[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> August 8 2024 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Inc. For Starters Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9FL1HCRURY) **Date**: August 8 2024  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9FL1HCRURY ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Alexa von Tobel:** Welcome to Inc's For Starters with Alexa von Tobel. I'm Alexa, a serial entrepreneur myself and founder and managing partner of Inspired Capital, a venture firm that backs fearless founders who are solving some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Now in our sixth season, we sit down each week with one of the best founders on the planet to hear their story of guts, inspiration, and drive. This week I'm excited for you to meet Sir Peter Beck, the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of Rocket Lab, a NASDAQ-listed leading launch and space systems company opening access to space to improve life on Earth. Peter started Rocket Lab in 2006 and has grown the company into a global organization of 1,800 people that went public in 2021 with a market cap north of two and a half billion. Rocket Lab's capabilities span the space economy, including satellite design and manufacture, industry-leading spacecraft software and components, and reliable launch services. Under Peter's leadership, Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle has become the most successful small launch vehicle globally, and Rocket Lab satellite subsystems have featured in 1,700 missions. Rocket Lab works with a range of global mission partners including NASA, the United States Space Force, DARPA, and the National Reconnaissance Office, among others. Prior to founding Rocket Lab, Peter began his career in 1993 with an apprenticeship as a precision engineer at a global appliance manufacturer. In his own time, Peter began building rockets at an early age, steadily increasing their size and complexity. Peter is an award-winning engineer, and earlier this year he was made Knight Companion of New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the aerospace industry, business, and education. ### Founding Story **Alexa:** Peter, first of all, I'm so excited to have you on today. You are my first really big space entrepreneur, which is incredible. I've always been obsessed with outer space ever since I was little—literally used to watch shooting stars, rockets launching from Florida, we'd go to NASA—total nerd. I want to start from the beginning: what's Rocket Lab in your own words, and let's go back to the founding story. **Peter Beck:** I mean, I'm from a little town at the very bottom of the South Island of New Zealand, and as a little kid I was always interested in two things really: space and engineering. So my desire was to work in the space industry, and from a little town in the bottom of New Zealand, the opportunities to do that in New Zealand were zero. Really, I focused my dreams on going to work for NASA, as all young kids probably do. I worked through various positions and roles, started off and did a trade in tool and die, and then moved into a government lab doing advanced materials and structures. Anyway, cut a long story short, I went on a bit of a rocket pilgrimage back in 2008 and went and visited a whole lot of the companies that I dreamed of working for, visited NASA and all those kinds of things. At the end of that visit, really two things became obvious: One, a non-degreed New Zealand citizen—it's very, very difficult to get a job at NASA. In our industry, there's a lot of crossover between defense work, so it's very difficult as a foreign national to work in the space industry, let alone somebody without a degree. So I had really no option but to come home and just start a space company and do it myself. That's how it all got started. **Alexa:** How do you start a rocket company? What was the first year like? What were the big moves? **Peter Beck:** Really, the hardest thing with starting any company is just to start it. So once I'd sort of just made the resolve to begin, it was all about building credibility and capability. The first project we had was to send a small rocket into space, and we actually became the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to ever reach space—not into orbit, just into space. Following that, that got the attention of a number of folks, and then we started working for the larger defense primes and space companies like Lockheed Martin and some of the US government research agencies. It wasn't really until around 2013 where I really felt we had the credibility and capability to go to Silicon Valley and try and raise money for the Electron rocket. I was still in New Zealand, and I knew absolutely nothing about how Silicon Valley worked. So I gave myself like 3 weeks to come home with a check or be run out of town. I arrived in Silicon Valley and I spent the first week talking to various entrepreneurs and companies to try and figure out how this whole venture capital game worked. Then the second week I pitched to three venture capital firms, and then the third week I did, in fact, come home with a check. These were in the times where raising $5 million for your space startup was a very hard thing to do. It's not like in 2020 or 2021 where you just needed a PowerPoint and you could come home with tens of millions of dollars, and in some cases even hundreds of millions of dollars. Those were very, very different times. I look back on that and think, man, that first investment was by Vinod Khosla, and here was this kid with no degree, from a country with no space heritage, looking to build a rocket and take on the giants of the industry. So it was a big, bold move by Vinod. ### Rocket Lab's Space Infrastructure **Alexa:** For those listening, can you help them understand what are examples of the things that you've built