Brian Ippolito [00:00:02]:

I've been here for 16 years. When I started, we were about 130, 140 employees. I was the young guy. I was the kid in engineering for like 4-ish years, and then all of a sudden the growth started happening. So we definitely had a rapid growth. We're almost up to 1,000 employees now. So just, I've seen that grow over the past 10 or 12 years. My personal track, obviously I was a, I think so, you can ask my boss, strong performer in the engineering role, kind of went from engineer to senior engineer and then had a little bit of a team lead situation going on.

Brian Ippolito [00:00:34]:

And then just like you hear the historic cliché, you're going to go from somebody's buddy to somebody's boss overnight.

Matt Gjertsen [00:00:55]:

When people think of aerospace or defense, they usually think of two big categories of companies. You have the legacy primes like Lockheed or Boeing that have decades of experience and hundreds of thousands of employees. And then you have startups like Avast or Castilian. Maybe they have a few years of experience, a few hundred employees. What most people don't realize is that there's a really important third category of companies that are usually smaller, maybe hundreds of employees, but they've also been around for decades, often since World War II. These are companies that are highly specialized and serve incredibly important niches for American manufacturing. Our guest today comes from one of these companies. Brian Ippolito is the senior director of operations at Morada Controls.

Matt Gjertsen [00:01:41]:

As you will hear later, Morada has been around since the 1940s, but the company is almost 10x in size over the past decade. Brian has spent his entire career at Morada, and starting as a mechanical engineer, moving up through the ranks. In this discussion, we touch on his journey as a leader. What has changed now that he is a leader of leaders, as well as some of the broader talent challenges that Murata faces along with others in the manufacturing industry. For any engineer listening, make sure to stay tuned because Brian gives one of the best answers I have ever heard for how to handle this shift from building things to managing people who build things. You know, how do you scratch that itch as an engineer? He has a really great technique to solve this. Before we get into the discussion, I do want to remind you that if you are listening to this show and realize that the managers in your organization need more support, Built, my company and the reason this show exists, is here to help. At Built, we are on a mission to train the next generation of hard tech leaders how to build teams capable of solving the world's hardest problems.

Matt Gjertsen [00:02:48]:

Just send an email to hello@builtleaders.com and we'll see if we can help with that. Shameless plug out of the way. Let's get into the discussion with Brian Ippolito. Brian, I'm so excited to have you on the Leadership Launchpad. How are you doing today? I am well.

Brian Ippolito [00:03:05]:

Thanks for having me. Very excited to have the chat.

Matt Gjertsen [00:03:07]:

I'm excited for this for a number of reasons. And I'd love to start with something that I learned when we first got connected. I had heard of Morata before. Many people who are familiar with the space industry and with other industries might be familiar with it. But I had no idea of kind of the deep heritage that the company has. So I'd love to start with you just kind of giving a rundown of what the company's focus area is, what some of that heritage is, as kind of a place to start so that listeners kind of know the position within the industry that you're talking from.

Brian Ippolito [00:03:39]:

Sure. Yeah, very good question. Obviously, Morata has been around forever, started in 1943 in a little corner of northwest New Jersey. We are primarily an aerospace and defense contractor. So we are serving a lot of the markets from the warfighter to space stuff, for aerospace, naval systems, and things of that nature. And the evolution of Morada since 1943 obviously has a long history being pre-World War II. So it all kind of started with the founder, Pat Morada, overhearing someone saying they needed aerospace components. At the time, Northwest New Jersey had some aerospace companies aside from Morada, and started making some stuff in his basement, and eventually bought a schoolhouse, and became 80 years later a big player in aerospace and defense.

Brian Ippolito [00:04:24]:

So along the years we've done a lot of missions for like things like Apollo, definitely big into the space race of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. There was a lot of work with the US Navy and the buildup there. And then in the '90s we started doing some power systems. Electrical engineers joined the team and now we're doing missile fin actuators, doing space stuff, launch vehicles, kind of a well-rounded team all around.

