Doug Bernauer

speaker

511 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Doug Bernauer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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The a16z Show · Three Startups Reinventing Critical Infrastructure · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

Oh man, it's a fun story.

So I was at SpaceX for 12 years.

I joined in 2007.

So I joined when they had two failed rockets, no successful rockets.

And so I got to work on the first ones that worked.

Yeah, I just wanted to work on an important mission.

And I really just cared, can I like polish one stone of this like great big pyramid that is like some lifetime achievement for someone else even, right?

That's what I wanted.

So yeah, I joined, I did that.

I did the first two Falcon 9s, did the ground system for it entirely, which involved all the permitting also.

So this is like launching a rocket from a military base.

There's a lot of like regulatory stuff there.

There's

Your first foray into the marketing wilderness.

Totally.

And not to eat up all the time, you know, I worked on like the first rocket with legs called Grasshopper back in 2011.

It was a four person team really designing, building the whole team, the whole thing.

And we were reporting directly to Elon, like just Elon, two of us, four, and then building the whole thing.

And it was awesome because we did really well.

We got lucky a lot of times, but we made a rocket that flew and landed on legs.

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