and that you've launched into space? And what solution were you providing before anybody else was? **Peter Beck:** So we started with small launch, and I named the company Rocket Lab—I probably should have called it Space Lab because we do way more than that. But we started off with small launch, and right now our small launch rocket, Electron, is the third most frequently launched rocket in the world. So friends over at SpaceX launch the most, then it goes China, then it goes us and Rocket Lab. But we do a lot more than that. What we're trying to build here as a space company is an end-to-end space company. When I say end-to-end, I mean if you think about the services that you use from space, lives are completely changed and improved by all the infrastructure in orbit. But a lot of people who are trying to put infrastructure in orbit are not natural owners of space infrastructure. The one challenge with the space industry is if you just want to provide a dumb old service like communications to an island in the Pacific, you have to become literally world experts in both spacecraft design and operation, launch, and all those kinds of things. The trouble with that is that that's a very high barrier to market entry. What we're trying to do is by combining both the build of spacecraft, the launch of spacecraft, and also the operation of spacecraft, a country or a business can literally come to us and say, "Hey, we want this service, we want this communication service over this Pacific island." Then we go out and we build the spacecraft using all our own components, then we launch the spacecraft, and we can operate the spacecraft for that particular customer and just provide the service. For probably most of your listeners, that just sounds like the normal thing that you would expect, but in the space industry, it's completely the opposite. You procure a spacecraft, and then you procure a launch, and then you have all the ground stations, and on and on it goes. So we're really trying to democratize space in a totally different way. **Alexa:** You just said something really important, which is "with parts that you built yourself." Tell us a little bit about how you innovated on the spacecraft. **Peter Beck:** The way to think of the space industry: it's a conglomerate of mom-and-pop shops, all at sub-scale. Take just one example, a reaction wheel supplier, and say "I want a thousand reaction wheels"—you can just watch everybody's head simultaneously explode, because the whole industry is used to building like 10 a year, not a thousand a year. So what we did is we both created some of this capability, and then we also acquired a whole bunch of these companies. Now we can provide spacecraft components at scale, not just for ourselves but for our customers. Literally just about anything that you can imagine, whether it's on the spacecraft or the rocket, we build it. In fact, 38% of everything that was launched last year that we can touch had a Rocket Lab logo on it somewhere. So it's really important to make these parts available at scale to the industry. ### Balancing Speed and Safety **Alexa:** In startup worlds, I've built startups, it's "move fast, go quickly." We're talking launching rockets in outer space—there's really no margin for error, right? And it's extremely expensive to make mistakes. How do you balance execution and speed, and how did you set the dial on that for the momentum of the DNA of the company? **Peter Beck:** This is really like a multi-hour drive because you're exactly right. In many companies, the "Move Fast, Break Stuff" model is really, really important. At Rocket Lab, we certainly move fast and break things, but at a component level. Because when it gets into a subsystem level, when you put a whole bunch of things together, you're exactly right—at that point, the subassembly you're standing in front of can be worth millions of dollars and take six months to build. So you really can't afford to have that fail. I think that's the secret of the success of the company: we've been able to walk that line really finely between taking risk, also learning fast, but when it comes to actually putting something on the pad, we all expect it to work perfectly. That's not an easy thing to do. The best way I can describe a space startup, especially a rocket one, is it's like running through a maze at night, but at every dead end, there's literally a cliff. So if you run too fast, you're going to just fall off that cliff and you're dead. So you have to run fast, but you also have to be prepared to stop really, really quickly. We kind of joke here about the rocket gods, because the rocket gods—you have to appease them, but they're there to punish you at every turn. **Alexa:** Can you give us a sense of what was the hardest day? If you look back at the last now almost 20 years, what would you say was the thing you were most proud of overcoming? **Peter Beck:** At the very beginning, I used to really worry about technical execution and "could we pull this off?" Then we just kept pulling stuff off time and time and time again, and we built such an amazing engineering team that now I don't really worry about "can we pull this off?" Sometimes it takes longer than we expect, but there's been nothing we can ever not pull off. Going to the moon was the ultimate "over your skis" moment, and we can talk about that story. Then you'll go through a period where you're raising capital, and you're watching the countdown clock and all the people around you and what you need to do, and you have to raise capital or you die. Probably these days, the most challenging moments are if you have a launch failure. We've been fortunate that we haven't had many in our career, but they do happen occasionally. When they happen, everybody pours their heart and soul into every launch, and when you do have a launch failure, it is like walking around a morgue. It's