when the decisions you're making aren't matched up against physics, but are matched up against society. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think that's right. And it's just a delicate balance. It's kind of like, you know, again, on your last episode, you mentioned,

mentioned Dr. Thomas of Brook and saying, you know, when somebody comes to you and says their estimate was wrong, you say, okay, let me help you fix it. And then if they come to you a second time saying their estimate is wrong, you fire them. And I'm sure it's not that quite that cut and dry, you know, but there is a balance there of making it clear that, you know, outputs matter, outcomes matter. But, you know, I've been in organizations where the other extreme was true. When I was in the in the air force, it was known there as, there was a time in the air force that was known as the one mistake air force, where one mistake and your career is kind of over. It has to be a pretty big mistake, but it was like, if it was, if there was a mistake that was big enough that

was like going to get on your performance report, then that meant you're not making full bird kernel. Like you're kind of, you're coasting to retirement or being forced out at some point. And that extreme is just a recipe for everybody. you know, saying as little as possible, nobody taking risks, nobody, nobody flagging problems. I never even knew that was an era. That's like, I, like, I want to dig into stories there, but I'm, we have only so much time. All right. I feel like I've exhausted my phase one, or my, my, my, my, my, my facet one question. Give me facet two. Facet two is going to be really familiar to anybody who's, uh, familiar with SpaceX. And I think the best way to put it is,

you have to always be trying to do as little as possible. right, where I think if you look at, you know, the SpaceX algorithm or things like that. Funny we can say that. But it's like our market is all of Earth's economy. It's everything. But they're only going to get there by doing as little as possible in order to get there, right? Like the goals are so crazy ambitious that you can't go off on, you know, side quests all the time of trying to optimize this or do that. Astroforge talks about this a lot as well, Matt.

He says, you know, I remember hearing him talk once about, you know, the NASA Mars rovers. And like, it's amazing that they lasted so much longer than they did, but how much of the schedule and costs overruns were because they lasted as long as they did. And if they had, if they had been designed, if they truly had only lasted for, you know, the 90 days or whatever that they were, would, would. they've been able to launch on time and on budget, you know, and maybe that's a trade that was worth it. But like, that's an example of, um, that's worth it retrospectively, though, if you, if, yeah, yeah, up front, I don't, I don't think a lot of the people reviewing those missions would have said, yeah, we'd rather it last three X as long as we predict or whatever, nine X as long as we predict. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And so I think, you know, this has lots of different flavors.

Um, I think, you know, the question all requirements is the basic one that you, you always hear from SpaceX. The one that I've seen in my own career is saying no to more. I remember, so when I started at SpaceX as the head of training and development, I had never been in like a formal training development role before I hadn't, so I hadn't like grown up inside an HR world or anything. And so I was thinking to myself, I want to prove myself and I want to prove my team's worth. And so anybody that comes to me with a problem, yes, like we can solve your problem.

we can solve that problem. We can do this for you. And ultimately what that means is you end up not satisfying a lot of people instead of satisfying a few people. You know, and it wasn't until I left SpaceX and went to work at the next company where I got to work for someone who had been in learning development for a very long time. They had a, she had a fantastic career and was really clear about, look, we're not going to get the level of research. that we want, the only way we're going to be successful is by saying no to almost everything and only saying yes to the things that we know, one, matter to the business and two that we can help with. Right. So it's only saying yes to the things that you know your team can knock out of the park or can truly deliver on because if you just, you'll just say yes to too many things.

And then kind of the final version that I always think about doing as little work as possible is knowing which fires you can let burn. I always say every company on the inside is a dumpster fire. But as a leader, as a manager, you're always having to figure out which ones are going to stay in the dumpster? Like which ones are the waste basket that'll just like burn themselves out? And which ones are going to consume the whole company if you don't stop them? And so realizing that there's just always going to be problems.

And so I think kind of like those are the three things that I always think about when it comes to doing as little as possible. It's question all the requirements, saying no to things, and then letting things burn. But all of that presupposes that you know what matters, right? It's kind of going back to your metrics piece. It's like really being vigilant about like,

what are the things that are going to drive change? That's a really interesting way to look at it, too. Which fires can we let burn? Because I think some people will hear that and think, you're saying neglect a bunch of problems within a company, but I'd like to the lens that you have of like, even the best companies have a lot of things that the people inside them will point to and say, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.

