[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> March 21 2024 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [The Spinoff](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq4q7Ya0wTg) **Date**: March 21 2024 ![](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq4q7Ya0wTg) 🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq4q7Ya0wTg ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Simon Pound:** You're listening to Business is Boring, a podcast that reckons it's anything but. Business is Boring is made by The Spin-Off with help from Callaghan Innovation. Here's your host, Simon Pound. Once something is done, it becomes expected, even if it was pretty unlikely to begin with. If you were to go back 10 years and say New Zealand would soon be one of the handful of countries in the space club, regularly sending satellites to space and famous for its space industry, you'd probably be laughed out of the room. The biggest force behind this quite amazing change is Peter Beck at Rocket Lab. His dream was so unexpected and unlikely that when he told his high school guidance counselor he wanted to make rockets, they called his parents in for a meeting. He persevered, working at Fisher and Paykel and Callaghan Innovation's forerunner Industrial Research, where he was supported with parts and after-hours lab access to experiment and refine his rockets. To get Rocket Lab off the ground, he's had to pull together some of the world's biggest investors, have international laws changed, and successfully pioneer innovations in making and sending rockets that are now industry standards. It was wildly unlikely at most every step, but today Rocket Lab is on the verge of a massive listing on the American Stock Exchange and a big shift to larger rockets. To talk about the journey, perseverance, and New Zealand being a member of the space club, I joined Peter Beck out at their Mount Wellington Rocket Lab HQ. ### Early Interest in Space **Simon:** Thank you for being here. Tell me about how you were into rockets really early on, and was that considered something you could kind of do when you were at school? **Peter Beck:** I think the earliest memory I have about space in general was standing outside under the night sky with my father, and him pointing out that all the stars in the sky were suns and they had planets around them, and in fact, there could be somebody on that planet standing back and looking at me. At that point, it was like, "Wow, that's a big concept to try and understand," and I think I was certainly under five. That was really what sparked the imagination of space for me. Engineering was always something that was within our family and something that we always did, so it was really the perfect alloy of engineering and space. Ultimately, if you put those two things together, the hardest thing you can do is go and build rockets, so naturally, that's what happened. **Simon:** Wow, and I guess a lot of kids kind of see the night sky and have their heads expanded and see rockets and go, "Wow, they're cool," but not everyone kind of sticks to it. How did you keep that dream alive and keep going? I saw an interesting story about you talking to your school guidance counselor and saying you wanted to build rockets. What happened then, and how did you keep going? **Peter Beck:** They called my parents in because they thought that my aspirations were thoroughly unreasonable and unattainable, and that I should go and get a job at the local Tiwai aluminum smelter as an engineer. I was very good with my hands, but for me that just was not an option. It was always going to be about the rocket. I think the original plan was actually to go and work for NASA or for one of the big aerospace corporations, but ultimately, it's a long story, but ultimately I ended up starting Rocket Lab instead. **Simon:** You were in Southland, and went to school and said, "I want to build rockets," and they called your parents? **Peter Beck:** It was more begrudgingly. I had to go along to this careers thing, and I remember having to sit there, kind of looking at the roof going, "Oh, this is a waste of time," and going through the motions of what I wanted to do. I was very obvious and clear what I wanted to do, and I had a plan mapped out to get there. I think they just thought that was just a waste of other potential options. ### Early Career and Training **Simon:** How did you then get yourself into Fisher and Paykel and then into Industrial Research from that, from a place that wasn't kind of encouraging you to follow those dreams? **Peter Beck:** The plan was always to go and get a trade in the most complicated thing that I could, because rockets are complicated to build. So I went and did a tool and die making apprenticeship at Fisher and Paykel Appliances in Dunedin. There, I was super lucky because all of the folks around me, both in the workshop and the design office - I'd run two shifts, so during the day I'd work for Fisher and Paykel, and during the night I would work for Peter, and I'd be building rockets. I was so lucky that I got free use of the workshop and all of their CAD and analysis tools, and away I would go. They did insist that I left at midnight because I used to stay until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and I think health and safety came in a bit hard on me on that one, so I had to stop the second shift at midnight. I remember that was a great to-do, but other than that, I had just complete support. I would arrive at my desk in mornings, and there would be lumps of