Rivian: RJ Scaringe

Building a business means being 10 people at once, the strategist, the spreadsheet person, the one fixing the office sink. US Bank made a card for exactly that kind of hustle. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. Hey, so before we get to this brand new episode of how I built this, I wanted to make sure that you all knew about the how I built this shop where you can find T-shirts, hats, mugs, tons of other merch for you or any trailblazing entrepreneur or builder or innovator, or just fan of the show. We created a collection of how I built this apparel accessories drinkware and more just for you. It's currently available at wanderyshop.com, so go check it out right now. Okay, onto the show. (soft music) One of the things that is interesting with electrification is it completely changes, performance boundaries that we previously accepted are pickup. I was on the PCH, the Pacifico's highway in California, so maybe three, four weeks ago. I pulled up to a light, it was early morning, and a brand new Ferrari pulled up right next to me. The guy looks over me, I look over at him and said, "Hey, you wanna see what we can do here?" And so we both accelerate quickly off the line and I out accelerate him by quite a margin. Oh yeah. When we get to the next light and he says to me, "I can't believe my Ferrari just got roasted smoked by a pickup." (upbeat music) Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. One guy rise and on the show today, how RJ Scorinch was laughed out of the room when he set out to make an all-electric pickup and how that motivated him to build Rivian, a truck to push gas-guzzling vehicles off the road. (upbeat music) Most startup founders are motivated by a purpose. You have to be in order to withstand the volatile ups and downs of building a business. And that purpose is often about introducing a product or service that you believe will have an impact, either in your community or industry or in the world at large. And this applies to many of the brands we've profiled on this show. For Paulina Wexler of Universal Standard, the purpose is to create a more inclusive clothing brand. For Sam and Mariah Calijoni of Dogfish Head Brewery, the purpose is to bring culinary techniques to the art of beer brewing. And for RJ Scorinch, the purpose is about building a better car, better for drivers and better for the planet. But the difference between RJ and the vast majority of the brands we've profiled on this show is timescale. It would take more than a decade of research and development before his company, Rivian Automotive, was able to sell anything. So this is the story of someone who found a way to merge his idealism with a huge market opportunity. Rivian is trying to solve a very hard problem, actually several hard problems. And it's why RJ Scorinch has been at it since 2009. That was the year RJ and a group of collaborators started a small car company that would eventually become Rivian. RJ wanted to build electric cars, but he knew then, as he does now, that to really make an impact with consumers, you have to make it easy and appealing. And for RJ, the way to get there was going to be with electric trucks. Now, even though you may think you see electric Tesla's and Kia's everywhere you look, electric vehicles only make up around four and a half percent of all cars on the road in the US. And most of those electric cars are sedans. But the top selling vehicles in America aren't sedans. They're trucks. Ford's F-Series, Chevy's Silverado, and the Ram pick up, dominate car sales in the US. So to get most people driving electric cars, you really have to win over the truck owners. When RJ got into the car business in 2009, GM and Chrysler were cratering. Both companies would be bailed out by the government. This was not an obvious time to get into the industry. But what RJ had and has is patience and a long-term vision. He knew and still knows that to mass produce electric cars in the US and then get consumers to buy them will take time. By the end of 2022, Rivian expects to deliver around 25,000 electric trucks to waiting customers. It's a drop in the bucket when it comes to overall car sales, but within a few years, the company hopes to become the biggest electric truckmaker in the world. There are growing pains for sure, which you'll hear about. Supply chain challenges, costs, manufacturing delays. But given what RJ and his team have already been through for the past decade, these are just more bumps in the road. RJ grew up in the 1980s on the space coast in Florida. His dad was also an engineer and an entrepreneur. And my dad and I are really close. So we would always talk about the business and he's an engineer's engineer. So he's the type of personality where he understands how everything works and if something's broken, he attempts to fix it. So that certainly was something that I grew up with. And as a kid, I would get very frustrated if I didn't know how something would work. So I would want to understand how everything worked. And I also always had this view that anything is possible. I mean, it really because of my dad, he would look at these complex problems and be like, oh yeah, that's something we could solve. And so he's such an optimist. And he's always been so incredibly supportive of me thinking about things that now I think back. Imagine your six-year-old son says, do you want to start a company? And he's like, yeah, of course, you should definitely do that. - So even as a six-year-old, you already had an idea that of what you wanted to do when you grew up, like you were that focused? - Yeah, I mean, I knew from my earliest memory, I knew I wanted to be an engineer. And it's sort of funny, even as a kid, I would be building these little businesses. So I had me these little business cards, and I was probably seven or eight years old, and I said my name, and then I said, I polished metal. So I'd go around to people's houses. My neighborhood said, you need any metal polished, and I had a polishing wheel and polishing wax, and I would polish metal. - So it was always just this perspective of let me go build something. - Wow. - And I also was deeply enamored with automobiles, and just a extreme card to just from my earliest memories. It was fortunate to have a really a premiere classic, air-cooled Porsche Restoration expert that lived by chance close by to me, where I was growing up and-- - Just a neighbor? - Yeah, just a neighbor. So I got very involved just through observation and through my neighbor, in this case, taking the time to really explain to me how everything worked. - All right, so you were, and in high school, if I knew you in high school, if I'm at you in high school, would I have known you as like, that's RJ, he wants to build things, he's gonna be an engineer. Was it already clear at that point? - Yeah, in the senior description of what I wanted to go do, I said I'm gonna go start a company, and then shortly after high school, I started to figure out what that actually meant in terms of what kind of company and the fact that I wanted to be a car company. - Wow, did you watch, like, I don't know, would you watch those films about like, those great sort of captains of industry who started a car company? - Of course, but when I say I was a car enthusiast, I was deeply embedded in just understanding the history of the automobile, and it was funny when I was growing up, I would say to my parents, I wish I was born in 1890, because that was when all the excitement happened in the auto industry, that's when it was all formed, and what's interesting sitting here today is I'm so glad that I was born in 1983, because I do think that the change is gonna be larger over the next two decades than what we saw in the first two decades of the auto industry, you know, the sort of the shift from a horse to a car, as we now think about going from a combustion powered, non-connected vehicle, which is the majority of vehicles in the road today to connected electric and increasingly autonomous vehicles, it's a massive shift, so. - Totally. - This is an equally exciting time. - Yeah, I mean, there's a complete renaissance happening, which obviously is what we're gonna talk about today, but I wonder, when you knew you wanted to make cars, right, from a young age, and you ended up studying engineering, I know at Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York, and then you went on to get your doctorate at MIT, but I'm wondering, you were hoping to start a car company, you knew this from the time you were young, so why did you think you needed a PhD? - The reason for