Chapman Snowden [00:00:00]:

We have a set of problems that last somewhere between 60 to 90 days, sometimes 180 days. And at the end of 180 days, do we still need that process? And if not, how do we throw that away? I think a lot of operational people that have worked in the past will come in with a tool belt and that's sometimes it's partially correct, sometimes it's not. Excited to talk to my non linear path to astroforge I just followed a path and started off in finance and worked in banking and quickly found that one of these things was not like the other. I didn't know what to do with that after banking and so the closest approximation I could get was hey, I'm going to go work for a venture philanthropy fund. And I just became addicted by addicted to the the compressed need for a group of individuals to create a shared model of an undefined problem.

Matt Gjertsen [00:00:59]:

How do you build processes that help streamline company operations without stifling innovation?

Chapman Snowden [00:01:06]:

We have to design practices and processes that allow us to surface the most important problems, blockers, challenges. It requires constant learning cycles and feedback both from the team and the leadership perspective to be able to execute that well. If it's executed poorly, it feels chaotic.

Matt Gjertsen [00:01:42]:

Hello and welcome to the Leadership Launchpad where we talk about actionable insights for leaders in aerospace, manufacturing, defense and the rest of the hard tech ecosystem. My name is Matt Jurtson, host of this podcast and founder of Built where we are training the next generation of hard tech leaders how to build how build to high performing teams. Process and bureaucracy is both the foundation and the greatest struggle of every company. Startups can move quickly because they don't have any processes, but the more people you have, the more processes you generally need. However, left unchecked, processes and permissions and checks on individuals can choke a once thriving organization. So how do you stop that from happening? How do you build processes that help streamline company operations without stifling innovation? That is exactly what we are going to be talking about today with our guest Chapman Snowden, the Chief Operating Officer of astroforge. Regular listeners will remember astroforge because we had their CEO Matt Galich as a guest just a couple of weeks ago. They are doing their part to turn the expanse from science fiction into science fact by making asteroid mining a real Chap has been at Astroforge for almost two years holding the titles of Chief of Staff, Head of Mining before becoming coo.

Matt Gjertsen [00:03:06]:

These are all roles I would have never expected based on his background. Chap spent much of his early career in various parts of the education industry, making software interactive instructional content and working as an online education specialist at Google. He then Co founded two different financial software companies before joining Astroforge in 2024. That background is exactly where I want to our conversation today. So chap, welcome so much to the show.

Chapman Snowden [00:03:35]:

Matt, thank you for having me and yeah excited to talk to my non linear path to astroforge.

Matt Gjertsen [00:03:41]:

Yeah and honestly that's where I want to start because I believe the week this show is going to come out I'm going to be at the association for Talent development conference in LA. It's massive conference, there's like 10,000 attendees and if you looked at the first, you know, number of years of your career, I would have expected you to be at a car like I would have said have met you there like that. Your back, your early background looks a lot like a lot of those people, people who are much more doing what I do every day. So yeah, talk me through kind of that path of how you wound up trying to mine asteroids.

Chapman Snowden [00:04:13]:

I think it starts with me coming out of college and I was squarely one of the the kids who had succeeded and knew I was like quote unquote smart, whatever that actually means. But I actually had no idea how I wanted to apply that. And so I just followed a path and started off in finance and worked in banking and quickly found that one of these things was not like the other. But the thing that sort of stuck out to me in banking was how do you take a group of really talented individuals and make them work on something? And that sort of like meta work was really fascinating to me. I didn't know what to do with that after banking and so the closest approximation I could get was hey, I'm going to go work for a venture philanthropy fund which invested in education startups, helped sort of grow different models of how we teach.

Matt Gjertsen [00:05:05]:

Right.

Chapman Snowden [00:05:06]:

Because I, I had a lot of opinions at that point of like what smart meant and how you develop talent. Right. Even in banking there was this always this like we need a players, we need a players. And I constantly ask the question of like what does that actually even be? Because it's so context dependent. Right. And so I and when I went to the venture philanthropy fund, started advising a bunch of entrepreneurs and how you build these really cool businesses quickly found that I don't want to be advising, I want to be doing the building.

