Fmr SpaceX CIO Ken Venner on Elon, Gwynne, & SpaceX Playbook

**Molly O'Shea** (0:00)
Ken, thank you so much for joining.

**Ken Venner** (0:02)
Oh, my pleasure. I'm so excited to be here.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:04)
We just had an amazing sit down with Jordan. We went through the company. We talked about you joining the team. You have a legendary career. You were at Broadcom. Then you were at SpaceX. Then you've done a couple of space companies since then.
So just like, I think it would be really interesting to maybe, let's start first with why did you join Senra Systems?

**Ken Venner** (0:25)
Yeah, I was really excited about Senra Systems because cable harnesses is such a large, fragmented, unautomated business, and yet it's the backbone to everything that's being built today. There isn't an autonomous vehicle or high tech piece of equipment that doesn't have sensors, actuators, and computers, but all need to be connected together through a cable harness. And most engineers, it's the last thing they think about and the last thing they want to build. And yet Jordan looked at this and said, this business is ripe for consolidation and improvement. And he's just making the right investments to scale up and scale out a business. And scaling up and scaling out are my core skills. So like when I was at Broadcom, I joined them and there were a thousand people, 400 million in revenue.
And the goal was to scale.
And we, in the 11 years I was there, grew to 10,000 employees and 8.6 billion in revenue, did 52 murders and acquisitions. So it's all about finding markets and growing reliable, repeatable, scalable businesses. And I think we can do that again here.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:26)
What's going to be your playbook?

**Ken Venner** (1:28)
Playbook is get it defined, get it working consistently and reliably in such a way that you can now replicate it and then go out and replicate it multiple times. And then every time look for ways to improve what you're doing, make that improvement, and then move it across the entire organization. That's exactly how we did it at Broadcom and it really worked well. And it was very similar to how we did SpaceX, which is bring automation to the table to help people do the right thing at the right time and have the system provide them the right information at the right time, and then scale the company without scaling all the employees linearly to how the company is growing.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:08)
So both Broadcom and SpaceX are having a bit of a moment right now.
I guess if we look back at Broadcom, to your point, you helped scale that company up and it reached a massive inflection point. So what were the biggest lessons that you learned there?

**Ken Venner** (2:26)
Yeah. The biggest lessons are each size you are as you grow requires a different behavior from the company. When you're 10 people, it's a network of us just talking to each other. I need very little process for systems. It's smart people just doing the right thing. You get to 100, you need a little more process but not too much, and then you get to 1,000 and you need more process.
But again, not too much because you can constrain the company by putting too much process in too early and stunt the growth. So you always have to assume smart people, stupid systems, let the right people do the right thing in the moment, but track them. How they're doing it, what they're doing, and make sure they're accountable for the actions they're taking. And then you get to 5,000, 10,000.
It's like everyone knows the piece they know but they don't understand how a whole business works. But bringing that information together and presenting it to the top level people so they can understand how the whole company is operating together is kind of the focus. And that was both Broadcom's growth path and when I joined SpaceX it was again about 1,000 employees producing about one booster a year. And through the years of growing up Warp Drive, the custom platform we built there, we scaled it up to 40 boosters a year and 9,000 employees across multiple locations. And it was just that continuously look at how people do what they do and then collect and present the right information at the right time.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:49)
How did you make the decision to go to Broadcom to SpaceX?

**Ken Venner** (3:53)
Broadcom to SpaceX. So Broadcom to SpaceX was a pretty simple one. The company had gotten big enough that it wasn't really innovating anymore. It was kind of just operating and I get bored in those situations. I'm not really a true just run the system about continuously improving the system. And the CFO at Broadcom was at SpaceX was an ex Broadcomer that I knew. He invited me up one day to just do a tour of the factory. I wasn't looking for a job, but he invited me up. I did this tour of the factory, which is in Hawthorne, downtown LA-ish. And here they are building big metal objects, supposedly cheaper than anyone else in the world in downtown LA. And I'm like, well, this is crazy. But I have manufacturing in my blood. My entire career has been in manufacturing. I'm like, this is a pretty interesting place. No idea who they are. I don't know what they do for a living because SpaceX wasn't a name back in those days. And they're an hour at least away from where I live. So he offered me a job. I'm like, I don't know. I want to drive an hour up to this place. But it was such an interesting story that Elon was going to save humanity from itself by colonizing another planet. Because we're going to screw this one up and we need to keep humankind going and it was another scaling opportunity. So I thought about it, talked to my wife and in the end decided to bite the bullet, take it. It was a great move.