Pete Beck:
So at the end of the day, the thing that motivates me the most is having impact. But the thing with space is the impact doesn’t come easy. You’ve gotta push hard. So a fear of failing and the driver of the impact you can have is pretty intoxicating.

David Cowan:
Welcome to Wish I knew the show about the revelatory aha moments that founders, CEOs and leaders discover along their own business journeys and why taking risks leads to growth. I’m your host, David Cowan, and on today’s episode we’re reaching new heights quite literally by going to where few have ever gone before outer space. And as we head off on our voyage, I’ll be your captain. Well, your moderator and podcasting terms on today’s show. 

Because while space is a brave new frontier for so many, I’ve been an aerospace investor since 2010 and a trek since 1974. In 2015, I took a small step for me and a giant leap for Bessemer when I funded and joined the board of a little startup in New Zealand called Rocket Lab. That’s when I first met Pete Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. It was at a time where it seemed that you had to be a mega billionaire like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson to build a new rocket company.

But having met Pete and learning about his pinpoint attention to detail and work ethic, I was hooked. Launching rockets is unfathomably difficult with no room for error, and entirely inconsistent with Facebook’s credo to break things often. But after eight years, there’s been a shakeout with Rocket Lab touting the highest launch rate success of any rocket company in history.

Today’s episode about deep space technology is also launching at an especially exciting time. XPRIZE and BES Venture Partners just launched the XB 100 list on June 14th. It’s the world’s top 100 private deep tech companies. If you’re already salivating at the idea of deep tech and wanna learn about the promising deep tech players around the world, you can head over to the XB one hundred.com to see the XB 100 list. But maybe do so after listening to this episode, of course. So without further ado, fasten your seat belts because Houston, we have liftoff. Let’s get into my conversation with Pete Beck. Pete, welcome to Wish I Knew podcast. It’s so great to see you again. Thanks, David. It’s been one of the great joys and privileges of my career as a venture investor to be one of your board members at Rocket Lab. When did we meet, do you remember what year it was?

Pete Beck:
I think it was 2015.

David Cowan:
It was after we had just sold Skybox Imaging to Google, and we learned that the hardest thing about deploying a constellation is launch. And so I’d met some other launch startups and then you and I got together and I just loved the vision that you had and the enthusiasm you had and the success that you had along the way. P for the benefit of our listeners, please explain to us what Rocket Lab does for a living. What’s the product? Who are the customers? How does it work?

Pete Beck:
Sure. So the best way to describe us really is an, is an end-to-end space company. So I think we are most well known for our launch vehicles. So we have the electron launch vehicle product, which is a dedicated small launch vehicle. You know, we’ve launched some 35 times over 160 satellites put on orbit now. And then we have the space system side of the house where we build spacecraft. So these, uh, range from interplanetary missions to Mars and through to constellations for communications. So a bifurcation of both launch and also space systems.

David Cowan:
Even as a kid you were a huge fan of rockets and space. What drew you to it?

Pete Beck:
The youngest memory I actually have is standing outside with my father looking up at the night sky and him pointing out all the stars and interrogating me about what I thought about that. And it’s kind of also educating me that every one of those stars has a planet and there could be somebody on a planet looking back at me. And that was kind of the blow your mind apart for a, a young child that really got me interested in space. The energy and the, the coolness of, of all the discoveries and things that were been talked about was super exciting.

David Cowan:
Usually when kids are fascinated by the stars, they get themselves a telescope and look up into the sky. But something compelled you to say, no, it’s not enough to look at it. I’m going to build rockets In a place where nobody was building rockets, how did you come to decide you wanted to build rockets and where does a boy growing up in a New Zealand fishing village start?

Pete Beck:
So you have to understand there was two passion. I had two passions. One was engineering and one was obviously space. And there is no university courses to go to. There’s no kind of logical trajectory. So the best thing to do is just to build them. And I started building rockets when I was at school. And as I went through my working career as an apprentice and then a design engineer and then working in a government lab and all of those things, all that time I would run two shifts in my life. You have the day shift where you create the financial resources to do the night shift. And the night shift was building rockets. So, you know, I would build a rocket engine and I would test it. And I was also at the point in my life where my brain as a teenager wasn’t completely developed and the risk profile I was willing to take was significantly higher than it is now. So I learned that the, I kind of surmised that the best way to test the performance of a rocket was just to put a leg of either side of it. So I started building rocket bikes

David Cowan:
And a rocket bike is just as it sounds, it’s a bike powered by a rocket.

