Inside Partly: Tackling Automotive Industry Complexities with Levi Fawcett

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain. And today we’re joined by Levi Fawcett, founder and chief executive of Partly. Great to have you on the show, Levi. I know we’ve sort of been chatting about this for a little while, so thanks for taking the time.

Levi Fawcett:
Cool, thank you very much. No, I’m excited to be here.

Paul Spain:
And before we go any further, of course, a big thank you to our show partners, One NZ, Spark, 2degrees HP and Gorilla Technology. I always like to start a little bit at the beginning and hear a little bit about where you grew up and so on.

Levi Fawcett:
I had a slightly unusual upbringing, I suppose. I was homeschooled. I had quite a large family. I’m the oldest. And yeah, I think, as I say, it was certainly an unusual upbringing. Being homeschooled had pros and cons. The pros were I had a lot of opportunity to build things, to experiment, to figure out what I was really, really good at. I spent a lot of time fixing things, building things.

Levi Fawcett:
I made probably a dozen go karts. I bought computers and iPods and that sort of thing and fixed them, sold them, sort of made money. There was a huge amount of upside in that. There were a lot of downsides as well. You know, you’re the weird kid. Nothing’s changed. But particularly back then and I guess also gave me a pretty interesting perspective on things.

Paul Spain:
And so tell us about some of those things that you got involved in. Sort of, you know, hands on wise. And as a youngster, yeah, I started pretty, pretty young.

Levi Fawcett:
Probably was about 10, 10 or 11 was fixing iPods and laptops. And that was I would just buy five of them from trade me at the time and get three working ones out of the five and that you’d pay 600 bucks and sell the three working ones for $1,000. Right. I also used to fix things, recondition engines for fixed farm equipment, that sort of thing, which you’d get paid for.

Paul Spain:
And were you living sort of a little bit more on the rural sort of side of things there?

Levi Fawcett:
That’s right. So this was rural Canterbury. It wasn’t a farm. Maybe like a big lifestyle block.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. You do get different exposures, don’t you, in a rural setting to. In a city that it’s actually quite hard to replicate in a city environment.

Levi Fawcett:
That’s exactly right. Yeah. A lot of scope to just go and solve problems and figure things out. And also, it’s not. There are a lot of aspects of that that are not easy. Right. You’re out there in middle of the snow, feeding out the stock and you’re birthing sheep and killing the food that you eat. Right.

Levi Fawcett:
You know, these things certainly expose you to some of the realities of life.

Paul Spain:
I suppose it’s good to highlight that because I think, you know, sometimes we come from differing backgrounds. If it’s, oh, you know, I’ve grown up rurally, I’m at a disadvantage to others. And I think we actually have to have. Actually, what are the benefits that we get if we don’t necessarily fit in the same box as others? And there’s usually some good takeaways. And it sounds like this has been pretty important part of your learning.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, 100%. There were, again, upsides and downsides. I think the upside is you just come into it quite determined and gritty. I guess you’re sort of saying, well, look, nothing’s really a problem. Sure, it might be hard, we might have to work some big hours and it might feel painful both emotionally and physically, but at the end of the day, right, you just push through and you get, you know, you get shit done. And I see that as a huge advantage. The downside is you. You can feel inferior academically, or you sort of think, well, maybe I’m not.

Levi Fawcett:
Some of these harder things, anything kind of more systems engineering or pure math or pure physics or anything like that. You sort of think, wow, you know, you’re just not exposed to people. You don’t know anyone that’s done anything like that. But then I think once you push through, working harder than everyone else gets you a lot further than people realize, I think.

Paul Spain:
And walk us through sort of transitioning from homeschooling into a more traditional education system.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, so I. I went to school for one year, just did year 13. And so over that one year, I sort of had to go and learn all the algebra and learn all the foundational flows that’s going to do the years before. And I sort of realized the vast majority of people, particularly at high school and Even in year 13, they’re working probably about 20% as hard as they could be. And because I was so far behind and I just worked, worked harder than everyone else, I, I sort of realized, well, actually I can kind of get, get it, get to the same level. And, and in the end, yeah, I did. I did really well in the, in the, in the year that I was there and then that was. That was good enough to go off to university and then I did a mechatronics degree.

Levi Fawcett:
I think probably throughout that I got more ambitious just realizing I wasn’t as. Well, I wasn’t as dumb as I thought I was, I suppose. Yeah. Because probably before that my aspirations were a little bit lower.