just soul-crushing. Making sure you can pick the team back up and move on is important. ### The Future of Space **Alexa:** We are in such an interesting moment in time as we think about space and what's possible. I've recently read a bunch of books on what's possible and where we could go. I would love just your point of view: if we fast forward 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, what do you see that maybe the rest of us can't see? **Peter Beck:** I think the biggest thing to be done in space has yet to even be thought of. The trouble with space infrastructure is it's all hidden, so nobody sees it. But I challenge you—if we turn off the GPS constellation, let's just watch the world descend into chaos. I think the biggest thing to be done in space is not even thought of, and that is going to be huge for humanity. I really look at space as kind of parallel to AI—it is literally that transformational. I used to, when I was young, really be annoyed and lament that I was growing up in the era that I was, because I honestly believed that the Apollo era, where we sent people to the moon, was like the premium time to be in space. But I think right now is really the premium time because we have flipped over from it being a government-dominated domain to a commercially-dominated domain. Just as our forefathers jumped on a ship and set out into the unknown, this is pretty much where we're at with space. I think it's tremendously exciting, not just from a commercial standpoint but also from a human exploration standpoint. **Alexa:** Can you give us a sense of like one of the craziest things that you think is possible in our lifetime that maybe people are not spending all their time thinking about because they're not running a rocket company? **Peter Beck:** One very close to me, and it's something that we are actually having a crack at, is looking for life in the solar system and the universe. I think that's a really important question to ask and answer, because if we truly are the only life in the universe, then that's something pretty special. If life is prolific in the universe, then I think you can take a different view on the world and your existence. So we have a life finder project to search for life in the clouds of Venus, because there is a very narrow region in the Venus clouds where it's possible that a form of life could exist, and there has been some evidence of that. We have this personal project—it's a nights and weekends, kind of purely privately funded mission to go to Venus and descend a probe into the atmosphere. We literally have a go/no-go test for life. I think if that question can be answered, it fundamentally changes humanity's outlook upon itself. Maybe I'm weird, but I think every time that I stand outside with somebody and look at the night sky, the questions that always start to get asked are like, "Wow, I wonder if we're alone in this giant universe here. I wonder if there's other intelligent people looking back at me." And if there is intelligent life, can it transcend between planets and solar systems and all the rest of it? I just think it's human nature to ask the question: Where are we from? Are we unique? Are we special? There is a very narrow band in the atmosphere of Venus that has the potential to hold life. I think if you can go to Venus and determine that yes, there is life there, then you can pretty much draw the conclusion that actually, life is prolific throughout the universe. Because if it can survive in this little narrow band, then it's probably prolific throughout the universe. But if we're taking the scientific method as it stands today, we have zero evidence of any other life other than us. So at the moment, from a scientific standpoint, we are the only life in the universe. I just think that's a really important question for humanity to ask and answer. ### Space Innovation **Alexa:** I always say that I believe one of the core tenets of humanity is that we are inquisitive and explorers by nature. Peter, I want to ask a question: if you think about the most important innovation for space in the last decade, how would you describe that? **Peter Beck:** It's not in rocket engines. I think from a rocket—everybody looks at a rocket engine because it's the bit that makes a lot of noise and fire comes out at the bottom, and it's a hard thing to build for sure. Actually, the measure of efficiency, which is combustion efficiency or C-star, hasn't really changed tremendously since the 1950s, and we've kind of extracted the most amount of chemical energy you can. It's like 98% thereabouts efficient, so you've only got a small amount of efficiency to gain before you've reached chemical equilibrium. There is nothing more you can get. I think most people think it's a rocket engine, but I think no, it's not the rocket engine, because we've already kind of reached chemical equilibrium. The most impactful thing is actually materials. Somewhere between 2% and 5% of the total rocket's mass or weight is actually the thing you put in orbit. 