Welcome to SPEED! This episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Bruey loves challenges.
He studied physics in college in part ‘because it was hard’. He worked at SpaceX, a company notorious for impossible deadlines and burnout for 5.5 years. And he’s now running Varda, a company that is going to make drugs (very hard) in space (WHAT?)
Will, Delian Asparouhov, and Dan Marshall co-founded Varda in 2020. In their first year, they raised >$50M and hired a stellar team.
Bruey is obsessed with moving fast. In this episode he shares 4 secrets to speed that have the Varda team moving insanely fast, while have fun doing it.
1. Laughing in the lifeboats
In startups, 💩 will hit the fan. In the early years of SpaceX, rockets failed 3 times to reach orbit. The only way to do great work in an environment like this is to bring joy, curiosity, and fun, especially when things get tough.
Bruey brings this superpower every day to Varda.
Even when deadlines are incredibly tight and months of the company’s work might be riding on a single engineer, he'll be brainstorming with the team or cracking jokes to help people relax.
2. Embracing ‘The responsible engineer’
Every project at Varda has a single responsible engineer. They have the responsibility and authority to make that project succeed. Even the coffee machine has this. If it's out of beans, they’ll say, “Ping the RE for the coffee machine!”
This creates a culture of ownership and prevents diffusion of responsibility. It can be intense (Bruey was inspired by Extreme Ownership, about Navy SEALs), but the stress is balanced by hiring amazing people and laughing in the lifeboats.
3. Cutting scope
Once staffed, it’s hard to speed up projects by adding people or pushing harder. Your one tool is cutting scope, but people hate this because of sunk cost bias. If you’ve spent 2 weeks building a prototype of a subsystem, it’s going to feel like crap when you realize it needs to be cut to meet a deadline.
So Varda celebrates it. Bruey will say “That’s a good scope cut” acknowledging the win and the hard decision, and everyone respects that engineer taking one for the team.
4. Parallelizing like crazy
At SpaceX, Bruey and his teammates would run a set of minimal ‘confidence’ tests, to get comfortable with the system they were deploying. Then they’d put their system on the rocket, and run the by-the-book tests while the rocket was being assembled.
This creates a game out of things, where you gamble a little by running a low number of tests, but also massively testing up.
Varda ran a parachute test with the actual flight capsule to test multiple systems at the same time. This was risky (if the parachute didn’t work, they’d destroy months of work), but because it worked, it sped up the whole company.
If you or a friend are starting a company in climate, health, education, or another important problem area, reach out! We’d love to help you realize your vision for improving the world. Consider this a warm intro.
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