Pete Beck:
I remember doing a festival of a speed event where I ran my rocket bike, but I closed the city off and then run these drag races down the center of the street. And my parents had traveled up, they hated me doing this stuff, but they somehow felt compelled to come and watch this thing. And they arrived just as the plume of the engine shadowed me disappearing down the road. And they sent the ambulance after me as a safety precaution. I just remember my mother just in fits because all she saw is cloud of smoke in an ambulance and she had no context to whether or not I made it to the end.

David Cowan:
Does she still wish that you were a doctor

Pete Beck:
<laugh>? No, I think, I think she’s come to grips with it, yeah. Okay. I think she’s come to grips with it. But yeah, that was kind of the journey in the process. So I built rocket bikes and then rocket packs and rocket scooters and on and on. It went until, you know, I reached my mid twenties where I obviously at some point in time realized that this probably wasn’t the best way to test rockets anymore. A load cell was, is far more safe.

David Cowan:
A load cell, by the way, is an industrial structure designed to safely test rocket engines. Unlike how Pete did it, which was to straddle the rocket engine on his bicycle.

Pete Beck:
There’s nothing like experiencing those failures and whether you’re building a little engine or a big engine to failures or the things that cause failures are often very similar. So I took, it took a lot of those learnings forward.

David Cowan:
They didn’t teach it in school. So did you learn it on Wikipedia?

Pete Beck:
No, just, just read lots of books and corresponded with lots of people in the states. And, and even today, like you, you can read a book about how to design an injector for a rocket engine. You’ll go away, you’ll do analysis and you’ll design the injector and that’s your starting point. And then you put it on the engine test stand and you start testing.

David Cowan:
And Pete’s trial and error didn’t stop there. In 2014, Pete traveled to the United States and went on what he calls a rocket pilgrimage for a couple months. He visited different people and places significant to the space industry from NASA to Aerojet Rocket Dime, a rocket manufacturer that at the time had an F1 engine sitting in their parking lot.

Pete Beck:
I remember, you know, going to Rocket D’S car park and turning up to the reception there and asking if I could talk to some engineers, you know, completely unannounced, strange talking foreign national trying to gain access to a, a rocket factory. So you can imagine how well that ended. Through that trip though, I really realized that the things that I thought were important, the things that I wanted to do within the space industry weren’t being done. And I also learned a lot about the giant space machine. It just became less attractive to be a gear in, in that machine, rather, I sort of felt that there was a better way, perhaps I should just have a crack and, and see if I can architect that better way. And that that was the beginnings of Rocket Lab. I was traveling home on the plane and there’s nothing like a 12 hour flight to kind of give you some good alone thinking time.
And firstly, as a foreign national, it’s very difficult to gain access to work in the industry in the United States, especially one that it, it doesn’t have a university degree, no formal training in the field, just really a picture book of all of the engines and rocket contraptions that I’d built. So it is very difficult to kind of take a picture book of photos and turn it into a career. So sort of faced with that reality and also the reality that the things that I thought really important, you know, dedicated small launch that would have an impact really weren’t considered to be done. And that was really the inflection point. You know, by the time I’d landed, I hadn’t slept one, one minute of that 12 hour flight. I literally came home and I’d already kind of come up with a logo on the flight back and printed a kind of a version of it, stuck it on my garage door and told my wife that’s what we’re gonna go and do.

David Cowan:
Was that before or after SpaceX had pivoted away from the small satellite delivery market?

Pete Beck:
That was 2014. So I think they must have just been close to either pivoting or near, near the end. SpaceX was just, you know, I didn’t visit them. I had no idea who they even were. Like they’re in that time of their career that they were completely unknown really.