90% to 92% of it is fuel, so it's just a big sack of fuel, and then the rest is structure. So if you can take 2% out of your structure and add it to your payload, you can literally double the payload performance of your rocket by removing the mass out of your structure. So at Rocket Lab, we use exclusively carbon composite material and these new materials that really move that needle. I think that's probably the biggest needle mover that's available to us, aside from just ditching chemical propulsion altogether and going into beamed energy or nuclear or some way-out stuff. ### Family Background and Upbringing **Alexa:** I want to transition to you, Sir Peter Beck. When you look back at your childhood to today, can you give us a sense of what do you think happened in your childhood—something that dramatically shaped you to prepare you to do what you do today? **Peter Beck:** I think it has to be my parents and my upbringing, because in the Beck household, there was no such thing as an idea too big or an ambition too great. I can remember that my parents were called into the school to have a meeting with the guidance counselors or the careers advisers because they all believed that my ambitions were far too unrealistic. It turned out that I was really good with my hands, so I should go to the local aluminum smelter and be a welder. So they called my parents into the school and we had this discussion. I remember my parents just sat there nodding, and then on the way home, I wasn't sure if I was in trouble or not, and they were like, "Well, that's just a load of rubbish. You go and do what you want." So there was never a limit to ambition within our family. It was always, if I come home and said, "I'm going to build a rocket engine," it wouldn't be, "Well, be careful about that, don't burn yourself or blow yourself up" or "I'm not sure that's a good idea." It would be, "Well, if you're going to do that, make sure you build a really big one." So it was just the environment that I grew up in—it just had no limits in that respect. ### Outthinking vs. Outspending **Alexa:** I love this quote of yours. You said, "We have a saying here at Rocket Lab: 'We have no money, so we have to think.' We've never been in a position to outspend our competitors. We just have to outthink them." What does that look like in practice? **Peter Beck:** Well, to that point, my two biggest competitors are the two wealthiest people on the planet. So there is no option to outspend. What that really means is sometimes placing these constraints—and I'm sure you see this in a lot of your startups—the startups that are way, way overfunded or extremely well-funded get kind of lazy and sloppy and are far less likely to succeed. The ones that really succeed well are the ones that are absolutely constrained and have to really think outside the box. I think that has been an example for us. The normal, traditional approaches that you could take that just cost money and you can buy your way out of a problem—we've never had that ability. We always have to think our way out of the problem. What that ultimately manifests into is very unique solutions. We were the very first people to 3D print a rocket engine out of metal and send it to orbit. At the time, when we said we were going to 3D print a rocket engine, 3D printing was used for bottle openers and cat prosthetics. It wasn't used for rocket engines. But we could see that that was the way out of a very complicated and expensive manufacturing process. Now flip forward to today, and everybody 3D prints their rocket engine in one way or another, and that's just the norm. So being so heavily constrained really forces you to think and come up with different solutions to the problems that ultimately end up, in our experience, to being competitive advantages. ### Balancing Urgency and Patience **Alexa:** Obviously, being a founder, a sense of urgency is critical, but you're building in a category that inherently takes longer to get to market, right? How do you balance that and create that sense of urgency but the patience that's necessary? **Peter Beck:** Let's be clear—I have no patience. So it is no different to anything else. If you look at the time that it took us and the capital that it took us to get Electron to the pad, it was faster than just about anybody else and certainly at a lower price than anybody else. If you look at Neutron, you know, a big rocket in development—once again, it's a 4 and a half year program, which is faster than ever before. The reality is, it just takes a lot because you're not just building a rocket—you're building a launch site, engine test facilities. A lot of people focus on the rocket, but a lot of the capital actually turns into concrete because you have to build just so much infrastructure to support the rocket. There's some things you have to be patient with, no doubt, but the timeline until you get a vehicle to the pad is just a function of the sheer magnitude of the infrastructure and everything you have to build. If you wrote everything down on a piece of paper from launch sites through the engine test facilities and factories, any sane person would look at that and go, "Let's not do that. That just does not seem like it's a possible thing." ### Staying Motivated **Alexa:** You're 20 years in, give or take. How do you stay motivated, and what are you most excited about when you think about the future of Rocket Lab and what's coming? **Peter Beck:** First, it doesn't feel like 20 years. It literally feels like yesterday that I was in Silicon Valley raising my first $5 million. You lose all sense of time in a rocket company because it is just insane speed and work all of the time. As I look forward to the company, what we're trying to build here—half of my brain is highly entrepreneurial, and half of my brain is conservative engineer. So you can imagine the war that's occurring in there on a constant daily basis. But nevertheless, for all of my issues, I'm very methodical in the way that we're trying to do these things. We started off with small launch, then we moved into spacecraft, now we're building a big rocket, and the end goal here, as I mentioned at the beginning, is to build this end-to-end space company. If you look forward, the very large space companies of the future are not going to be the companies that just build a satellite or just build a rocket. In fact, these companies—it's going to be blurry about whether they are a space company or a services company. I think that's what truly excites me and what truly motivates me, because I think if you do that, the impact that you can have on the planet and all of the people that you can provide meaningful services to and change the outlook on a number of things is huge. Wrapping