Cowboy recruits engineers who built and raced college cars

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:17:07

   I want to ask you a little bit about the trials and tribulations of those companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin. Space is hard. There's no denying it. What have you learned from their process that you're trying to apply to how you build your rocket? Yeah, I think one of the most important things is kind of the role of iterating through failures, right? SpaceX kind of dramatically illustrated that iterating through failures is the path to reliability, is the path to reusability.

2. 1:17:41

   And I think it's like when even I think when we were watching that happening a decade ago when they first got to reusability, it was kind of like, oh, my gosh, is this launch going to work? There was a level of sort of tension, which I imagine must have been even more pronounced internally. But it's kind of having the risk calculation of saying in order to get these parts to work in a reliable way in the real world, the only real way to do it is to test it in the real world.

3. 1:18:08

   That there's a limit to where you can get to with simulation, iterating with computers and models. And at some level, you've got to try these things in the real world. And the reason I think this is important is because it also has an effect on how you think about the cost of these things, right? That if you're going to try to build something that's truly reliable, it kind of goes hand-in-hand with trying to down-cost as much as possible.

4. 1:18:33

   Because if you try to iterate through failure and each one of your, you know, items that you're building is very, very expensive, it limits your ability to do so. But go deeper than that for a minute. I mean, I hear you on the iterative approach, but, I mean, what have you learned from, I don't know, the engineering approach that they've taken, the teams that they've built, you know, the cadence on which they've approached it.

5. 1:18:58

   I mean, Blue Origin has been in business for 25 years now. Yeah, it has. I mean, how do you think about how you are building your own company learning from the process that they've gone through yeah i'll give you one really uh concrete real world example it's kind of the role of of hiring people that are fresh out of college the new grad talent and what what to look for there so i think one of the things that we've built at our company is hiring a lot of people that have done competitive racing programs in college wow there's something called formula sae um which is a college racing program where my understanding is that teams of students build race cars and they go and race them and getting folks that have done that kind of stuff in college even if they've had a little bit less real world experience like that experience of going from idea to building the real thing to

6. 1:19:49

   testing the real thing to living with its failures that that is actually like a really interesting talent pool to build the company around so we've got a lot of those folks at cowboy and if anybody's listening, we are continuing to hire. Do you think that orbital data centers start to become a matter of national security? I do actually, yes.