that was really quite simple. I knew that we would need, and I would need a lot of capital to start a business like this, and I felt that if someone were to invest in a company, a car company, which admittedly is an extremely high risk proposition that demonstrating some level of intellectual rigor and intellectual capability through a PhD would be helpful in that regard. So I studied and worked really hard at graduated. Number one in the school from RPI with a perfect GPA. Wow. You were single-mindedly focused. You wanted to go to the best graduate school, presumably. Yeah. I was very close and in fact signed onto a position at Stanford, but ultimately switched a few days into that to MIT. And the reason was I was selecting the grad school based upon what I thought would best position me for starting Rivian. Wow. That is unbelievable. You're like a unicorn in that sense because I almost never meet people who were that sort of had that much foresight. You were literally thinking about how MIT could help you request to start a car company one day. Absolutely. Yeah. So at that point, this is back in 2005. Yeah. Stanford did not actually have a very strong car program or vehicle program. MIT's was the best in the world, said the Sloan Automotive Research Lab. And that lab was supported by and integrated with a number of different auto manufacturers. Wow. So they have like a pipeline right to GM and Ford. Yeah. So you'd beat with engineers and research staff from those respective companies and be able to dive into their technical challenges. You'd get a chance to go visit and meet with them on their their R&D centers. Yeah. And what I realized is that the likelihood of me being successful starting a car company with with no capital, no team, no technology, no brand, no facilities, no supply chain. I actually felt the likelihood of me having impact doing that was still higher than the likelihood of me being able to impact the trajectory of a large existing OEM. And the challenges I would say of holistic or system level innovation. Yeah. All right. So if I met you in 2005, 2006, when you're doing a graduate degree at MIT, and I was said, so RJ, people are telling me that you're really interested in starting a car company. But at the same time, you want to start a business. So you've got to solve a problem. And there's a number of problems you can solve. You can say, well, you know, the existing American cars isn't compact enough or it's not cool enough or there's no Italian designing, you know, design schemes in America. We need beautiful American cars or we need faster American cars or what was the problem you want to solve? Was it about fuel efficiency? Was it about emissions? Was it about design? Was it about quality price? What? The question we were trying to solve and what I was focused on is how do we how do we create a transportation system that will work in 100 years or in 200 years? And the challenge we have as a society is our current transportation system is it's causing without questioning some of the biggest challenges we face as a society. So everything from almost all of our major cities around the world have severe air quality issues to to a lot of geopolitical conflicts we have around the world. So perhaps most challenging not perhaps. I'd say definitely the most challenging is we are fundamentally changing the composition or atmosphere. That was what was motivating you. For sure. It was it was the central focus. It was it was the internal combustion engine has got to we got to figure this out. This is a problem. We have to move to a carbon-free system. And so while I was at MIT I was spending a lot of time thinking about what type of car it needs to be, what type of products are going to be necessary over the next several years. And I mean it was pretty wild. The beauty of a clean sheet is you can think really proudly. So it was we were thinking about or I was thinking about everything from pedal-powered cars to diesel electrics to pure electric. But I actually was really sort of intrigued by this idea of a pedal hybrid like something with what we now see with e-bikes but doing that in like a covered format. Yeah like a Flintstones car. Yeah but but where there's electric motor to sort of help you. Yeah but sort of like that with pedals. And I realized that as cool and interesting as that might be the reality is there's not a lot of scale of people are not going to want to buy that. It's interesting because around this time it may have been around this time 2004-5, 6 and maybe earlier I can't remember but there was a there was a documentary it was called something like how GM killed the electric car or something. And I remember there were a lot of conversations around like GM had this amazing electric car and lots of people loved it and then they just killed it and there was a conversation around this time 2005-2006 like electric cars really were not viable. Do you remember those conversations? Of course yeah very much so but for myself and I think in academia it was there was never a question that electrification is the future. The question was was solely around what's the path to get there? All right so this was what you're focused on and when you when you were set to you know to get your your PhD and go out into the world was it clear to you already that you would not go and work for another company from the get go that that you literally you get your cap and gown and you would take it off and you would start your on thing. Yeah so what the interesting thing though is I didn't talk about it so I kept this all to myself. You didn't tell anybody. In my last year I should say as a graduate student I talked to a few professors about it and Jim Wilmak who's now become a close friend and a great advisor. I was in a class he was he was giving on the future of automotive which was in 2008 or 2009 and near the end of the class end of the semester I walked up to him and said hey I'm starting a car company and he sort of looked at me and said you're crazy but other than that I really kept it very much to myself and then of course we graduated and I started the company the next day. The next day this was not Rivian this was the company you found it called mainstream motors. Yeah so I I didn't have a good name so I incorporate I had to incorporate something so I incorporated under a temporary name and I used mainstream motors my dad's company was. It's a sexy name. Yes that's a really that's a hot name. You're gonna sell a lot of cars. This is a mainstream motor. Yeah so that was that was I think the name for a couple of months I don't remember exactly how long but but very short period of time and then we came up with what we thought was the actual name which was Avera AV-ERA. And Avera was a port one two of a couple of different words right? Yeah we took the word Verde and Terra so green and earth and the idea was a green earth. Right okay and and I guess the goal the this idea of this company the goal was to make a like a more fuel efficient sports car right like a like a hybrid that that was what you were planning to do right? Yeah well in terms of the first product it was even more crude and simple than that it was let's build the first product that helps us build the brand. The idea was 100 mile per gallon sports car and build the brand around efficiency and sustain a building and then from there continue to develop more and more technology different products and so we started working on that and you say we it was you and it who else? Well it was me to start yeah and then hired one or two people in the first six months but you know very very slowly grew the company we we did not have a lot of capital well that yeah I mean this is my question this is I believe you you started this you founded this in 2009 correct yeah and anybody remembers 2009 knows that like all the auto manufacturers like the big three they were in Washington all the time they were asking it's not forward but the others were asking for help to make sure it collapsed and I mean the whole industry was in crisis GM Chrysler for sure and this was not a good time to be thinking about a starting a car company be asking investors to invest in a car company when the the two two out of the three big big ones in the US were asking for bailouts. Yeah it's it was in some ways the worst possible backdrop one could imagine for raising capital and walking up and down San Hill Road and sort of knocking on doors and trying to get meetings you were trying to do this yeah I'd say very unsuccessfully trying to raise capital in 2009 you were trying to raise money from like