Scaling without breaking — what an ex-SpaceX exec teaches B2B GTM founders

In this episode, Michaelman, President and CEO of SQA Services, explores the vital intersection between high-stakes manufacturing quality and go-to-market operations. Drawing from his foundational experiences at SpaceX and Rocket Lab, he unpacks how aerospace transitioned from a zero-tolerance failure model to an iterative, fast-paced approach that revolutionized the industry. He highlights how building tolerance for failure into your systems is the key to unlocking rapid innovation and scale without catastrophic collapse. He also dives deep into the realities of managing global supply chains with thousands of vendors. A major point of friction for modern operations is the reliance on biased, self-reported survey data to feed AI risk models. Michael emphasizes that sustainable scaling requires unbiased, on-the-ground factual verification to accurately predict and prevent downstream breakdowns, rather than simply reacting when products or processes fail at the finish line. Finally, the conversation shifts to leadership and operational maturity. Transitioning from a highly technical individual contributor to a CEO requires fundamental mindset shifts—chief among them the necessity of open debate, standardizing siloed processes, and mastering effective delegation. GTM leaders can apply these lessons by addressing 'rework loops' upstream, ensuring that foundational processes are tight before pouring fuel on the fire of rapid growth.

Discussed in this episode

How SpaceX revolutionized the aerospace industry by shifting from a zero-tolerance failure model to an iterative, fail-fast MVP approach.
The fundamental difference between a temporary quality initiative and a comprehensive business management system.
Why managing a massive global supply chain requires prioritizing a small subset of problem-generating suppliers.
The inherent flaw in modern AI risk models: their dangerous reliance on biased, self-reported supplier survey data.
Using past non-conformance and on-time delivery histories as leading indicators to uncover hidden upstream quality issues.
The danger of highly technical leaders developing myopic focus on niche problems while losing sight of broader team dynamics.
How to foster a healthy executive culture of open debate where team members feel completely safe challenging the CEO's assumptions.
The importance of standardizing disparate processes across siloed client teams to improve overall scheduling and operational efficiency.

Episode highlights

0:00 — Introduction to Michael and SQA Services
2:15 — Defining quality and business management systems
4:30 — Balancing speed and perfection at SpaceX
8:00 — Managing massive supply chains and risk
11:45 — The problem with AI risk models
14:20 — Transitioning from technical leader to CEO
18:00 — Handling Elon Musk's intense deadlines
23:15 — Fostering healthy conflict and open debate
26:40 — Why GTM leaders must control upstream quality
30:00 — Effective delegation and rapid-fire questions

Key takeaways

Innovation requires building a calculated tolerance for failure into your systems.
Risk models fail if they rely on biased, self-reported survey data.
Control quality upfront to prevent expensive rework loops downstream.
Consistent yields are far better for planning than wild process variability.
Effective delegation means letting someone else do it 80 percent as well.

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by none other than revenue reimagined. Today's guest is none other than Michaelman who's the president and CEO of SQA Services, a company that helps some of the world's most regulated and high stakes industries maintain quality, trust and operational control. Before joining SQA, he held leadership roles at SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Heliogen, hope I pronounced that right, where he scaled operations across everything from rocket systems, literally probably like a rocket scientist here, to renewable energy and medical device supply chains. But this episode isn't about theory, it's about what it actually takes to build systems that don't crack under pressure and what go-to market leaders can learn from the world of quality and operations when shit gets messy.

Michael, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks for joining, Michael. Um, we want to jump right into it and talk about what quality actually means.

So you've worked in high pressure industries, SpaceX, Rocket Lab, we talked a little bit about that, now SQA. What does quality mean when the cost of getting it wrong isn't theoretical? Yeah, um, that's a big question for sure. Uh, but I think like, and it's simplest Nice and light here today on Friday.

Right. Yeah. Uh, what's the meaning of life? Um, I, I think in its simplest form, right, you have an engineer or designer or someone with a vision that has a product or a thing that they want to do a particular function.

And I think quality is the entire process that ensures that that intended function happens the intended way every time you use it. So it's very tied in with reliability and all sorts of other, you know, things that people talk about, but I think at its core, it's just making sure that the product or system or software or whatever I designed does what it's supposed to do without any sort of surprises. So if you bring that to the next step, what what would separate quality initiative from a quality system? Yeah, I see quality system is kind of the the overarching or underlying process that you set up in order to run your business.

