Relentless

Interviewing the greats.

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with Ryan Petersen (@typesfast), Founder of Flexport.

0:03 Pablo Escobar was a logistics guy
2:29 The explosion in tariff fraud
8:58 The Dutch East India Company
11:20 History of global trade
14:39 1,000x spice markup
17:53 The British East India Company
24:02 How the British got 20% of China addicted to opium
27:44 The Forbes family & opium trade
30:40 Jewish trading networks
37:33 It’s illegal to criticize the King of Thailand
38:58 Strait of Hormuz
45:58 Maritime chokepoints

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with US Secretary of Energy @SecretaryWright and @ScottNolan, Founder of @GeneralMatter.

This conversation is on nuclear and how we're going to power the AI data center buildout.

0:07 Powering the AI data center boom
3:25 Biggest energy bottlenecks over the next five years
6:03 Ramping power generation before we have SMRs
16:06 Bridging the nuclear transition with natural gas
21:39 What if we’re underestimating how much power we’ll need for AI
27:10 Staying ahead of China
34:07 Why AI is hated + the fear of AI data centers driving up electricity prices
40:21 Increasing baseload capacity
42:50 Building hundreds of gigawatts by 2050
49:37 Copying the SpaceX playbook
53:14 Incentivizing founders to build ahead of demand
59:03 “If you want to build big things in America, come talk to the government”

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My second interview with @JimBelosic, Founder of @SendCutSend.

0:15 Beating China in manufacturing requires scale
1:10 Automation is not a magic bullet
2:12 Scaling profitably
4:31 Delivering a great customer experience
8:44 Why SCS raised $110M
11:20 Expectations are promises
15:33 Increasing speed and capacity
18:46 Focusing on customers
22:20 Frugality and generosity
25:06 Creating The Anything Factory
26:33 3pm is the new midnight
27:49 Figuring out the next bottleneck
30:37 Finding buildings with enough power
35:21 Lowering prices
37:36 Gambling to turn on factories faster
39:03 Aim for perfection and you’ll end up at excellence
40:04 Maintaining a maniacal sense of urgency through impatience
41:30 Seeding SCS DNA at new factories
43:08 Solving challenges
45:32 Finding great capital partners
48:40 Focus on customer pain
51:59 Learning from Home Depot
54:16 Bringing manufacturing back to America
55:11 Building capacity creates demand
57:01 Handling demand surges
58:21 Being default skeptical and sensing bullsh*t
1:00:27 Getting back to building

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @lulumeservey, Founder of Rostra.

0:07 How to Destroy a Terrorist Group
3:01 What Makes a Great Cult Leader
4:42 Unleashing Palmer Luckey
7:34 Why Elon Is Unpredictable
10:41 Demanding a Hardcore Culture After the X Acquisition
13:41 How Napoleon Rallied Troops to Volunteer for a Suicide Mission
18:24 Choosing Who to Alienate
20:59 Picking Someone to Fight For
22:59 Deterrence and Shaping Incentives
25:19 Why Google Had an Activist Problem
29:12 Tyrant Mode: Stopping a Leaky Culture
32:11 Building Loyalty
35:58 Why Visuals Are So Powerful
37:40 Time to Train AlexNet: Jensen Huang and Inventing Metrics
39:36 Why People Root for You
42:15 Recruit Based on the Spirit Not the Letter
43:20 The Three Levels of Story
51:01 Secret Truths and Trusting Yourself
55:25 Cicero’s Impossible Trial
58:11 Offense vs Defense
1:03:44 The Roman Concept of Auctoritas

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @EricJorgenson, Author of The Book of Elon.