you know of the Sequoias and whatever out there for sure yeah but the nature of it is I mean imagine I had no capital no product design no no technology no team you had the credential you had the MIT credential at at a PhD from IT yeah and so I would basically go into meetings and say I'm starting a car company and they'd say well tell us about your factor tell us about your team or show us the product and I'd say well we don't have those yet but we're going to build them so it was a it was you know looking back it was an incredibly hard pitch you know in starting a car company it's different than most technology businesses or traditional venture-backed businesses because even the whole venture space is designed around the idea of being able to launch your minimum global product yes you can launch something quickly yeah so for for very little capital you can build your software platform build your app and show that there's market demand for and the challenge in starting this is if you're being honest with yourself And therefore, honest with investors as you talk about the business, you have to say well, we have to raise At least a billion dollars if we had all that money right now It would still take us several years and you want to be the first dollar in right so it's a really really hard investment So you have this classic like chicken or egg. You need money to develop technology and product But if you have no product and technology, how do you get how do you raise the money? So you have to sort of almost like will it to happen. You have to just start working on the problem and start slowly making progress Well, so I'm curious in 2009 when you're going around asking investors if they want to invest What you want to do is at this point is to build a prototype of a product which is going to be a fuel-efficient Sports car, but but you needed to do that and you could do that for what five six seven million dollars? Oh less than that. Less than that. Well under a million dollars. We built the first prototype and so you raised no outside capital to begin work on the prototype It was all like family and friends and stuff. Yeah, exactly in the beginning. It was just family and friends mainly my dad and I and I bought a house when I was in high school and my dad refinanced his house and we both Put that money into the business You bought a house in high school from like what your your your jobs and just like you just bought like a cheap house then that you rent it out Yeah, yeah, so I um late 90s summers. I work two full-time jobs I worked as a as a machinist during the day and then I worked in a restaurant in nights and weekends and my goal was to buy a house so I saved up enough to To buy a house. Yeah, I'm just amazed when I hear about like high school and college kids who are just so focused and then they buy a house and then they rent it out and that eventually builds wealth, but that's a different story Okay, now here's my question. I'm just thinking my god. How do you build a hybrid? I mean, how do you build a prototype car that's gonna work like you're in Florida you're in this area where you grow up It's you and get one or two people with you. Yeah, how do you physically like where do you start like what first of all Where do you build the car do you to just like rent a warehouse that you start working in it's exactly what we did We I rented a warehouse. It was actually a warehouse. I rented from my dad and that was what we worked out of initially and then To make a prototype been to figure out how to how to do that so Started traveling back and forth to Detroit to meet with some of the prototype part fabricators and As we were going through it. I mean it was very scrappy as we found People that could make things all over the place whether it was in Florida whether it was in Detroit area that could sort of make some of the parts Mm-hmm. I mean, I can't even imagine just the all the problems all the the challenges you had to solve for right it to make an engine and Then an efficient chassis and suspension powertrain all I mean and of course this was not gonna be a completed car They were building it wasn't gonna look like some you'd find an auto showroom, but still Like where where to start at that time we were really focused on how the car'd be built so we started with the Processed to assemble Sort of what we think of is like the structure the the aluminum structure So I was developing parts. I was designing parts and CAD It was 24/7 we never had enough even close to enough money to do anything the right way so everything was sort of hacked How did you get like I mean were you were you just basically getting things made for you? Yeah, I mean then just shipped to you in parts and you would kind of assemble it in this warehouse Yeah, and we do some assembly of it depending on the parts some of those parts have been put together in the Detroit area But yeah, it was definitely a hand-built process All right, it took I took you guys small team of you you had about Like 12 13 people working on I think some like that. Yeah, just over 10 almost two years to come up with this And you got some attention. Press attention. There's an article in Orlando Sentinel and I mean, it's really cool You you said at the time That you were hoping that by 2012. Yeah, you guys could build these in Florida and that you know, you could they would go for about 25,000 bucks. Yep. Yeah, is this probably off in the case we Thought the task was easier than it actually is This is not for the faint of hard and I think in those days we we had assumed we could do it with less time and less money Then was actually realistic and I often talked to people about the stage and in some ways It was helpful that we didn't fully understand How challenging it was because it the the steepness of the climb appeared less scary so to speak we didn't we didn't look at it and fully Appreciate how hard it was going to be and what about the so I'm looking at a photograph of a team of you around What would become with the eventual car this a Vera car which looks pretty great It's this a blue car looks like a yeah sporty little car. Yeah, and so this car did drive it You did drive it right? Yeah, yeah, it drove in a video. It looks very real, but it was it was not a there wasn't a supply chain built around it and there was not a It wasn't durability tested. It was it was a it was like a hobby car basically. Yeah, it was a prototype very crude prototype and did it did it go What did it was it fuel efficient? Sort of It had a long way to go to get to what the target state was I'll say that yeah But but still I mean I can imagine you know, it's kind of cool You've I'm looking at a picture of this small team of people around a fully built car which is kind of a cool achievement to I mean to this under two years And so you were probably excited about the prospect of like Florida could be this manufacturing center You could make cars in Florida and maybe you were kind of carried away with this vision Which I think anybody would that you could make this happen. I think that's about right. We we really Believe we could make something special But I would say underneath the surface and of course I can say this now I wouldn't have said this to the team at the time I had Pretty deep concerns just around the Around whether we were solving the right problem and where we're working on the right thing Yeah, the kind of thing that you go to bed lying about thinking about Should we be building this is this what the world needs to we deserve to exist as a company? That was a question. I'll ask myself all the time What gives us the right to exist? I read a quote from one of the engineers who worked on this project I think that works with the Caribbean who said when the vehicle was done Literally you guys finishes a very vehicle great achievement popped a champagne corks, and you know You literally said we're switching we're switching course here. This is not the right direction. Yeah, it was At this point we did bring in a small amount of outside investment So we had you know investors to think about we had employees and Ever wanted poured their heart and soul into what we were building and but I just knew it wasn't the right thing for us And I knew it wasn't solving the right problem. So I Said look this we've got a shift and That was the easy part the hard part was is that we didn't know At that point what we were shifting to When we come back in just a moment how RJ and his team begin to design a whole new vehicle And why they decide to do it very very quietly Stay with us. I'm Guy Ra's and