Matt Gjertsen [00:04:48]:

Yeah. The thing that I love most about is because as I've learned over the past decade or so, more and more about manufacturing in the US, and I kind of talked about this in the intro as well of there's, you know, we talk a lot about the big defense primes that consolidated a ton back towards the end of the Cold War. We talk a lot about these new companies, but there's this wide array of very often family-operated companies, other manufacturing companies all across the country. The interesting thing that I find about Morata is that many of those companies have stayed quite small, and you hear about them struggling, you hear about them worrying about the next generation, whereas especially, you know, as there's been this boom over the last decade or So it sounds like Murata has really embraced that and grown. Is that right?

Brian Ippolito [00:05:32]:

Totally. Yeah. So a big thing, we're now third generation family owned, and a lot of the struggle that you hear about traditionally with the third generation hasn't really impacted us. The family is very much involved. A big thing that they do is they have all had jobs outside of the family company prior to coming back. So there's more experiences just than what's happening of, hey, like I was 14 years old, then I started in the stockroom. They all kind of went out and did something else and then came back, and they all brought different experiences and different values back to the organization and done something with it. The family members are very much still involved now, and it's kind of something special that you don't see much of, especially in aerospace and defense area.

Brian Ippolito [00:06:10]:

Everybody's gobbling everybody else up, and it's kind of, you know, anybody that's growing to the level that you are kind of gets scooped by somebody else. And that's sometimes where you lose what's special, right? You lose the family-orientedness of being scrappy and getting stuff done. And sometimes that gets consumed by the bigger companies that do that.

Matt Gjertsen [00:06:28]:

I'm really intrigued in what you just said, that all these members of the family, they still go out and kind of work elsewhere and then come back. I don't want to put you on the spot, so if you don't have an example of this, then feel free to say so. But I would be really interested, does anything come to mind of, you know, you said they come back with these ideas that they then implement? Because I do think you're right. So often in, in companies when they're around for a long time, the challenge is that they just get kind of stuck in their ways, and this seems like a great way to get out of that trap. I don't know, are there any examples that come to mind for you of ideas or practices that have come from outside the company that have really helped Murata stay kind of leading edge?

Brian Ippolito [00:07:05]:

Yeah, sure. So Michael Murata, who's the youngest of the brothers, he was actually in Florida selling airplanes, so very much in the aerospace business before he came back to Murata and liked what he was doing. And it seems to be warmer in Florida than the 15 degrees high as we get here in New Jersey lately. He brought a different perspective of, hey, I've done something that wasn't, you know, making widgets. I was selling, you know, to larger components. It definitely brings a different aspect of everything, right? So I have a different career because I've only been here and right out of school. Yeah, but when you get to go somewhere else and see something else and bring it back, it definitely brings a different perspective, different ideas, and not just, hey, this is what I'm going to do the rest of my life. So pretty cool.

Matt Gjertsen [00:07:45]:

On that note, we tend to talk about leadership here. That's kind of our thing. You, as you just said, have grown within Murata from the very beginning. I'd love to spend a little bit of time kind of talking through your journey, starting as an engineer and moving up through the ranks. Like, if you think back to when you first became a people leader, what were some of those kind of first challenges that you faced, especially because you were growing in the organization as the organization was growing tremendously? So if we think back several years, what were some of the first challenges that you faced?

Brian Ippolito [00:08:17]:

Yeah, so to give the extra context there, so I've been here for 16 years. When I started, we were about 130, 140 employees. I was the young guy, I was the kid in engineering for like 4-ish years, and then all of a sudden the growth started happening. So we definitely had a rapid growth. We're almost up to 1,000 employees now. So just, I've seen that grow over the past 10 or 12 years. My personal track, obviously I was a strong performer in the engineering role, went from engineer to senior engineer, and then had a little bit of a team lead situation going on, and And just like you hear the historic cliché, you know, you're gonna go from somebody's buddy to somebody's boss overnight, things change a little bit. Going back to your question, one of the challenges was definitely there for me to how am I going to tell my buddy that I'm going go-kart racing with or going out for a beer with to how do I tell him, go do your job and get it done.