0:12 Why Elon outcompetes everyone
1:53 Not wanting to be CEO
6:15 Why there was a 1 in 100 chance of Tesla and SpaceX both succeeding
10:03 Thinking in lost future revenue
11:58 Living with a gun next to his bed
15:02 How Elon starts companies
19:23 Giving Larry Page an early demo of the Roadster
21:27 Why Elon calls people into the factory at 2am
25:01 The 20 people who execute Elon’s will autonomously - MrBeast clones
28:52 Working with Elon is doing a tour of duty
31:18 Creating a grand vision that people can believe in
36:42 How to thrive under Elon
37:30 The Algorithm - question every requirement, delete part or process, simplify and optimize, accelerate, automate
41:38 Setting up a tent factory in the Tesla Fremont parking lot
43:28 How Elon would play the game if he was born 300 years ago
45:10 Empathy for the individual vs empathy for the mission
46:57 Being feared vs being loved
48:38 The endless churn at Elon companies
50:49 Ruthlessness and having a willingness to be disliked
56:08 Creating enemies and chaos
58:37 Shifting SpaceX’s focus from Mars to building a base on the Moon
1:00:07 Justifying Tesla’s valuation by reseting the vision
1:02:21 The S-Curve of ambition - colonizing planets, Starlink, Terafab
1:04:44 Throwing billions of dollars behind new companies
1:06:22 A great team is just the sum of the individual vectors
1:11:09 The idiot index at an industry-scale
1:13:53 Why it’s critical for space companies to control launch
1:15:44 Thinking in limits
1:18:47 Expanding the vision until no one can measure it
1:23:41 Internalizing pain and dealing with setbacks
1:26:03 The evolution of Elon’s operating philosophy over the last 30 years
1:27:37 Effectiveness

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @Brian_Armstrong, Co-Founder and CEO of @Coinbase.

0:25 Crafting narratives
2:28 Bias towards action
4:06 Biggest calls in Coinbase’s history
5:53 Developing intuition for making big bets
7:30 Getting truth out of people
10:04 Being anti-authority
12:30 The 3 levels of communication
14:39 Practicing to pitch w Paul Graham in 2012
16:55 Working w Fred Ehrsam
20:33 Hashing out bad decisions in the early days
22:23 Having a scarcity mentality around people
23:31 Action produces information
27:34 “If you wait for perfect clarity, you’re never going to get anything done”
31:45 Uber vs Lyft in crypto
34:23 Building trust
36:30 Advancing the mission of Coinbase
38:33 Skillsets: fundraising, storytelling, recruiting, sales
40:10 Prediction markets and AI generated content
43:58 How he operates differently than other big startup CEOs
45:18 Solving his greatest fear
48:09 Burnout and running at a marathon pace
51:20 Experiencing pain
54:32 Hiking and getting out in nature
56:54 It’s always wartime
58:58 Defining moments of crisis
1:05:35 Finding the next marching post
1:07:18 Installing ideas in people’s minds
1:10:25 The power of bringing people together over dinner
1:13:00 Action produces action
1:14:10 Backing founders outside of Coinbase
1:15:45 Scheduling 4 week long-long vacations a year
1:18:35 Finding people who raise your energy
1:20:18 Leaving a trail of proof of work
1:23:03 Touching people emotionally
1:25:19 Why we built the Iron Bank of Braavos
1:26:38 Playing an infinite game
1:31:47 Selling brownies on The Silk Road
1:35:36 My philosophy for Relentless
1:38:35 Business is like playing Civilization
1:44:59 Bonding w Fred Ehrsam over video games
1:45:47 Never leave a meeting without next steps
1:49:06 How Coinbase makes acquisitions
1:50:30 Why Coinbase’s best acquisitions were people
1:52:00 Bitcoin is the new gold standard

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @Peter_J_Beck, Founder & CEO of @RocketLab.

Rocket Lab is scaling launch cadence faster than SpaceX scaled Falcon 9.