And people will talk about a QMS or a quality management system and now that's kind of evolved into this concept of BMS or business management system, uh, because it is larger than just when you call something quality, people tend to look at the quality engineers or the inspectors and they're like, oh, that's their job. Uh, but there is a a big push philosophically to be like, no, quality is everybody's job. And so I think the quality system is kind of the structure you're setting up so that when I release a design or I revise a design that it's going through the appropriate steps to make sure that all of those changes are appropriately cascaded throughout the entire manufacturing, you know, supply chain, uh, end user, uh, aspect of of what you're doing. And as I see quality system, it's kind of like the system for lack of a better word that that you're running your business on.

I think quality initiatives are really more around I want to get from point A to point B and I I need to do something to enact that change. And so I I see initiatives usually as having like a scope and it's something that you want to change, you want to improve. Um, and that may involve making changes to your quality system, but it it's typically a more finite fixed thing. How do you, how do you balance that?

Because so in like the software world, we talk a lot about, you know, perfection is the enemy of progress. Do you ship fast or do you ship right in like for lack of a term, I hate the term MVP, but ship an MVP. And flipping that to like the world where you come from, you know, SpaceX, aerospace, like you you can't make a mistake. So how do you balance the operational safety at scale without like slowing things down?

Yeah, I think SpaceX is a very, very interesting uh case to look at because they really did flip the paradigm around like quality and risk posture in the aerospace industry. Because historically, you know, especially space has been very much a government project, right? It's taxpayer dollars going towards these multi-billion dollar programs to get, you know, people on the moon, to launch a space station, to send probes to Mars. And so the tolerance for failure is basically zero because, yeah, Yeah.

I'm, I'm spending taxpayer money on this, I need to make it look like a good decision, so I can't have a rocket blow up, uh, that looks really bad and and ends up killing my program. I think it was cool to see the approach that, you know, Elon really took of, uh, taking calculated risk and and he really did take more of a software approach of kind of MVP, fail fast, learn fast, you know, very much, uh, the way the software startup world works. And they did it in a way where they built themselves enough tolerance for failure. Uh, and if you go back to the early days of SpaceX, there was, I mean, the first three Falcon Ones, uh, failed and they basically had no money and they scrapped together a fourth Falcon One and it happened to work.

But if that, if that fourth one would have failed, like you can ask anybody that was around at that time that predates me, but, um, they were like, yeah, we, we all knew this was our last shot. And so, you know, it, it got to a point where they, they had a zero tolerance of failure, you know, but then past that point, they unlocked the necessary funding and got some contracts and at the end of the day, they were launching cargo, not people for a long time. And so you, you still had some tolerance of failure to say, well, if I'm moving the industry forward and doing things that have never been done before and I'm trying to land and reuse rockets, which is a game changer from a financial perspective, then you have to acknowledge that I'm never gonna make the progress at the speed that I want if I wait for everything to be perfect. And so they really did introduce this concept of kind of iterative design and test, fail, test again.

Um, and it's cool to see how that has rippled through the whole industry because after SpaceX, I went to Rocket Lab and, you know, we had a mission failure as well and even just simple things like reading the YouTube comments, you know, people were like, you guys got this, like, you know, this happens, space is hard, you'll figure it out, keep up the great work. And I was like, man, pre SpaceX, that would have not been the the overall vibe. It would have been people saying, see, this is why private space doesn't work, leave it to the experts, you guys are wasting money. Uh, but there really has been a huge culture shift, uh, industry wide to realize if I want to innovate and I want to keep up, I have to have some tolerance for failure.

Now that whole equation changes when you start putting people on these things because SpaceX will be the first to acknowledge, they cannot afford to fail on a manned mission. Um, and so what they've done really well is created the opportunity for them to launch exponentially more frequently than everyone else launching their own satellites where they can have a very high tolerance for failure. And so they'll, you know, we designed the Falcon 9 to last 10 times. We wanted to be able to reuse it 10 times.

And now they're launching them 15, 16, 17, 18 times, but they're doing it on their own satellite missions, so if, if one of them happens to fail, they don't have angry customers. Um, and that allows them to learn what is the actual failure limits of all the components on the vehicle. So now when they put people on it, they know what their factors of safety are. They know that they've got margin.