And that is an aspect of not only like human culture, but company lifecycle, that there are people that arrive at different times in the company that have different priorities and different reasons for being there and context for how they arrived. People that come in from other companies oftentimes would diagnose different problems because their lens of what is good or bad is different because they grew up at a different place. Yeah. So it's, it is a weird mix. And I assume that over time those things would change too, right? You're saying like, maybe that fire's okay to let burn for a year or two. But then time moves on. You are in a different spot as the business and you realize, oh, that fire actually needs to be

taken care of now. This other one I'm going to put in the back burner for a little while. Yeah, it's being able to, yeah, it could be changes in industry. It could be changes in company size. it could be a dramatic shift in technology. And those are some of the things. Like if you go back to what probably most people think are like the things that are driving business success or not, part of it is successfully looking down the road and making bets on which fires are the important fires, which are the things that are really going to matter. So do you have examples that you could pull your?

your old SpaceX brain out of, out of retirement there and look at what they're working on today. From the outside, are you able to tell this is the thing that they clearly have deprioritized in that mindset and this other thing is where their focus is going? Or is that impossible to tell from the outside? I think at a big picture level, it's 100%. You know, like, just like look at Starship. And this is something that I have many qualms with and like can wish my way to say like, oh, I wish they were doing something else. But they have clearly decided launching cargo for other people in the near term

doesn't matter. Right. Like they're getting enough. And this is partially because probably they're getting enough funding from other places. They're doing things. But like, like they've decided like the big fire is the number one priority is rapid reuse of the whole stack. Period. End of story. Whereas somebody else might have said, no. Like if you like,

and I could imagine a world where, at least in the shorter term, like the next five or ten years, like, how different would it, would the world be if SpaceX had said, okay, with V3, with V2 of Starship, we're going to start launching this with a disposable upper stage, create a big clamshell fairing, and now all of a sudden you can launch 100 tons to orbit for $100 million. Like, I think that probably would have been possible. And I can say all I want, like, I think that would have been better in the near to medium term for the space industry because then the VAS

or the K2s of the world would have been like, okay, we got our ride. But they're clearly going a different direction. That's like obviously at the biggest, at the biggest scale. But I think from the outside, that's the one that comes to mind.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not, you're not wrong in that way. I mean, I went on a long rant about why sell a launch to anyone else in the industry. Yeah. Yeah, the S-1 kind of made that clear that the opportunity cost of launching anyone else is massive. And then I think another way that that might have changed over time is if anyone was putting pressure on Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, if there was any pressure from the launch industry to respond to that, maybe they would have had, that fire would have felt more important to solve now. Yeah.

Whereas Starship continuing to not be a commercial launch provider, number one, it's not eating their Falcon 9 revenues. Those are just getting better. Number two, no one, like, why? Nobody's really putting any pressure on them. So might as well focus on their own use cases. I think there's smaller stuff too within the Starship infrastructure that fits the same and that

you know there's everything that we would put on their list in front of them of orbital refilling and I mean the heat shield stuff seemed to slide up the stack but orbital refilling is definitely one of these things and going full orbital there's a bunch of these little technical achievements that we're looking for

I say little technical achievements they're like literally the whole thing but even payload optimization V3 had this whole list of changes that increase their payload capacity by so much, which indicates, and I think there were people out there concerned of like how much payload can they really launch with the old starships? And I was like, it doesn't, that's not where they're at yet. They don't, they're not spending the time on that yet because there's all these other things to solve and they haven't solved those

things to then go and do the math on where else they can trim mass and propellant use and all that. So the premature optimization aspect there is definitely something that's evident to the outside. Yeah, and I think another, another lens of this that you see a lot with SpaceX is, You know, when you start in a new project, which do you start first? Do you start the hardest, longest lead items that you might not see a payoff for a long time? Or do you start making progress right away and start checking boxes? And I think, you know, whether it's with Raptor on the prop side and things, you know, clearly they've always said like, no, we're going to do the hardest thing first and then check the boxes later. And other companies might switch that.

So, and I think you see that commonly is like, yay, we're checking off a lot of boxes. But there's an elephant in the room here where there's a, this uncertainty that might, you know, make the whole thing not worthwhile. All right. What's number three? So number three is the one that I first thought of from your discussion. And that's you have to be willing to push people and processes until they break. And so like the discussion that you had was talking about Jared Isaacman coming into NASA.