Paul Spain:
And what were the highlights for you of that time at university where you’re both studying? You’re also leaning into your entrepreneurial bent at that stage?

Levi Fawcett:
In the first year I had a business building sort of websites, automating it, kind of building a platform kind of similar to Shopify now, but we way worse, way worse. And then I had another one building architectural balustrades for sort of $2 million plus houses. And I had to built up, built a caravan, prefabricated technique for building caravans, which was just more efficient than anything else as, as was the balustrade, an extruded aluminium balustrading technique that was just better than anything else. So those were highlights because A. I failed a lot and. And then by the third one in third year, it was profitable. Like I made quite a lot of money and, and then in fourth year I went and worked for Rocket Lab alongside the degree as well, doing both. So.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, because you were studying University of Canterbury.

Levi Fawcett:
Yep.

Paul Spain:
And then did you. Were you working for Rocket Lab in Auckland or how did that.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, Rocket Lab approached the university and said, Rocket Lab’s growing. I think they just raised a. It was before series A, so it must have been a seed round, I guess. So we want to hire, you know, we’re trying to hire more people. Is there anyone that you would recommend? One of the lecturers recommended me and then Rocket Lab said, well, we want you to start on Monday. This was kind of middle of the year. Start, start, start a second semester.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Levi Fawcett:
And. And I said, yep, you know, great, I’ll be there on Monday. Which I think helped a lot. There were, there were some other students that were. That maybe looked better than I did on paper, but wanted to Finish the degree. So, yeah, I just. I worked at Rocket Lab for Monday to Friday and then I’d fly back to Christchurch on the weekends and watch the lectures and kind of catch up and yeah, it was fine. It was, you know, my final semester grades were not.

Levi Fawcett:
Certainly wasn’t an A plus average, but still worked out fine.

Paul Spain:
And this was. What was that? 2016?

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, 2016.

Paul Spain:
Correct. Yeah, yeah. And when you look at that time and Rocket Lab is obviously moving very, very quickly at that point, you know, I guess the very large majority of what was happening would have been here on the New Zealand sort of side.

Levi Fawcett:
That’s right.

Paul Spain:
So I’m picking. You picked up and learnt some pretty useful things along the way.

Levi Fawcett:
Rocket Lab was incredible. I loved it. It was a huge amount of work. So I would. I lived in. Well, I actually slept in my car for the first little Toyota crawler for the first six months. And then, and then I got a van and I just lived in the van the whole time I was there because it was so much easier. I just, you know, you’d get up in the morning, sort of 7:00, you’d go and research.

Levi Fawcett:
For me it was like kind of reading, understanding concepts both internally and reading some of like NASA’s paper on simulation. My role was to build out the hardware simulator. So guys, navigation, control, Httle, it’s called Hardware in the Loop. So it was sort of a bit of a combination of research, combination of understanding things internally and then just going and actually building it, simulating things. And then. Yeah, you kind of just work until late at night, midnight, go sleep. And then we just did that. Seven days actually, or whenever, whenever I was, Whenever I was there in the first six months.

Levi Fawcett:
I was at uni at the same time, as I mentioned. So it was definitely the best decision I could have made. Probably about a hundred people. This was two and a half years before the first launch. Before that first. It’s a test launch.

Paul Spain:
Yes.

Levi Fawcett:
And the caliber of people, it was just incredible. And while we were working, everyone was working ridiculously hard. It was just fun. It was fun because there was this big mission, put a rocket into space. Pete was. Pete sort of embodied ambition, just unreasonably ambitious. And he’d be like, we’re gonna launch in six months, we’re gonna launch in 12 months. And then, you know, two and a half years later we did it eventually.

Levi Fawcett:
But point was, it was doable. We did launch it and there were all of these huge milestones off the back of it. Second private company in the world to put something into space.

Paul Spain:
And because you’re doing such new work that obviously in the world of aerospace, it’s not like it’s completely brand new. But of course there are a lot that is new and a lot that Rocket Lab really invented and came up with for themselves. They weren’t just sort of, oh, yeah, we’ll pick that thing off the shelf and oh, we’ll grab this existing bit of software that’s there. What did that teach you about research and innovation and other things that have really set you up well and lessons that might be interesting for others?