Um, and that's been been really, really helpful in allowing them to be more and more reliable. It it's I find it fascinating the differences as well as the parallels, um, between, you know, what we'll call non-software and and software. Um, it's we, we do a good amount of work with companies on both sides and I think that a lot of software folks don't realize that things outside of software could benefit what is this big, sexy SAS industry so much. Um, where it's like, oh, we're SAS and we're the best and let's do it our way.

Um, so hearing, hearing you talk about all this, you know, certainly makes my brain think. So you're, you're running a company now that steps in probably safe to say when supply chains, you know, or when there's quality issues, when things break down. Maybe sometimes people call you and it's like, oh, you know, we're starting something new and things are great and we're just looking for a change, but I would imagine similar to my business, you know, it's not like, oh, things are wonderful. Let me, let me call Michael at SQA.

Um, where, where are you finding most people are exposed and how do you actually like come in and like get control and bring things back to the way that they need to be? Hmm, that's a good question as well. I think there's a fundamental just bandwidth problem that is really hard for any one company to solve by themselves. When you look at most aerospace companies and pharmaceutical companies.

Those are kind of the two big swim lanes that we play in amongst some other industries. But most of the large companies, their supply chains are in the 1,000 to 10,000 plus suppliers all over the world. Um, and at that size of a supply base, your ability to know what's going on in 10,000 different facilities all over the world is close to zero, right? Like you just, you would need armies and armies of people to put out there and and understand what your risks are.

And so I think that's probably like the biggest shared gap that everybody has is just you've got a huge supply chain and depending on the size and maturity of the company, you've got, you know, a team of supplier quality engineers or auditors that, you know, is maybe maybe a couple of people, maybe a hundred people, but it's not 10,000. And so you have this this kind of juggling act where when I first started at SpaceX, I had 262 suppliers that I was personally responsible for. How? I was also straight out of college and, uh, and I was a mechanical engineer and I got thrown into avionics, all the electronics parts.

Um, and so I just spent the first two years traveling, like every single week, flying all over, going to these suppliers, trying to understand what they were making, how they were building it, what the potential risks are there, feeding back any issues we were seeing internally, you know, test failures, these types of things. And, um, and yeah, it's just you have to prioritize and use some sort of risk ranking and spend your time where you think it's going to have the biggest bang for your buck. Um, kind of world class is, you know, people say you should have like 10 to 20 suppliers per supplier quality engineer. Uh, but very few people actually have the resources to achieve that ratio.

So you end up spending your time a lot of your time with a very small number of suppliers that generate the majority of your problems and you have this long tail of suppliers that you may never ever even visit. Uh, is is there a way to identify what suppliers are are are higher risk or might burn you before, uh, beforehand? Yes, there's, there's quite a few different approaches people take to that. Um, none of them are foolproof.

And I think this is a big area that we're starting to see some really cool advancements and and we're trying to invest in this as well, but, you know, AI and analytics are light years ahead of where they were, you know, even four or five years ago now. And so, uh, you know, trying to really look at what, um, leading indicators do I have that maybe something is going to go wrong. Uh, but at the end of the day, those models are only as good as the data that you can feed into them. And that's a huge problem that people have is, you know, if you're trying to collect information on 10,000 suppliers that you work with, most cases you're sending out a survey or you're scraping website information or, you know, it it's something where you're highly reliant on them being truthful about their situation.

And, you know, uh, and whereas I would love to think everyone is truthful. Um, some people will nicely polish over areas that No. No. No.

Uh, and so I I think that's one of the the fundamental challenges that everyone has that's trying to apply all this like advanced analytics to help them understand where they should be spending time is, yeah, you can come up with really cool risk models, but if the data you're plugging into them is poor, then the output's going to be poor. And that's where I think we have a a big advantage, uh, just in the nature of our business is we've got a thousand associates, quality professionals in 65, 70 countries all over the world that can collect, you know, unbiased third-party factual, I went there, I saw with my own eyes what's going on and I can feed you that information and now you can put that into your risk model and you can trust it. Um, but that's something that is, uh, probably the biggest challenge that I I think people are facing right now is just obtaining reliable data to make any of those decisions off of. But once you have it, you can look at things like, you know, past non-conformance history or, honestly, on-time delivery history can tell you a lot because one of the key reasons that things are late is due to quality issues that the suppliers are experiencing internally or that are experiencing with their sub-tier suppliers.