0:44 The biggest bottleneck to increasing launch cadence and mass to orbit
1:25 Growth of new space startups
3:05 Why governments have been ineffective at scaling launch
3:53 Tall Poppy Syndrome
4:38 Starting Rocket Lab without having $100 million
7:24 Scaling Electron vs focusing on Neutron
9:17 Rocket Lab hustle
11:10 Creating a culture of “F*ck it, let’s do it”
11:40 Worst supplier experiences
13:54 Having an engine explode before an important meeting
18:52 Rocket Lab’s first mission to the moon
20:55 Chewing glass and forcing the outcome to be good
22:57 Similarities in how Elon and Peter operate
25:05 Elon time and how to structure timelines
27:13 Designing a culture where everyone runs towards the fire
28:44 Making the Ferrari of rockets — the importance of creating beautiful things
31:20 “You don’t need to equate a price tag to beauty”
32:12 Why Peter hates launch day
34:48 “After a launch failure this place is a morgue”
35:22 Moving forward after a failure
36:40 Transitioning from an R&D organization to scaling rocket production
38:07 Production hell with rockets
39:09 Taking learnings from Electron to Neutron
41:03 Having dinner with Elon
42:00 Keeping the hiring bar extraordinarily high
44:05 “My job is to fix sh*t”
44:56 Rocket Lab’s first NASA launch
45:55 “The great thing about America is anything is possible”
47:40 Coming to Silicon Valley — meeting with Vinod Khosla
51:22 Why he decided to take $RKLB public
54:12 Creating a company that will outlive you
55:41 Turning Rocket Lab into a profitable business
57:23 The best space companies will all build their own rockets
1:00:35 Scaling Neutron
1:01:32 Why they’re using carbon fiber instead of steel
1:02:56 “Going public was a great capital unlock”
1:04:10 The importance of relentless optimism

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My second interview with @soren_ma, Co-Founder and CEO of @neros_tech.

Neros just acquired a new 250k square foot factory which will allow them to ramp production to 1M drones a year.

0:50 New 250k square foot factory
5:13 How the Russia Ukraine war has evolved
8:51 Learning from the Starlink production ramp
12:37 Building a military spec drone
15:25 Prototypes vs production product
17:27 Creating a fully China-free drone
20:27 Scaling production capacity
25:53 Production hell vs supply chain hell
29:11 Timelines and urgency
34:08 Flyoff mode and PBAS
37:40 How Soren operates during a sprint
40:54 Shifting from building drones to company building
42:37 Leadership hiring
49:05 Focusing on execution
50:30 Defeating drone jammers
57:55 Oh sh*t moments
1:00:09 Refocusing on health and taking care of yourself
1:05:21 Measuring effectiveness by battle field results
1:13:04 Evolution of their testing process
1:16:05 Archer Fiber
1:17:55 Lifting up the entire drone industrial base
1:21:12 Building region-specific supply chains
1:23:49 How America can win over the coming decades
1:26:55 Are we going fast enough?
1:29:12 Choosing to work on lethal systems
1:32:35 Being pro-America
1:35:37 Future of warfare and autonomous systems

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @ScottNolan, Co-Founder and CEO of @GeneralMatter.

0:48 What if Russia stopped selling uranium to the US
4:47 The history of uranium enrichment
10:44 What if he was given $25 billion to turn on reactors as fast as possible
13:37 The US doesn’t have the capability to make fuel for Small Modular Reactors today
14:43 How Founders Fund decides to start companies
19:28 Why you shouldn’t start a company
26:02 Working at SpaceX in 2003
28:10 How Elon drove urgency in the early days of SpaceX
30:28 How it felt when the first three Falcon launches failed
32:41 Figuring out what to work on after leaving SpaceX
34:26 How Peter Thiel convinced him to join Founders Fund
38:53 The most unintuitive thing he learned from Peter Thiel
44:03 Lowering the cost of uranium enrichment
47:32 The idiot index for enrichment
50:18 Vertically integrating vs using existing supply chains
53:44 The idiot index for timelines
59:13 Taking risk to pull in schedule: current burn vs future revenue
1:02:44 Choosing where to put their first enrichment facility
1:05:42 Maintaining maniacal urgency with multi-decade timelines
1:09:10 How a war with China will impact our ability to produce energy
1:14:06 What conventional wisdom gets wrong about building this type of company
1:17:48 The AI data center boom requires nuclear
1:21:02 Why SpaceX switched from an ablative engine to a regeneratively cooled all metal engine
1:25:08 How Elon makes nonobvious decisions
1:29:59 Don’t focus on problems that are already getting solved

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

The US vs. China Manufacturing Debate

My first debate between @sdamico, founder of @ImpulseLabs, and @aphysicist, founder of @atomic_inc.

