My name is Vince and we have a Rocket Lab Weekly podcast.
And I think at one point we were going to do an interview. Are you comfortable being on camera?
Yeah, I'm comfortable. Let me just have Marielle, our comms person here as well. She always likes to be here with me.
Sure. She supervises you. Very busy lady.
Always. Yeah, very busy lady.
You guys get up in there.
Ah, it's amazing. It's amazing.
By the way, I just I'm so bad at this. It's like face tracking me and I wanted to show you guys.
So, we have Adam Spice here and we have Frank Clay here.
Yeah. By the way, it's so funny. You know, Rocket Lab Weekly was started exactly 100 weeks ago. So, this video that we do, it's going to be the 100th Rocket. That's it was almost like it was meant to be, you know.
That's cool. Nice of you guys to open the site for us on the 100th anniversary.
Yes. Yes, we've planned it exactly for you. Completely intentional.
Exactly. Always got to have a plan.
Exactly. Exactly.
By the way, if you don't want to answer without Marielle, but it's like more of a general. Because we were thinking like how is the cars, because you're from the car, right? Like how is that different from like rockets?
Well, when it comes to building cars or building rockets, the method behind building rockets and spacecraft and car is very similar. It's all about operational excellence. It's all about implementing KPIs, identifying the gaps, pulling a team together to close the gaps. So, there are a lot of similarities.
Okay. Yeah. And because what we were wondering is, you know, like on the cars you're like cranking out like a thousand per week, and then like on a Neutron you're like...
Yeah. But it's both. It's like in the car industry, you have high volume products where you build 100 or 200,000 in a factory, but you also have low volume. If you look at a Mercedes-Benz Maybach, I remember building two a day. When you look at the SLS production, we just build a handful of cars. Armored vehicles, a handful of cars. I build one-off cars in my career. And Rocket Lab is the same. We built reaction wheels where we built thousands of them in one year. We built satellites, just one-off satellites. But look at Electron. I mean last year we built 60. This year we built over 20. So production is up 40%. I mean that's very similar. So we do both and us is we're just ramping up production. We're scaling. So, we're at the right time to implement all the methods that allow us to ramp up production while increasing efficiency, which Adam is looking over my shoulder to make sure we do it as efficient as possible.
We're always looking. Always. I would say the biggest difference in the last year has been like, you know, we've relied on a bunch of really smart people ultimately just figuring it out. Often it was just in time, right? In the last year now with Frank coming on board, there's a plan. There's like there's a plan, there's a process, there's a focus, you know, how you're gonna get now. Like a lot of times I didn't know how we're going to get from point A to point B. Like I just knew we'd get there because we had really smart people and ultimately if push came to shove, Pete would jump in and do it, right? Figure it out. I think now, but you know that works when you're small, but when you're scaling, you're getting bigger. You need discipline. You need process. You need people who've done that before and know what scaling looks like. And I think that's why, you know, we brought on Frank when we did, right? That kind of to me that was a you know he's very fortunate his timing because he came on at really good time. We joke about it.
Or are we fortunate in time? I'm not sure cause and effect. We're trying to work that out.
But I think you know in hindsight that was probably a pretty good indicator of like okay why are we, why are they bringing on a guy like Frank, right? It's not to go do little things, it's to do a lot more things and bigger things, right? And so I think you know I'm not, I'm actually not an active personal investor, like you know you, as I kind of just focus on my business, but that's it's probably now that I think about it, it's probably a good thing to look for in other companies. It's like, okay, when are they bringing on these kind of pivotal resources because that's probably a pretty good indication of conviction where you're kind of turning the corner on growth.
Yeah. I have a somewhat related question. So like acquisitions historically, there are smaller companies that y'all then are scaling and they're companies that are I guess kind of close. They're companies that you've worked for. So what other I guess acquisition targets do you kind of look at because we're always kind of guessing like you know what are they looking at.
We look at a lot of stuff. We look at really small stuff that wouldn't be on anybody's radar and we look at big stuff that shouldn't be on anybody's radar, right? We look at lots of stuff. But you know, deals start off like literally like a funnel, right? You look at a lot of stuff in the front end and bottom, you know, very little stuff gets through the bottom because we have a very fine filter because it's got to meet technical needs, market timing, cultural fit, you know, all those kinds of things, financeability and so forth. And so far, we've acquired more I'd call them tuck-ins, right? That would just further vertical integration, space systems. But I think what's unique about us too is like we have this big funnel, but we also have an equally sized funnel of like, you know, we don't look at things like what do we have to go acquire? We look at what does the company need from a technology or customer or market exposure perspective and then we say well there are various ways to get there. You can either build it or you can buy it. And then you know it's not because we're such an engineering driven company, like literally we can build anything. It's just a matter of time, right? And so it's, we only buy stuff when the make versus buy absolutely makes compelling sense because there's a lot of risk when you buy something else versus when you develop it internally. Like if you go back two years ago, the biggest bottleneck, anchor constraint or pain in the LEO market was electric propulsion, right? You had Apollo Fusion, which was bought by Astra, not doing well. You had Busek, which is a great little company, but you know doesn't have the scale and so forth. So, you know, we had been looking around, there's half a dozen other startups and we could have acquired any one of those. But instead Pete said, look, I can build this, just give me X amount of dollars and time and we will build this and then we won't have to go through the whole risk of integration and cultural alignment, all those kind of things. But not every company can do that, right? If you got somebody who's more of a marketing person driving your company, then they're going to opt for like kind of more the shiny bright object, maybe easier thing to do. When you're run by an engineer, you'll do the tough stuff because that's what's, you know, that's what's most satisfying in a lot of ways, right? So, I think we have more tools than most other companies to do really well thought out discipline make versus buy. So, a lot of acquisitions. I mean, our pipeline is more full now than it's ever been, but what comes through the end of that?
You just started a lot of reverse the last two. Payload was what is missing?