titanium just labeled "Apprentice training projects," and I knew that everyone knew they were for building rocket engines. **Simon:** That's so cool to have that support around you there. What led you to Industrial Research, which is kind of the forerunner of Callaghan, isn't it? **Peter Beck:** It's the old DSIR, yeah. So I was working at the time for a superyacht company, and I was project managing a role there. It always kind of drove me insane that on the superyacht, we were making titanium door knobs for the kitchen to save weight, but yet in the back where the owner sits, we poured many, many tons of sand to deaden the sound. This is a very simple problem to solve from a Helmholtz resonator, because you've got a very defined frequency that the propellers and the engines make. So we don't need to just pour sand in there; there is a much smarter approach. So I started building some analytic models and trying to determine this, and ultimately contacted Industrial Research for some assistance on that. It looked like a really cool place to work, and of course I would have access to the Crown's equipment, which would really accelerate my rocket building activities during the night shift. So I applied for a job there, and I was a research engineer there for many years. **Simon:** While there, how did you meet and what were the circumstances around making relationships with some of these people who would end up being real supporters through the rest of the journey into Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** I think if I look back through my career, I've just been super lucky with people who wanted to support me. Industrial Research was no different. I would do the day shift, and then the night shift would come around, and I had all of the Crown assets to leverage to build more and more complicated systems. I was just surrounded by the most incredible scientists and engineers to learn from. Those years were all very formative - learning how to strain gauge, learning how to do vibration testing and analysis, and on it goes. All those things are really important when you go and build something like a launch vehicle. ### Decision Not to Go to University **Simon:** Across those years, you famously didn't go to university, although you kind of made your own university in the evenings, it sounds like. What was that decision, and why did you make that? **Peter Beck:** The plan was - don't get me wrong - the plan was always to go to university, but the most important thing to start with was to build the engines and build the rocket things that I wanted to. The most important thing to begin with was a trade and having the hand skills to do these things, because there are no courses - you can't go to university and learn about rocket combustion dynamics, so you have to learn yourself. If you're going to learn yourself, that means you need to build them yourself. That was kind of the first step, and then the plan was always to go to university. It's just I've never quite got there yet. It almost became slightly pointless because I remember when I was at IRL, I was supervising final year design students, but if I wanted to get my degree, I would have to go to university and take a first year design course. So it didn't really make a whole lot of sense or good use of time. I just kept on moving forward. ### Setting Up Rocket Lab **Simon:** How did you go about setting up the company in the first place? It's such a cool kind of thing - once things have been done, it's like people are now saying, "Oh well, New Zealand has a great space exploration industry." There wasn't when you were setting up. How did you go about convincing those first people to get behind you with this really audacious goal? **Peter Beck:** It actually was a trip to United States. As I said in the beginning, my plan was always to kind of work for NASA or one of the large space companies. So I went to the United States on a bit of a rocket pilgrimage and went and spoke to all the people I'd been corresponding with over the years. From that trip, there were really two fundamental learnings. Part of the trip was to go into the Mojave Desert, and there's a bunch of small companies there doing really innovative things, so I went and visited those guys. The first thing that I learned was that all these companies that had been funded by the US government and doing cool stuff and all the rest of it, that I'd kind of looked up to over the years, were no different - absolutely fundamentally no different - to what I was doing in my garage at home. That sounds kind of a bit of a crazy thing to say, but actually they had the same combustion and stability issues with their hybrid rocket motors as I did. They were using the same National Instruments equipment as I was. There actually wasn't this massive gulf that I kind of had perceived in my mind. Then the second fundamental learning was, as I went around NASA and all the large space companies and was kind of proclaiming that satellites were going to shrink and there needed to be a small launch vehicle to launch them, nobody kind of disagreed with me. But actually, everybody said, "Well, we'll wait until the government tells us to do that and fund us to do that, then that'll be a real thing." So it was kind of a crazy time because for many, many years I'd built this picture in my head about what the US space industry looked like and my place in it, and then found that had been completely turned on its head. All the important things that I felt should be being done weren't being done, and all