Timestamps:
0:39 Introductions
11:34 Is it possible to reverse America’s manufacturing decline?
16:37 Where would Sam invest $100M in a factory today?
21:28 How California made it illegal to do chemistry w metals
25:43 Elon on Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory
32:01 Using the data center boom to pull advanced capabilities onshore
36:51 Building Chinese level capacity in America
38:33 The US Gov hasn't incentivized companies to build base level capacity
42:54 Why space companies have to vertically integrate their supply chains
45:06 The advantage of building a Chinese supply chain
49:10 Why Apple manufactures all their products in China
59:42 Apple exports engineering expertise
1:02:19 Consumer electronics
1:07:55 How the advent of humanoid robots will shift the balance of power
1:12:29 Why Apple spent hundreds of billions building their supply chains in China

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

Why the Co-Founder of Robinhood is working on Data Centers in Space.

My first interview w @BaijuBhatt, Co-Founder of @RobinhoodApp and Founder of @AetherfluxUSA.

0:05 Rock climbing w Jared Leto
5:46 Culture differences at Robinhood vs Aetherflux
15:57 Building a Shelby Daytona during Covid
23:44 The hair patterns of founders at different stages
28:16 Orbital data centers
38:22 Failures before Robinhood $HOOD
45:57 Hitting dead ends
51:39 Seeding Aetherflux with $10M
58:08 Willingness to be scrappy again
1:01:18 Starting from scratch in a new industry
1:08:26 The second company is just as hard as the first
1:12:16 Playing Magic the Gathering as a kid
1:17:32 Goblin mode vs Monk mode

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @sachaker, Founder & CEO of Babylon Biosciences.

Babylon is on a quest to cure Alzheimer’s.

1:00 History of Alzheimer’s research
8:09 Why tackle this problem
12:22 Axon degeneration
13:57 Structuring Babylon to survive many failures
15:24 Self-financing Alzheimer’s moonshots
19:01 Viagra
19:59 Swanson linking and Raynaud syndrome
24:16 Most efficacious drugs for Alzheimer’s
27:29 Experience starting Babylon
31:34 Attracting mission aligned people
36:24 Filtering for missionaries vs mercenaries
41:07 Lack of agency causes burnout
46:02 Living without a phone to reduce distraction
49:31 Why the information to cure Alzheimer’s might already be out there
54:19 How AI changes things
55:36 Controversial science
1:03:11 Volunteering at memory clinics
1:04:28 Impact-per-dollar and being scrappy
1:07:55 Internalizing pain when you make a bad decision
1:09:26 Time to last embarrassment
1:10:51 Risk taking
1:12:57 What causes cognitive impairment
1:22:11 What keeps him up at night

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @aliansarinik, Founder & CEO of @micro1_ai.

1:10 Continuous model improvement
2:42 Starting with an AI recruiting tool
5:42 Moving into the human data space
7:19 The Human Happiness Index
13:32 Creating a real world robotics dataset
17:03 Hiring hundreds of doctors & lawyers in a week
20:15 Providing a world class white glove service
22:15 Hiring for agency & risk taking
26:03 High velocity on two way decisions
27:35 Going all-in on data
28:52 Structuring incentives
38:18 Leadership & staying in the details
40:10 Losing their biggest customer right before an investor pitch
43:24 Becoming risk averse after an existential crisis
50:45 Taking action as fast as possible when you feel the urge to act
56:12 What it felt like growing revenue 30x in a year
1:00:48 Staying focused & limiting new projects
1:02:30 Predicting what the big AI labs will want
1:06:50 Creating a model to predict timelines
1:12:23 Hiring as a last resort
1:18:25 Taking big bold bets
1:28:49 Long-horizon tasks

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @EdwardMehr, Co-Founder & CEO of @MachinaLabs_.

