with tesla your goal has been to make a better car and you've done that with an electric vehicle that people covet that has quite a cult following that's upgradable but you also want to achieve and your turn of phrase is very nice or try to achieve this Platonic ideal of a car right to reach your affection so what does the perfect car look like well I'm going to do I do use that phrase with our engineering design team that aspirationally we're in pursuit of like ideal of the perfect car and it here knows what that looks like actually but it's I want to try to make every element of the car as as flawless as possible will always be you know some degree of imperfection but try to minimize that and create a car that is just delightful in every way and I think if you do that then the rest kind of takes care of itself that third failure in a row did you think I need to pack this in though why not I don't ever give up I mean I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated eight weeks later must bet the company on another flight we have liftoff this time around everything worked perfect that portal hadn't worked that would have been it we would have not had the resources to do analysis really liking what you do whatever area that you get into given that even if you if you're the best the best there's always a chance of failure so I think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing if you don't like it life is too short if you like what you're doing you think about it even when you're not working I mean it'll just it's something that your mind is drawn to and and if you don't like it you just really can't make it work I think so many people try to talk me out of starting a road company it was it was crazy one good friend of mine collected a whole series of videos of rockets blowing up and maybe watch those you just didn't want me to lose all my money we're doing these things that seem unlikely to succeed and we've been fortunate and at least thus far they have succeed now is the time to take risk you don't have kids as you get older your obligations increase so you and once you have a family you start taking risk not just for yourself but for your family as well it gets much harder to do things that might not work out so now is the time to do that before you before you have those obligations so I would encourage you to take risks now to do something bold you won't regret the failures are not the most terrible things well you have to learn from it and react to it yeah exactly is when you're building something new there's going to be mistakes and it's important to to recognize those mistakes acknowledge them and take corrective action and the successful company is very much more about how quick are you to fix the mistakes not will you make mistakes or admit a mistake absolutely yeah and if you see the difference between a startup that is successful one that is not as because the successful one they're both made mistakes but the successful one recognizing mistakes fix them very quickly and the unsuccessful one tries to deny that the mistakes exist you know extremely smart people are sometimes quite arrogant because they believe in what they believe in right and so when they face criticism it's less likely to admit you know they can make mistakes with that in your case I learned it when I was doing when I was studying physics the the you know in physics you're taught to always question yourself you're taught to always assume that you're wrong not assume that you're right and you have to prove yourself not not wrong and I think that that that physics framework is really where where I learnt it and it's very effective for wonderful learning counterintuitive things that aren't obvious hmm so you are very famous in saying that failure is actually an option and if you're not failing but that means you're not innovative yeah it's not like I like failure if you like snow is terrible but if you only do things that are certain to succeed then you're only going to be doing very obvious thing when interview someone to work the companies would be to ask them tell me about the problems that they worked on and how to solve them and if someone was really the person that solved it they'll be able to answer multiple levels they'll be able to go down to the brass tacks and if they weren't they'll get stuck and then you can say oh this person was not really the person who solved it because anyone struggled hard with a problem if again if you're creating company or if you're joining companies the most important thing is to make sure is to attract great people so either view would join a group that's amazing that you really respect or if you keep building a company you've got to gather great people I mean all the company is is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service and so depending upon how talented and hardworking that group is and degree to which they are focused cohesively in a good direction that will determine the success of the company so do everything you can to to gather great people if you're creating a company you got to make sure that whatever you're doing is a great product or service it has to be really great and I go back to what I was saying earlier where if you're a new company I mean let's just like some new industry or new market that if it's an untapped market or then then you have more ability to just as the standard is lower for your product service but if you're entering anything where there's an existing the place against large entrenched competitors then your product or service needs to be much better than that it can't be a little bit better because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and they say why would you buy it as a consumer you're always going to buy the trusted brand unless there's a big difference so a lot of times you know entrepreneur will come up with something which is only slightly better and it's it's not you can't just be slightly better it's got to be a lot better you are unusually fearless and willing to go in the face of other people telling you something that's crazy and I know a lot of pretty crazy people you still stand out where does that come from or how do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea where do you get the internal strength to do that I love this all I'd say I actually think I see if feel fair quite strongly so as long as the I just have the absence of fear I've I feel it quite strongly but there are times when if something is important enough you believe in it enough that you do it in spite of fear so speaking of important things selects people shouldn't think III should if you think well I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn't do it it's normal to be to feel fair like you'd have to definitely something mentally wrong you shouldn't feel fear so you just feel it and let the importance of it drive you to do it anyway yeah you know I ask you something that can be helpful as fatalism some degree you could just think it's just accept the