And so you can infer a lot by symptoms that you're seeing. Uh, but then you kind of need to send someone out there so you have first-hand perspective of, okay, I see the symptom, but what is the cause? And that's something you can usually only get by going and seeing yourself. We're gonna, we're gonna swap up a little bit.

This, this segment we're gonna call leadership under load. So, um, you've gone from the tech leadership type of, uh, world where you're managing really technical teams to now the entire company. So you have like a lot of other things besides the technical load. Um, how's your leadership style evolved across those transitions?

Um, I think, I mean, it's involved a lot of learning on my part, right? Um, and it's one of the things that always attracted me to supply chain and supplier quality is, you know, I, I am a relatively technical person. I have a mechanical engineering degree. I always liked, you know, math, science, engineering type stuff.

But I also really like the people element of business and, uh, you know, just understanding what motivates people, what drives people. And I think that was one of the key things that allowed me to be successful early on in my career. Like I mentioned, getting thrown into SpaceX with 200 plus suppliers and technologies that I didn't have previous experience in was just figuring out how to have those conversations with people and learn. Um, and so that's generally the first step of of my leadership approach to any new situation that I'm plugged into.

It's just spend time with the team, understand what they do. Sometimes I can probably get a little too into the weeds there cause I'm a very detail-oriented person. Um, and so after a while, I have to kind of consciously tell myself like, okay, you, you understand enough, you know, pull out of the weeds and let's look at a little higher level strategy. Um, but I mean, I think there's, there's, uh, pros and cons to managing very technical teams too.

Uh, and sometimes like, uh, you know, it's, it's nice to be able to kind of throw a very technical problem out there and have extremely technically skilled people that can problem-solve and diagnose it. But sometimes like engineers are really bad at, uh, you know, categorically getting myopic focus on something and like going down the rabbit hole to solve this little issue and kind of losing sight of the bigger picture. Um, and so I think there's benefits to managing, you know, some less technical teams as well because they can kind of take a step back and help me understand, hey, you know, yeah, there's, there's a system problem, but ultimately there's a philosophical difference that needs to be solved here. I'm, I'm reading, you know, the emails that this person is sending and I'm, I'm feeling that they're not bought into this path forward.

Uh, and those are things that I think, you know, as a more technical team and a more technical person, sometimes I, I don't naturally grasp. Um, and so I I've had a lot of, um, I think positive experience working with the less technical teams too, because it's it's taught me the importance of, you know, seeing the full picture and and focusing on, you know, interdepartmental relationships and customer supplier communication and all those types of things. People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win.

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com. How do you, how do you handle pressure today versus like five years ago? Because I I'd imagine and and maybe 5, 7, 10, however many, but like I'd imagine a SpaceX and an Elon is very different than an SQA and your board and your owners. Um, but at the same time, recognizing like you're ultimately responsible to some of the largest, most regulated companies in the world that while they might not be Elon or SpaceX, um, have very, very high expectations and I'd imagine there's immense pressure, um, in what you do.

What's changed in the way that you handle that pressure? Going from employee to CEO. Yeah, um, I mean, I think I am naturally wired to handle pressure pretty well. Uh, it actually kind of, um, my wife often comments on how she gets frustrated at the fact that I like just things don't seem to phase me.

Um, and so I don't know, some of it is just, you know, I I've, I've learned to just take things one step at a time and I think that applies to really any type of pressure you're under is you can't allow yourself to get overwhelmed. You have to just focus on the the next problem in front of you that you can solve. Um, and learn when to escalate, when to ask for help. Um, those types of things, I think are really important.

But I'd say the biggest difference, uh, probably is the the scope and the focus of the pressure. I think, you know, under kind of the Elon SpaceX environment, um, there was always a million different projects going on, but at the end of the day, there was one goal and one, you know, company that we were working towards advancing. And so I think that, uh, while, while the intensity of the pressure was extremely high because that's just kind of how Elon is and he sets goals and expectations that are, uh, borderline impossible at times. I vividly remember we had, when we were first unveiling the Dragon capsule, you know, our first, our our first manned version of the Dragon capsule.

So SpaceX has been launching Dragon, I think the first launch was 2010 of, uh, just test mission. And then they had Cargo Dragon for years. And then we were coming out with basically the first one that was going to carry humans. And I don't remember what year this was, but this was in like, you know, January, March, some Q1 time frame and our goal was to release it in October and have like this big unveiling event.