And it's like, yeah, the Artemis program, we can all say like, oh, we're, we're all happy. And we all create a schedule that we're all happy with. and it's going to take us 87 years, but that's okay because we're all happy. And everybody can kind of point to one another as saying, like, we're not the bottleneck. We're not the bottleneck. And it's not until you as a leader actually push your people and say, like, no, we're going to find the constraint in the system that you can really start making changes. And I think this is where going back to some of the things you mentioned before, you know, where you have like Steve Jobs is an asshole or different things like that. I do think there's a certain quality of certain leaders where for some reason, they kind of don't care as much about making other people feel uncomfortable.

And because of that, they're able to push their people a lot farther. And not everybody's going to be that way. And so I think whether you're a little bit more empathetic or you're a lower level leader, it's all about how do you create a situation, how do I build relationships where I, I can make other people comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think that's what good coaches do and that's what good leaders need to do. But ultimately it comes down to you have to create a situation where you as the leader feel comfortable pushing people until they break. Because that's how you find what it is. And this kind of goes back to the, you know, just because there's a problem, it doesn't mean you're the problem.

It breaks and say, okay, now we know what to fix. We know what more capability you need or what. more resources you need. Yeah, there's, I mean, there's a million of those Steve Jobs stories that, but they do, most of them tend to have something we talked about in the first aspect here, which is hard metrics that they care about, right? The time Steve Jobs took an iPod and threw it in a fish tank and bubbles came out and he was like, there shouldn't be any bubbles that come out, right? Like, that was a good metric. That wasn't saying this person is a bad industrial designer, but here, there are clearly optimizations to make. There was air inside this device.

like go remove that. Those are the things that I think yeah, it's good to call out like the empathy levels that somebody needs to have to communicate successfully to people and I think there are engineers or designers or whoever that work closely with those kind of founders that do separate that quite a bit in terms of what is good or bad.

I wonder how much at some point in time we'll get more stories out of the very early Starlink days, but I wonder how much that would be a good example here where the first couple of test satellites launched and then there was a big clearing of house that apparently Elon in the upper management was not happy

with the way Starlink stuff was managed and I wonder if there were similar metrics that they could point to and say no like we need to be launching X amount by Y date that is the metric that matters not the actual design of the satellite or the capabilities like we need the things out the door

it seems like from reporting that was the metric at the time. So it's, it is, I just wonder how much of that is easier for us in fields that are very engineering heavy, where there are harder and colder metrics and in other companies, in other business lines, even in certain departments, there's not as clear of a line. There is more subjectivity. And then I, I don't know how to actually figure out, because I'm engineering mind too. I don't know how to figure out how to apply your gauge for what is too far to push, what is just far enough to get that extra performance out of somebody or to, you know, inspire them to go do the thing that unlocks a whole new line of thinking.

Yeah. Well, I think that's where it is, it is going to be different for every person. Like you as the leader need to change your approach or are going to have different approaches, but then the individual people on your team are going to be different as well. And I think depending on where you're at and whether, you know, the metrics are super hard or a little bit fuzzier, that's where you have to have to make those judgment calls. But ultimately, it is, you know, because any improvement still has to come down to, there's a phrase that I always have that says, the only difference between hard skills and soft skills is that we haven't thought about the soft skills long enough to make them hard.

Right. Like there's always still some impact on the world. There's something that we're trying to achieve. and so it's about spending the time to think about it maybe it's not easy to identify oh it's you know dollars per kilogram or whatever or whatever or tons to orbit um amount of air in an ipod yeah exactly um but it is thinking about i mean that is kind of a great example in the sense of like it's not like that's just like an off-the-shelf metric right like there's some creativity involved in even thinking of that um and so it's it's trying to

to get like an example that I you know one example that I always use is from this uh uh online personality in the entrepreneur world known as uh or his name is Alex Hermose and he talked about trying to train his their new producers in doing online content and one producer was really good and the other producers they just seemed flat and he wasn't sure why and so what they did is while he was working with one producer he just had somebody write down all the things that they were like physical things that they were doing. Like, oh, they're standing right behind the camera. So there's an easy line of sight. They're nodding a lot so that I can like have a lot of engagement and really see what's going on. And then they took this list of behaviors and just gave it to the other person