you're listening to how I built this As I mentioned earlier every founder I talked to does it all the big picture dreaming the late-night spreadsheets the 6 am coffee run nobody asked you to make and every dollar you spend on your business should work just as hard as you do That's why I want to tell you about the us bank triple cash rewards visa business card Right now you can earn an extra $750 cashback plus you get 3% cashback on eligible purchases at gas and EV charging stations Office supply stores cell phone service providers and restaurants the things you're already buying and here's the kicker 0% intro APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 billing cycles That's breathing room when you need it most visit us bank.com/business to learn more The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. some restrictions apply Hey, welcome back to how I built this I'm Guy Ra's so it's 2013 and RJ is in pivot mode He's already built a prototype of a fuel efficient sports car But now he decides that to really make an impact he needs to make a vehicle that's fully electric two vehicles in fact an SUV And a pickup which was sort of the craziest thing back in like 2013 to even talk about electrifying You can imagine if if people thought it was crazy to start a car company when I said I want to make Electric pickups and this is 2013 It wouldn't be an exaggeration say we'd get left out of the room. Yeah, but we said this is actually a really good thing if people are laughing us out of the room We need to we have an opportunity to demonstrate That this is a segment that it's the least efficient vehicles in the road. It's among the most profitable segments, so it's the type of vehicle that actually the world needs to see. There's demand for electric, and the world needs to see that it's possible to electrify. All right. When you realize that you need to switch direction, you knew that it was going to be all electric. I remember test driving a Tesla Roadster, I did a story about it back then, and it was a sports car, electric sports car, and it was really cool. You could have said, "Hey, let's focus on electric sports cars," or you could have said, "Let's focus on electric sedans," or, "Let's focus on an electric family car." There were different directions you could go in. Did you think about maybe going in that direction? Of course, but Tesla launched its Roadster in like the 2006-2007 time frame. I thought of going out and building what Tesla had already done ten years later, just it felt like that wasn't a problem that the world needed work done. But how did you land on this idea of making a pickup truck? What were the factors that got you to that point? What were the things you realized about this particular kind of car? Obviously, it's a very popular segment, but we also saw it was a segment that perhaps more than any other has been characterized by compromises, so a truck drives like a truck. It can be capable and robust, but it's not going to ride as smooth as a car. A truck is going to be inefficient. A truck is not going to have a lot of trunk space, like a truck cannot be sported. All these really wonderful, wonderfully interesting opportunities to demonstrate how technology can eliminate a compromise. When we thought about the role of technology and the role of driving electrification, we said we need to not just make a truck that's electric, it needs to be something that's totally different and turns things that are today weaknesses into strengths. Put on your business hat for a second, not the engineering hat. Did you see an market opportunity in focusing on SUVs and trucks? This is still the biggest segment of car sold in the US, SUVs and trucks. Did you realize that and say, "We should really go in that direction"? We were very much analyzing the different segments you can go into, analyzing the size of the segments, the efficiency of those segments, but what was incredibly clarifying as we thought about what to do was we knew the right question to answer. It was a single question, and the question was, whatever we do, it needs to have the most positive impact, and that even if the company wasn't successful, if we were working on problems that were big enough and hard enough, that inspired competition, that inspired existing OEMs to change the way they looked at things, that would be a success from the measure of reducing the amount of carbon emitted into the world. This is one of my, in the moment, most perplexing and challenging times, but looking back, it was actually one of my favorite times in Rivians history because it was so freeing to say we're trying to solve for impact. Now let's go iterate through lots of different concepts and ideas and strategies that can do that, and the freedom we had at that point was so unique. We could pivot wildly, like on Monday we think we're doing this, and by Wednesday we're 180 degrees different from that thinking, and so the fluidity of concepts that we wanted to focus on was just, I mean, it was extraordinary, it was awesome. You know that the future is electric, and you're going to be building trucks and SUVs, and then, I guess in 2013, you guys decide to relocate to Michigan, like just outside of Detroit, and it means that for obvious reasons, the whole US automotive industry is based in the upper Midwest, but I just had a curiosity at this point what the company is like 10 or 12 of you guys. Yeah, I guess it was probably about around 12 people, half of us all moved into a single house in a place called Ipsilani. But yeah, it was a very interesting time. My now wife, we were dating at the time, and she moved with us, and none of us had any money, the company had no money of course. So we were really running lean and hard to try to come up with and scale some of these ideas that we were thinking about. All right, let's break down some of the things that you had to do. First of all, you changed the name from Avera to Rivian. What was the name change about? Why'd you do that? Because Avera's a pretty good name. Yeah, it's a pretty good name. Yeah, this must have been 2010, we were sued by Hyundai. So Hyundai had a product at the time called the Azerra, A-Z-E-R-A, and they were concerned that the name was too similar to our name so they, they basically said you need to change your name and we said, okay, we're not going to fight Hyundai and use the very small number of dollars we have to fight over a name that very, very few people are on the world had ever even heard of. So we had lots and lots of different sessions and ultimately arrived at Rivian, which I'm so glad all that happened because I can't imagine the company with a different name. It's, I love the name, it's something that just works so well. Where's the name come from? So I grew up on the Indian River. In Florida, right, which is not actually a river, it's the ocean, right? Yeah, it's essentially, it's part of the inner coastal waterway, so it's a, it's a path for large ships to move if there's large storms that come in, you know, they come inland through this waterway. Yeah. But anyway, so, so, we took the first three letters, the word river, R-I-V, and the last three letters, the word Indian, I-A-N, and merged those two together into Rivian. And we wanted something that was phonetically easy to say, we loved the basis of it coming from the word river, it sounds like a word that's flowing and moving, we wanted something that didn't mean anything in any language around the world, which this, this satisfies. So for a bunch of engineers thinking about how to name a car company, that was, that was what we came up with. Yeah. All right. So you're in Michigan and in Ypsilanti in this group house, and you know that you're going to focus on making SUVs and trucks electric. Man, I just cannot imagine what a daunting task you have ahead of you. You've got to make a battery, you've got to make an engine, you've got to design the car, you've got to, I mean, everything. And then down the road, you've got to figure out how to mass produce it, and then you've got to find a factory, and then a supply chain, forget about all that stuff. First of all, just even do these things that I'm talking about, you need lots of money. So was it, I mean, now that you had the prototype of that sports car, you know, now that you proved a concept, even though you weren't doing that anymore, was it, was it a little bit easier to attract capital? In a way it was, we were able to show as a very small team highly undercapitalized that, you know, that we could build something. And so if the risk was extremely high before that, it was now