0:46 Creating a sculpture of Tesla’s Chief Designer
3:28 What went wrong with early prototypes
5:56 How the metal forming process works
9:01 Rapid design iteration
13:48 The limiting factor in creating more Elons
16:18 Building the first prototype on $300k
22:22 The importance of naiveté & having fun
24:17 What it was like working at SpaceX in 2012
29:57 Celebrating customers
40:36 Focusing on the biggest risks
45:35 Designing the system to fit inside a shipping container
47:25 Early mistakes
52:22 Finding 10 champions
1:06:42 Selling systems, parts, vs finished assemblies
1:10:39 Hardware companies require complex capital structures

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @Mehul, Co-Founder of @MaticRobots.

0:43 Why Artists Are Never Satisfied w Their Work
3:46 Creating A Minimum Lovable Product
6:35 No One Wants R2-D2, They Want A Solution To Their Problem
10:35 Selling His First Startup To Google
13:30 What YC Was Like In 2012
15:50 Acquisitions Are Like Organ Transplants
19:57 Building The Apple Of Home Robotics
25:00 Creating A Problem Deck
29:05 Why Most Vacuums Suck
35:58 First 250 Iterations
46:13 The Wife Test
51:46 Surviving 2020
56:35 Why Roomba Priced At $199
1:02:35 AI Products: Overpromise, Underdeliver
1:06:13 The Magic Of In-N-Out
1:09:06 Simplicity Is The Goal, Not Perfection
1:15:08 Designing A Company You Enjoy Working On For Decades
1:21:01 Taking Inspiration From Pixar & Harry Potter
1:23:24 Products That Give People Their Time Back
1:32:44 The Day Tobi Lutke Tweeted About Matic
1:39:34 Tesla Optimus
1:48:25 Going Through Production Hell
1:56:15 Designing Their Reliability & Testing Process
2:01:17 Pain As A Moat

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview w @sulaimanghori, Member of Technical Staff @xAI.

0:41 WTF is happening at xAI
1:46 Predicting future bottlenecks
3:05 Shredding conventional timelines
4:23 Experience joining xAI
9:23 Bootstrapping off the Tesla network
11:59 What is Macrohard
13:14 How Elon deals w fires
16:30 What it’s like working at xAI
20:33 Cybertruck bet with Elon
21:12 Using 80 mobile generators + battery packs to balance load at their data centers
22:45 How they built Colossus in 122 days
23:35 Work backwards & figure out the highest leverage thing you can be doing
25:51 How xAI hires
30:27 Challenging requirements
32:46 Experimentation
34:55 How Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates
39:15 AI engineers vs AI researchers
40:36 No one tells me ‘no’
42:09 Everyone’s an engineer
44:06 Why fuzziness between teams is an advantage
48:25 Testing human emulators as employees
50:00 Biggest blunders
53:23 What a meeting w Elon is like
54:22 How Elon gives feedback
56:44 Figuring out ‘what is truth’ for Grokipedia
59:21 What happens when Elon sees wrong Grok outputs on X
1:00:08 What a surge feels like & operating in xAI’s war room
1:02:53 Making fidget spinners & 3D printers in his bedroom
1:08:48 Creating a liquid fuel rocket engine

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with Shuo Wang (@shuooo), Co-Founder & CRO of @Deel.