And, uh, right around that time was when the, the tensions with US and Russia really started to escalate and at the time with the space shot retired, we were sole sourced with Russia as a nation to bring our astronauts to the space station. And so we had this kind of 10-month timeline on on releasing this Dragon capsule. Elon sends out an email and it's just like, hey, with the escalations between US and Russia, uh, I want to make sure that the US knows we're ready for manned space flight. So you have 30 days to get it ready for unveiling.

And it's funny cause if you're No pressure. it's it's just giant bullpen, right? You know, low cubicles, you can see everybody across the entire room. Elon doesn't even have an office.

He has a cubicle. But he sends out this email and I'm on the third floor and like everyone just like stands up and like looking at each other like, wait, what? And, uh, and so that kicked off this, you know, 30-day scramble, but we, we got it done. We had, uh, you know, a mock-up that we could unveil and show the world like what Dragon was supposed to look like.

And that continued to evolve dramatically between that point and when we actually launched the first one. But those are the types of, you know, deadlines and pressure that were just commonplace. It was just taking something that a normal company would take a decade, our deadline would be a year, and then halfway through it, that deadline would be pulled then sooner, you know. And so it's just constant constant go, go, go.

30 days. Um, and you know, here there's probably a little less of that. Um, however, we still work with companies like SpaceX. So we get the flow down of those crazy requirements and and those deadline shifts.

But I think the bigger challenge here is we have a hundred plus clients that all have their own critical path priorities and deadlines and things. So whereas like that direct pressure isn't necessarily there, you have this big distributed pressure and it becomes really a prioritization challenge and, you know, we never want to let a client down. Um, and so we have to really look at, you know, which of those deadlines are real and which ones are actually going to impact the client and how do we make sure that we're resourcing ourselves and prioritizing our teams appropriately to keep everyone focused on those goals so that we're keeping our client's goals moving. So we, um, we talk a lot about systems versus heroics.

Um, on on the show. You relatively new to the CEO role. There's a lot in place. SQA is not a new company and I'm going to put you a little bit on the spot here.

When you took over SQA, what did you see that like you were like, this needs rewiring. This needs to be changed. We're going to fix this. Mhm.

Yeah, I I'll start by saying, I was very pleasantly surprised. Uh, so yeah, SQA started in 1995. So we've been around for 30 years. I stepped in two and a half years ago, you know, so like 27 years into this journey.

Um, it was founded and run by the same guy as CEO, Mike McKay for 27 plus years. Um, and he and I are very, very different and he'll be the first to admit that. He is, you know, very, very big relationship builder, sales guy. He's super good at reading people.

He's just like, I always describe him as the type of person that will go out to dinner with a stranger and he'll be like, godfather of their children by the end of dinner. He's just like really good at like, I love it. at at building those core relationships. So he's more like me and less like Dale.

Yeah, probably. Okay. Um, but he's not technical at all, you know, he doesn't have any engineering background. Right, that's just like me.

And, uh, and so, you know, when he first approached me to to bring me in and and, you know, just for context, like I was, uh, for a while at SpaceX leading the source inspection program and some of our supplier, uh, assessment and approval and onboarding processes and things. So I worked very closely with SQA when I was a client, essentially. And that's how I got to know the team, got to know Mike, the former CEO. Um, still owner and chairman of the company.

But he approached me and he was just like, hey, I've, you know, I've I've I love this company. I built it with my dad. Like, you know, I really want to see it succeed. But I'm also, you know, kind of at the point where I know it needs somebody other than me at the helm, someone that's going to bring a different approach because, you know, he grew it from zero to where it was, which was, you know, extremely impressive when you look at the list of our clients all being some of the biggest names in Pharma and Aerospace and we're, you know, relatively small company out of Palo Verdes, California, working in 90 countries all over the world every year.

So I mean, that was was him and the team that was here. And many of many of the people that I have on my team now have been at the company 10, 15, 20 plus years. Like it's a very You don't see that a lot. stable, yeah, stable environment with people who really love this this company.

They love the culture. They love what we do. Um, how important our work is. And so I was, you know, blessed and pleasantly surprised when I stepped in and kind of got a vibe for the overall team, the culture.

Everyone's like, really bought in. They want to do the right thing. Uh, they're really hard workers and make sure that like, you know, come hell or high water, we'll find a way to get it done. And so I think, you know, at first I was kind of, you know, worried about what am I stepping into here, you know, young kid coming in to this company where people have worked here longer than my entire career, you know, and at other companies and, uh, but the team was very, very welcoming and open and and kind of ready for something new, which I think was great.

