Matt Gjertsen [00:00:00]:

I had never heard of this before. Scotland, I guess, recently built a new parliament building and that project was 978% over budget. The final cost was almost 10 times the original projected cost. Hello and welcome to the Leadership Launchpad. If this is your first time listening to the show, welcome. If you are already a subscriber, thank you so much for being here. My name is Matt Jertson. If you're new, I'm a former Air Force instructor pilot, the former head of training development at SpaceX.

Matt Gjertsen [00:00:50]:

And now I work with hard tech leaders at all kinds of companies to help them build teams capable of of solving the world's hardest problems. Today is a solo episode, as you can tell, where I have two things happening. One, I want to make a big announcement, somewhat big announcement. Second, I'm going to do some opining about the state of technology and leadership in the world today because it has to do with the announcement. So what is the announcement? If you've been watching the show for a while, listening to the show for a while, you'll know that for the past five years I've led a company called Better Everyday Studios. That was what I founded not long after I left SpaceX. And we have decided to rebrand. We are now going to be known as bilt.

Matt Gjertsen [00:01:38]:

The mission of Built is to train the next generation of hard tech leaders how to build teams capable of solving the world's hardest problems. I couldn't be more excited about narrowing into this specific set of organizations and individuals. I've always said one of the things I love most is helping great engineers build, become great managers. And so that's what we are going to be doing exclusively now at Built. Another reason I'm really excited about it is because we are focused so heavily on this industry and this space that is having a little bit of a moment right now. I think it's hard to argue that tech, hard tech is having a moment. There's actually two moments happening. One, we have what's happening in hard tech.

Matt Gjertsen [00:02:18]:

We have billions of dollars of investment pouring into space. Aerospace, engineering, energy development, all kinds of stuff. And then we also have AI, which is, you know, related, but its own massive thing. And, you know, if you look at these two things, first, you know, in my other podcasts, vhtb, we recently had a discussion about what's driving all this investment into the hard tech space. And I made the argument that it's, it's a combination of things. It's like, you know, several crests of a wave all meeting at once. To form this massive spike where we have the rise of competition in China, we have the Trump administration for sure. We have kind of a generational change in what it means to go to college and whether or not it pays off, which is then leading more people to look towards like blue collar work instead of white collar work.

Matt Gjertsen [00:03:03]:

There's just a mix of political and economic and social factors that are all combining together for this moment where you have the reindustrialized conference and everybody's kind of realizing, wow, we haven't made anything in the United States in years, we should probably fix that. And, and I'm all for it. It's amazing. You know, completely separately, I mean, related, but separately from that is this rise of AI where you have all of this investment and funding going into creating artificial intelligence, creating agents, and, you know, making it so that individuals can be more productive than ever. And it's interesting because I think the combination of these two things is without a doubt making us hope for this really bright and amazing future. You know, if you go back a decade or so, there was always people saying how, you know, I was promised flying cars and I got 140 characters and it was like, wah, wah, you know, this whole idea of software eating the world, it's been great. But certainly we now realize that, you know, things like social media, maybe they weren't the best on our society. Do we really want SaaS to be the most valuable and important companies and parts of the economy? Maybe we don't.

Matt Gjertsen [00:04:15]:

And so there's all this hope that this combination of AI and, and hard tech is going to give us that future that we all imagine, whether it's being able to go to space or unlimited resources from mining asteroids or supersonic air travel. Again, you know, I'm, I'm all for it and I'm really excited about it. But it's interesting when, when I personally think about it, I actually think the limit, the limiting factor in whether or not we achieve all those amazing things, that bright and amazing future, it's not going to come down to funding, it's not going to come down to regulations and whether or not we can build enough data centers and all that stuff. Really what it's going to come down to is leadership and whether or not we have enough leaders to go out and do these amazing things. And you know, because we're trying to do all these big amazing projects and if you look at recent history especially, we don't have the best track record of achieving these projects. I'm actually, I'm reading A book right now called How Big Things Get Done. The subtitle is the Surprising Factors that Determine the Fate of Every Project. From home renovations to space exploration and everything in between.

