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Founders

#419 Kelly Johnson: Skunk Works

Founders

David Senra

History, Entrepreneurship, Business, Technology

4.82.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2026

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kelly Johnson’s “14 Points” read like a SpaceX operations manual — 60 years before SpaceX was founded. Kelly Johnson created Skunk Works, which he defined as: “A concentration of a few good people solving problems far in advance—and at a fraction of the cost—of other groups by applying the simplest, most straightforward methods possible to develop and produce new projects. All it is really is the application of common sense to some pretty tough problems.” Kelly Johnson was a great engineer and system builder with genius for organizational design. His autobiography which he wrote when he was 75 years old is full of hard-earned wisdom from his 44 year career. This episode is what I learned from reading Kelly: More Than My Share of it All by Kelly Johnson. Made possible by: Ramp: https://ramp.com Axon by Applovin: https://axon.ai/founders Vanta: ⁠https://vanta.com/founders⁠

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

So a few weeks ago, I made this episode called How SpaceX Works.

0:03.6

And while I was reading about the way SpaceX operates, I came across this very interesting

0:07.4

sentence. I want to read this to you.

0:08.8

It says many of these ideas are not even new.

0:11.3

Lockheed's Skunk Works ran similar approaches 60 years ago.

0:15.8

Founder Kelly Johnson's 14 rules reads like a SpaceX operations manual.

0:23.1

So that made me want to read Kelly Johnson's autobiography, which is called More Than My

0:26.6

Share of It All. He wrote it when he was 75 years old.

0:30.8

And the first thing I want to tell you about in the book, I actually want to jump towards the

0:33.6

end of the book. It's one of the last chapters. The chapter is called It's No Secret,

0:37.2

and it breaks down how he built and how he ran Skunk Works. But before I jump into the book,

0:43.5

there's this list of 20 ideas. I want to give you an overview of basically how he ran this

0:47.3

operation. I think telling you these list of 20 ideas up front will make it easy to remember

0:51.0

and understand everything that comes after. So number one, a breakthrough program is an organization before it's a design.

0:57.3

So this is one of maybe the greatest designer of aircrafts of all time.

1:01.9

In the case of the plane, the SR 71, which Kelly designed all the way back in the 1960s,

1:06.6

it still holds to this day, 60 years later, it still holds the record for the fastest air breathing

1:11.5

manned aircraft when Elon Musk is telling his team about the importance of speed and how speed

1:16.9

is a massive competitive advantage for business he uses the SR 71 as an example let me read you

1:22.4

this quote from Elon about this he says the best offense and defense is speed. The SR 71 Blackbird, again, a design

1:29.0

from Kelly Johnson and skunkwarks. The SR 71 Blackbird is a military plane with almost no defense

1:34.2

except acceleration. It was never shot down, not even once. Over 3,000 missiles were shot at the

...

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