of the companies and projects that I thought were just way above what I was doing turned out to be kind of the same. So there's nothing like a 12-hour flight back from LA to kind of reconcile your life, and by the time I'd landed, I decided, "Well, you know what, I'm just going to do this myself. I'm going to do the things that I feel are important," and quit my job and start Rocket Lab, and that was that. ### Raising Capital in Silicon Valley **Simon:** That insight - that the satellites were getting smaller and so launch vehicles could be smaller - that allowed you to get going kind of an order of magnitude cheaper and leaner, and you could have smaller launch sites and smaller rockets and all the rest of it. How was that received by conventional wisdom when you went out to raise money? **Peter Beck:** Within Silicon Valley, it was received very well. I mean, let's be real here - I was the only one running around Silicon Valley trying to build a rocket. I mean, these days it's pretty common; there's about 140 companies trying to do what we've done. But at those times, I was definitely the odd one out - this crazy Kiwi guy running around trying to build rockets. It was basically Elon and myself trying to do that. It was definitely unusual, but a lot of the venture capital that I spoke to actually had invested in satellite companies, small satellite companies, and they were all sitting on the ground trying to get a ride into orbit. So when I came along, it really didn't take much selling because it's like, "Yeah, we know the pain, we've got all these satellites and all this investment stuck on the ground." So actually, a rocket would be super handy. **Simon:** Over the years, as you've gone to the Valley and talked to those big-name VCs that you've brought on board, what does it mean to have some of those names on the cap table, especially things like Lockheed Martin, who are so involved and so synonymous with the industry? **Peter Beck:** I've always looked at building a company very similar to playing a game of chess - it's all about moving the right pieces in the right place. Bringing on the right investor is critically important, and as I help New Zealand companies today, that's one of the key things that we always try to do: bring really high-quality investors around the cap table. My view is that if you have a bunch of really bad engineers, then you end up with a bad product. If you have a bunch of really bad investors, you end up with a bad company. So bringing the right investors and being really fussy about it and being really fussy about the cap table is super, super important. For us, we were only interested in bringing on tier one Silicon Valley VCs. These are the guys that look for really big opportunities and things that have to have a meaningful impact to the world. If you can bring on one tier one VC, then chances are you can bring on more tier one VCs along your journey, but it's a little bit harder if you start at the bottom end of the pile to kind of work your way up. So bringing in the right investor from day one is just super critical. ### Regulatory and International Challenges **Simon:** To get the actual permission to do the things - looking at your journey, the things you've had to do, you're not just kind of doing the old cliché of putting the tracks down in front of the locomotive. You've actually had to go out and get international treaties renegotiated. Tell us about that - what it took to actually get from not being able to send rockets out of New Zealand to sending rockets out of New Zealand. **Peter Beck:** I think I spent a third of my life as a diplomat actually. Yeah, turns out you can't just turn up into a country and start launching rockets, because governments look at rockets as weapons of mass destruction. Because the reality is, if you can put a satellite into orbit, you can put a warhead on any country in the planet. So not surprisingly, countries have all these nonproliferation and non-weapons of mass destruction treaties. In order for us to build and launch out of New Zealand, we had to convince America to change their 40-year policy of denial, meaning for the last 40 years, any country that wanted to create a space launch capability, America would say no. The reason why that's important is under the MTCR treaty, if one of the 36 signatories says no, all other 36 also have to say no. It's a global nonproliferation treaty. That was pretty difficult, and we were super lucky to have the support of the US government and the support of the New Zealand government. I spent a very long time holidaying across the road from the US State Department in Washington DC, and it took a while, but we were able to hammer out a bilateral treaty between New Zealand and the US to enable us to launch rockets down here in New Zealand. Once that bilateral treaty was signed, then New Zealand had a whole lot of obligations under that treaty. There had to be the High Altitude and Space Activities Bill, which went through Parliament select committee and passed into law. Then somebody needed to administer the law, so the space agency was created. Then the EU got jealous and they created their own space agency too - it's a true story if you look at the timing, you can see - and so on and so forth. There was a whole lot of other regulation that needed to be changed. For example, we had to get space designated as a freight destination. Otherwise, when a customer came in with a $50 million satellite, they'd have to pay GST. But because space is a freight destination, it's a temporary