Brian Ippolito [00:09:09]:

The transition period for me was more being in the trenches with the team. So having done the job before, I had the opportunity to say like, hey, I know how to do this. 'Let's do it together,' or 'We need to meet this goal,' rather than, 'Hey, I need you to go do this and stay late on Thursday night.' It's a different mentality than, 'Hey, I'm gonna stay with you, we'll work on it together.' And then as you continue to build the organization, you know, kind of build the group beneath you, you can more naturally transition to, 'Hey Matt, I need you to do this,' rather than, 'Hey, we need to do this together.' And that for me has been a multi-year transition. It's not like on month 1 I was like, 'Hey, we're gonna do this together, next week you're doing it on your own.' It's definitely a more natural progression to go from us doing it to, hey, I need you to do this.

Matt Gjertsen [00:09:51]:

Yeah, that really resonates with me because I feel like that's kind of the leadership style that happens a lot in the military as well, of it's very doing it together kind of camaraderie through just embracing the suck, if you will, embracing all the work that you have to do.

Brian Ippolito [00:10:08]:

I've heard stories of where you are military, and if you are like out at sea, if you're in the Navy and you're one of the guys for a while, and you become an officer, then all of a sudden you're an officer. You're not hanging out with the guys in the mess hall. You're in a room and you're, you know, reading a book by yourself. And it's a different environment of, hey, I'm out to sea on deployment for 6 months, where that transition may happen more quickly. Whereas in corporate environment, hey, you do have an opportunity to kind of gauge where you're comfortable before you need to be able to do that. And obviously there comes a point where, you know, you are the one telling them, hey, let's do this. But it's not organized that way where, hey, you're now on your own.

Matt Gjertsen [00:10:41]:

How did that work, that transition for you? Because you said, so it was a period of years. It can be tricky. I feel like managers can fall into a couple of pitfalls there when they're using that technique of still staying really engaged in the work, and that's kind of how you build trust and camaraderie over time, and rather than just making that hard pivot. But it can lead to a world where, you know, you're spending maybe too much time doing the work and not enough time on the management side of things, or it can lead to, in the worst case, like micromanagement, Did you ever have any of those challenges of kind of how you found the balance, right, of being engaged in the work and using that to build those relationships but still slowly separating yourself?

Brian Ippolito [00:11:24]:

Your question implies that I found the balance. Yeah, it's definitely, definitely an ongoing struggle, right? So it's do it, delete it, or delegate it. And the delegate it is the hardest one. But once that threshold hits where, you know, you're working 60 hours and the guy next to you that works for you is working 40, You gotta start hitting the forward button more and you gotta rely on the team of, hey, I'm gonna send this over and then I need you to check this rather than I'm gonna stay here all night, I'll see you in the morning. You know, it's gotta be more of a delegation. And again, that comes with time and it comes with experience. I was lucky enough to have some strong mentorship on my leadership side of people saying, Brian, you gotta hit forward more. You gotta hit forward more.

Brian Ippolito [00:12:03]:

And I think the constant repetition eventually got me to be very comfortable. Some people say I'm too comfortable hitting the forward button now. So it's always a challenge and continues to be even at the higher levels of management.

Matt Gjertsen [00:12:14]:

Well, it's good that you're being pushed in that sense, because I do think the more common sentiment that I hear in a lot of especially technical organizations is that there's not necessarily that push. Like, you need to stay connected to the technical stuff, but that's also what you enjoy. And so it's really easy to just stay there. And I don't necessarily know that all, all organizations kind of push that over time. So it's good that you got that. As you've risen more and more, like beyond that kind of initial level? How has that idea changed? Again, it's always a balancing act, but I guess I'll ask the question, are you now in a position where it's like you're not just a people leader, but you're like a leader of leaders? Have you ever been in that kind of role?

Brian Ippolito [00:12:53]:

Yeah, so definitely a leader of leaders at this point in my career. And a struggle for me, you know, we're going really on the couch here for the session. One of the struggles was I'm an engineer by heart. I like to tinker with stuff. Yeah. And I got so used to being able to tinker at work that I was being satisfied by that. And when I started hitting the forward button more and not being able to do that every day, I kind of felt like, what did I do today? I was almost unsatisfied. But as you're able to backfill with personal hobbies or tinkering at home or doing other stuff, it's not that bad.