Matt Gjertsen [00:05:34]:

Right.

Chapman Snowden [00:05:35]:

That's where honestly the learning cycle and sort of that from a meta process like that's where you get to sort of Incorporate all that knowledge and reap all of the gains of like, oh, I've just learned a new thing, whether it's a domain or process. How can I implement that? That wanting to build got me into startups and I just became addicted by. Addicted to the, the compressed need for a group of individuals to create a shared model of an undefined problem space and then try to figure out what's a reasonable path to a solution through that. And my first, the first couple startups, most notably Death Bootcamp, which was one of the first learn to code camps, was that in sort of like all turtles down, right, we had to figure out how to teach students in a very compressed way, but also figure out how to develop good pedagogy in a really small amount of time. And so what that really did for us is create these really fascinating learning cycles that we had to sort of test within the management of the company and then sort of like iterate down into the people who are actually buying the product. And I really started to get a better understanding of what it meant to be operationally excellent. And how do you think about process that really drive towards a result that you're, you're promising? A group of individuals made my way to Google working on some very similar things where it was, you know, effectively how do you identify talent and intelligence from afar? Right. So Google had this problem of it's really easy to find the folks from Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

Chapman Snowden [00:07:11]:

How do you find the really smart kids that go to small state schools, community college, that don't have the sort of pedigree or the, or the resume that would otherwise sort of indicate that. But what are the behavioral indicators of that? Rolled that, tried to roll that out into my own startup. Realized that, you know, startups hiring processes are very different than Google's hiring processes. And so they don't want to pay for that sort of asymmetric bet, they just want the Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon grad. So when that ended, I decided I just wanted to get out of education for a while. It sort of felt like the wrong ground for me to play in. Found my way into. I just wanted to solve some like interesting problems.

Chapman Snowden [00:07:51]:

Really got interested in fintech. Spent four years building a company that eventually got blown up by a funding deal that went wrong. And in that same year I sort of, I had lost my dad as well and it was a real reset year for me. I was like, great. I've spent the last, at this point, you know, 15 years building in a direction. What if I just ripped the Band Aid off and went in an entirely different direction. And around that time Matt had actually reached out to me because we were both YC founders and had a role that, to be frank, I wasn't quite interested in. And I told him that on the call.

Chapman Snowden [00:08:26]:

But I was like, I gotta imagine you have a whole slew of problems at an asteroid mining company. I love what you're doing. Be happy to figure out a way if I can help if so. And, and that was. That was August of 2024.

Matt Gjertsen [00:08:40]:

That's incredible. So. Wow. So it was really, it was kind of the thing that brought you back into space was it was kind of just happenstance that you both had worked together. But it happened at this moment where it was just a big psychological reset for you of like let's, let's go do something big. It sounds like.

Chapman Snowden [00:09:02]:

Yeah, yeah. And at the time I was living in the Bay Area. My wife and I had basically said, hey, Bay Area is going to be our home. And then the challenge was the only companies that were really hiring at that moment. I didn't have the energy to go back and do my own thing. But the only companies that were hiring were AI companies. And as a reasonably intelligent person, once you got outside of the big model makers, I couldn't actually discern the difference between AI company number 57 and 822. And I think especially for me, wanting, I'm a very problem oriented person and I couldn't figure out what I was going to actually work on.

Chapman Snowden [00:09:40]:

And so when Matt came to me it was like, this is actually quite fascinating. I sort of look at it as an old school venture bet where it's a very binary outcome. We're either wildly successful or not. And that, that in and of itself is quite freeing from an operational perspective because it forces, it narrows the aperture of what you need to consider on a day to day basis significantly. And so when I thought about what types of opportunities I had, like this one made them made the absolute most sense to me.

Matt Gjertsen [00:10:10]:

That's awesome. In on that idea of, you know, narrowing the aperture, if I'm understanding you correctly. Is that kind of like that idea? Like I think there's a book called, you know, it's, it's easier to think 10x than 2x. Once you say like we're going big, it just clears out the solution space of like you can't make tweaks. It's, it's wholly clean sheet.