I think at the, you know, highest level to answer your question of what, what I saw that needed to change, some of it was some team dynamic stuff. Um, I think, uh, it was eye-opening to me. I'd never been in an executive, much less, you know, CEO position before. And so I've always been used to just being able to like throw my opinion out there in a meeting.

Be like, oh, I think, you know, this would be a good idea. And for the first couple of weeks here, I I started to realize like once I threw my opinion out, people were like, okay, that's what we're going to do. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm new here. I don't know if that's a good idea or not.

Like I was just stating that as an option. We should talk about it and we should evaluate the pros and cons. And if it's a dumb idea, you should tell me it's a dumb idea. Has that, has anyone told you that any of your ideas have been dumb ideas?

Uh, no one's used that word specifically. Oh, sure. But, uh, yeah, yeah. At least to my face, probably behind my back, right.

Um, but no, I remember like, uh, a couple weeks in, uh, one of our our guys, Ed Snyder, who's been with the company for 20 plus years and I worked with him when I was at SpaceX. He was the program manager for me. So we know each other well. But I, I kind of threw out an assumption in a meeting and he was like, actually, no, that's not true.

Like and he gave me the the data to show it wasn't. And I like call a timeout. I was like, Ed, thank you. I was like, everyone, please do that.

If I'm wrong, like tell me. Um, and so I that's been, I think one of the biggest things that I've been focusing on building over the last two and a half years here is this comfortability with conflict and the ability for the team to just debate openly and not hurt each other's feelings or feel like, oh, well, my idea got shot down, so, you know, that guy thinks that I'm stupid or he's trying to make me feel bad. It's just like, no, this is the way for us to come up with the best ideas for all of us to argue for a little while and then, you know, see the pros and cons and way them and then choose a path forward. So I think that's probably, you know, culturally the biggest change that that I wanted to make and I think, you know, we've made really awesome progress and I think you guys even kind of pointed that out when you started, you know, talking with some of our team seeing like the dynamic of the meetings and things.

I think, uh, hopefully shows that we're on the right track there. Um, and then I think from a more technical perspective, we, you know, have really kind of scaled this business model from zero to where we are now and it's been a very, uh, siloed approach in many ways where like client A has their team and client B has their team. But then each of those teams develop an entirely different process for doing the same thing. Could be source inspections that suppliers or supplier quality audits.

But we've got so many different flavor variants of what we do now. Um, and so, you know, you have client A, B, C, and D that are all trying to do the same thing, but they're doing it in four different ways. And so I think that's that's what we're working on now is trying to drive some standardization. Um, where we can and use best practices from all four of those clients to say, hey, actually, if we do it this way, we can schedule more efficiently or if we do this, we can get you data instantly instead of you having to wait for us to fill out your form and send it.

Um, and so that's still a work in progress, but I think it's looking at where can we, um, centralize some of those resources, create some synergies between different programs, while still allowing that very customer-centric approach from a, um, from a like customer service perspective that made SQA so successful to begin with. I love that and and it leads in really well to the next question because we were kind of talking about as we were engaging with SQA. Um, and and go-to-market. Um, this this kind of question comes from how can go-to-market learn from quality?

So most go-to-market organizations only think about quality when something breaks. Um, what should they be trying to do sooner? Because, you know, we had originally had this conversation when we were together in Utah and the event and as we start doing the the work through the process and you've come come from a quality perspective, what can some of the go-to-market leaders do to to get ahead of that so it's not breaking too late? Yeah, um, I don't know that I have a great answer like specifically on, you know, what can the go-to-market leaders do.

I I think at a more holistic level, when people think of quality, often they're thinking of probably a very small subset of quality. And to your point, you know, talking about products breaking and things like that. That's that's the worst case scenario of quality, quality problem when you have an end customer that goes to use your thing and it doesn't work. So those are the ones that get the highest visibility and the most priority, you know, justifiably so.

But I think, you know, from working in manufacturing my whole career, there's so much throughout the process, and this this goes for software and any other industry as well, but when you start to really drill in and look at the amount of rework loops that are happening throughout the entire design, pre-production, production, you know, release process, there's so much opportunity to save money and time if you invest in controlling quality up front and doing it right from the jump. Um, and that's where I think a lot of companies probably find that out a little too late once they have a product that's out there and they're ready to scale is when they run into all types of those issues. And I mean that that's something that, you know, the the launch industry taught me pretty well as building one rocket is very hard. Building 50 rockets a year is hard in an entirely different way.