very, very high. So yeah, it allowed us to start having different types of discussions with investors. But I think the other thing you have to remember at this time is it wasn't at all clear that electrification was going to happen yet. And so that was, that was something we also had to overcome was to convince, to convince people that there was actually going to be a big market for electrified products. And now, of course, it's a very different world. It's universally accepted that 100% of, of the world's vehicle production in the very near future will be electric. So yeah, but that wasn't the case seven, eight years ago. So all right, you had to raise money just to get this started. And I know you got, and how much money did you, I mean, even just to get to, I don't know, just start, I can't imagine how much money you needed. Did you start with a small amount or with 50 or 100 million? No, no, no, I wish we started with that. So the way, the way it played out is we, as we were pivoting into this, into this new space, I sort of zoomed out and said, we're really far away from raising them on a capital we need. Again, if you're being honest with yourself, you look in the bank and it has more than a million dollars, you're like, oh, this is great. And then you're like, but wait a second, we need more than a billion dollars to actually ramp. So I'd start thinking about, well, how do I meet the people or the person that's going to help take this to the next level? And ultimately, the approach that actually worked the best was I went back to MIT and I met with some of the senior leaders there who I had and I still have a great relationship with. And I said, I need some help. I've started this company. We need a lot of capital. And I need to connect with people that might be able to help me in that way. And that turned out to be a really smart approach because I guess you wound up getting in touch with an MIT alum, a guy named Mahon. Hama Jamil, right? I think he's the CEO of a company called Abdul Atif Jamil, it's a huge family on corporation from Saudi Arabia. And I think a big part of their business is an automotive. And so what you pitched him on Rivian? - Yeah, I remember I went out and met with him. And it was just a great meeting because we ended up having a conversation around the future of transportation. And at the end of it, I had a hunch that they would be willing to support us and ultimately that played out. So it wasn't as if they walked in and said, RJ here's $50 million. It was, they walked in and said, here's a very small amount of money. Let's see what you can do. And let's build a business plan. And once that was completed, they said, okay, this makes sense. Now let's build a more sophisticated prototype, built that, okay, that seems to be working. Let's engage with more suppliers. And we would then add to that more capital, but it was like less than a million dollars to a million dollars to slightly, to five million dollars to 10 million dollars. So it was a very gradual growth because the risks were so high. - Here's what I'm learning about. You are the main engineer. It's your company. But now you're spending most of your time trying to raise money. And I mean, given that you love the engineering side, every single founder I've talked to you with some exceptions, they're just raising money sides of grind. They really don't like that part. How did you feel about having to really focus on that side of the business? - I really have always thought of my job as my role needs to be constantly looking for what's the most important problem to solve with the company. And at that period of time, it was very important that we solved, it solved how we were gonna capitalize the business. I mean, that was existential. The money issue, that was the issue. - Yeah, without money, there is no company. So it's sort of like, it'd be nice to just work on the vehicles and-- - But you can't. - But you can't, yeah. - 'Cause this is not a cookie company. You are not buying chocolate chips and flour and sugar. You're trying to build an electric car. You can't even start until you have the money. - Yeah, so one of the hardest things, not necessarily raising capital, that was hard. You're being told no way more often than you're being told yes. The ratio is crazy. You're probably getting 150 knows from maybe one partial, maybe yes. But that was fine. I knew that going in. The hardest part was maintaining the morale of the team. - Yeah. - Yeah, I knew all of these folks really well. I knew their families well. I knew the names of their kids and sort of knowing that their livelihood, the livelihood of their families is dependent on us being successful. But also knowing that I needed to keep their state of mind focused on solving technical problems and not stressing about the fact that we have a half a week of cash. - Yeah. - And we haven't paid any of our suppliers in two months and it's a very emotionally challenging state. - I'm curious because around 2012 when you start raising this money, you did something and this is interesting 'cause there's, as you know, I think in, I hope our listeners know, we do a lot of research for every interview, very deep research. But there is a significant gap in our research between 2012 and let's say 2017 'cause you very intentionally went into stealth mode. You decided we're gonna just not talk about what we're doing. We're not gonna publicize it. We're not gonna go to the media. We're not gonna, and was that connected to what you had done in Florida where you actually did talk to the media and you said, "Hey, we've got this awesome car. "We're gonna make him in Florida." Did that inform this strategy of just going into stealth mode and not talking about it at all? - Yeah, absolutely. When I first started, we had targets and as you'd expect, the targets were not realistic. And you could find things where we said, "We're gonna launch this thing by 2012 or 2013." And I realized that the number of unknowns was so significant as we were beginning this sort of second part of this new part of the journey that it would just be silly to talk at all about what we're doing externally. I mean, we didn't even have a website at this point. We just went completely dark. And it was actually really helpful because it avoided us getting overly married to any specific aspect of the strategy or any specific aspect of our timeline. And it also created its own challenges. Recruiting was a challenge because people would joke with me. So I'm gonna go home and tell my spouse, I'm gonna join this company that doesn't have a website, that doesn't appear to have a lot of money and intends to launch vehicles sometime in the future. I was like, "Yes, I'm version of that, yes." So it was challenging to say the least. - Yep, all right. So let's sort of dive into this stealth mode period, right? I'm trying to, 'cause this is like a good sort of four year period in stealth mode. So can I tell me what's happening? - Yeah, it's, so we built our first truck what would look like to most people a production ready truck by the end of 2013. - Okay, so similar kind of what you've done, Florida, you rented a warehouse and you were actually building a prototype. - We were building a prototype. This was, it was completed into 13 beginning of 14 and we called this P1. - And it was a pickup truck that you were building? - It was a pickup, yep. - Like a flatbed pickup. - Well, not a flatbed, more like a little, it was a little two seat pickup. So it was a very small pickup. - Okay. - And we realized that that conceptually wasn't right, we didn't really get the branding on it right and we were trying to make it really low cost. So then we built another version, which we called alpha and this looked like it was from a 1960s science fiction movie where it was like looked futuristic but looked like it was trying to look futuristic if that makes sense. And then we iterated again and really by that point had started to deeply understand the brand we were trying to build in terms of both enabling and inspiring adventure but this idea of like a product designed to take kids to the beach and family's mountain biking and that kind of thing. But each of those iterations you can imagine spooled up like there was clay models and there were teams of people doing research and we would build not just the vehicle but then mules or like test vehicles to test the components on the vehicle. So these big iterations were at the end of each one. We said, oh, this isn't it, this isn't right. We don't have it yet. - All right, as you're in stealth mode, which I wish I had