probabilities then that diminishes fear so I'm starting SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10% and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose lose everything but that maybe would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward even if we died maybe some other company could pick up the baton and move and keep moving it forward so that we still do some good yeah say what Tesla I forget odds with a car company succeeding were extremely low depending on how well you want to do in particularly for starting a company you need to work super hot so what is super heart mean well when my brother and I was starting out his company instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch and we showered at the YMCA and we're so hot up we had one computer so the the website was up during the day and I was coding at night seven days a week all the time and I sort of briefly had a gopher in that period and in order to be with me chefs asleep in the office so I work hard like it mean every waking hour that's that's the thing I would I would say if you particular if you're starting a company and I mean you can do simple math say like okay if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100 you'll get twice as done as much done in the course of a year as the other company when does half be focused on the short term and money coming in when creating a company because otherwise the company will for die so that the I think that a lot of times people think like creating company is going to be fun I would say it's not it's really not that fun when their periods of fun and their periods of which were just awful and particularly if you see of the company you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company there's no point in spending your time on things that are going right so you only spend on things on your time on things that are going wrong and there are things that are going wrong that other people can't can't take care of so you're like the worst you have a filter for the crappers problems in the company most pernicious and painful problems so I wouldn't say it's I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold and there's a friend of mine who says like starting companies like staring at the abyss and eating glass and there's some truth to that we're sharing is the best part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because where's mo startups fail it's like 90 percent ugly 99 percent of of startzville so I bet that's the staring in to give this part you can't see constantly saying okay if I don't get this right the company will die it should be quite right for quite stressful and and then the eating glass part is you've got you've got to do you've got to do the problems you gonna so you're going to work on the problem that the company needs you to work on not cons you want to work on and so that the unit working on problems that that you'd really wish you weren't working on and so that's the eating glass part and that goes on for a long time so how do you keep your focus on the big picture when you're constantly faced with we could be out of business in a month well it's just a very small percentage of mental energies on the on the big picture like you know you know where you generally heading for and and the fascial path is going to be some sort of zig zaggy thing in that direction and try not to deviate too far from the path that you want to be on but you're going to have to do that some degree but I don't want to I don't to diminish the I mean I think the product the profit motive is is a is a good one if the rules of an industry are properly set up so there's only fundamentally wrong with pop and in fact profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you're doing then you're spending to create it that's a good thing and if you're not if that's not the case then you'll be out of business and rightfully so you're not adding up right the innovation can be very exciting life the doing business sometimes requires you know assistance sometimes could be very boring do you have the same plunder from innovation as from business running a business well going to rob that you do just the innovative engineer instead of a business owner or runner I mean I'd love to just do innovation work and just do engineering but you raise a good point because you know a lot of life in general any job there's like you have to do your chores you know there's no nobody else can do that for you well it's yet I think to be successful at almost anything you can't it you have to do the tough stuff and as well as the enjoyable stuff you have to do the boring stuff as well as the non boring stuff and if you don't do your chores then bad things will happen but if they don't do the things that they don't like to do then the company will be in trouble yeah like you have to basically be like it's more fun to cook the meals and to clean the dishes okay but you need to clean vicious we need to get that yes as your boss exactly that's why I really thought like how can I provide advice that would be most helpful and I'm not sure I've given enough thought to do that to give you the best possible answer but I think I think certainly being focused on something that you're confident will have high value to someone else and just being really rigorous in making that assessment because people are attend to natural human tendencies wishful thinking so a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say well what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit and it's it that is it that is a really difficult thing to to tell you can you tell the difference between those two things yeah so you need to be sort of very rigorous in your self self analysis I think certainly extremely tenacious and and then just work like hell I mean you just have to put in you know 80 hour 80 100 hour weeks every week and then I like that's that's all those things improve the odds of success okay I mean if other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks then even if you're doing the same thing you know that in one year you will achieve what they achieve you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve I would definitely advise people your soldering company to expect a long period of quite high difficulty yeah but it means long as people take super focused on creating absolute best product or service that really delights their end customer if they stay focused on that then it should be basically if if you get a such that your customers want you to succeed then then you probably will alright you have to focus on the customer delivering for them yeah make sure if your customers love you you will your other successor dramatically higher question that has been discussed over the past couple of days should we be considering one tips one way only takes to Mars what's the best approach to colonize the planet with it but what you do it's not socially acceptable to think people will sign up to do it I think is plenty of people are