The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups

Entered the SpaceX four times. I couldn't leave. Like, it was the dream. I spent about a decade at Tesla and got to run around the battery supply chain. Chandler Lujitsa is the CEO of Gallady, next generation missile propulsion. Turner Caldwell is the CEO of Marion Minerals, critical mineral supply chains. When Elon sets, like, super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately. There's a thousand things that have to happen, but a 100 of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those 100 things. Things. Being somewhat foreign to this industry, I realized we don't have enough, they cost too much, and we can't make it fast enough. With my background being purely in like propulsion across SpaceX and even at UCLA launching liquid rockets, there's a very real way to apply this technology something we're gonna do that. What is the single most important thing that you learned at SpaceX or Tesla that you now apply every single day at your companies? The companies that define an era don't just ship products. They produce founders. In 2002, SpaceX had 160 employees building a rocket most engineers thought would fail. Two decades later, its alumni have founded more than 100 companies, many in the hardest sectors of the physical economy. Tesla's pipeline runs parallel, but the real lessons these founders carry aren't the ones that make headlines. Not flat org as dogma, but systems that prevent data silos at 100 person scale. Not vertical integration as ideology, but as a survival question. Does the company exist without it? The gap between mythology and method is where the useful knowledge lives. Aaron Price Wright speaks with Chandler Luzicca, founder and CEO of Galladyne, and Turner Caldwell, founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals. I spend a lot of my time with founders building in the physical world, and one thing that keeps coming up is how many of them trained at Tesla and SpaceX. People talk about the mythology, the all nighters, the flat org, the impossible deadlines. The best part is no part. But beyond the myths are repeatable practices that change how teams build and ship complex hardware. Chandler Lujitsa is the CEO of Galladyne, next generation missile propulsion. And Turner Caldwell is the CEO of Mariana Minerals, critical mineral supply chains. Chandler was the lead propulsion engineer on Starship, Turner led battery, minerals and metals at Tesla. So it's really great to have you guys here to talk about your experiences in the school of Elon Musk. Maybe to just kick off, maybe start at the beginning, briefly tell us the origin story of your companies, the problems you saw, the first prototype or pilot you built, the moment you realized that this could be a real business. Chandler, let's start with you. Yeah. I think being somewhat foreign to the missile industry until the summer of last year, right as I jumped into …