some cameras in there 'cause I think it would have been really interesting to be there. - Yeah, me too. I should have taken more pictures. - You probably did, you were nervous 'cause you made that, but was at any point during that time did you think this might not work out? I mean, 'cause I'm thinking like 80, 90% chance is not gonna work out. - Oh, I think much higher than that. I would say 98% unlikely. - But would you think it was gonna work? Did you think the 2% was on your side? - I didn't think about that a lot. I mean, it was something I thought about at least every week, but I didn't allow myself to go there. It's a, you know, 'cause you can quickly start to get into the realm of, well, what's plan B and what's plan C and if we can't raise money, how do we take some of the things we developed and turn those into smaller businesses and like all that, but it's really distracting to focus on failing, you know, to focus on how this is gonna go wrong. And if it goes wrong, how you make it less bad for everybody. - Yeah. - And like in some of the darkest moments, you know, it'd be the page of ideas on what we could turn the company into if it doesn't work. But I never found those to be particularly useful 'cause they didn't drive actions. I wasn't gonna go work on plan. The moment you start working on plan B or plan C, the likelihood of plan A working goes to 0%. - How did you land on this idea of adventure, of branding this product as adventure? - Because, you know, the F-150, I think of Home Depot. I go to Home Depot and there's like that part of the parking lot near the lumber area and it's like all big, you know, trucks. - Yeah. - Dodge for, you know, I'm thinking contractors, right? - Yeah. - Yeah. - So that could have been a focus or like, you know, the sort of rural, you know, kind of independent, minded American, wide open spaces, you know, self-sufficient, that kind of image we have like a big truck with like, like an American flag or something behind it, like, that's a huge market. - Yeah. This idea of adventure is really a deeper reflection of what we think about when we think about what is humanity. Humans are innately curious. And so that curiosity leads to us as consumers wanting to accumulate new experiences. So we actually, we had a few objectives when we were designing the vehicle in the form you see today. We said number one, we actually don't want this to be something that's heavily cross-shopped with existing trucks, meaning we actually want to be drawing in customers that are coming out of everything, not just trucks or SUVs, but pasture cars, sports cars, coups, hatchbacks. And what's amazing is we now have the data to show it and it's exactly that. So people who've previously owned a pickup truck represent just over 10%. percent of our customers, meaning 90% have never owned a pick up before, which is awesome. And then the second objective we had is we, and this was one that I was even more focused on, is we were trying to target customers that were not electric vehicle customers, meaning it doesn't have impact if we're just moving a customer from a Tesla into a Rivian. We want to be moving a customer from a combustion-powered vehicle into a Rivian. And again, we now have data on this where less than 20% of our customers have owned EVs before, meaning more than 80% have never owned an EV. Yeah. As you were making progress on building these prototypes, you must have gotten to point where you're confident that you could really now produce these, and you were raising money. You started to look for a plant to actually build these cars. And one became available as an old Mitsubishi plant in Illinois. And you guys had, you bought it, you were able to buy it. But that meant, I think you paid $16 million, but then you'd have to put a lot more money into getting it ready to be an electric car plant. But that meant that you were doubling down. Like now, 2016, early 2017, when you buy this plant, you're essentially saying we're going to make this. Oh, yeah. I mean, in the automotive space, there's been a lot of new companies over the last 50 years. And one of the biggest challenges is to go from the concept or the prototype to mass manufacturing. And that step causes one to think about, what are all the ways you can get there? Can we use a contract manufacturer? Can we, do we build a greenfield site? Do we find an existing site? So we were looking at every possible combination. We were thinking probably maybe we could partner with Volkswagen or Ford or GM. I think GM at one point even wanted to partner with you. Yes, we're looking at all different types of things and ultimately arrived on this idea of let's buy it, find a facility that is in place that we can buy and repurpose. And in the world of used automotive plants, there's not, you know, it's not an overly liquid market. There's not a lot of used plants that are in a viable condition. This is a unique setup that this this plant we purchased started production in 1989. So it's a relatively new plant and very good access to the supply chain. And so we ultimately, as you said, we bought it for $16 million, which was just an incredible deal. Close in beginning of 2017, now we didn't have at that point the money to actually turn it into a plant for ourselves. So we sort of bought it and then said, okay, now we got to secure all the capital to convert this into a rivion plant. So here's a wondering, I mean, that's a huge step by that plant. And it's in 2017 and it's going to take some time before you can at that point, manufacture there. At this point, Tesla is really starting to make an impact, still struggling at that point, right? But it is making an impact, certainly in California, people are starting to drive it. And it's getting vehicles are getting good reviews. I mean, did you see that? Did that make you anxious? Like, oh, God, there's just so much more far ahead of us. Or did you see that as like, oh, this is great. They're they're just helping us build this market. We definitely looked at it as great for the industry, great for electrification. I think today there's around one and a half billion cars on the planet. And even today, this is now, you know, relative to 2017, 2018, this is a lot further along, but of those one and a half billion cars, less than 2% of those are electric. Yeah. So we are so early, we're unimaginably early in this transition. And so the fact that Tesla was out earlier than us in building what I think of as a very strong brand, we saw that as a good thing. But the world needs more than just Tesla to convert those one and a half billion cars to electric and to completely remap the industry. So we, yeah, I think the world often believes that we would be rooting against them or something like that that it's just not the truth. We, I think their success is good for the world. I think it's it's good for the space. We've we've designed products and a brand that feel and look very different than theirs. So their success and our success collectively help each other. All right. So you've got this factory and, you know, at this point, I mean, I have to imagine it got a little bit easier, maybe a lot easier for you to start to raise significant capital. And part because the economy was getting better, venture funds flush with cash, did it become, I mean, and you're talking about billions of dollars you have to raise. Now I'm not a few million. Did that start to, what did you feel like it started to become easier? You didn't have to make the case as aggressively. It became easier, but not it was not a, there was no binary step. The court decision we had, this was back in like 2017, was win and how do we come out of stealth? Because being in stealth at that point, it went from a, I would call it like an asset. It was helpful that we were in stealth to becoming actually a painful liability where you needed awareness. We needed awareness. And so whether it's investors or suppliers or recruiting, it just became really problematic. And so we took the decision to say, let's come out of stealth and we decided to show the R1 team, the R1S, that's our truck and our SUV at the LA Auto Show at the end of 2018. So you said in 2017, you said at the end of 2018, we're going to go to the one of the biggest auto shows in the world, the LA Auto Show. And we're going to debut our pickup truck and our SUV. Exactly. So we built some very solid technologies, some solid platforms. We were engaged in a variety of different strategic discussions with big partners. So we went into the LA Auto Show and we had already built a very deep relationship with Amazon. We hadn't