Chapman Snowden [00:10:33]:

Exactly right. Like you know, in, in your traditional sort of B2B SaaS company you can always make these marginal bets, right? Well, if it's just an increase of 10% revenue month over month, does that actually get us to the place? And that might come with some amount of risk that you can calculate, but then you can say, well, we could do 2% and maybe that doesn't get us as much of a valuation, but we can always have something to default to. And yeah, and here there is no default, Right. There's no, there's no base case for an asteroid mining company.

Matt Gjertsen [00:11:02]:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a number of things you said in all that that I want to go back to. One that I can't let you just say and then leave is it was. I'm going to misquote you, but it was something like creating a shared model of an undefined problem space. Yes. So I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, leadership, what it is. I have a book coming out later this year called Minimum Viable Manager and kind of in. In my thought process I said like the first thing this might relate to the first two items.

Matt Gjertsen [00:11:36]:

It's like get people to work together, get them working on the right things. It's like those are like the two of the three rules that like a manager needs to. Needs to follow. Is that kind of what you're like? Tell me more about what you think when you say creating a shared understanding of an undefined problem space.

Chapman Snowden [00:11:51]:

Yeah. So most, I think most startups, generally speaking, start with somebody who has a vision, right. They have a, like Matt has a vision of we want to explore deep space. Incredibly compelling. There's innumerable number of problems underneath of that. How do you sequence them? How do you actually start to say, like, how do you start to make from that vision the first incremental step forward? And even when you recruit the first, call it five to 10 folks, everybody has a different understanding of what's the sequence of those problems, what's the magnitude of the problems within each of those problems, what's the balance of known knowns to known unknowns to that. Right. And I think so much of if I take it back to I have to teach somebody the quadratic equation or something like that.

Matt Gjertsen [00:12:44]:

Cool.

Chapman Snowden [00:12:45]:

If I have five people in the room, what's their current understanding of the quadratic equation? Great. Once I get a sense of that distribution of like mental models, how do I create a shared mental model such that this is a small group of folks who have to work together, can actually make decisions and match words, burn down risk as quickly as possible. Because if you have slightly different derivatives of that model. You start to get direction shifts in how efficient you can be in solving that. And. And that, to me is. It's an incredibly hard problem. I don't think that there is a one size fits all sorts of solution for it.

Chapman Snowden [00:13:22]:

It's. It's a function of leadership personalities, the people you have on the team and

Matt Gjertsen [00:13:28]:

sort of how you.

Chapman Snowden [00:13:29]:

What are the tools that you reach for to help create that shared mental model, update that in real time and then let that expand naturally as we get to a bigger team.

Matt Gjertsen [00:13:39]:

Yeah, yeah. On my other. The other pod I mentioned to you vhtv, I recently got the opportunity to sit down with Andy Lapsa, the CEO, co founder of Stoke. And Stoke is the thing that's so amazing is it's like, look, they've built a second stage. They're building the first stage. They've built all their test facilities. They've built this launch site. They have like 250 people.

Matt Gjertsen [00:14:00]:

Like, it's crazy. And I think it is all. It's staying aligned. It's creating a shared understanding of what is the order of operations. How do we minimize it? He talked about kind of hit their methods that they use there. And I totally agree with you. There isn't a one size fits all. So I'd be, you know, like, how do you think about this at Astroforge? How do you keep people going in the same direction? How do you try to create that shared understanding?

Chapman Snowden [00:14:24]:

Yeah, this is. This is an interesting challenge, to be very frank, because this is the first time that I've really had to implement these changes at a time in which I'm not in the driver's seat. Right. Matt. Matt is obviously in the driver's seat here. And so, yeah, this is a. You will probably. You've probably already discerned and probably will continue to discern through the rest of this podcast.

Chapman Snowden [00:14:46]:

Matt and I have wildly different personalities and also very different ways of operating. And so.

Matt Gjertsen [00:14:52]:

And he is a strong personality.

Chapman Snowden [00:14:54]:

Very strong personality. Right. And so learning how to. I think for he and I, the sort of predecessor to anything that we can call sort of like operational excellence is learning how to disagree very quickly. Right. And we don't always agree. And so I think we've had to spend a lot of time and it was nice to be able to do this as chief of staff, where, like, my. My main goal was to augment his ability to lead.