Brian Ippolito [00:13:24]:

Because if you're sitting behind a desk for 80% of the day instead of 10% of the day, all of a sudden you still get satisfied by being able to go home and take something apart, put it back together, whatever that may be. Being now a leader of leaders, I've also encouraged my team that are now in the management role, you gotta hit that forward button. If you really wanna have hands-on hardware, guide the guys, the team through stuff. But if there is fulfillment that you need, you gotta find another avenue to do that. And whether that's—

Matt Gjertsen [00:13:50]:

Yeah.

Brian Ippolito [00:13:50]:

We'll all go out and take something out and build a race car or do something else, that's up to you.

Matt Gjertsen [00:13:54]:

I really love that technique. And now that I'm thinking about it, I think about other higher-level leaders that I know and, you know, whether it's they do coding on the weekend or whatever it is, there are a lot of those side projects 'Cause yeah, I think you're right. Naturally, you're not gonna be able to scratch that itch, or you probably shouldn't be scratching that itch, but you still wanna maintain your connection with it. You need to find that outlet because that is kind of where your passion is, where your love is. On that struggle too, 'cause I think this is a big thing that I hear a lot of folks talk about when it comes to becoming a manager. I say this all the time. One of the best descriptions I ever heard of becoming a people manager from an engineer was this idea that, You know, you spend your whole career, your whole schooling being taught that the way to succeed is to be the one up on the board answering the question. And then all of a sudden you become a manager and your job is to be at the back of the room asking questions.

Matt Gjertsen [00:14:47]:

And so you, you have to make that switch. And there's the challenge to that that we just talked about of this is your passion. But in some ways there's also can be a challenge of like, as you said, what am I doing here? Like, what did I get done today? How do you think about finding new purpose and meaning in the role of being a manager and helping people versus directly solving the problem?

Brian Ippolito [00:15:11]:

Great question. I often have to remind myself, like, sometimes you walk out of the office and you're like, I didn't do what I needed to do today. And you need to remind yourself, I kept X amount of people busy. I kept 150 people building hardware that's going to go onto a rocket ship today. My role in this was to make sure that they had what they needed to do their jobs. And constant reminder to yourself is almost, again, therapy session, but it's part of what the job is, right? Our job as managers and leaders in the organization, especially in technical fields, is give them the tools they need to get what they need done, and that achieves everybody's goal.

Matt Gjertsen [00:15:46]:

It really is super difficult. Like, so much of the work is just making sure people know what they need to do and they have everything they need to do it. Like, that's just such a big struggle day to day, and it takes a constant effort to keep that many people moving forward. Yeah, agreed.

Brian Ippolito [00:16:02]:

And in the engineering field, the product isn't always happening like the next day. Like, sometimes there's a lag. You're going to design something that's going to go onto a vehicle and you're not going to see that for months. We've had the opportunity and been very fortunate to work with some customers where you're making something and that's going to fly in a few days. But that's not always the case. Sometimes you're working on something. I mean, I designed something in 2012 that like has flown once already and it's not going to fly again for another few months. You know, it's like this takes a long time.

Brian Ippolito [00:16:31]:

So it's not that instant gratification that you may have in other fields as engineering takes a long time.

Matt Gjertsen [00:16:37]:

It's one of those things that you get, whether it's working at a smaller non-legacy or like a smaller company or a company that's more connected with a lot of the startup industry and smaller companies. Just because I remember listening to a podcast recently with one of the co-founders of Castilian, and I forget where he had come from, if he had come from Lockheed. His background was at one of the traditional defense primes. And he was talking about how the challenge is like, you could have kind of an entire career as an engineer, especially as like a frontline engineer doing the work, and never see your hardware fly. You could design a whole system and spend 5, 8, 10 years on it, and then the program gets canceled in the end, and it just like never goes anywhere. And I cannot imagine a harder thing to take. Why it's great that even if it is, you know, even if you're waiting months, like you're waiting months, not years and more, which is, which is incredible. Yeah.

Brian Ippolito [00:17:28]:

It's good to make something. One of my first projects here was for a satellite manufacturer, and it was a longer program that like took 2 years and then it took another year to fly. And that was at the time was, oh my God, we made something and it went to space. This is super cool. And then I go on to the next program and it's like, I need you to make something on Friday and I'm flying it on Monday. I'm like, wait, what?

Matt Gjertsen [00:17:49]:

Oh wow.