yet announced our deal with them, but we knew it was coming. Amazon would eventually invest 700 million dollars in Rivian and also order 100,000 trucks. Yeah. So Amazon is now our largest shareholder. They've invested a lot through multiple rounds. But when we showed the vehicle LA, we hadn't yet announced them as an investor. Now we knew that that was going to happen, but it was actually really helpful going into the LA Auto Show with a level of confidence around what we knew, but the world didn't know was going to come over the coming six months in terms of partnership announcements and investment. And that was, you know, that was sort of the moment when we went from a company with no website, no background to a company that was out of stealth. And essentially from that point forward, we were then very much followed publicly and we knew that that would happen. Yeah. You were at the LA Auto Show. I'm assuming. Yeah. Tell me what the atmosphere was like. What was there with their lines of people to come see? I know I got a lot of attention. It was fun in the sense that people were like, who is this company? Where the heck did you come from? When we come back in just a moment, how RJ's plans to get Rivian up to speed get snarled up in the supply chain? Stay with us. I'm Guy Raaz and you're listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raaz. So it's 2018 and after years of near radio silence, RJ and his team debut their first two vehicles, a pickup truck and an SUV at the LA Auto Show. And because Rivian has been operating in stealth mode for like five years, it kind of seems like they've come out of nowhere. And we explain. Well, we have a team of about 600 people and they're like, well, where did a 600 person team come from? And so I think that was that was what surprised the world and it was it wasn't as if like we thought of this concept a year ago. It had it gone through so many iterations, but that was the overall tone in LA. It was just like curiosity around the origin curiosity around what's next, those kinds of things. All right, so you make this big splash at the Auto Show in 2018. And I want to fast forward here just for a moment because it's going to take you a while to get these vehicles built for actual customers. But you start to get orders, like thousands and then tens of thousands of pre orders from people who want to buy a Rivian. And and then finally, I think something like three years later, 2021, the first electric pickups roll off the line. Yeah, I mean, it's it's funny. I even talking about here, it's hard to believe it was years of time iterating and and grinding away without enough capital. But some of those constraints led to some of the best innovations, like the decisions to build electronics and software in house were both strategic, but also practical. We couldn't get suppliers to work with us. So we we built with the benefit of time, a lot of capability. Right. The scale of challenges can sometimes be overwhelming, but being calm is actually a really important aspect of solving problems because you think more clearly and you know, there's a storm of activity and a storm of challenges, being able to make the right decisions as to how to navigate that, whether it's a supply chain challenge or a ramp up challenge. These are all solvable items, but they sometimes take a lot of effort. They take the right team. They take coordination within the team. But I'm incredibly confident in our ability to go solve all those. We had a recent episode of this show with Max Lebshin, the co-founder of PayPal and the founder of Affirm, and that's exactly what motivates him, solving hard problems. That's what gets him out of bed. When I was talking to him, I was thinking how hard the problem he's working on, how hard they are to solve. I talked to you, and I'm like, this is at a stratasferically different level. Here we are and we're talking about your company that is now public. It's worth $30-40 billion, whatever the market cap is today. The stock market's been a little nutty, but even with this amazing rise, this overnight success story that's 13 years in the making. You still have massive challenges ahead of you. For example, just making enough cars. You've got tons of people excited about these vehicles have put down deposits and have ordered them. You were hoping to deliver between 20 and 40,000 a year in 2021. That hasn't happened. I'm not trying to criticize you for that. I'm just saying, it's an enormous challenge. Walk me through why it's so challenging to make 20 or 30 or 40,000 these cars a year. Yeah, sure. When you look at a vehicle, take our truck, our R1T, what we build on our plant, we're assembling roughly 2,000 different components or subassemblies that come from around 400 different suppliers. Some of the components we make ourselves, we make our battery pack, we build our battery modules, we build all the sand panels we build in house, but there are other things we don't make. So, semiconductors are not made in our plant. Tires are not made in our plant. Headlights are not made in our plant. So those 400 suppliers make a lot of the components that come in. And that supply chain to get that spooled up is not just those suppliers. They have suppliers to them and those suppliers in turn have suppliers. So pick a simple part that we buy, like a headlight, that part has over 100 individual components that are in it just the light, just the projector. So if you look at the number of discrete components in the car, like individual mechanical components, there's around 25,000 components in any single one of those could disrupt the production. So it's made this difficult for us is we're not just launching one vehicle. We're launching four at the same time. We have our truck, the R&T, our SUV, our R&S, and then we have a commercial van. There's two different sizes in the van for Amazon, right? Yeah, which we really haven't talked about the commercial side of the business, but that's another whole side of what we're building. Fleet vehicles, like basically commercial transport vehicles for huge companies. For goods, yeah, right, for goods. But where we've had challenges is the supply chain has been in a very weakened state given the combination of the pandemic and then the really the unexpected constraints that have happened in the last one and a half years with semiconductors. And what I think is often not fully appreciated is turning a supply chain on is not like a light switch. Yeah, each one of those suppliers has to ramp. So it's a very, very complex orchestra. But the good news is it is now ramping we as of our last earnings call we built over 5,000 vehicles that is now ramping. So we are seeing the light so to speak at the end of the tunnel. But it has been a it's been a challenging ramp up over the last six months at full capacity. How many trucks and SUVs can the plant produce a year in normal Illinois? So the plant has a capacity of 150,000 units a year a year that the challenge we have come back to the supply chain point is we're not able to use the plant fully. So the plant the lines are running at essentially 25 to 30 hours a week because we don't have enough parts. So you know, a good automotive plant is running 110 to 120 hours work a couple hours a week. So to only be using 30 hours out of 168 it's really painful. Yeah. You have I think about more than 80,000 people who put deposits down on a car, which is awesome. But I guess some of them are going to have to wait maybe two years before they see their car. Yeah, that's right. It's really frustrating when if you have to wait two years to get the vehicle, it's it is just challenging. Yeah, yeah. But that will take the next we think the next year to fully ramp capacity. Yeah, I mean, and sometimes listeners accuse me of stressing founders out and I'm not I don't mean to do that because you've had a lot of stress over the years, but you kind of deliver a hundred thousand vans to Amazon by the end of this decade. That just be a little stressed out about that. We I'm excited about it. It's, uh, if I were to look at the risk of Vivian success today versus the risk a year ago versus the risk five years ago, I would say at this moment, this is the lowest risk we've ever had in terms of success. We have $17 billion in cash. We have incredible demand on the consumer products. We have a amazing partnership with Amazon. And we have a plant that's now producing faster than our supply chain can keep up, but the plant is running. Right. Like the number of things left to solve is much smaller than it was a year ago. Let's let's talk about