Matt Gjertsen [00:05:31]:

There's some amazing statistics in here. If you look at big projects. The researcher of this, of this book has a database of tens of thousands of projects globally. And when you crunch all the numbers, if you look at how many projects are completed on time, on budget, and deliver the value that they promised, it is only 0.5% of all projects. If you just look at budget, the average large project is 62% over budget. And though that in and of itself might sound extreme, the author points out that there's. That number hides this really large and long tail where we have these extreme events where I'll just to quote a few, the Big Dig, the project in Boston that lasted for decades, I think, where they were taking a freeway and put it underground. That project ended up being 300% over budget.

Matt Gjertsen [00:06:33]:

The James Webb Space Telescope, right, this amazing piece of technology, it's sitting out in space now. It's bringing back amazing cameras or amazing pictures, but it was 450% over budget. But here's, here's, here's the kicker. I had never heard of this before. Scotland, I guess, recently built a new parliament building and that project was 978% over budget. The final cost was almost 10 times the original projected cost. Right. And if, if leadership is supposed to do one thing, it's supposed to deliver things on time, on budget, and delivering the value that they're supposed to.

Matt Gjertsen [00:07:14]:

So if you look at projects of recent times, clearly, so if we think about all these amazing things that we're going to do in the future, my argument is that it's going to come down to leadership. We need leadership if we want to be able to do these things. And despite not just looking to the past, there's, there's three arguments that I want to make to show just how important leadership development is. Number one, AI is allowing companies to become much, much smaller, right? Without a doubt. Right. We can now achieve larger things. I recently read that there is now the first billion dollar one person company. It's a software company, of course.

Matt Gjertsen [00:07:50]:

And so whereas in the past if we want to do big things, you needed a lot of resources, so you needed relatively few large companies to go do those big things. And so those companies needed relatively few great leaders to go do those things. You know, there's one SpaceX you need. I mean, you need multiple leaders. You don't just need the top. But, right, you don't need all these different companies. And now as, as there's smaller companies, all those companies need leaders. All those companies need great inspiring leaders to push things forward, right? And so more than ever, if we don't have more leaders, especially technical leaders.

Matt Gjertsen [00:08:24]:

This is why I'm talking to you. This is why I have this podcast, right? We, this is why. This is the thesis of the book that I have coming out in August called Minimum Viable Manager. The thesis of the book is that we need more, more technical leaders. We need more people who are engineers who understand the technical details of the products and the work that they are doing. We need them to develop the people skills to be effective leaders. We need that in all of these companies. And so the pace at which we create these leaders is going to determine the pace at which we can create successful companies that can go do these big amazing things.

Matt Gjertsen [00:09:03]:

So that's, that's number one. Number two is just looking at AI right now and kind of, you've probably used AI, right? You've used AI to, you know, you go on chat, GPT or GROK or whatever and ask it things, have it make pictures or whatever. And I think when AI was first pitched, we believed, you know, there's this idea that just like make me a picture of a unicorn, it would make exactly what you want, like it would intuit what you wanted to do. Clearly that's not the case. Right. It turns out that the quality of the output that you get all has to do with the quality of the input that you give, right? Of the prompt that you give it. Was it detailed enough? Does it have, does it have all the constraints? Right. In my opinion that's kind of leadership.

Matt Gjertsen [00:09:47]:

Even if you're just talking about one individual AI, you are trying to lead that AI towards an outcome. Even if you don't have to worry about the people stuff, you have to worry about the key piece of setting expectations, right? Which getting the AI to work on the right thing. That's one of the three pillars of what it means to be a leader. Setting expectations, that's really what a prompt is, right? And so if you imagine you're now, you know, we're now working with agentic AI. You have all these agents doing all these amazing things. You have to be able to coordinate all of them and, and clearly set boundaries and tell them to work together and work in the right way. Right? And so even if you're just a one person company like leadership, like these qualities of leadership do come into play and Certainly if we're going to be doing big things, no matter how good AI is, it's going to take more than one person, right? So you're going to need to bring people together, get them to work together, get them working on the right things and improve that work over time. Those are going to be the critical skills.