David Cowan:
But this, this is where our story takes a turn at the founding moments of Rocket Lab, little did Pete know at the time, the next decade of his career would be spent matching wits against formidable tech tycoons like Richard Branson at Virgin Orbit, Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin and Elon Musket, SpaceX. But if Pete knew one thing, it’s that unlike them, he had already been training his whole life to build rockets. Coming up, Pete takes on the challenge of founding his own company to compete in a space race with us aerospace heavyweights. Now you spent your life figuring out how to build rockets, but actually going off and raising the seed money you needed, that was a new challenge. How did you manage that? Did you know what you were doing?

Pete Beck:
Oh heck no.

David Cowan:
Must have been a little scary,

Pete Beck:
Scary and fun. So in New Zealand, the backdrop there is very, very small venture capital community and everybody was telling me down there, if you go to Silicon Valley, you know that’s the, the big sharks and this is not gonna go good for you and you’re gonna Eden alive. And anyway, I still got on the plane and I gave myself three weeks to kind of either be run outta town or come home with a check for the first week. I, I ran around a whole bunch of startups, some in the space industry and some not in the space industry, just trying to figure out how it all worked because I’d never seen a term sheet. I, I knew absolutely nothing. But, you know, I was lucky that the community in Silicon Valley is a great one. So it was a great environment to learn quickly. Everybody was super willing to share the things that work well and the things that don’t and what to worry about, maybe somewhat arrogantly. I had a plan that I thought just couldn’t fail. So when people start questioning you about why do you think this will work, it was just, of course it was gonna work like this, this was gonna be no issues. So yeah, I, I would say I was lucky. And then the first round I only pitched to three firms because those are the firms that we really, really wanted to work with.

David Cowan:
I remember you came out to Silicon Valley to raise money again, and I remember that I just loved the opportunity so much that I did not want you to go back <laugh> without a handshake. And I think if I recall, we actually verbally handshaked on a deal. I think you were actually on the plane. Were you on the runway? Is that right? Yeah,

Pete Beck:
Yeah. Yep, that’s correct.

David Cowan:
Yep. That was an exciting moment for me that I remember. Well, even though a large part of the company now operates in the United States, you started it in your home country of New Zealand and at the time there was no aerospace industry there. So how did you build a team?

Pete Beck:
Well, it’s fair to say that, that n nobody we hired had any space background and that is part of the magic because there was no predetermined ways of doing things. We used to joke that we built a rocket from first principles rather than from experienced people, which was kind of painful. But what it did do is it forced us to rethink of the way everything was done, the way avionics was done, the way tanks and structures were done, the way rocket engines were done. I mean, we were the first to 3D printer rocket engine and put it into orbit. We were the first to do an all carbon composite rocket and put it into orbit. We were the first to do all fiber optically networked avionic suite on a, on an launch vehicle and put it into orbit. So there was a whole bunch of stuff that we did. And I would say that that was primarily because one, we didn’t know how it should be done and just took it from first principles and using the latest technologies, what’s the best way to solve the problem.

David Cowan:
From the beginning, Pete focused on finding, recruiting and leading the best people, building a culture that safeguarded the mission above all else, whether it was their first launch or 10th launch or 35th launch. At my last count, rocket Lab successfully completed 32 out of 35 missions to space, and that includes the test flights. How favorably does that compare to the industry and what’s your secret?

Pete Beck:
Well, it’s pretty good, to be fair. The nearest kind of analog would be SpaceX and we sit slightly further ahead on, on launch success than, than than the early years there. And I think the secret to the success is pride in a lot of sense and building great machines.
So if you walk around Rocket Lab and you and you look at the company, everything’s tidy. Every tool is in its place where it needs to be. And if you look at the launch vehicles themselves or the spacecraft, you know, there’s nothing on those launch vehicles that look like they belong in a tractor. Like everything is beautifully finished. You know, I’ll go down and look at a launch vehicle and everybody knows that the cable ties holding the wire looms should be 50 millimeters apart, equi space within Nibs pointing up. So you go down there and all the wiring loom is just works of art. And you can argue that why is that really needed? Is that, is that really needed? Does it matter if they’re 50 millimeters or 60 millimeters apart? Probably not. But the reality is, if someone’s taken the pride to make it all look just absolutely beautiful, then chances are they’ve taken the pride to look at the wires at their cable tying and the tray, they’re cable tying too. And I think there’s nothing better than somebody’s, you know, walking away from their job going, that’s the best that can be. So it’s hard coded into the DNA of the company. It’s one of our core values and that is built beautiful things. So, you know, anything that goes out of the door of Rocket Lab, you know, must be beautiful.

