The future of EVs, with Rivian’s RJ Scaringe

**Jeff Berman** (0:01)
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**Molly Graham** (1:37)
Hi, I'm Molly Graham, host of Worklife, a podcast from TED.
The most important lessons about work usually aren't the ones anyone teaches you. They come from experience, from uncertainty, from figuring things out as you go.
On this show, my expert guest and I explore how careers really unfold. Through change, through doubt, through the decisions that shape who we become over time. Because those moments aren't the exception. They are the work. Listen to Worklife wherever you get your podcasts.

**Jeff Berman** (2:14)
This Masters of Scale live event presented by Atlassian was recorded at Atlassian Team 26 in Anaheim, California.

**RJ Scaringe** (2:24)
In instability or comfort in chaos is really actually important.
You have to go into it knowing this is like full contact, multi-dimensional chess. And you're doing it sometimes in the middle of a tornado inside of a storm.

**Jeff Berman** (2:39)
Multi-dimensional chess inside a tornado, perhaps also while making dinner, caring for a baby and writing a Broadway musical.
If you're leading a business right now, that description probably feels pretty accurate. So how does Rivian founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, weather the endless storms?

**RJ Scaringe** (2:59)
For me, a recognition that resilience and comfort in instability or comfort in chaos is really actually important. With that, we have a whole process inside the leadership team of checking our own assumptions. Like the world's changing so fast. The thing we thought six months ago, is that still right?

**Jeff Berman** (3:20)
This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, RJ Scaringe. She's the founder and CEO of Rivian Automotive.
Rivian just launched the much anticipated follow up to its first electric vehicle. This one is the R2. It's a crucial moment in the company's scale journey. In my onstage conversation with RJ, we dig into how he thinks about competing with Tesla, the hard-won lessons of building a company that makes both vehicles and software, and much, much more.
RJ, business is hard. It's not easy leading teams, leading companies. Services are hard, software's hard, hardware's hard, logistics are hard. You're kind of doing all of them? Like, how does that work?

**RJ Scaringe** (4:13)
I knew it would be difficult. It wasn't something I said, this is gonna be an easy path.
There's certainly been aspects that are much harder. But a lot of the elements of building any business ring true within Rivian, or whether you're looking at team building, organizational structure design, processes, tool sets, supply chains. It's a challenging business, but I'm having a ball.

**Jeff Berman** (4:35)
How do you think about teams working together when they work on such different parts of the business?

**RJ Scaringe** (4:41)
Yeah, this is one of the things that's maybe most unique about building a car company. When you really look honestly at what's necessary, you need many thousands of people to develop one product.
That product requires, we have to be on the order of about 40 million different decisions to bring it to life.

**Jeff Berman** (5:00)
Forty million.

**RJ Scaringe** (5:00)
Forty million. There's millions of hours of engineering time necessary to deliver it. So the only way for this to work is you have to put lots of people working in parallel.
So you have ultimately like a team full size, and maybe five and a half, six thousand engineers working at the same time on the same product. So it becomes a real exercise in coordination because you're not just talking about homogenous teams of all the same background and all the same skill. You have chemists that are working in battery cell chemistry. You have structural engineers working on the body design, teams working on designing electronics, teams working on building software platforms across the stack from the lower levels all the way up to the application layer.