"When I joined SpaceX, it was ~1,000 employees producing ~1 booster/yr."
"We scaled it up to 40 boosters/yr & 9,000 employees across multiple locations."
Former SpaceX CIO Ken Venner's biggest lesson from scaling SpaceX:
Every stage of growth requires a different behavior from the company
"You always have to assume: smart people, stupid systems. Let the right people do the right thing in the moment, but track them."
"When you're 10 people, it's a network of us just talking to each other. I need very little process or systems. It's smart people just doing the right thing."
"You get to 100, you need a little more process, but not too much."
"You get to 5,000 or 10,000, it's like, everyone knows the piece they know, but they don't understand how the whole business works."
"Bringing that information together & presenting it to the top level people so they can understand how the whole company is operating together is kind of the focus."
🚨BREAKING: SpaceXAI just open-sourced Grok Build
SpaceXAI’s coding agent, CLI and harness now fully open source on GitHub
Apache 2.0 — run any model
BASED
In 2013, Elon Musk joked he’d trade a Tesla for one bite of a chicken burger. 🍔🚗😂
Years later, the clip still goes viral.
Sometimes personality spreads faster than technology.