Brian Ippolito [00:17:50]:

But what, how are we, we're putting this thing in space like on Monday? And it, you know, it was total game changer, but that was awesome. It was super cool. It's like, hey, we can do this and have this rapid iteration and you're seeing the fruits of your labor, if you will, happen right in front of you. And the instant gratification is super cool. I can't imagine the mothball stuff or your stuff gets canceled. That's just like beyond disheartening. It's just, you spent this time on it.

Matt Gjertsen [00:18:11]:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, I wanna shift now to, We'll let you get off the couch and talk a little bit more about some of the talent and people challenges that are more kind of systemic through the entire industry. You know, when I talk with my clients, one of the things, especially like larger aerospace manufacturers, everywhere I go, I feel like there's this wall or this cliff that everyone sees coming sometime in the next 10 years where it's all of these people in all of these back shops that do all of these specialty things are going to retire because they're all in their 50s or their early 60s. Everyone's terrified and very few people have any idea what they're going to do. It's like everybody's hoping that Optimus actually happens or something. But when we last talked about it, you particularly, you called it the Bob from Valve's problem. Could you expand on what that problem is a little bit more? And then I'd love to dig into kind of some of the ways that Murata is trying to answer that challenge.

Brian Ippolito [00:19:10]:

I did not coin the Bob from Valve's thing. This is Anthony Coangelo and somebody on his podcast, I believe, said But it's very true, right? So we have an organization that's super specialized, or industry is super specialized, super niche. And like the theory is there's a guy named Bob who's off in the corner, and when Bob is sick, you can't get the hardware because he's the only one who knows how to make it. I think that challenge has not just been on the manufacturing side, but also on the engineering side where we have a lot of seasoned, you know, graybeards. I don't know if that's politically correct anymore, but you know, the seasoned engineers and what they've done. And brought to the table, but it's just not documented as much as it could be. So I think that trying to pull that tribal knowledge out of the team and getting that onto paper, or getting that into some format where it can be reviewed and understood, is important. Early in my career, we did a pretty decent effort of converting a lot of this tribal knowledge onto drawings, but the why isn't there.

Brian Ippolito [00:20:08]:

So you get the thing that's telling you how to make it, but if you need to troubleshoot it, or you need to decide, is this okay if it deviates, you know, 10% in one direction or and you don't have the why there, it's not the whole picture. So I've seen along my career where there's a handoff of projects because that's kind of how things go. You know, they hand off to the next person, the next person continues to design it. And unless you have that connection to the original owner of the design, you don't know why, you could make a mistake on a use as-is disposition or something where, hey, I want to use this in the field, I don't know if it's good or not. And then everybody gets gun-shy and says, I don't want to touch it because Bob, who designed the thing, isn't here anymore, and I don't know if it's good. So we're trying at Murata, we're trying to document more of the why. We're using tools like Confluence, and we're trying to put more footnotes on code is always a big thing. That's always a huge thing for software guys.

Brian Ippolito [00:20:57]:

The person who wrote the code before me, he was an idiot. He doesn't know what he was doing. I gotta rewrite the whole thing. You gotta have the comments in the code, whether it's actual code or it's design rules or CDRs or whatever it may be, to make sure that that knowledge is transferred from person to person.

Matt Gjertsen [00:21:12]:

Yeah. In my own life, I always think I am in no way a coder, but I always think back to at one point I, when I was in the military, one of my roles was as a scheduler out in the desert. So I was stationed in Al Dhafra and my role was there were 3 of us that would rotate through and we'd handle all the tanker schedules for the next day. So we'd get the tasking orders from up above and we'd figure out which crews and which aircraft are gonna go fly all these missions. And we used an Excel sheet. Spreadsheet to manage all this stuff, and there was an Excel macro built into it where, you know, yeah, exactly, everything's, everything's done. And you'd finish the schedule, you'd push a button, and it would do all this stuff. It would like make copies of it, print some stuff out, make some emails to send it to headquarters and do all these things.

