Tom Gardner

We're so pleased to be spending this time with Sir Peter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab.

Before going into our conversation, I'll just share, I don't know how familiar you are with The Motley Fool, but when we recommend companies and often put our own skin in the game with our members, we do so with a five-year contract.

a minimum holding period generally, and ideally multi-decade holding period.

So we like to assess the long-term vision and mission strategy and performance of the business.

And obviously, we don't want to put you in a position where you're having to give any forward-looking statements.

So just deny any of our long-term questions that you can't answer, but just letting you know that we really are most interested in the very long-term.

And our greatest investments, which is not unusual for people throughout their lives, are the ones that they held the longest period of time.

Now, I love my low cost basis of $25 a share right around there for Rocket Lab.

But Seth Jason, who's here, and Lou Whiteman, who can't be here today, both recommended the stock.

and owned the stock since it was below $5 a share.

So a lot of our Motley Fool members have gotten in some early low positions with the business.

But I think, Peter, we'd love to hear you just outline the main components of Rocket Lab, maybe beginning with space systems, since it's easy to overlook the segment, or many may view Rocket Lab as a launch company.

Can you just a walking tour of the business, please?

Can you talk about the interplay as an entrepreneur and an engineer between the importance of creativity and imagination, discovery and experimentation, and how crucial it is to execute down to a layer of detail and precision that, given the business, most people would ever encounter anything like what it takes to have the conviction when you put something on the launchpad that it's time to go?

It feels to me like most of our questions will weave between engineering and entrepreneurship.

So perhaps you can continue to blend those by telling us the process of making acquisitions to be a payload provider, to own the payload, why that's significant and how far you are in that process, how complicated it is to assemble that and why it matters.

Just a succinct light question for you about investors in Rocket Lab.

If an investor today wanted to align their time horizon with your time horizon as an investor, how long should they be thinking about holding the stock?

There's so much of a transactional dynamic in the public markets with a lot of information.

One of the biggest challenges we face at The Motley Fool is to teach the importance of finding something that you want to be an owner of.