import-export, and all of these kinds of craziness that needed to occur. ### Innovations in Rocket Technology **Simon:** Which do seem - those kind of settings - they seem like they could be afterthoughts, but none of the other innovations can work if you aren't able to launch things. Tell me about some of those other innovations. A number of things that you pioneered have now become the standard but were very much not conventional wisdom. I just love how once things are done, they're obvious, but they weren't at all. Tell me about things like the 3D printing and different engine approaches. **Peter Beck:** When we first started, we were focusing on the end goal, so we're not afraid to take on big, really difficult R&D projects. One of the constraints on the cost of building a rocket engine is actually the manufacturing process. So we started 3D printing rocket engines when metal 3D printers would have been used for like - I think their claim to fame at the time was a cat's prosthetic. That was what 3D printers were going to do. You'd go to a trade show and pick up a bottle opener and bits and pieces, and we're like, "Well, we're going to take this technology and we're going to 3D print the most thermally stressed and structurally stressed component there is on the planet," being a rocket engine chamber. At that point, I think people thought, "Well, that's a very difficult thing to do." We announced the engine at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs - it's the largest space conference in the world - and we had some people thinking it was a great idea, and I would say a lot of people thought it was a really bad idea and very, very ambitious. But as you point out now, it is the industry standard. Everybody 3D prints their rocket engine. In fact, there's a whole company now that's been created that just 3D prints engines and parts of rockets. So very much standard within the industry now. **Simon:** And that other unconventional approach - the smaller payloads and the smaller rockets - has that also become, how's that changed in the industry since you launched? **Peter Beck:** When we started, there was really only one other company, a company by Richard Branson called Virgin Orbit, and they were really the only other company that was progressing down the road to provide this service. Virgin Orbit had, I think they've spent like a billion dollars, and they've had one flight, so kind of gives you a bit of a sense for how difficult this actually is. Out of all the history of space flight, there's only been SpaceX and Rocket Lab that have delivered regular, reliable access to space from a commercial perspective. So it's insanely difficult. In fact, I wish it wasn't so difficult. But now, like I said, there's about 140 companies trying to get there, but we remain still the only one in small launch that's providing a regular service. ### The Importance of New Zealand as a Launch Site **Simon:** How important was it to be doing it from New Zealand? Because I imagine if it hadn't worked out with all of the government negotiations, you could have fallen back on doing stuff out of the States or something. But what does that ability to be launching from here bring you? **Peter Beck:** I think the easy thing to do would have just been to move everything to the US and just launch out of the US. That would have been by far the easiest thing to do. But the challenge with that is that in the US, there is a certain cap on launch frequency, and that's primarily because there's a lot of air traffic in the United States. You have to close down air traffic every time you fly a launch vehicle, or traffic around it. So you have to take the long view here. The short view would have been, "Yeah, we should have just gone to the US and launched a few rockets, and that'll be that." But you quickly bump up against a scale issue. So the whole reason why we have so much down here in New Zealand is because of the launch site down in the Mahia Peninsula. That is the only private orbital launch site in the entire world, and that launch site is licensed to launch every 72 hours for the next 20 years. If you put that into context, that launch site has more launch availability than all of the launch sites in the Continental United States times two. If you're really serious about accessing space in a big way, then that's actually fundamentally what you need. You can have all the rockets in the world, but if you can't actually launch them, it's all pointless. ### The Complexity of Starting a Space Company **Simon:** How many people did you go and knock on the door of and say, "I've got this dream that New Zealand's going to join the space club," which is a pretty exclusive club, "and we're going to be launching off this little sliver of land on the east coast of New Zealand," and how many people just kind of said, "Oh well, that's just too far-fetched" or "that's too fanciful" along the way? **Peter Beck:** I think the secret here is to not write it all down in one dissertation, because if you do, I think you would believe it to be so fanciful that it wouldn't be possible. I mean, if you think of all the things that needed to align - just not from a technology perspective. Firstly, we had to build a rocket that worked, and there's only been one other private company in history that had done that. So that's challenging. Then you've got all of the bilateral treaties, and that never happened before. You've got to build a whole launch site. Then we had to put tracking stations all around the world. We had to upgrade the internet