Matt Gjertsen [00:21:53]:

But you'd push the button and the system would sit there for about 5 minutes flashing all these different screens and doing all this stuff. And I'm looking at it, and the reason behind all this— and it would take, you know, forever to load and everything— is because this was a role that had existed for over decade, and different people, like, you know, people are rotating in for these like 2 or 3 month rotations. Some of them have some Excel knowledge or whatever, and so they try to make little tweaks. So like, I'm going to add a page to build in weather reports and automate this piece and automate that piece. And over time it just gets really, really clunky and bogged down, but nobody knew why any of that was there or what was important or how to fix it. So we were all just living with this like really bad system that was really slow, but everyone was afraid to touch it because it was like a critical system. Now, no, because that whole unit doesn't even exist anymore. Um, but that was a decade ago.

Matt Gjertsen [00:22:49]:

But that was one of the things that I did while I was there is finally helped fix it. But I think I made a lot of people mad when I did it because I certainly made a lot of mistakes.

Brian Ippolito [00:22:58]:

And that's how Skynet started. That's how Skynet happened. And exactly the plot of Terminator.

Matt Gjertsen [00:23:02]:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It just kept going. So there's the documentation piece. Yeah, it was interesting because as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about actually just today I had a discussion with somebody on LinkedIn. We were having a back and forth in the comment section where they had made a post about tribal knowledge and kind of how in the world, like, there's a lot of expertise that is required for the kind of stuff we do. And isn't there always going to be some level of tribal knowledge? And kind of the back and forth that I had with him is like, yeah, but like, it should be a constant cycle, like where somebody figures something out for a time, it's tribal knowledge to them, but the system should constantly be trying to take tribal knowledge and make it general knowledge. And then there's some new tribal knowledge and you, and you're just, and that's kind of how the system like pushes forward, especially with the kinds of components that you all make. The level of precision is kind of crazy.

Matt Gjertsen [00:23:59]:

Yes, for sure. What is that balance of like, what can be individual expertise? Versus what can be kind of documented and become general knowledge?

Brian Ippolito [00:24:10]:

A lot of the manufacturing know-how is the difficult part, right? So if I'm going to make a part and I'm going to, you know, machine this down to a few tenths, and when is it good enough? Is it always going to be, hey, I need this surface finish to be X, Y, Z, or I need, you know, even system level design? Do I need to have X amount of check valves and hand valves or whatever it's going to be? And a lot of it comes down to experience and experimentation. I often joke with my team, you know, go try some stuff. So when they come back and they can't figure something out, I'm like, go try it. Like they want the AI script to tell 'em what the answer is. And I don't want them to just get the answer. I want them to get the why. And you're gonna have to build that in every person going forward. So the tribal knowledge, it's what's been learned previously that needs to be on the documentation, but you are always gonna need the next generation or however you wanna word it to learn that as well.

Brian Ippolito [00:25:00]:

Cuz you can't just take it as fact. Yeah. There's going to have to be some, yeah, I don't know, YouTube video or something that tells you the why, or you get to learn how it happens. You can't just look it up in the book and say it's Bernoulli's equation, whatever the real answer is.

Matt Gjertsen [00:25:12]:

And outside of kind of the tribal knowledge piece, there's also just this challenge with talent in the entire manufacturing industry across the entire country. I've seen different companies try to handle this in different ways. How does Morata think about that, of just making sure just the, you know, the general technician level people coming in day one, like, how are you making sure that you can maintain that talent through this growth, especially when you're in a part of the country that, at least from my experience, isn't well known for this kind of talent?

Brian Ippolito [00:25:40]:

Yeah, so I'll give a selfless plug here. We, in 2017-ish timeframe, we had a group of interns. I was part of the original internship team that we were kind of bringing on more people 'cause we had to hire so much all the time. It's like, how are we gonna do this? Yeah. We started a thing called Valve Camp, and the idea was that we were gonna give a crash course on the first 2 weeks of your internship such that you can learn everything about Valve, and then for the next 8 to 10 weeks you can be off on your own. Because previously it was always, hey, go back to Brian, ask him a question, go back. And I'm like, I'm tired of this. I'm just gonna put the slides together, I'm gonna stand up and preach for 2 days, and then we're all going to be about our way.