Tesla. Um, they are still sort of the biggest player and sort of most developed electric car manufacturer in terms of their network of chargers and the technology and the driverless technology. They are also, um, uh, they can be litigious and they have, I mean, they've directed lawsuits against you guys against other, another EV company for technology infringement and so on. Um, so this is something that you have to deal with. There is, you are being sued by them. They contend that you that you hired the way their employees and got some intellectual property there. So are those lawsuits that actually affect your ability to do what you do or are they just distractions that you don't really worry about? Yeah, it's not something I spend a lot of time worried about it. We say we've, we've got about 13,000 employees. Um, a lot of our employees formally worked at Tesla. So probably like five, six hundred, uh, so that inherently, I think caused some frustration. Sure. At Tesla and so they, of course, uh, filed a lawsuit because of it, but, but we're very confident in our position there. And I'd also just say that I think that's, it's just an artifact of some of the talent battles that technology companies have to deal with. You, you see the same between Google and Facebook and sure. Yeah, you see it all the time. You see this kind of thing all the time and it's, it is probably one of the biggest challenges of building a, a company around technologies, just competing for the best talent to go to the technology. Yeah. Um, when you think about, most people are driving gas and buying gas powered cars. And I think there's 250 million cars in the road in the United States alone. Mm-hmm. And 98, 99% of them are powered by gasoline. Just kind of thinking about the math there. It's going to be a while before it's all electric on, on, on the roads of the US. Yeah, it, it will be, um, new car sales today are a teeny fraction of, of total vehicle sales. So first we have to get the world to 100% of new car sales being electric. And even if we were to do that at the flick of a switch right now, it would still take us the next, you know, 10 to 15 years to replace the full global car park. So call it the next 15 to 20 years. We'll see the fleet of vehicles in the world essentially shift almost entirely towards electric, but you know, within I'd say 25 years, it would be fairly rare to see a gas powered car on the road. It would be like seeing an antique. And the role that we play there is, is an important one, we believe. And you are a vegan. You don't eat any animal products. Yep. And even a car is vegan because of vegan leather and, and you don't really, it's not really kind of pushed too, too much. And I, because some people that, that is seen as a, I think it's crazy, but some people think that, see that as a political stance, not just a personal health stance or, you know, wanting to help the environment out. So do you intentionally not kind of push that side of, of the car? We don't make a huge deal out of it. We could choose to like make a big deal about the headliners made from recycled soda bottles, those kinds of things. But, but ultimately, that shouldn't be the reason you buy the vehicle. The vehicle should just be fundamentally better. Yeah. And like, we feel it's just like responsible of us to, to make decisions that are lower carbon and, and utilize materials more efficiently. I do think your point, though, on, unfortunately, sustainability becoming somehow politicized. For reasons I, I, I have no idea why, but it's become, unfortunately, a bit of a political topic. We just don't view it like that so we try really hard to not make Rivian politicized or the idea of sustainability politicized. So that's also part of how you present the vehicle. Because you're not, you don't want to make a car for blue state, blue state America, right? And I think from what I've read, most electric car owners tend to be politically left of a center, which is unfortunate because in order to make sustainable everybody's going to want to buy these, everybody want to appeal to everybody, want you want everyone from the most conserved and the most liberal people, not even thinking about their politics. They buy a car. They just buy a great car. Is there a way to, you know, it may be Ford's F-150 electric vehicle that does it, right? That kind of opens the floodgates and actually opens a market for everyone. As we go to electrify, I think we're going to have the need for lots of choice and the driving experience helps get people excited. And one of the things that is interesting with electrification is it completely changes performance boundaries that we previously accepted. So our pickup is faster than most hyper cars. I was on the PCH, the Pacifico's highway in California, this may be three or four weeks ago. I pulled up to a light. It was early morning. And the brand new Ferrari pulled up right next to me and the guy looks over me, I look over at him and said, "Hey, you want to see what we can do here?" And so we both accelerate quickly off the line and I out accelerate by quite a margin. Oh, yeah. And we get to the next light and he says to me, "I can't believe my Ferrari just got roasted smoked by a pickup, right?" And so I think that's like that reframing of electrification is also going to help in a big way where people are going to be excited about the products regardless of whether they're buying it for sustainability reasons or not. They're just fundamentally more exciting, more desirable to drive products. When you think about this path that you've taken, right? Pretty amazing. You've got this facility and all these employees, 13,000 people and these two products that people love and one more of, you can't make them fast enough, multi-billion in the tens of billions of dollars in value this company is now valued at. And I know you're still far away from being able to breathe. But how much of where you are today do you attribute to just a grind that you put in and how much of it do you think has to do with luck? I think they're equal parts. I don't know. Some days I might say more luck and some days I might say less luck. I mean, I think every situation creates opportunities to learn. So if you ask me, do I wish we were launching into a different environment that didn't have semiconductor shortages and a pandemic? And with the supply chain challenge, you could say, boy, this is pretty unlucky. But it also is creating skills and organizational knowledge around how to operate in these extreme circumstances. It's really great. But then we've also had really fortunate connections with investors and connections with the right people in terms of the team that we built. But those days that are really luckier those days, it may be seeming really unlucky. All of it benefits from working and grinding away really hard. When do you know you'll be successful? And when do you know that you can say, OK, we made it. Are you there now? I don't really think that will ever be the case. It's sort of the journey that you hope never ends. So have we launched a vehicle? Yes. Do we have excited customers? Yes. Have we raised a lot of capital? Yes. Are we profitable? No. Would we achieve profitability? Would I say we've made it? I would say no. We'll continue to be pushing. But if I were to say, have we made an impact? I would say with absolute confidence. Yes. That's RJ Scarenge, founder and CEO of Rivian. By the way, Rivian loves to tout all the bells and whistles on its pickup, including a hidden cubby behind the rear seats that can accommodate a fold-out, portable camp kitchen, complete with stove, sink, pots and pans, coffee maker and grinder. And if you don't want the kitchen, the space is also big enough to fit a fully grown, stretched out human being. Could you ever have a need for that? Hey, thanks so much for listening to this show this week. If you enjoy our show and want to show your support, can you help me out and spread the word? Maybe tell a friend about how I built this or send out a message on social media. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at how I built this and mine is @guyRaz. And on Instagram, we're at how I built this and I'm @guy.Raz. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Rump Team Nera Bluey. It was edited by Niva Grant with research help from Sam Paulson and technical assistance from Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Casey Herman, Liz Metzger, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Safer, Elaine Cotes, John Isabella, Chris Messini and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this.