David Cowan:
I love

Pete Beck:
It. And generally if something’s beautiful, it works. That’s been my experience, <laugh>,

David Cowan:
If something’s beautiful it works. Now any learnings from those three failures?

Pete Beck:
<laugh>, the first failure was the first test flight and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the launch vehicle whatsoever. What that was is we had a third party contractor doing the flight termination telemetry and it was a tick box that wasn’t ticked for error correction in their software and printed it out and framed it and stuck it in the boardroom for everybody to look at as a reminder of just because you think you have done your job properly, it doesn’t excuse you from checking that everybody else has done their job properly. And then flight 13, which caused the number 13 to be banned within Rocket Lab, it’s 12.9 9 9 9 9 9, now you’re not allowed to say 13 was the tiniest of issues with an electrical connection that wasn’t quite perfectly talked, which resulted in an increase in temperature of the joint, which resulted in some liquid potting compound to become fluid and ultimately transiently shutting the power down to a particular system.
So it’s so mean because if I gave you a piece of paper in a Fal tree to get to that particular failure, you’d have to be really squinting your eyes and going, man, that would be unlucky. And it was. And the flight 20 failure was a similar thing. It’s just crazy. Like it was an electrical issue and we test for that issue in a vacuum chamber and if we just pulled the chamber down like a another half a psi, we would’ve seen that failure. So the lessons there are that all of these things are crazy, crazy tiny. And it just comes back to the fact that in order to kind of drive these out, you can drive these out by design and you can drive these out by process. And then finally you can drive these things out by just people taking care and immense pride.

David Cowan:
Well that’s it. I’m changing my birthday from the 13th of the month to the 12th 0.99. Ninth day of the month. <laugh>.

Pete Beck:
Yep, there you go.

David Cowan:
Zuckerberg was famous for telling his engineers to break things fast and that obviously doesn’t work in the kind of company you’ve built at Rocket Lab. How do you take engineers who are used to Silicon Valley cadence of shipping product and in part upon them the gravity literally that comes with launching rockets?

Pete Beck:
I think we’ve been lucky in the culture we filter for this, right? The bar to get in at Rocket Lab is incredibly high. And we don’t just filter for great engineering talent, we filter for people who have great pride. And I think when you have great pride in things when they don’t work, it’s pretty devastating. So we screen for it and we, we promote that culture and we also are just honest with the staff and, and, and everybody that if we screw this up, this could be literally people’s lives lost in a national security sense or we have the ability to destroy entire companies. You know, if you take a, a company’s satellite, especially a startup and you put it in the ocean, you can often end up just destroying that company because that’s their ability to generate any revenue just gone. So our job is kind of to mitigate and manage the risk to the very, very best we can and make sure that failures and incidents just don’t occur.

David Cowan:
The highs and lows that come with the successes and failures obviously impact you so deeply and personally as a leader in the company, do you share that with everyone or do you feel like you need to mitigate the highs and lows somehow to keep people steady? I’m

Pete Beck:
Not that reflective, nor if there’s, we have a great win generally there’s a million things stacked in front of it, so I just get onto the next thing. But I’ve, I’ve also learned that it’s very important to make sure that the team can celebrate as much as they can on the wins. And I would say as a company, we probably don’t do that well enough. We are just so focused on executing the next thing. But what I would say is if there wasn’t for a launch, then it would be very, very difficult to get anybody to work in the space industry or in, in, especially in the rocket industry because the work is difficult, the consequences is super high and there’s so much energy and effort and emotion that goes into every single launch. And a successful launch is a drug really, because, you know, once you have a successful launch, you just crave the next one. And I think if, if that wasn’t the case, then there’ll be very few rockets that launched to space because all the engineers would do one and then just go home because it’s way too hard. That’s a special thing with, with the industry.