and said, do these things. And they started doing better. And so it transformed this. They just, I don't know, there's like this energy that I get from them that makes it a lot easier to record good videos to, you know, make these motions. And I think we always have to think through those to identify what we're going to push people on so that we can push them. When you're working with companies and people in the industry, are there differences in when you're working with a leader within an organization who is the leader of individual contributors versus the leader of leaders where it's somebody in a C-suite and oftentimes their best. effort is this team is having a problem. They need that leader with that set of skills or

understanding or people's skills. I'm going to put them these two things together and that will solve a problem. That's a different level of insight about your company and what has gone well and poorly in the past. And maybe that's Bezos with the Dave Limp example of dropping Dave Limp into Blue Origin because he knows this mindset and that company, they need each other. How much of that do you separate when you're working with people? I do think there's a big difference, which is why I tend to stay director level and below. You know, because I do think when you get to the higher levels, now, don't get me wrong, I do still think it comes back to the basics and certain,

and a lot of organizations, just a reminder of those basics can help everybody all throughout the stack. But one of the reasons why, you know, I don't do executive coaching. I tend to, you know, is because I don't feel confident in my, I haven't been exposed enough to that world to be able to confidently map some of these behaviors the way I am much more confident at the lower levels. But I do think these, and that's the interesting thing about like when we think about these requirements, I think at every level what it is, whatever you are at, you as the leader should be like, okay, like, what am I doing to make sure I get the right information and I deliver the right resources? What am I doing to empower my people to say no to

things? What am I doing to make it so that people feel comfortable being uncomfortable? Those are questions you can ask yourself at every level. Dude, I'm working myself. I'm about to do that as my next several weeks of work. I'm like, let me just strictly apply these things and see at an individual level what it does. All right. So what would be, if we are both of the thesis that SpaceX is the industry outlier, what are your power rankings for organizations you either have direct or indirect experience with or no experience with, but you would say they're on the path towards the right mindset overall? ask that again? I'm just trying to come up with power rankings of who's who's closest in

terms of these actions or or and that could be that you know internally that they're doing these things well or that from the outside it looks like they're on a trajectory to get a lot of this right in the same way that SpaceX has. I think from and I'm going to be speaking purely from the outside this is no like internal insight especially for the first one like you know because ultimately with this stuff you are looking at results and Stokes. seems to be a clear outlier where they're delivering really quickly and really focusing on doing, you can't build a brand new launch vehicle, two engines for those vehicles, an entire test facility and a launch site with like, where they have like 200 people or 250 people.

Like you can't do that unless you're being pretty rigorous here. So they're a good one. Vast. Clearly they took, I mentioned them specifically because there's such an outlier in so many of the other people doing the same thing where they clearly just like they kind of said like forget the NASA requirements like we think this is the fastest path to start doing something and that was obviously really effective for them. So those are the two that come to mind right away. I like it. I don't know if I have a good enough power ranking to be honest, but I don't know. There's going to be some clarifying moments in the

next two or three years. I think I think the new Glenn incident is going to be a major clarifying moment for Blue Origins to be like, who are we now in this era? I think this is the first, they had been on a great run. This is the first huge issue in the Dave Limp era in which has been reportedly so different from prior eras. And I think this is a good moment to shine. There's a lot of people within the NASA infrastructure that are getting pushed in the way that you're talking about with the Isaacman administration that are, and we're going to find, like which decisions were too far. There's a lot in the in sourcing of different roles at NASA that I've heard.

Not great things from people working on that. But is that going to be good or bad? Is that I'm hearing bad things because that's how it was and that's how it always worked. And now it's working different. Yeah. So there's just, we have a very good rubric in the next few years for very visible external stimulus and what the response to those will be. Yeah.

Blue Origin is such an interesting example because like, I want Ashley Vance or Eric Berger or somebody to go, like I want a book on what was the difference. Like what are some of the things that have changed? And I think generally, and I think we touched on this the last time we talked like, people are uncomfortable talking about that sometimes because it's like your point, you know,

people don't always want to make the direct comparison of Satya Nadella to who was before, what was his name? It's Balmer before? Yeah, Balmer. Steve Baumar to Satya Nadella, but like there were clearly there were changes. Yeah. And I would be really, I think we all need to know more about the changes that were made there.

