[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> March 6 2022 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [Deloitte Top 200 Awards](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPkKuXvpvXs) **Date**: March 6 2022 ![](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPkKuXvpvXs) 🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPkKuXvpvXs ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Interviewer:** So congratulations to our visionary leader. We're very fortunate to have Peter with us right now joining us. So Peter, tēnā koe, thank you, congratulations, and can you tell us about your passion and how you made it into this incredible business? **Peter Beck:** Oh gosh, I mean, it's like anything, it's the 15-year overnight success. So, look, I started the company in New Zealand in 2006, and then in 2009, we sent our first rocket into space—not into orbit. And then it wasn't really until sort of 2013-2014 where I went to Silicon Valley to raise the capital required for a project, the Electron project, which was an incredibly ambitious project. And, you know, fast forward to 2017, we had our first launch. In 2018, we had launched a bunch of times by then. By 2019, we were the fourth most frequently launched rocket in the world. And then 2020, we started our Space Systems division where we actually built spacecraft and satellites as well. And, you know, just today we were awarded one of the largest satellite constellations that's out being procured at the moment. So yeah, it's been a—it continues to be a pretty wild ride. **Interviewer:** Double congratulations for that as well. And you did mention being ambitious, but what else do you think has been critical to Rocket Lab's success? **Peter Beck:** Well, I mean, a company is never one person, right? I mean, if you look at Rocket Lab, really there's a few fundamentals that I think have been key to the success of the company, and the first one is the people in it. You know, the talent bar at Rocket Lab is extraordinarily high, and everybody here—every engineer, scientist, technician—are really the most incredible people on the planet. So you can have all the vision you want and all the ambition you want, but at the end of the day, it takes a huge team, a really dedicated team at the absolute top of their game to pull something of this scale off in a really, really challenging industry. **Interviewer:** Hugely challenging. And you talked about your team. How does the team at Rocket Lab continue to stay ahead of your competitors? **Peter Beck:** Well, look, we run fast. We're not afraid of really taking on huge projects. And, you know, the vision from day one and the direction that we're going to take this company has been super clear. So we've been running ever since. And, you know, we live by a number of values, and one of those is to always be incredibly innovative and push the boundaries of what others might deem to be possible. We also have an incredibly strong culture here of just excellence amongst everybody. You know, we have no offices at Rocket Lab. It's an environment where there's just free-flowing communication and just the minimal hierarchy possible, just so that at the end of the day, the best decision, the best engineering, always wins. **Interviewer:** Kia ora, and thank you for those insights to your inspiration. And can we ask where to from here with Rocket Lab and what can we expect to see in 2022 and beyond? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, so I mean, we joke at Rocket Lab that a year at Rocket Lab is like dog years, where one year at Rocket Lab is like three years everywhere else. **Interviewer:** Or pandemic years? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, or pandemic years. So, you know, in one year's time, it's kind of hard to predict. But what I will say is that every year, Rocket Lab has doubled in size. You know, last year we were sort of 550-600 staff; this year we're 1,100 staff. So if you map the company's trajectory, pretty much every year we will double in size. And we have some incredibly ambitious missions. We have a Moon mission launching later this year. We were awarded two missions from NASA to build some spacecraft to orbit Mars, launching in 2024. And, you know, a really, really large satellite constellation build that we just won. So, you know, if you look at the company and including all of the subsidiaries that we've recently acquired, we have more than 1,000 spacecraft or spacecraft components on orbit in the period of time that the company has been running. **Interviewer:** Incredible, and I see what you did there with the trajectory—you're heading to space and beyond! But it is really our honor to congratulate you and to celebrate you as a visionary leader, and thank you so much for spending time with us, Peter Beck. **Peter Beck:** Thank you so much.