David Cowan:
I remember the board meeting after Rocket Lab sent a spacecraft to the moon, he went to the freaking moon and I went to the board meeting thinking there’s gonna be a party. And you said, well thank goodness we got that behind us and you were onto the next missions, <laugh>, <laugh>. And I kind of thought, aren’t there gonna be extra donuts or something? But, but no onward and upward.

Pete Beck:
Yeah, we can probably do a better job at that.

David Cowan:
Pete, for founders who are following your example of building a company where the consequences can be life or death, what is your advice to them when they’re getting started? Is it to encourage them to move forward despite the risks? Is it to caution them to go slow? How should founders learn from your experience?

Pete Beck:
If you’re gonna take risk, then that when great things happen, right? But if you’re going to take those risks, then, you know, doing it blindly without the work is gonna end in failure in my opinion. So my advice would be, yep, risk is good to take. But once you’ve agreed to take that risk, then you need to do the work to really, really manage the risk and really understand all of the ways that it can go sideways, all the possible ways and make sure you mitigate every single one of those dead ends. Because it’s very easy to follow a path that ends very poorly. And in my experience, most of those things are things that if you thought forward, you probably could have avoided. So take risks, but boy, manage them with the most intricate level of detail.

David Cowan:
We have to talk about the time that you literally ate your hat. For listeners who don’t know what I’m talking about, Pete recorded himself literally eating his own hat after walking back on his statements that he’d never build a big rocket and that his electron rocket would never be reusable. Pete, why did you do it and how did it taste?

Pete Beck:
Well, at Rocket Lab, everybody lives and dies by do what you say you’re going to do. And I think it’s really important to be honest about things to the extreme in some cases. And so I felt that I’d accumulated enough debt that I, I really needed to clear the slate so I could move forward. And to me, I mean a lot of people said, you’re gonna have to eat your hat over that Pete. And I thought, well, all right, we’ll clear the slate and I’ll go and eat a hat. And I look, I really, really do not recommend it. We put it in a blender because it was the most kind of digestible way to eat a hat. And I remember removing the lid, the blender when we were filming it cuz we just, you know, we, we filmed it and the pungent odor of, of emelda hides and whatever was used in that fabric was hideous. But you know, the show must go on. So disappointing thing was that I had to do that like three times because inevitably the cameraman wasn’t happy with the shot. So I ate more than one hat

David Cowan:
<laugh>. Well, our listeners can see that video on YouTube and with that video you lived up to your word, you exemplified the intellectual humility to change your mind and you entertained Rocket Labs adoring public. Take me back to that moment when you realized that a reusable neutron with the potential for human flight was possible. Where were you and what was running through your mind?

Pete Beck:
I mean, a little bit cheeky, I’d always had it in the back of my mind, but there needed to be a certain level of market conditions before I was ever gonna talk to everybody, anybody about it, because I knew I was gonna need to eat my hat at that point. But keeping an open mind is, is is critical in this industry. So I’d had some concept for Neutron for a long time and when it became super clear that in that sort of 2024 to 24, even 30 timeframe there was gonna be a massive deficit of launch, that was when we kind of dusted off the cup and said, right, this is an opportunity. I also very much believe avoiding entrepreneurial drift. So as you’ve seen, I’m sure David, plenty of times an entrepreneurial kind of gets 80% of the way and then wants to change the direction completely onto something new and shiny. And I wanted electron to be really done and dusted before we went into space systems. And I wanted space systems to be well on the way before we went and built another big rocket. So when, when all those things kind of aligned and there was an opportunity through going public to fund such an endeavor, then it all became clear in, in a way we went.