that whole thing up into one nice little box of solution is when I'll call it done. ### Space Debris Concerns **Alexa:** When you think about things that worry you and outer space—I had a conversation the other night about space debris and the fact that we're sending up hundreds of satellites, and they're all—there's like, who's organizing the logistics of things that are floating around up there, and how do we play offense to space debris? **Peter Beck:** That's a great question, and normally I loathe any kind of regulation as you can imagine, but this is one instance where I'm highly supportive of it. I think there will have to be a point in time where we need Space Traffic Management. The challenge with managing traffic in space is that it's all predictive. A spacecraft is orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes, so if the orbit doesn't change, it's very predictive. You can determine at any point in time, taking into account various orbital decay, where the spacecraft is going to be. But the challenge is that spacecraft are moving all the time, so your ability to predict where they're going to be is very difficult. When you couple that with countries that don't like each other not sharing what they're doing with their spacecraft and how they're moving them, then we end up in the scenario right now where literally people get calls at 2 a.m. in the morning saying, "Hey, in the next two hours, you're going to have a spacecraft smash into yours, so you better move it." At the moment, we have a relatively small number of satellites in orbit. If you took everything that's in orbit, it would all fit in a football field—you could jam it all into a football field. So there's not that much stuff in orbit, but that is changing very rapidly. Starlink is like a 30,000 satellite constellation, you have the Chinese constellation of similar numbers, European... So before you know it, there's going to be a tremendous amount of traffic up there. My biggest fear is actually that we don't preempt some of this, and we do end up in a scenario where we've got a bit of a mess up there, and that'll take a bit of time to sort itself out. So I'm desperately hoping that for once in human history, we don't wait until it's a mess and then go and fix it—we actually preempt the mess and put some regulations in place such that everybody can globally adhere to them, and we can manage the traffic. **Alexa:** You said that the number of things in orbit is changing rapidly in a short period of time. Say more. **Peter Beck:** I think I can visualize the graph in my head, but I can't give you the numbers, but it's literally a very exponential curve. Don't quote me on this, but something like we launched more in the last couple of years than all of history into orbit. So it's a very exponential graph, and that's just going to continue to point to the sky. In some respects, it's amazing because we're getting all these great services and all these new capabilities, but it does need to be managed. ### Managing Stress **Alexa:** Building a company is stressful, but I have to imagine building literally a rocket company is more stressful than most companies that I've ever built. How do you manage stress? Because you've clearly gotten extremely good at it—you've gotten to the point where you've taken a company public in 2021, you've been very successful, you'll continue to be. But how have you learned to titrate your own stress? **Peter Beck:** I don't do that well. Literally, it's like a forcing function. I have to do things that rely on me not thinking about the company; otherwise, I'll just think about the company 24/7. So I'm a helicopter pilot. When I climb into a helicopter, I have to not be thinking about Rocket Lab; otherwise, I will die. That is a great forcing function to kind of remove your head out of the zone. I find that those are the things that I have to do; otherwise, it's a little bit of an unhealthy obsession. ### Core Values and Hiring **Alexa:** What do you hold sacred for a company? When you're building a business, there's sort of these visualizations or these rules in the back of your head that you will never break. For you, what's sacred? **Peter Beck:** Culture is the easy answer to that, but deeply within that culture is at Rocket Lab, we're very, very strict on only hiring the best. I think every CEO says, "We only hire the best" and all the rest of it, but I think we live this a lot more deeply. It's twice as easy to get into Harvard than it is to get into Rocket Lab, and we just hold that bar super, super high. Then I would say that we're often asked, how come at one point we were tracking 140 small launch startups, and now there's one? The secret to that, I think, is there's a number of things, but hustle is a really, really important element within the company. It's very, very easy when someone puts up a big concrete block wall in front of you—the natural thing is to kind of stop at the wall and think about it for a while, and then maybe you get a ladder and climb half of it and get scared, come back down. That's not us. If we come against the wall, there's no hesitation—we're out with our shovels, and we'll just dig under it. ### Quickfire Questions **Alexa:** I'm going to move to the quickfire round. First thing that comes to your mind: What gets you out of bed every day? **Peter Beck:** I have trouble sleeping, so that's generally not an issue anyway, but I'm super excited about trying to build what we build, and I have a huge sense of urgency. We need to get the company to this end point that I think will be really beneficial for humanity, but also for the shareholders, of course. So I'm motivated every morning to get this thing built. **Alexa:** What's an interview question you like to ask people to get a sense of whether or not they should come to Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** By the time I'm