And you have to transition this mindset from being like a science project into being a production company like a a Ford or a Toyota or, you know, something like that. And so the level of focus on the details you have to have that's not always there from the beginning when it is kind of R&D startup mode, you you have to get this like mindset shift across all your engineering teams and everybody that's involved in the process to just realize that it's not okay for me to take five minutes every time I do that to redo something that somebody upstream didn't do right. And people learn to just live with those little things. They're like, oh, well, I found these parts that are super cheap because they're uh, originally used for a remote control car, but they're like a pretty good motor, so I can use them in my rocket motor.

But I have to sort through them and do all this testing and I order a hundred and I throw 50 of them away and then I use the 50 that are good, but it works because overall it's like 1% of the cost if I were to buy this like fancy aerospace grade motor. And like that works kind of well when you're in scrappy startup stage. The problem is, I can't guarantee that 50 out of 100 are always going to be good. So I may get one batch where 100 out of 100 are good, and that's great.

But then the next time zero out of 100 are good. And now I'm blaming production because I don't have parts. And so I I think that's probably the the hardest shift that I think people have to understand and that I've seen as this company's grow and mature is like variability becomes really, really important and minimizing that is is almost more important than like improving your your yield to 100% is at least if I can have consistent yield of 80% every time, at least I can plan around that and I'm not going to let my customers down or cause unnecessary delays. But when my yield goes from 20 to 90% on any given day, I just can't plan my business around that.

And that's where I think a lot of the supply chain problems come in as well as if you're not really understanding that variability all the way through your supply chain, you're setting yourself up for surprises and surprises are almost always bad. Yeah, surprises always bad. Surprises are always bad. I agree.

All right, as we come up on time, let's go to some quasi rapid fire questions. We're going to try to lighten the mood a little bit. Um, but we'll see. Let's have some fun.

Uh, what in your mind is the one leadership skill you think took you the longest to develop? Effective delegation. I I think that was one. That one's tough.

That one's tough. Yeah, I think especially early on as I kind of started getting direct reports and things. I I had this mindset of, you know, I, well, I, I know how to do this really well and you don't know how to do it as well and I'll I could train you, but that's going to take me a lot of time and then you're still probably not going to do it the exact way I do it. And, uh, as my scope grew, I, I came to finally realize, hey, somebody else spending 80% of their time on this is almost always going to be better than me spending 1% of my time on it.

Um, and so I I'm still working on developing that skill, but that was one of the harder ones for me. Who's one leader you've learned the most from? Hmm. Yeah, this is an interesting one.

So I actually hired him here. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Former director of mine at SpaceX, his name Paul.

And, uh, and I actually worked for him at Rocket Lab as well and then we worked together at Heligen, the company I was at before here. Um, we are very, very different. He's ex British Special Forces. Um, very like, you know, regimented, like just hardcore ops guy.

Um, you know, and, uh, and we almost always approach problems from the exact opposite direction. Like my gut instinct is almost always the opposite of what his is. And, uh, and I've learned from working with him over the years. like it's great to have that counterbalance because my my gut instinct is not right all the time and his isn't right all the time either.

It's right a shocking amount of the time, I will admit. Um, but it's it's been cool, uh, now to have him on my team and still, you know, even though I'm his manager now, um, I'm still learning a ton from him because his his natural style is just so different from mine. I love it. What, um, So true.

What's your favorite guilty pleasure snack? Mmm. I'm not a huge snacker, but like probably ice cream. I just there's always room for ice cream.

And, uh, especially anything like peanut butter chocolatey. That's that's always a go-to for me. Last one as we wrap up. Dream vacation destination.

Ooh. Um, my wife and I travel a lot. We have two young kids now, three-year-old and an eight-month-old. Um, and we just got back from Europe for two and a half weeks, so that was an adventure.

Uh, but one that's been on my list for a while is Patagonia. I'm a big hiker and outdoorsy guy and every time I see photos from there, I'm just like, I gotta get down there. So that's probably top of my list. I love it.

Absolutely love it. Michael, thank you so much for joining the show. We appreciate it. It has been great chatting with you and talking about how we tie quality to go to market and to software.

Awesome. Thank you, Michael. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having you guys.