David Cowan:
How involved do you remain in the technical decisions and how do you balance that with the need to empower employees? I mean,

Pete Beck:
If it was up to me, I think I would just be 100% an engineer. That’s the most enjoyable part of my day and I’m still the chief engineer for the company, but we’ve built such a great engineering team and and engineering leadership team that it’s more of a tick box exercise on a concept than, than me going in there and fundamentally changing architectures. That happens occasionally, but I’m lucky enough at this point to just be at more of the end points of big decisions rather than the fundamental beginning or the structural part of big decisions. So, and, and that just comes with maturity, right? As the company’s grown spend, lots of engineers that have grown with the company and they’ve all moved up into leadership positions and and so on and so forth. But it is, and it’s a delicate balance.

David Cowan:
So is there anything about this balancing act that maybe you would’ve done differently that you wish you knew along the way?

Pete Beck:
Oh, that’s a tricky one because you can wish all you want, but the reality is the work needs to be done. Probably I would’ve hired some more senior executives sooner to take some of the, the stuff that I just felt as a CEO I had to do off my hands earlier. That probably would’ve been a better way to go. In hindsight, what

David Cowan:
Do you think was stopping you?

Pete Beck:
Oh, my own stubbornness. You just keep working more and more hours in the day and when things start falling off, that was kind of the point in which the, the trigger point in which to do some of these things rather than kind of, uh, thinking a little bit further forward and going, okay, let’s not get there. Let’s do that slightly earlier.

David Cowan:
So Rocket Lab’s now gaining on SpaceX as the most successful space launch company to compete with Elon Musk. In what ways do you try to emulate his leadership and in what ways do you try to be different?

Pete Beck:
I think our, our culture’s very different. That’s part of the magic of Rocket Lab. Look, SpaceX is an incredible company. Elon has created the most incredible thing. But I think one of the things that we do here very differently is there is no yelling and screaming and thumping at tables. We hold each other to account for sure, but we like to think we do it in a pretty respectful way. Both teams have very driven missions. Both teams work crazy hard and I think you, you see the result.

David Cowan:
Speaking of culture, the company’s always articulated an affinity for the Maori culture of New Zealand. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with the Maori people, both personally and professionally.

Pete Beck:
Yeah, so our launch site is based in the Mahi Peninsula, which is northeast of the south island. Of the north island. One. One of the requirements of a launch site is that it’s very remote. That’s what makes the Mahi Peninsula great, but it’s also, you know, in its remoteness you have a tiny little communities and the land that’s at the launch site is built on is owned by the Maori tribe. And, uh, we, we had a meeting with them at a donut shop of all places and proposed that we were gonna build this launch site and, and launch rockets to orbit out of this farm. And I, I remember vividly the leader of the group at the time said, well, we have been looking at diversifying out of beef and cattle, so this sounds interesting, <laugh>, it’s just been a great partnership and also it’s important to us that that that we give back. So we have good scholarship programs there and yeah, it’s important to us. It’s part of our D N A

David Cowan:
I’ve really marveled at how you cultivate an ecosystem around Rocket Lab ranging from investors and army generals in the United States to fishermen and Maori villagers in New Zealand. When you started the company, had you any idea that you’d have to spend more time as a diplomat than an engineer <laugh>?

Pete Beck:
No, absolutely not. No. If you had told me that I would have to sing Wata, which is a Maori welcome solo to an entire group of folks in a mri, I would’ve never have believed you. And

David Cowan:
How does that song go?

Pete Beck:
I, I shall not repeat. I sung it so badly that all the Maor elders joined in because they felt so sorry for me <laugh>, and I’d gone through my entire life lip syncing everything. So at that point I realized also that I would do just about anything for this rocket company to succeed.

David Cowan:
Why is that? What is it that makes you so committed to make the company work and to see its mission through?

Pete Beck:
Well, I think, I think it’s important, right? It’s not just about firing hot sticks in the sky. You know, the missions that we launch are national security emissions, people’s lives matter, the companies missions to deliver entirely new services to lots and lots of people. And the thing that I get really excited about space is I don’t know any other industry where literally you can make a little box of electronics, stick it up in space and have an impact to thousands or even not millions of people. You know, I think of it very much as, as infrastructure, you know, if you’re an engineer you can go and build a bridge in, in a town, but that bridge really only services the people who use that bridge and the people in that town. Whereas space, like every 90 minutes that satellite’s operating the earth and it’s providing data and services and insights to the entire planet and every everybody on it. So the thing that motivates me the most is having impact, but the thing with space is the impact doesn’t come easy. You’ve gotta push hard. So a fear of of failing and the drive of, of the impact you can have is pretty intoxicating.