Yeah, I mean, the Apple nerds out there, we're all talking about the jobs to cook the turnus change and what we think will happen there. So, I mean, I think that's going to be, that is the best I could hope for in that, just to go stupid Apple nerd is WWC week. So everybody be prepared for this. But I think Apple, Apple, in terms of things they're good at, they are the outlier in terms of hardware, right? They are far and above everyone else in the industry. Hardware guys now running the company as of the fall. That was clearly the right approach. Another example in the past was,

I guess Disney, right? There was a moment where Disney a few years ago replaced the executive and they had like the choice between do we do the Disney Plus guy or the theme park guy. And that was like a big, there tend to be these moments of which of these paths is the future of the company. So I guess someday when Elon Musk is no longer running SpaceX, what will the decision point be then? Is it like we can either go the Starlink way or the other, you know, the data center path. Like, what is the actual path for this company? There's forks in the road at different times. And, yeah, maybe one day we'll find out what the blue origin one was. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Awesome, man. Well, plug your new name again. Because you got a cool domain. Built, and you go to builtleaders.com.

I also have a book coming out later in August called Minimum Viable Manager, which is kind of of all about, I think these, so if we were talking about like the cultures, the cultural elements that you need in an organization order to succeed, like minimum of album managers, if you're a new manager, like these are the basic things you should be doing in order to create that kind of culture. And so you can go to, if, again, it doesn't come out to August, but you can go to builtleaders.com forward slash mv, and you can sign up for updates on the book. Good name. Thank you. Come back when it's out. I'm also going to read it and then we'll talk about So that'd be great.

Perfect. So the ultimate question is how, how satisfying were those three requirements? Oh, I'm, they definitely put to words things that have been like, kind of not rumored, but sort of loosely hinted at in terms of how SpaceX optimizes internally. And I think a lot of times you're number one, right, getting information and resources to the right team. That is a much more clarifying way to put it than what is typically said, which is just, Elon Musk is a really good engineer and he tends to work at low levels of the company. It's like, no, no, that is how he does it.

But what he's doing is this other thing. And that one, I don't know, though. Maybe that's, we should, maybe we should have unpacked that more. Like, do you think what level of expertise and familiarity does that leader need to have when they go into those environments versus can they get the benefit of that by transitive trust between team members. And I think that's why it's going to be, how you do this is going to be different for every, for every organization, because not every manager, you know, some managers' span of control is such that they just don't have the technical ability in some of the regions that

they're responsible for. And it's knowing that you're not the right person to help solve that problem. But you might be the right person to bring resources to that problem or to remove a blocker for that problem. And so it's not just the technical knowledge. I think it's also your additional, because that's the other thing that Elon brings to these situations. It's not just his technical ability. It's his ability as the CEO. If you say, okay, we can solve this problem, but we need $20 million to solve it, he can just say, okay, and he can just make the decision versus like pushing it through a chain. And so some of that is just purely bringing your authority to the team. Oh yeah. Boom. A little extra right on the way out. So there you go. Perfect. Thanks so much,

Matt. Thank you. Thanks again to Matt from coming on the show. I've got to update the executive producers list here to properly credit him now with the new name. So we'll say thank you to all of you who made this episode possible, including the 32 executive producers over at management cutoff.com slash support. Thanks to Steve, Ryan, Matt from Built, Russell, Joel, David, Chris, Joe Kim, Fred, Pat, Matt, Theo, and Violet, Natasha Saccoz, Donald, Warren, Miles O'Brien, Will and Lars from Agile, Frank, Jan, Tim Dodd, David Ashinot, Josh from Impulse, Stealth, Lee, Eunice, the Ashtergatorz at SCEE, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support for making this possible. I could not do it without all of you supporting every single month. I'm so thankful for that. And if you want to join the crew, manage a got off thecom slash support is where to do it. you can join up, get access to Miko headlines, a show where I run through all the stories that are

happening in space, filter out the ones that you don't need to know about, make sure you keep up with the ones that you do need to know about. It's a great way to stay up on the news, to support the show, to get more of this podcast in your life, that's the kind of thing that you like. So check that out, and we'll be back later this week. I've got some more things scheduled, so you'll hear from you soon, and otherwise, enjoy the IPO hype that's happening this week if that's up your alley, but otherwise, I'll talk to you soon.