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Justin Lopas learned crucial lessons about running a startup from his time at SpaceX and Anduril.
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His time working for Musk, sometimes directly, taught him “culture is the most important thing.”
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Lopas told BI about the other takeaways from his SpaceX years he applies to his company, Base Power.
Justin Lopas has seen Elon Musk‘s management style up close, and he’s embracing some of the things he’s learned.
Lopas, a 30-year-old cofounder, worked in manufacturing and mechanical engineering at SpaceX and Anduril before launching his company Base Power, a Texas-based home battery company, in 2023.
He talked to BI about how his time at both companies, and experience working directly with Musk, has helped guide his own work at Base Power, from the culture to the interview process.
Representatives for SpaceX and Anduril did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Lopas was just a sophomore at the University of Michigan when he landed an internship at Musk’s rocket company in 2013. He later returned to SpaceX full time in 2016 and moved to Anduril in 2020. At SpaceX, he split his time between working on the Falcon rocket and building out manufacturing capabilities in Boca Chica Village, Texas (before it became the city of Starbase).
In his interviews at both SpaceX and Anduril, Lopas said he noticed that interviewers tended to focus on practical skills and addressing actual questions the company is facing.
He uses the same strategy when talking to applicants for Base Power.
“It’s like, ‘Here’s a problem that we’re working on now, how would you solve it?'” Lopas said. “I found that to be a far more effective way to judge somebody’s technical talent than, ‘Can you solve this sort of Mechanical Engineering homework problem?'”
Lopas’ biggest takeaway from his years at SpaceX wasn’t limited to engineering expertise.
“Culture is the most important thing, I pretty firmly believe that,” he said. “I learned a lot of that specifically at SpaceX.”
When he was there, Musk’s company emphasized a few basic concepts that Lopas is now trying to instill at Base Power: high ownership, first principles, and a good work ethic.
High ownership is the idea that an employee should own any problem that’s related to their work, even if it doesn’t explicitly fall into their job description.
“Are you going to go solve the problem, or are you going to look for ways to define the problem so that it’s not your problem? The answer has to be ‘yes’ to the former,” Lopas said.