David Cowan:
What is it about being a founder, c e o that comes naturally to you and what still challenges you even today after so many years into it?

Pete Beck:
That’s a great question. I, I think what comes naturally is being able to look at project and quickly see the path through to get to the end point and being able to try and rally the resources and align the teams and kind of get through it. I think what comes kind of less naturally is some of the hardest stuff that as a C E O you have to do when you don’t have good performers and you have to make the hard decisions because when you’re working hard together and it’s a close team, that’s really difficult to do. And I know, you know, some CEOs blink an eyelid when those kinds of decisions need to be made. But I will toss and turn in bed at night a hundred times more over having to let somebody go than I will an engineering problem. For example,

David Cowan:
You coined the phrase space is open for business and you just talked about how space colonization improves life on earth. To what degree do you and Rocket Lab now think about space exploration and the impact we can have beyond Earth

Pete Beck:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>? Well, personally, I think about it a lot. We have our Venus mission, which is kind of a, a knights and and weekends project. And that to me is fairly important mission because what we’re trying to do there is answer some of the biggest, if not the biggest question and, you know, are we the only life in the universe or not? Because if you take the scientific approach in the absence of evidence, you’d have to say that we are the only life in the universe. Now, I probably don’t believe that’s true statistically, but until you actually have a piece of evidence to prove it, that is fact. And, you know, our mission to Venus, the probability of discovering life in the 50 kilometer interesting region of the clouds is like so ridiculous to remote that it’s, it’s, it’s almost zero, but it’s kind of worth having a go. And all of these things I think ultimately drive to the betterment of human and human nature even trying to understand where we fit in the universe. So I mean, philosophically for me, that’s actually really an important project and we’re super lucky to have, you know, been able to do the, the mission to Moon Vanessa last year and we’ve got two missions to Mars as well. Nasa. So exploring well out past our planet is pretty exciting

David Cowan:
As Pete makes an impact on the planet and beyond. He’s also helping New Zealand as a mentor to so many local entrepreneurs. Pete talked to me about why mentorship is so important to him.

Pete Beck:
If you’ve got a set of skills or knowledge that can, can be really impactful to, to somebody else, it’s almost your duty to pass that on. And also the New Zealand venture capital environment is, you know, I was started, was just non-existent. In fact, I would say the ironic thing about that was, you know, everyone was telling me that the VCs in, in Silicon Valley were the sharks. Well the ironic thing there was it’s completely inverted and it’s super hard. Like if, if you’re a, a New Zealander down the bottom of nowhere and you want a build a billion dollar business or more, it’s incredibly difficult and rare and it shouldn’t be because Kiwi are pretty good at some of this stuff. They’re just cocooned in an, in an environment that’s not very helpful in achieving it. So I would say that it’s a huge opportunity to try and give back and a huge opportunity to see other great entrepreneurs kind of thrive out of New Zealand.

David Cowan:
You see an opportunity to bring some of the Silicon Valley culture to New Zealand and foster boar collaboration, more entrepreneurship.

Pete Beck:
Absolutely. There’s a real magic in Silicon Valley. There’s some bad stuff too, but there’s some real magic and, and and trying to bring that down to New Zealand and, and creating that cross-pollinization, I think is benefit for both countries and, and all entrepreneurs.

David Cowan:
Tell me about the bad stuff. What’s the bad stuff of Silicon Valley?

Pete Beck:
No offense, David, but like checks get written that just should not get written. And I would say that quite often there’s this kind of a theme that follows it’s hot and especially in areas that are like technically very difficult to diligence. And I think that sometimes creates some pretty wacky markets and, and corrections. So, you know, may, maybe that’s just my conservative engineer coming outta me, but you know, Silicon Valley can create really large bubbles under their own abilities.