Matt Gjertsen [00:10:42]:

And we can see it even in our one on one interaction with AI. But a lot of this isn't one on one interaction, right? In companies. Now, AI is going to make every single individual more productive and more powerful. And this is where we bring in the third argument of this idea that Elon talks about of companies being basically a vector sum of the talent within that organization where each person comes in with their own vector, right? With which is a magnitude and a direction, right? And so they have this magnitude, that is their skill and their direction towards what they are trying to achieve. And as you bring more people into a company, those vectors get summed, right? And so if you have a two person company where the two individuals have equal skill, so equal magnitudes, but they are pointed in opposite directions, they're working against one another, that company's not going to go anywhere. Now that's not usually likely to happen, but as you bring people in, this is why one of the primary things that a leader is meant to do is trying to align those vectors so that the sum is as powerful and as far as possible. And so with AI supercharging the skill of every individual in an organization, that alignment is going to be more important than ever because each individual is able to pull the organization off track all the more effectively if they are not well aligned, if they do not have a good idea of, of what they are supposed to be doing, right? So as the individuals in your organization become more productive, that leadership quality is all the more important. I was just having a conversation recently with a number of other people that do what I do, right.

Matt Gjertsen [00:12:30]:

There are other consultants who work in different, they are not in leadership but in different qualities like this, you know, the people side of things. And I was just impressing them on this point. Look, look, right now I know, you know, tech is having a moment for sure, but that moment can only go so far as the leadership will take it, as the talent within the organization can take it, in my opinion, right. The companies that are laying off people right now, they're going to regret it because it's just a lack of imagination on the part of their leaders. I don't think anybody's going to tell you that there's a lack of problems to solve in the world. I don't care what vertical your company is in, there is infinite work to be done. Right? We have a whole universe out there. We can do more.

Matt Gjertsen [00:13:17]:

And so if, if you're sitting there thinking like, oh, because of AI, we're just, we, you know, this whole segment of the company isn't even so we're going to lay them all off. That's just a failure of imagination. Right? There's always more for those people to do. And if you're laying them off, they're certainly not going to feel aligned to your values. They're not going to want to come back to work to you, work for you. And, and people who just saw you lay off a bunch of people are going to be less inclined to come work for you. And so if, if you want to be one of the companies that takes advantage of the situation that we're in and really moves things forward, I guarantee you it's going to come down to leadership. That's why I'm so excited about this rebrand to built.

Matt Gjertsen [00:13:53]:

If you are in an organization where you're trying to develop leaders, if you're in an organization where you are a leader, you're looking around and seeing like, I don't know, we're seeing some points of friction. You know, maybe our attrition is going up, our employee relations isn't going really well, or our productivity. We just hired a bunch of people, but we're not getting a lot done. I would love for you to give me a call. Just reach out to me, Matt BuiltLeaders.com and we can have a conversation because I'd love to see if there's a way that we can help you because hard tech technology in general is having a moment right now where we are re energized with this new belief in what is possible in the future. I'm here for this moment. I am so excited and I can't wait for it. I hope you enjoyed my meandering conversation.

Matt Gjertsen [00:14:43]:

I promise. Next week we're getting back to our regularly scheduled programming, you know, the kinds of conversations normally have as it is right now. Next week we're expecting to have Matt Galich from Astroforge on. We're going to talk about, you know, asteroid mining, unlimited resources and what he's done at Astro Forge to create the kind of organization that is able to be really, I mean, they are like the pinnacle of scrappy at Astroforge. If you, if you know anything, it's, it's pretty incredible. So make sure to come back for that conversation. And I look forward to seeing you next time on the Leadership Launchpad.