backbone for Gisborne. We had to build 30 km of road. And that's just the infrastructure part of it. And then so on and so forth. So I think I would be scared to just write this down. Otherwise, you never start. It's just better to pick the end goal and just start running. ### The Decision to Build Neutron Rockets **Simon:** Tell me about that decision to then go to the larger class of rockets, the Neutron class of rockets, and famously eating your hat - talk me through that. **Peter Beck:** Rocket Lab, you know, we have a saying: we do what we say we're going to do. So I always said that I would eat my hat, so I ate my hat, and that's just the way it is. But no, the Neutron vehicle is a very big rocket, and it's designed to lift large numbers of either mega constellations or cargo or crew to the International Space Station or beyond. The Electron vehicle is a very successful small launch vehicle and will remain so, and that serves a really nice niche. But the Neutron is really focused at the next kind of great niche, which is human spaceflight, and also large numbers of spacecraft. **Simon:** Tell me about some of your inspiration for the way you've approached that from the Soviet Soyuz scheme of rockets. **Peter Beck:** Everything we do here is very analytical, so we looked back through history and we said, "Well, what is the most successful launch vehicle in history?" And it's the Soviet Soyuz launch vehicle. Then we also looked forward at what is the size of payload that are likely to be launched here in the next decade or so. If you look backwards, it's about 5 tons. If you look forwards, it's about 5 tons. You need about 8 tons to lift humans. So that's why we settled on around about 8 tons to orbit, because historically it's been the most successful size launch vehicle, and in the future, that's the class of payload that it needs to lift. You just may as well make it lift a little bit more to carry some humans. ### Vision for the Future of Space **Simon:** What will that enable? What do you see - if you were to write down where you see the world being in 15 years or 20 years or 50 years as a result of this increased capability to lift and go to the moon or whatever - what does it look like in 20 years in the best case scenario? **Peter Beck:** I think the world looks vastly different than it does today. I think that where we are with space right now is right at the beginning. It's kind of like, if you want to compare it to the internet, it's kind of like we've sent our first email over the internet, but we don't really understand the potential of the internet. Who would have thought that we can barely live our lives now without it? Space is exactly in the same place. It's only been a few years since commercial companies were able to access it at a reasonable price on a reasonable time frame. So it's kind of like the first ship that has sailed across the seas, and all of the commerce and things that are going to come out of actually being able to access space as a domain. So I think the world is going to look very, very different. We're already seeing a huge amount of developments, but with that also comes the responsibility for that environment as well. That's one of the things that, as a company, we're very pro-space obviously, and we're pro access to space, we're pro use of space, but we also are very pro-responsible use of space. We certainly are definitely the louder voice within the industry saying, "Hey, these mega constellations are great, but how are we going to do this sustainably?" Even with the Electron launch vehicle, the way we go to orbit is quite different to everybody else, so that we don't leave any junk behind in orbit. So I think there's great excitement, but we also temper that with, "Well, hang on, we just need to make sure that we use this environment carefully." ### The Venus Mission **Simon:** Can you tell me a little bit about Venus? I saw some, when I was looking into the Soviet rocket program and some of their work, I saw the remarkable footage that was taken on the surface of Venus by the Soviet program, and the sound that they captured as well. It just made me think that it's so small in our imagination of space compared to Mars or the moon or the rings of Saturn or whatever, but it was eerie and wonderful. **Peter Beck:** Venus is a much forgotten planet, and in fact, if you look at Venus and Earth, they're far more similar than Venus, Earth, and Mars. Venus is really Earth's sister gone full climate change on us, and there's a tremendous amount we can learn from Venus. So I've always been extremely excited about Venus as a destination, and hence we have our own private mission there in 2023. But not just for what we can learn - if you look at the places around our solar system, there's a few places that it's kind of hypothesized that there could be life. **Simon:** Wow, and so you're heading there in 2023? **Peter Beck:** 2023, yeah. It really comes back to standing with my father out there one night as a very young child and him saying, "Hey, look, there could be other life on these planets." If we want to take a true scientific approach here, there is no evidence to support life outside Earth today. That would change our view on the universe significantly if we can find life in the clouds of Venus. Then it's pretty reasonable to assume that life is prolific throughout the universe, which is an evidence-based fact rather than hoping that there's other life out there. I think if that question could be answered in my lifetime, that would be a wonderful