David Cowan:
Yeah, well I we totally deserve that remark. <laugh>, we should be eating our hats every day. <laugh>.

Pete Beck:
I think the good outweighs to bad by a long way, so I wouldn’t get too hat hungry. <laugh>,

David Cowan:
I’ve got five rapid fire personal questions for you. Are you ready?

Pete Beck:
I’m

David Cowan:
Ready. What are you reading or watching? Currently

Pete Beck:
I’m watching air traffic control emergencies.

David Cowan:
Oh, it’s fascinating. Is that on Netflix or how do you No,

Pete Beck:
No, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s on, it’s on YouTube and I’m in the final process of my helicopter license. So I, I find it very useful to understand all the emergency situations possible and how people react. It’s kind of, of studying that at the moment. So if I do find myself in one of these positions then I have some, some knowledge to draw against.

David Cowan:
Fascinating. Okay. What’s your favorite place that isn’t your home or your work?

Pete Beck:
There’s a, a creek called the Po Mahaka River where I do gold mining.

David Cowan:
Whom do you goldmine with?

Pete Beck:
Generally just, just my son and, and sometimes my wife and and daughter. Nothing better than getting paid to dig a hole. <laugh>.

David Cowan:
If you could have a stage walkout song, what would it be?

Pete Beck:
Not Rocket Man. I can tell you what, it’s not <laugh>. I’m so sick of that song.

David Cowan:
<laugh>, what skill would you love to learn?

Pete Beck:
Well, you’ll like this David. So I wrote a list at Christmas and on that list of things to must do this year. And I like to do things that are very uncomfortable. It’s a little bit of a, an illness may, maybe that’s why I enjoy the space industry so much because I think if you’re in your comfort zone, then either you are not doing it right or something bad’s about to happen. Anyway, I sat down and I chose the most uncomfortable thing I could think of. And uh, my things to do this year is to play Johnny be good on guitar and sing it in front of people. Now I don’t know how to play a guitar. We’ve established I can’t sing, so that was the most uncomfortable thing I could think of.

David Cowan:
So what do you wish you could do more of and what do you wish you could do less of

Pete Beck:
At work? I would say I wish I could do more engineering and, and less kind of CEO eing. You know, I, I enjoy the, the thrill of the chase and doing big deals and all those kinds of things, but I think every c I will tell you there’s a whole bunch of stuff in there that’s just not fun. And then in a personal context, I wish I could spend more time with my family. I think that would be, that would be great.

David Cowan:
On the Wish I Knew Podcast, we end each episode with a parting thought for our listeners as they embark on their own personal and professional journeys. So I’ll ask you this question, Pete. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, what do you wish you knew either before it all began or as it was unfolding?

Pete Beck:
I don’t wish I knew it at all, because if I knew it, I think most logical, sane people would stop. So I know that’s the wrong answer for your question, but I, I really honestly would not want to know. And I think the successes are great. The failures are equally as great because you learn just as much if not more from those hard times. You know, I’ve often asked, what would you do differently? And I wouldn’t do anything differently. I’d do it exactly the same. It would be equally as painful. But I think all of those things are the magic that actually makes the company and the people.

David Cowan:
Well, if that doesn’t inspire a new generation of founders, I don’t know what will. That’s it for today’s episode of Wish I Knew. You can find and follow the show on Apple, Spotify, Amazon music, or anywhere you listen to podcasts or at bvp.com/wish I knew an extra special. Thank you to Pete Beck for joining us on today’s episode. Remember to check out the XB 100 list. That link is in our show notes. Wish I Knew is a podcast by Bessemer Venture Partners. The show is created by our very own Karen Lee and Christine Dickers. I’m your host, David Cowen. Our show is produced by the team at Philia Media. Our lead producer is Molly Getman. Our executive producer is Kate Walsh. We’re engineered by Evan Viola. Our theme music is by Terry Devine King at Audio Network. Additional Music by Blue dot Sessions. And remember, if you’re gonna live and die by what you say you’re gonna do when you’re wrong, you’re gonna have to eat your hat. We’ll see you on our next episode.

 

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