Chapman Snowden [00:15:20]:

Right. So I got a good amount of time to understand how he operates. Now we operate as peers. And so I have to sort of exert my own lens or sort of cadence on how I think about execution. Anything from like how we recruit engineers to how we sort of organize our internal schedule. So I think the predecessor is always making sure that the leadership team has a shared language and how we disagree and how we, how we move through those disagreements. Because not every disagreement is going to be resolved. And so we need a way to just simply say at this moment, like you and I disagree on this, but if there's not a solution in sight, we have to choose a path.

Chapman Snowden [00:16:02]:

Because if we stay in this sort of suspended zone, we won't actually be able to accomplish anything. So I think that is sort of really sort of the first important ingredient. I think the second ingredient is what is it that we're actually designing around. Matt is very clear that on speed he like the speed of execution. And I think that is more true than it's not. Especially for a type of company like ours that has so much risk associated with it. The only way to go through to really understand what are the true existential risks are to burn through those as intentionally and as quickly as possible. And so speed, and that alignment on speed gives us a really simple lens through which to make trade offs.

Chapman Snowden [00:16:51]:

Right. And so I think speed for Matt when we were sub 20 people was really easy. You could be in the details every day. Yeah, he can be in the details every day. It's harder. Right. It takes more time. It, it can become slower at times.

Chapman Snowden [00:17:08]:

And so now this is a point in which we have to design practices and processes that allow us to surface the most important problems, blockers, challenges, however you want to frame them, such that whatever little time we have from leadership team or heads, we can spend that as most effectively as possible. Because especially in a, a land of never ending problems, it's very seductive to just want to cycle through all of them. Not really understanding that there's a ranking and a hierarchy of like what's actually the most important here.

Matt Gjertsen [00:17:42]:

Yeah.

Chapman Snowden [00:17:42]:

So I think for us, like using that common lens of speed, Matt and I, having a really clear language on when we disagree, what do we do, enables us to get to a place where we can start to put in some process. And I think probably the most important thing about putting in process is being able or being willing to throw away process. I think a lot of operational people that I've worked with in the past, and I think you've referenced this in a couple podcasts, will come in with a tool belt that they've, they've done It's a hard earned tool belt, right? If you spent 20 years at Amazon, that's a hard 20 years. And you come in with the one memo and all of this stuff and, and that's sometimes it's partially correct, sometimes it's not. I think what we need to be very comfortable doing is we have a set of problems that last somewhere between 60 to 90 days, sometimes 180 days. What are processes that get us through that? And at the end of 180 days, do we still need that process? And if not, how do we throw that away? And that, that requires constant oversight. It requires constant learning cycles and feedback, both from the team and the leadership perspective to be able to execute that well. Because if it's, if it's executed poorly, it feels chaotic, right? It feels, wait, we did it this way, now we're not doing it that way.

Chapman Snowden [00:19:06]:

What people don't understand why. And so it can be really disorienting to, to folks who we, we need them to have focus and, and speed.

Matt Gjertsen [00:19:15]:

I love hearing what you're saying because one of the things that I've reflected on a lot at the companies, you know, because I've, because I've been at, you know, I've worked in the dod, you know, the, literally the largest hierarchy there is in, in the world. And I've always said, I think that those that, you know, bureaucracy is bureaucracy and red tape. It's like a law of nature. And the companies that are most likely to succumb to it or get controlled by it are the ones that most disdain it because they are the ones that don't pay attention to it, that think they can just make decisions and move on, that it doesn't need to be there. And so they never put in a process for reviewing processes or don't have a process for removing process and things. And so it just gunks it up. And so having that deliberate focus on it is so essential. I think this is a perfect time for me to bring in.

Matt Gjertsen [00:20:10]:

So for listeners, the reason why I wanted to have chap on was at astroforge, they have their own podcast called Roid Rage that I highly recommend. It's kind of like an under the hood look at what they're doing over there. And a couple weeks ago listened to an episode that was all about minimum viable process. As soon as I heard it, I was like, oh, sweet. I love it because I'm naming a book that's kind of similar to that and everything, but I'd love to start with just, you know, because we were just talking about all this process. People can go listen to the episode, we don't need to rehash the whole thing. But I'd love kind of a primer of from you. What is a minimum viable process and why is it valuable?