thing. ### Going Public and Building a Larger Company **Simon:** You had a pretty big week when you were announcing the Neutron rockets that would allow that, and also the listing on the US Stock Exchange. What does that extra capital from that listing open up for you to do, and why go down that route? I guess there had been great success in your company from dealing with people with very long-term perspectives. You've attracted great VC and also the Sovereign Fund of Australia and the like coming on board. Why go to the market? **Peter Beck:** It's for two reasons. Firstly, we're looking to grow a very large company here, and we've had great success in raising private equity, and that's a fine way to do it. But as we look to grow and expand - and I mean, we've talked a lot today about our launch vehicle side, but we have a space systems division that is growing at an equally fast rate - really going to the public markets enables us to do two things. One: access to capital - that's great, but you could argue that there's plenty of access to capital through the private markets anyway, so that's not the needle mover here. What the needle mover here is actually having a public currency to go and do things like acquisitions that we really want to do. There was a deal we tried to do last year - it was a very big deal, would have been great, but our price wasn't any different to the ultimate purchaser of that company, except they had a public currency. So when you're a private company without that public currency, it's very difficult to do really big deals. So that was one of the fundamental reasons to go public, and this was already well baked into our trajectory from early on. I think it's kind of cool as well to have a high-quality space asset that the public can participate in, because whether you like it or not, space is something that very much attracts public interest and a public following. Everybody gets excited, and being able to share in that within a new space company, we thought was a great thing to do. ### Reflecting on the Journey **Simon:** And there is that magic, hey. There must be pinch-me moments on the way for you, working with - just the idea of NASA. It's so cool. What's it like to go from making small rockets in your garage and working after hours and gradually increasing the scale and the coolness of it all, to then having NASA as a customer? **Peter Beck:** I'd like to say that you can sit back with a glass of wine on a beach somewhere and kind of think about that, but honestly, I don't. I'm just internally frustrated that it's taking too long. I would have hoped that we were further down the road than where we are. Look, we've made great progress, but everything always takes too long, and that's just, I think, within this industry. Everything's very, very difficult. But as I look forward, I think some of the best moments have been, certainly, flying NASA as a customer. That was great. We've got some really exciting missions to the Moon later this year, and to Mars, and there's some super exciting things. But they're always wrapped in a lot of work and a lot of stress. It's probably less easy to kind of sit on the sidelines and watch this amazing stuff happen. Everybody here really works hard to make these things happen. ### The Role of New Zealand **Simon:** How important is the fact that you're making it happen from New Zealand and in New Zealand? We're sitting today inside the quite remarkable HQ in Mount Wellington, and that in and of itself is not that likely a place for the center of excellence. What is the role of New Zealand and the importance of having it here for talent in the industry? **Peter Beck:** It should be said that New Zealand is a center of gravity for engineering for sure. I mean, we have a US facility and a Canadian facility and a US launch pad as well, so we're spread out between the US and New Zealand. The majority of the staff are employed down here in New Zealand. I think the New Zealand element has been really critical. If we had built the business and designed the vehicle up in the US, it would look like every other rocket. It would be an aluminum metallic - it would look just like everything else. Building it down here in New Zealand, we kind of didn't know what was possible and what wasn't possible, and we ended up with a very, very different product that's been very successful. We see a lot of people trying to emulate that. I think there is a kind of New Zealand spirit here as well that really enables you to move quickly and achieve great things. The flip side to that, of course, is that in New Zealand, we do have a tall poppy syndrome. So once there's a certain level of success, then it kind of inverts itself a little bit. Kiwis love an underdog, that's for sure. But in general, I would say the success of the company is rooted in the fact that we decided that we were going to do the majority of the initial development here. ### Challenges Along the Way **Simon:** Have there been some real hinge moments? There are some very famous examples in the space sector, like SpaceX is very chronicled really with the "going to run out of money, and if this explodes again, we're over." There seems to be from an outside observer a calmer trajectory so far. But have there been moments where it was on the line, and you wondered if it was not going to work? **Peter Beck:** Oh, many, many times. Many times. I think if you took a journey into my mind, at least it would be a very, very scary place. There have been a number of instances where we were right on the