signed up for a warrior to Mars but maybe if I could have a show of hands who would consider such an option I see some not married or perhaps enough for a couple of missions simply beam up and I think it's sort of like is it a one-way mission and then you die or is it one or a mission and you get resupplied that's a big difference wait for the second option yeah exactly but I mean I think it's an interesting route point because you want to bring the spaceship back like these spaceships are expensive okay if they're hard to build you can't just leave them there so whether or not people want to come back or not it's kind of like they can jump on if they want but do you need the spaceship back thank you I mean kind of weird like it was like huge collection of spaceships on Mars over time really it's like where you spin the back and of course there's just been a bet CEO of SpaceX and you've said that your ultimate goal is to get humankind to Mars I've heard your response to the question but these guys need to hear it why is Mars important what is Mars matter sure well I think the it's really a fundamental surgeon we need to make as a civilization I you know what kind of future do we want do you want a future where we are forever confined to one planet until some eventual extinction event however far in the future that might occur or do we want to become a multi-planet species and and then ultimately be out there among the stars being among many planets many star systems and I think the latter is a far more exciting and inspiring future than the former and and Mars is the next natural step in fact it's the only planet we really have a shot at at establishing a self-sustaining city on and and I think once we do establish such a city there will be strong forcing function for the improvement of spaceflight technology that will then enable us to establish colonies elsewhere in the solar system and ultimately extend beyond the beyond our solar system and and so there's the defensive reason of protecting the few humanity ensuring that the light of consciousness is not extinguished should some calamity before earth but also that's the defense of reason but personally I find the word what it gets me more excited is is the fact that this would be an incredible adventure maybe like the greatest adventure ever mmm and it will be exciting and inspiring and they need to be things that excite me inspire people yeah after your you know reason is why you get up in the morning it can't just be solving problems it's got to be something something great is going to happen in future yeah we talked about this at length yesterday it's not an exit strategy or a back-up plan for saving time or fails right it's also to inspire people on earth right and to transcend and just to go beyond our mental limits of what we think we can achieve right I mean I think it sort of how incredible the Apollo program was and just yeah I mean if you ask anyone and to name names of humanity's greatest achievements in 20th century the Apollo program landing on the moon would wouldn't it and in many of our most places you know on a 2001 with just a toy a friend of mine and you asked me what I was going to have to pay pal and I thought well you know I was wondering like I'd like to be involved in space but I just didn't think as a thank you as an individual and but I was curious as to when we when we NASA would be sending a team to Mars because that was always gonna be the thing to do after a MOOC I figured that could be some plan when I just go to websites and I could read the you know the schedule then Martha there oh yeah it's like okay 2017 good okay but actually there wasn't anything on the website and or at least I thought like am I cannot I'll find it like what's going on here and it was secret I don't know I so but it turned out that that NASA had done a study on what it would cost to send to do a manned Mars mission and I this was under Bush the first and I suppose he asked for a 90-day study she would left a taking office and NASA came back with a 500 billion a price tag and he said okay maybe not kill you not me that's when five hundred billion dollars was serious money if the government so I so then that got Toby shell and it was like you're not allowed to talk about any kind of crude mission to Mars at NASA anyway so I thought well if I can do something that word galvanize public interest that and then that public interest would translate to additional appropriations from NASA increase the budget then then maybe they could do it so the puts actually what I sort of thinking I would do is send us a small greenhouse the surface of Mars it was seeds in dehydrated gel and then upon landing hydrated Jenna grow the plants and the Pollack tests respond to precedents and superlatives so this would be the farthest that life ever traveled the first life on Mars I try to start figure out how to do this with the proceeds that I had from from PayPal and I was able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft down and the communications and the little greenhouse everything but the one thing I couldn't compress was the cost launch there's only a few options and the us options are way too expensive and so I ended up going to Russia three times to try to buy the biggest ICBM and the Russian nuclear fleet that's where I start yeah yeah go baby well yeah I mean okay they were there was there was some strange trips that's for sure but you look like virtually like you can buy any it's a very careful of society somewhere so actually didn't go she had a deal to pick to buy to the ICBMs – the nukes and but I can't even conclusion after that third trip that it would really matter like you for before I actually came to inclusion that my initial premise was was was wrong because I actually think there's there's transponder will in the American population particularly to to explore United States you know maybe more than any other country is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration and it's really fundamental to psyche so if people think there's a way I think you actually get a lot of support but but then it can't be just banging your head against the wall I gotta believe but this can be done without breaking the federal budget so that's when I said okay well is there some way to affect the cost of space transport and and is really and so I got together with a group of people over series of Saturdays just to just try it on said if there's something super fun de mentally super expensive about rockets or can the cost be substantially improved and that we had a bunch of those kind of brainstorming sessions and I couldn't see I couldn't see any fundamental obstacle to improving the cost of rockets so that's when I started SpaceX okay I'll just build them myself yeah and then but I said at that point I would say before the quality of success was definitely less than 30 percent I thought it would most likely not succeed but was worth the try [Music] you
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