Chapman Snowden [00:20:47]:

Yeah, I think a minimum viable process to me is it's the simplest articulation of a set of steps, people and tools that need to be visible or legible in an organization to make something get done effectively. Right. And so this can be as simple as a. When we want to tweet out a picture of from a vibe test, where do you get the picture? Who's taking the picture? What's the scope of that picture? Where does that get shared? Right. I'm using a very overly simplistic example here because it's nice, because these are, these are not complex tasks, they're not always even unbounded tasks, but they're tasks that are repetitive and they build up a lot of friction. And oftentimes I think these tasks can get woven into what has been described as sort of tribal knowledge. And tribal knowledge, once you get past, I'll call it 10 to 15 people succumbs to the, the, the age old sort of Achilles heel of the telephone game. Right.

Chapman Snowden [00:21:51]:

And so then you get, well, so and so told me to do it this way, but now maybe we're doing it that way. And there are moments in time which that can be frustrating and. But when you get to a place where we're now 60 something people, it now holds us back.

Matt Gjertsen [00:22:05]:

Right.

Chapman Snowden [00:22:05]:

Because we play that multiple times a day within teams, across teams around a number of things ranging from where do we find the photo to tweet out to. Hey, how do we actually document this test or procedure that we have to put in Epsilon 3, right. And, and so what I, the way for me to approach this is I just sort of think about it as building software. Right. I have to sit down and talk to people about like, what do you spend most of your day on doing that you don't think you should be doing, or what causes you friction. And I think when you find things that are repetitive tasks that cause real pain, that slow down due dates or require somebody to shift the amount of attention to a task they shouldn't be shifting attention to, that's a really good sign to put in a really lightweight process to say, this is now our shared or agreed upon method of doing it. We know where to host it, it will change, but it's a reference point that we can use as we continue to sort of wrap our head around what is it that we actually need to solve and what are the top priorities for us.

Matt Gjertsen [00:23:09]:

How did you kind of come to this understanding of, of thinking about. I have to believe. I mean, when I heard you on this other, even listening to you now, when I heard you in the other show, I just kept thinking of, you know, the instructional design process and when you're teaching people and needing to break things down, I have to believe that time you spent thinking about educating others plays a big role in how you think about systematically breaking things down like this.

Chapman Snowden [00:23:33]:

Yeah, it's. I'm going to speak in very broad strokes right now. A failure pattern for instructors in a traditional education environment, as well as ops leaders in startups, big companies, is to think that you have a captive audience and therefore you don't have to treat them as a customer. Right. Like, I have 30 kids sitting in front of me for 45 minutes. I have people who have to come for this training.

Matt Gjertsen [00:24:00]:

Yeah.

Chapman Snowden [00:24:01]:

I don't have to think about the scope and the efficacy of this training. This is my 30 or 45 minutes to dull some amount of information out there. I loathe that to the inner core, because everybody has a choice, right? Like I, I have a choice whether or not I should sit through this training or not. Like I have a choice whether I should pay attention. And, and when you have that choice, the person who is instructing in this example needs to take that into the design process. And for me, I think that what that oftentimes means is starting as simply as possible, such that the production value doesn't get in the way of what the actual content should be. And it enables me to strip out all of the extra fluff and do you know what you would traditionally call, like, checks for understanding? Right. And make sure that we're sort of building upon the sort of scaffold scaffolding that all of these students, employees, coworkers have because it's respectful of their time and where they are.

Chapman Snowden [00:25:02]:

And I think if you meet people where they are building process building pedagogy always becomes way more effective than, than if you just say, here is the, here's the handbook from. Insert any training manual and we're just going to start on page one.

