Speed is Everything

Lessons from Starhopper on rapid execution

There’s perhaps one single trait that I’ve observed to exist amongst all good organizations - companies, government agencies, non-profits, school teams, and others: Speed. If you’re able to achieve your goals faster, then you simply can achieve more goals over the lifespan of the organization.

First - let me try to describe what speed isn’t, as, especially in the context of slow (typically older and larger) organizations, speed is often described as:

1. Reckless

   1. Speed, unlike in the transportation sense, does not increase danger or risk - in fact, the opposite. Instead, approaching a problem with a sense of urgency clarifies thought, removes distractions, and enables focus on the core mission. If that mission is the design of a safety critical part, then speed will likely make you consider the core fundamentals of that part (meaning, its safety) more than you otherwise would.

2. Burning people out

   1. Going faster on a given task or project does not necessarily mean that you need to spend more hours on it. Oftentimes, with a framework of speed, the opposite is true. By pushing yourself and your team to a tighter deadline, you often find that you can reduce scope, cut features, remove artificial barriers, and more.

   2. Once all of the items above are complete, then yes, you do need to spend more hours to make the project go faster; this just is rarely actually the case.

Implementing Speed

I’ve witnessed perhaps no better implementation of speed than in the early days of the Starship program in Brownsville, TX. In early October, Elon tasked a small group of folks including me to build a representative Starship launch vehicle at the Brownsville site “before the end of the year”. This is what the site looked like after about a week of being there…not much. Days before the ground wasn’t even cleared.

The view from the grading equipment - the entire site was empty (Oct 2018)

Guided by Elon’s insistence on speed, we looked for days, hours, and minutes to pull in the schedule to get to the first prototype build being complete, dubbed “Starhopper”. His framing was simple - worry about nothing else: cost, efficiency, repeatability - just get the first one done as fast as possible. This was extremely clarifying, and left very little to interpretation in terms of what to be doing at any one moment.

We pretty quickly realized we didn’t really know how to build a tall steel cylinder. But you know who did? Companies that build water towers. So, I flew to see one the next day and we hired them. What was communicated to them was the following - speed is everything. We got to work right away, helping them to remove barriers, bring in our own labor crews, and develop tooling to make them go faster.

A few weeks in as the first work tent was going up. A tent was used per Elon’s request as it is meaningfully faster than constructing a whole building. This was first used at the Tesla factory in Fremont. (Nov 2018)

Bring Along Outsiders for the Speed Journey

It's important to recognize that no big project gets done without some outside help. In the Starship example, it was critical that we enabled our contractors to go fast. It was clear to me very early on that they were not used to the level of speed that we had internal to SpaceX, and since this experience I’ve found basically the same thing in every supplier-company interaction. We tend to be the fastest and most demanding customer they’ve worked with and that’s ok.

Instead of letting the pace of the project be set by the external dependency (the water tower vendor in our case), we instead tried to bring the contractor up to our speed by:

1. Overcommunicating our goal and getting them aligned on the same goal

2. Removing barriers, blockers, and other things slowing them down. Jumping in to help where they are blocked immediately, including bringing in our own folks where we could, alongside the contractor. This built up trust in that we were all on the same mission.

3. Staying super close to them on schedule, with us often time driving the schedule and setting daily tasking and priorities.

All of the above was hard, and has been hard in every subsequent similar experience. Especially for older and established companies, and those that you may have less influence over than SpaceX had over this contractor, you need to do a lot of leading by example. We find this often in the energy industry, where players such as utilities tend to move meaningfully more slowly than startups like us.

One key item that I tell folks about is the concept of “who has the ball”. When working with, say, a lawyer on a transaction, it's usually the case that one party “has the ball”. In this example, either the lawyer is drafting the document (they have the ball) or you are reviewing the document (you have the ball).

#1 rule: minimize the time in which you have the ball. Turn around feedback within hours, and show to your counterparty (again, the lawyer in this case) that speed is important. There’s nothing more telling than your actions. Similarly, follow up respectfully but often if you believe your counterparty is going slower than they could be and especially if they are pacing your program or gating work.

The main tank and legs were done and lifted off the stand. A little before midnight, December 30th.

Setting a Culture of Speed

Ok so back to the Starhopper example. Now that we had a contractor who was on board, we had to also get our team on board, in particular a large contingent of new folks that we were hiring locally. There were <10 folks from Hawthorne there, so you could imagine that hiring a few hundred locally means that the gospel of speed could have been lost. As such, it was critical to ingrain the culture early on with one of urgency.

Specifically, there’s a few seemingly small things that enabled the culture of speed, many of which we’re implementing now at Base Power:

• Communication methods: there’s a hierarchy of communication in the sense of speed. In particular, I’ve found that many in the corporate world hide behind email as a slower method of communication that can elongate conversations. Wherever possible, I’ve encouraged folks to use instant messenger (Skype for Business back in the day, Slack now) or a phone call. One better? Go to their desk and talk to them directly, right now. Especially if it's a high-urgency item, do not wait behind standard email times.

• Follow ups: akin to the above about outsiders, never have the ball - this includes internally. Make a habit of not letting a text, email, or IM sit as unread or read without a follow up. Shorten responses if you have to, to let the person know that you saw the message and have provided thoughts back.

• Explicitly telling people about speed: just say it to new hires. We do a short course in the first month for all new hires where my co-founder and I explicitly mention a lot of the traits in this post. Be direct.

• Always asking why the schedule can’t be brought in: whether you’re in a leadership position or not, you should always be questioning the schedule of the project you are on. Simply asking “why” it can’t be done sooner often solicits tradeoffs with other things, the ability to descope the problem, or artificial barriers that can be knocked down quickly. This is an extremely powerful trait for everyone in the organization to have, at every level.

Nose done and ready for install. Jan 6, 2019

Tactical Habits to Increase Speed

As a super habitual person, I’ve found building speed-oriented methods into my habits has helped tremendously on my ability to utilize speed in work and life. Below are a few things I’ve found to be helpful:

1. Set proper notifications: have notifications for any Slack channel, text, or email that you think could be important set to “on”. Respond to those notifications right then and there unless it's rude or you’re actually focused and busy (this is ok).

2. Use your inbox as your to-do list, and try super hard for inbox zero. Avoid going to bed with anything in your inbox - either respond or archive.

3. Integrate work and life: avoid the concept of “turning off” because you need it from overworking yourself in terms of number of hours. Set a reasonable pace all the time so you don’t have to forcibly separate work and life at certain times throughout the year. This involves spending some time working on the weekends (don’t let a Friday night request wait all thew way until mid Monday) and holidays.

4. Be politely relentless with outsiders and teammates. Nicely but firmly encourage speed wherever possible, without ruining a relationship or overdoing it.

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So where did we end up? Well, we didn’t finish the rocket by the end of the year, but came quite close.

Nose on the tank, Jan 9, 2019