Ken Venner
speaker
352 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Ken Venner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So I built all the systems and IT technology that drove that business.
Day started at five o'clock in the morning, driving up to Hawthorne, trying to miss the crowd, getting in by six, and then working with all the various groups in the organization to define how they were operating and making sure
We were not only collecting the information, but we were presenting design changes they were making up front and their impact on operations and making it very apparent very early what was going on so that you didn't get to a certain point and go, like, that design change just cost us $5 million to implement.
They knew as it was going through.
So it was a very tightly coupled system that kept everyone working together and then just trying to scale the business.
And Elon had hired me because they had Visual, a purchased application.
He wanted to build.
the digital nervous system for the 21st Century Rocket Company.
And I'm like, I started that way at AT&T early, early in my career building because no purchase software existed.
And the opportunity to build it again, I'm like, this is either the smartest thing or the stupidest thing we've ever done.
And I have no idea right now whether this is smart or stupid.
And I'd say for the first two years, I didn't think it was such a smart idea.
By year three, when we really had the software working well and the company was really using it, I'm like, this man is a genius.
He figured out what we needed to do, how we needed to get it done.
It became one of the major differentiators for how SpaceX could scale and keep all the information together and connected with each other.
Number one is first principles thinking eliminate before automation is clear to what he's saying and remove before automate is an activity and then just holding people really accountable and driving them the whole concept of a responsible engineer.
is what I learned there.
And that person owned that part from first requirements all the way through to post-flight.
There were no handoffs.
There was no finger pointing either.
Showing 61–80 of 352 · page 4 of 18
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