“Even just being an intern at SpaceX when it was sub 50 people, at the end of the first week or month, I felt pretty high certainty that SpaceX would eventually win, even though it was at most a thousandth the size. It was just because of the speed of execution. … These small teams, even though they seem completely outmatched, by moving quickly with a good group of people, you can still beat incumbents.”
Cheeky Pint · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026
Context
Nolan had described interning at Boeing on a cost-plus military program, where adding people did not make the project go faster. Collison asked whether that incentive system is broken; Nolan draws his lesson from comparing Boeing with early SpaceX.
Transcript
…point of Cost Plus is to make sure people can work on projects whose costs are very uncertain and okay we have a very urgent project the government needs you to do XYZ we need some of the suppliers to come forward and actually say that they'll try and do this and it's for everyone's good. It's
a wartime and not a peacetime incentive system. I
think so or it's something where it's very urgent, never been done before and it's very uncertain what the cost will be. Once you get to equilibrium I don't think that structure makes sense at least not to motivate the right behaviors. But I think the bigger thing I walked away with after Boeing, even in just being an intern at SpaceX when it was sub 50 people, was at the end of the first week or month, I felt pretty high certainty that SpaceX would eventually win, even though it was at most 1,000th the size. And it was just because of the speed of execution. And so the thing I walked away with that I actually, especially in the early years, with that is a more recent memory while I was at Founders Fund, was these small teams, even though they seem completely outmatched, by moving quickly with a good group of people, you can still beat incumbents.
So it gave you this ability to be optimistic about the odds of a first-person startup. Bet on the small guy. Yeah.
Yeah. If they have a vision, if they have some insights about how they want to do it differently, especially if they're motivated by something more than just, let's stand up a small business here. No, let's actually change things long term.
You know, the three examples I used were SpaceX, Andrew, and General Matter. I hadn't realized until you said it in formulating those examples that all three are deeply tied to Founders Fund. Juas, what is it about Founders Fund and the culture that makes it a good breeding ground for these sorts…
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