Matt Gjertsen [00:25:18]:

Yeah, yeah, I think it's interesting. I'd never quite made that connection before, but it is so true in, you know, creating especially, you know, like mandatory trainings that are required by regulations and stuff, those are always just atrocious and terrible for that exact reason. But then you switch it to. When I think about, I still do time in the reserves and to think about the military. And so often that's the challenge there too is when you see these processes, it's clear that there, and I see this in large organizations as well, like with the software and the process that they have to follow to document things in their software, it's clear there's just not an inherent valuing of every individual's time or else you wouldn't have, I think to use another learning software example, there's this one learning management system that a lot of companies are forced to use simply because it's attached to an HR system. And I was, I had it at my last company and I remember one time mapping it out and just enrolling someone in a course I think took 28 clicks of my mouse to enroll. That's just not, no one would think that's a good process if you're respecting the person who's actually using that software.

Chapman Snowden [00:26:32]:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Matt Gjertsen [00:26:33]:

Yeah.

Chapman Snowden [00:26:34]:

And I think that when, when you, you know, in the. For the team that we have this on the oper right now, like treating not just the engineers but the rest of the company as our customers and saying the nice thing about this, we don't have to worry about venture backing. I have to worry about like all of those sort of like long term mile markers. And if you're worried about how does this scale when we're 200 people, I go back to this whole sort of like YC adage of like do things that don't scale. We don't have a scale problem right now. We have a operational efficiency and making sure that if we each spend 70, 80 hours working, those are high value hours. Because one of the things, and this is where Matt and I are aligned is like, I also don't want junk hours. I don't want people doing things that have low input or low impact on the end deliverable the product that we need to deliver.

Chapman Snowden [00:27:29]:

And so that's the thing that we're trying to solve here.

Matt Gjertsen [00:27:32]:

Yeah. So is it just kind of like a mindset? Then you think of just viciously attacking like and respecting people's time. Like how why does this go wrong in so many organizations? And as, and as you grow, how are you thinking about outside of yourself? You know, you're, I'm sure at the point now where you're starting to hire leaders and you'll have leaders of leaders and how are you thinking about making sure that this kind of mindset or process for Making processes, gets in, stays in the culture as you continue to grow.

Chapman Snowden [00:28:03]:

I mean, I would love to hire an army of mini me's, right? Cause that would make my job so much easier. I don't think they exist and arguably we probably don't want more of me. To me, the simplest and most effective way that I have seen larger groups of people. So when you get into, you know, measuring people in the tens is give people really simple sort of X over Y frameworks to make decisions. Because I think if, like even just to say we prioritize speed here, it's like great, over what? So if I get, if the priority is speed, but I know this thing is going to break, do I make that trade or do I not? And on an engineering perspective, like we do have some feedback where we can say no, if the spacecraft doesn't work, we can't make that trade. From an operational perspective, it's harder. Right? And so I, so a lot of times what I will do with our teams is just give them. And like you can have no more than three or five because I think at that point then you're like you're, you've either hired the wrong people or you're safeguarding against something that you haven't actually articulated yet.

Chapman Snowden [00:29:12]:

So as a simple one, I prioritize frequency of communication over clarity of communication. I'd rather have you come to me multiple times, then wait two weeks to say, great, I've got this perfect note that I can now send to you. Because oftentimes in that perfect note something happened on a decision gate that we probably should have talked about even if you were right or wrong. And so I, that's a, it's, it's an important lens. When I give somebody a task or somebody has a project and I say, great, like, remember, I prioritize like consistency and frequency of communication over perfect communication because the more surface area I get, the more I actually get to see into your process. And I also get to build trust, right? I get to build trust with somebody that you don't have to bring me a finished problem. I'd actually rather you bring me a imperfect solution. We can talk through it and then have fewer, more frequent touch points there.

Chapman Snowden [00:30:10]:

Now this is a great example of like, that doesn't work at Google, right? That doesn't work at SpaceX at this point. Like there are times in which you actually have to have cleaner interfaces in hand, handoff of information. But for us that's a really clear trade that I can make with sort of the ops Team, as we build out all of these, to say, how do we ensure that we're building the right processes for the company and also modeling those as well.