interviewing somebody, their qualifications are taken for granted—like, clearly they're the best. But you can be the best but also not fit in and not fit into the company. So what I'm looking for is really understanding the person, and I like to know what people do outside work because I think that tells you a lot about a person. For example, if you're a young engineer and outside work, you go home and you play video games, you're going to fail dismally at Rocket Lab. But if you go outside work and then you have a car you're building, or engineering just continues outside your work, then you're a natural-born engineer that just thinks about it 24/7, almost obsessive—then you're going to excel here. **Alexa:** When you think of your biggest "pinch me" moment to date—so a day in the company where you actually went home, went to bed, and were like, "I just can't believe that happened." What happened? **Peter Beck:** I would say it would have to be the CAPSTONE mission to the moon. So we bid on a mission to launch a small spacecraft—it's the very first part of the Artemis mission. NASA is returning to the moon—Artemis mission to send a spacecraft into lunar orbit. I mentioned before there's a battle between the entrepreneurial side of the brain and the engineer side of the brain. The entrepreneur is like, "Yes, yes, let's do the most amazing thing possible!" and the engineer's like, "No, no, that's not fundamentally possible." That was one of those days where the entrepreneur just got a hold of the steering wheel, and we bid on this mission that was insanely difficult to do. I mean, we had to launch the spacecraft off a little rocket, and we spent the next two years just in absolute engineering hell trying to make this thing happen. We had to do eight circularization burns of the spacecraft to get it to the moon, and every one of those eight burns was just a miracle of engineering. This is one of these things—we have to build an interplanetary spacecraft and double the performance of your rocket in two years, and everything has to work 100% perfect. It's just such a complicated machine. I remember that we finally did the last burn and sent the spacecraft on a trajectory to the moon, and that was certainly a pinch-me moment. Because if you had asked any time during that two-year period whether or not this was possible, I think the general consensus would be this is not possible. And the team pulled it off. Moreover, not only did we send it to the moon, we sent it to the moon with the most insane accuracy that you could possibly imagine. So it was a huge moment. **Alexa:** I mean, that may be the best answer of any pinch moment I've ever gotten from a CEO. When you think of a quote you live by—a quote, a mantra, just sort of something that in the back of your head is like a guiding principle, is there one? **Peter Beck:** It's really, really important to me that we build really good stuff. I'm quoted as saying "I'm built to build," and that is an absolute guiding principle. Whether it's anything in Rocket Lab or anything outside Rocket Lab, I believe in the power of pride in your work, and building stuff that is both beautiful and building stuff that is built well. **Alexa:** Is there a book that you've read of any kind, literally any kind, that has had a massive impact on you? **Peter Beck:** "Rocket Propulsion Elements" from Sutton. It's like the godfather textbook on rocket propulsion, and I got my hands on that at a very early age. I read that book from cover to cover dozens and dozens and dozens of times. It's not what inspired me to build rockets, but if you read a book enough times, the very difficult things all of a sudden become seemingly simple. So when it came time to start building rockets, I had a good base knowledge, but also I came into it thinking, "Well, this isn't that hard" because I understood so many of the fundamentals. **Alexa:** What is one thing you wish you knew before you started this business? So like a piece of advice you kind of wish someone could have paid it forward to you? **Peter Beck:** That's an easy question. I would never want that, because I think if you wrote down all the stuff that you had to do, you would never in a million years start it. I'm not one to look back and look at these kinds of things. That would be the most destructive thing that you could possibly do, because so many things are seemingly impossible that you would never even try. **Alexa:** Last question, serious one: UFOs. What do you think? **Peter Beck:** Is there life outside Earth? I think statistically, probability is really, really high, hence the reasons why we have the Venus Life Finding Mission. I guess I'm a little bit more scientific about it than green men coming down and probing me. But I think probably there is life outside us here on the planet. But like I say, the engineering in me needs the proof, and we're going to try and get that proof. I think if you can prove there is life, then I think it does certainly lead a little bit more credibility to some of the UFO stories—a little bit, not a tremendous amount for sure. ### Closing **Alexa:** Sir Peter Beck, it has been an absolute pleasure. With all my heart, I sincerely mean this: thank goodness that people like you exist on this planet, people who have devoted their life to moving all of us, humanity, forward in such a massive way. It is not just your talent and your entrepreneurship—it's the selflessness that goes into what you're doing, and you just said it, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There really are no breaks, and I'm just so grateful. Everybody out there, if you want to check out more, you can go to rocketlabusa.com, and you can find me here next week with a new episode of For Starters with Alexa von Tobel. Sir Peter Beck, what an honor. You are incredible. **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much. Very kind. Thank you.