edge. With a rocket company, you pour everything into a launch vehicle, and if it goes real bad, then that's the end of the company. I think the reason why there's been so few successful rocket companies is the way I kind of liken it and describe it: it's like running through a maze at night, and at every dead end, there's somebody there with a shotgun ready to shoot you. You have to run fast because you run out of time, but you also have to peek around the corner and make sure you don't go down the dead end. Because in this industry, if you make one wrong decision - like one wrong engine selection, one wrong trajectory selection, or one wrong anything decision - you exhaust so much capital and time that you just peter out. So it's incredibly unforgiving. It's very unforgiving in physics, it's very unforgiving in engineering. It's just really, really hard to do. ### Work-Life Balance and Family **Simon:** I remember seeing at a high-tech awards, you were given an award and you video linked in or had a video played because you couldn't be there that evening because you wanted to be at an event for one of your children. And you said in the video, "Look, I'd love to be there, but I miss a lot of things with my kids because of this company, and I didn't want to miss this." I just thought that was so cool. Tell me about that kind of balancing, and what are the things that you're telling your kids as you look up to the sky? **Peter Beck:** I would not hold myself up as a representative of work-life balance. I'm tremendously lucky to have a really supportive wife and family. I've missed birthday parties and everything you can imagine. But wherever possible these days, I try and make it up. But work-life balance is not a strong point of mine at all. So tremendous amount of sacrifices by myself, but not just myself - everybody around me, my family, and also, if you think about all of the engineers and employees at Rocket Lab, nobody comes here to do a day's work where it's just plain sailing and easy. Everybody really works hard. ### Advice for Those with Big Dreams **Simon:** What would your advice be for someone who does have a big dream and the system rings up their parents and says "dream smaller"? **Peter Beck:** I'd tell them to just not listen. I mean, it's funny because I spent a lot of time with New Zealand entrepreneurs, and the one thing that I've noticed is I'll go to like an entrepreneurial event in New Zealand, and the New Zealand entrepreneurs will be "I can't wait to make my company worth a million or $10 million." And then I'll go to exactly the same event in Silicon Valley, and the same kind of entrepreneur will be "I can't wait until my company's worth a billion dollars." It's just an order of magnitude of sense of scale. It's not about the money - it's never about the money. That is a measure of the success of a company, that's it. The one thing that I always say to New Zealand entrepreneurs is think of the biggest problem you want to go and solve and go and solve it. Because the reality is that it doesn't matter if you're building a little business or a big business, the pain is the same. If we had decided to do half the things that we had done, it still would have been just as painful as doing the really, really big stuff. So this is the one area where I think culturally New Zealanders let themselves down - they don't dream big enough and go after the really, really big opportunities. **Simon:** And as a last thought, what will success be for you personally, and what will success be for Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** I have to keep redefining success. It's kind of just a stepping journey, and there's certain things that personally I want to achieve. One of those was to build a successful publicly traded space company and also providing really great access to space and doing really interesting things that ultimately impact positively us down on Earth. I think the ultimate - if I'm lying on my deathbed - the ultimate metric of the success of both the company and me personally will be how many people did we influence positively in this whole Rocket Lab journey. That's also one of the key elements for going public - we're trying to build an enduring, lasting company. The challenge with staying private is that I have a lifespan on this planet, and when that gets extinguished, if it's just me as the company, then what happens to the company? So what we're trying to do is build a long-term, enduring company that is built on the foundations of what you saw, no doubt, when you walked into the door here. The first thing you read when you arrive at Rocket Lab is "We go to space to improve life on Earth." That's the whole point. So building something that's enduring, building something that delivers on that as a goal, I think will be the definition of success. **Simon:** So cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story today. That was CEO and founder of Rocket Lab, Peter Beck. **Peter Beck:** My pleasure, thank you. **Simon:** And thank you to Peter Beck and the team at Rocket Lab for having me for this interview, to T Butler for producing and putting it together, and to Callaghan Innovation for the ongoing opportunities to tell these stories. And thank you for having us along and listening. If you've enjoyed this podcast, head along to the iTunes page and maybe give it a like or a subscribe - it all really helps other people find it. You've been listening to Business is Boring, presented by Simon Pound, brought to you by The Spin-Off and Callaghan Innovation.