I interned to 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 Galadai, next generation missile propulsion. Turner Caldwell is the CEO of Mariana Minerals, critical mineral supply chains. When you want 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 hundred of them cannot be done in six months,

so we have to happen,

but 100 of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those hundred things. Being a somewhat foreign to missile industry, I realize we don't have enough. They cost too much and we can't make them fast enough. But my background being purely in liquid propulsion across SpaceX, even at UCLA, while you want to look at rockets, is a very real way to apply this technology to missile systems

and we're going to go to that.

What is a single most important thing

that you learned at space exercise I want you to look at rockets is a very real way to apply this technology to missile systems and we're going to do it.

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-Rite speaks with Chandler Lugitsa, founder and CEO of Galadine,

and Turner Caldwell, founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals.

I spent 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.

...