Matt Gjertsen [00:30:36]:

Yeah, yeah. I love that kind of idea of you because as you were talking, the thing that came to mind to me is kind of like, you know, cultural values and things like that. And one of the things that's challenging in so many company values is that they don't mean anything in. In the sense that you can read it and you can, like. Yeah, I can just kind of apply that to any situation. And if. If your values aren't helping you make decisions day to day, then they're not. They're not doing anything.

Matt Gjertsen [00:31:05]:

And so by setting up those dichotomies of this over that, it makes it really clear what you're. What you're talking about. I. When I work with a lot of my clients, whenever we're making courses, I have to kind of have like, almost like a come to Jesus meeting at the very beginning when we first started working together of saying, like, look, I'm gonna bring you stuff that has typos in it, because we're not judging that right now. I need you to give me feedback on the ideas in this, not the spelling and grammar. So just ignore that and focus on the ideas. If they're a client that can't do that, which there are, you know, there. We've all had that director who will find the missing period on slide 35 and derail the whole meeting like they ex.

Matt Gjertsen [00:31:49]:

But you have to set that out so that everybody knows where you're starting from.

Chapman Snowden [00:31:54]:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Matt Gjertsen [00:31:56]:

Yeah. Awesome. I feel like we could. I could just keep asking you more questions here because we hardly dove into the fact that, you know, you know, what are some of the other attributes that you think are effective? What are some of the things that. For leaders, what are some of the common pitfalls? Because it is such a challenge. But I think really what it boils down to is really making sure it goes back to that. That the first quote that I started of, you know, how do you. How do you create a shared model of an undefined problem space? Because so much of.

Matt Gjertsen [00:32:25]:

I think the bad processes and bad bureaucracy start from just like bad instructional design, honestly, start from the fact that we don't actually know what we're solving for. We're creating processes where we're not either. We haven't done enough reps, we're not mature enough, whatever it is. And so that's why I love this minimum viable process idea. Of it's like, let's be very clear about what we know. We don't know what we can build process for and what we can't build process for or else we're just wasting people's time.

Chapman Snowden [00:32:53]:

Yeah, exactly. And I think this is a, this is a hard thing, especially in an early stage company. You part of what being willing to go and be in what is like fundamentally sort of a, a fluid environment from, from a, from a rules perspective is to sit in that discomfort. And I think especially anybody who has been more than 10 or 15 years in their, into their career, you've assembled all of these scars from fluid or non fluid environments and said well I don't want to be back there anymore. And right like, and so you put all of these protectors around yourself to say, well I know how to have, I know how to have a really hard conversation with an employee in the context of Google. I'm going to have that really hard conversation with an employee in the context of a startup and it's going to sound entirely weird. And so like I, as a leader or anybody as a leader has to be constantly willing to sort of rip down the belief structure that you have and rebuild it in that sense. And that, that is, that is expensive and it is frustrating.

Chapman Snowden [00:34:02]:

And so I get why a lot of people want to pattern match, but it's really just sort of shifting the burden of the work off to somebody else, which may feel good in the short term but doesn't actually help a group of people execute towards something.

Matt Gjertsen [00:34:17]:

Yeah, that's a huge one. Is I think if every process you make, every email that you send, you think about am I just giving them work, am I shifting the workload here from myself to them? Or if I just spend another five minutes here, can I eliminate 30 minutes of workload over there? That's a huge question.

Chapman Snowden [00:34:40]:

Yeah.

Matt Gjertsen [00:34:41]:

Yeah. Well this has been a fantastic discussion, chap. I really, you are one of the, you know, you and astroforge are just one of those companies that are really shooting big right now and I, and I love it. There's so many space companies doing so many amazing things, but there's honestly not a ton out there who are, you know, getting outside of Leo really doing like the next generation of space stuff, you know, like the, let's, let's assume that we got a countdown clock to when launch is permanently solved, right? Like it's already kind of solved, but it's like really soon going to be totally solved. And then what are the interesting things we can do. I'm sure you all are doing some really interesting stuff. So thank you so much for your time. Best of luck to you.

Matt Gjertsen [00:35:21]:

Best of luck to Astroforge. I can't wait for your next mission.

Chapman Snowden [00:35:24]:

Thank you. Appreciate you having me on, Sam.