Brian Ippolito [00:26:14]:

We've expanded that, our Valve Camp thing, and we have now Valve Camp for engineers, we have Valve Boot Camp for technicians. And it's more of like the early on, as much information as we can get into the individual early on so they learn both what they're doing and then what the next person is doing. Because if you don't know, hey, I'm going to run this, I'm going to build this unit and then the next person is going to test it unless you know how they're going to test or why they're going to test it, it may be useless. When more people caught wind of this, we're running Valve Camp for support functions. I'm running Valve Camp for human resources. I'm having them take apart a Valve, not a flight unit. Quality is going to get on my case. Yeah, not for flight unit, but take it apart and put it back together to say, hey, the people that I'm hiring are going to have to do this.

Brian Ippolito [00:26:56]:

So I understand their role and they're going to have to be able— so when I'm having conversations with them, I need to make sure that they understand the dexterity of having to go out. So it's getting everyone on the same page for, hey, this is the mission, this is what we have to do, and then training everyone as early as possible from the machinists to the support functions to the technical people and all the way up and down. But your point on the availability of machinists in particular has been a struggle. We've been working heavily on the robotics side of things and continuous improvement for machining components, but it just doesn't replace you know, a man behind a wheel. There's magicians down there with a bridgeport. I'm not one of them, but they can make stuff that you couldn't program in a million years. And it's really a dying art. So it's something to somehow continue to feed.

Brian Ippolito [00:27:39]:

And we try to, and we do the mentorship program as much as possible, but it's definitely a struggle.

Matt Gjertsen [00:27:43]:

I love how you talked about Valve Camp though, and how it expanded, because I think it really is critical. And it's something that so often in startups it can get lost. Because there's just such a frenetic pace, like you just gotta move so quickly. And so really expansive and deep dive onboarding programs can be tough. And then in really large companies that maybe have the resources for it, it's such a wide scope that it becomes really hard to even figure out what you're trying to do. Whereas it sounds like, you know, you all are in, in this sweet spot, both in terms of size and the focus of the company and the fact that it's been around for generations. And so it sounds like kind of a mix of both a tortoise and a hare where it's like you're moving at the speed of a tortoise right now because it's like that's that's what the industry is demanding. But you are a tortoise because it's like you've been around for several decades.

Matt Gjertsen [00:28:29]:

And so you can appreciate the value of those kinds of things because it really helps give people, not only for engineers and technicians, a really deep dive, but then for people like myself who would be in a support function, it gives us the context of, as you said, how to hire, how to help you, what are the challenges that you're facing, and just really leads to a better overall organization. So it's awesome that you all have that.

Brian Ippolito [00:28:53]:

Very cool. It's a very special place to be and continues to develop, you know, and the ideas like Valve Camp and other things that we've done like that hasn't come from upper-level management. It's— we're given the liberties to— you want to try something? Yeah, go get a few pizzas, get a bunch of people in a room at lunchtime and teach them about Valve. See if it works. And, you know, sometimes the ideas work and sometimes they don't, but just having that flexibility within our organization and given the liberties that we have, it seems to be going well.

Matt Gjertsen [00:29:19]:

Yeah, well, that's fantastic, Brian. It's been really great to chat with you. Really great to hear more about Morata and all the great things you're doing. There's so much happening in kind of the aerospace and manufacturing world right now. Anything in particular you're excited about coming up, whether it's, you know, Morata has hardware on it or you're just interested?

Brian Ippolito [00:29:36]:

I really like the big boy rockets. So there's, you know, for a long time we've been working the stuff coming online for New Glenn. Obviously Starship is super cool. And then Artemis is supposed to go off whenever it goes off, depending on the temperature. all really cool stuff happening. And we're always so focused on the launch vehicle stuff, sometimes we forget about the stuff that's going up there because, you know, we're putting so many launches up, we're putting so much content in space that like we're going to have this really cool ecosystem happening up there. We're super excited time to see it happen. So it's very exciting time to watch and then also be involved, of course.

Matt Gjertsen [00:30:07]:

Yeah, I just saw a post. I think AST with their latest launch just set a new record for kind of like the largest unfurled satellite in low Earth orbit or something like that, which is pretty cool. So yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff going up. It's great to see that you all are in the middle of it and helping it all happen. So thank you so much for your time. This has been fantastic.

Brian Ippolito [00:30:26]:

Thank you, sir. Thanks for sharing your experience too. Awesome time.