1:08 Designing Deel To Scale Quickly
3:28 Why Companies Should Go Global Early
7:30 Building Deel’s Sales Team
10:33 Why Shuo Loves Sales
14:44 Pivoting 3 Times During YC & Being Shameless
19:06 Dreaming About Intercom
22:04 Solving Payment Delays Early On
25:11 Joining YC As A Crypto Payment Platform For Content Creators
32:37 How To Make Decisions Before You Have Data
36:30 Why It Was So Painful To Open Corporate Entities During Covid
39:57 Thinking Outside The Box
44:15 Why Covid Was “A Lifetime Opportunity” For Deel
46:11 Deel Speed
47:55 Argentina & Brazil
50:07 Interviewing Deel’s First 400 Employees
51:33 Screening For Happiness
52:59 Creating Ghost Busters (Special Projects Team)
59:16 Having A Co-Founder You Can Rely On
1:03:31 Why Offsites Are Important
1:06:07 Torturing Yourself Into Greatness
1:07:20 Learning How To Run A Business From Her Mom
1:11:26 Growing Up In China With Her Grandparents
1:15:51 Moving To The United States At 16
1:24:13 Building An Air Purifier Company In China
1:30:18 Being An Outsider In Silicon Valley
1:31:08 Focusing On One Product vs. Building Multiple Products
1:32:46 What PMF Was Like At Deel
1:34:46 How Shuo Thinks About Risk
1:37:18 Understand The Problem, Not The Solution
1:42:08 Creating An 11-Star Customer Experience
1:43:44 What Makes Alex Special
1:46:00 Poker
1:46:43 Always Look At The Positives Even In Tough Situations

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with Keller Cliffton (@Keller), co-founder & CEO of @Zipline.

0:51 Building An Automated Logistics System For Earth
2:22 Starting In A Trailer Park
6:09 Scrappiness In The Early Days
9:08 We Do This Not Because It Is Easy, But Because We Thought It Would Be Easy
10:47 Shut Up. Just Do Blood
18:08 Flying To Rwanda
19:46 Scaling Up Is Always A Sh*tshow
23:22 Dropping A Blood Bag On A Hospital Roof
26:38 Falling In Love With The Process & Valor 8:30am Meeting
32:06 WFIO Moments: We’re F*cked It’s Over
38:34 Building A New Industry From Scratch
42:29 Launching In Rwanda Without Looking At The Weather
43:39 Building A Relationship With The FAA
47:49 Creating Customer Love
54:35 4 Traits Of Great Hires: Practical Problem Solver, Fast Learner, Low Ego, Mission Driven
58:34 Scaling Zipline
1:02:01 Growing 15% Week Over Week

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with Ian Brooke (@ianbrooke), founder & CEO of @AstroMechanica.

0:31 Creating Long-Range Supersonic Planes
3:07 Private Jets vs Airliners
8:26 How Insanely Expensive Private Jets Actually Are
11:30 Building Great Products That Last Forever
20:39 Front Loading Work To Design Things Well
30:42 Making Contact With Reality
43:32 Following Your Intuition
48:38 Thinking In Shapes
53:54 Expressing Yourself Through Building Things
58:56 Starting With A Vague Idea & Sharpening The Vision Over Time
1:03:16 Trying To Tell A Story vs Just Building Something
1:17:44 Seed & Soil - Emmett Shear
1:27:57 Doing Things That Bring You Joy & Energy
1:32:35 Keeping The Product Vision In Your Head

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @laurence1allen, Co-Founder & CEO of Terranova.

Terranova is lifting land out of flood zones using terraforming robots by injecting wood chips deep underground.

0:37 How land raising works
4:15 Being reactive vs proactive to wildfires & floods
10:26 How Terranova started
12:03 Using a hacked concrete pump
14:58 The sinking city problem
16:45 Why use wood chips
18:55 The history of land raising
24:32 Working w partners vs vertically integrating
27:46 Scaling to larger projects
34:19 Working at SpaceX
45:10 Creating a high intensity environment
53:57 SF vs El Segundo
57:04 Biggest manufacturing & sourcing challenges
1:01:31 Hiring tinkerers
1:04:47 Setting the right expectations