#369 Elon Musk and The Early Days of SpaceX

What I learned from rereading Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger.  ---- Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. You can search all my notes and highlights from every book I've ever read for the podcast. Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book ---- Episode Outline:  —Numerous other entrepreneurs had tried playing at rocket science before, Musk well knew. He wanted to learn from their mistakes so as not to repeat them. —Elon announces that he wants to start his own rocket company and I do remember a lot of chuckling, some laughter, people saying things like, ‘Save your money kid, and go sit on the beach.’” The kid was not amused. If anything, the doubts expressed at this meeting, and by some of his confidants, energized him more. —Musk was a siren, calling brilliant young minds to SpaceX with an irresistible song. He offered an intoxicating brew of vision, charisma, audacious goals, resources. —When they needed something, he wrote the check. In meetings, he helped solve their most challenging technical problems. When the hour was late, he could often be found right there, beside them, working away. —The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs, bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt. This is what SpaceX engineers and technicians did. —"Here was a man who was not interested in experts. He meets me, he thinks to himself, 'Here is a bright kid, let's employ him.' And he does. He risks little with the po