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, I mean, I think this wasn’t necessarily specific to Rocket Lab. It was just Rocket Lab had really good people and New Zealand as a whole are quite good at this, like the whole number eight wire mentality. Do a lot with less think from first principles that, you know, when you’ve got exceptional people that are doing that and are given a lot of freedom and responsibility, I mean, that’s probably the biggest takeaway for me was just how, how much you can do with so little. And I think Kiwis are particularly good at that. So things like the 3D printed engines at Rocket Lab pioneered even some of the things we did, which is less obvious in gnc, we’re kind of the result of just being very pragmatic saying, what’s the end goal? We need to put a rocket into space. You know, what are the fundamental system constraints here? Right. Realistically, rockets at a. Well, maybe this may be controversial, but at the end of the day, no one part is that complicated.

Levi Fawcett:
Engines, propulsion is probably the most complicated, but outside of that, it’s just a really, really complex system. And the reason rockets are so hard is that, that you’ve got to get it right the first time. And if one part of that very complex system fails, then it doesn’t work. So sort of like kind of understanding the highest order dynamics of the system and then going, well, okay, how are we breaking this down? Which to be fair, was not. You know, I was sort of on the output of that. There were people that were much smarter than me on the design side and on the sort of the GNC algorithm side of things.

Paul Spain:
But ultimately the proof was in the pudding. Right. And now when we look back at Rocket Lab with north of 50 launches and share price, sort of getting somewhat stratospheric and so on. Right. It’s pretty impressive. Yeah. Anything else that you can sort of share from learnings at that time?

Levi Fawcett:
If I was to summarise learnings from Rocket Lab number One would have been ambition. That was the biggest takeaway and I think why founders often come out of other startups just seeing how we sort of set this giant mission, borderline unreasonable and then just driving towards it. The vast, vast majority of people, particularly in New Zealand, I think, are not, not ambitious enough, nowhere near ambitious enough, actually. Second was the value of. The value of a clear, extremely well defined goal. And Rocket Lab didn’t plan this necessarily. It was just there was a single point in time that we had to put a rocket into space and every single team was driving towards that. No one wanted to be the team that delayed things for obvious reasons.

Levi Fawcett:
And their teams each knew what they needed to do and so it was just, okay, well, gnc, you’re building guidance, navigation and control, make sure that the rocket stays pointing in the right direction and ends up in the right place in space propulsion. You know, like they all had pretty clear goals and each team could kind of work together to make it happen. Probably the rest of them were probably all sort of smaller goals around hiring exceptional people. You probably boil it down to hire. Hire the best people in the world, expect a lot from them, a lot of freedom, a lot of responsibility, but also set a really high bar in terms of what’s expected and then don’t settle for anything less.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s great. Talk us through the other things you did in terms of. There were a couple of other sort of startups that sort of crossed into your university time. And prior to launching, partly the main.

Levi Fawcett:
Startup I had after Rocket Lab were kind of partially during the end of Rocket Lab and then I quit to work on it full time was called allgoods. That was. Well, we’ll call that one a learning experience, a very valuable one.

Paul Spain:
We need these. They’re going to be celebrated. They might not have felt like that at the time.

Levi Fawcett:
No, it didn’t feel like that at the time. So all Goods was headless commerce for SMBs. So we sort of wanted to bring all the small medium businesses together, give them a tool to bring all of their e commerce product information to one place and then kind of publish that out to wherever buyers were online. Now we made dozens of kind of really dumb business mistakes, commercial mistakes. I mean, a lot of the context here was at that point I was still very much an engineer. You know, it was all around precision and kind of everything being correct and, you know, kind of driving things from an extremely engineering centric perspective, which obviously you’re just not aware of. I thought that I was building a company and I was just building some cool tech and it was cool. We were doing really interesting things on the tech side.

Levi Fawcett:
Not many problems are hard. Most problems are not valuable and this one wasn’t valuable. Then we made a whole bunch of other mistakes around trying to compete with trade me Rookie Business Mistake 101 the network effects and sort of the capital needed to compete with something like that. So there were a whole lot of things understanding the network effects, understanding like the power of the brand, it just didn’t, it didn’t make any sense. So we kind of brute forced it into kind of working. You know, we’re just on a thousand business customers and 400,000 users. But it was never going to be a wildly successful company. So yeah, certainly a few years of learning how to run a business and making every mistake in the book.

Paul Spain:
So then comes partly yes, yeah.

Levi Fawcett:
So yeah, partly was kind of the result of building all goods. We kind of got it to the point all goods to the point where it was, you could kind of consider it moderately successful. There were a handful of things that made partly very attractive. So we’d sort of seen some behaviors from all goods. We had 150 odd customers that sold car parts. The liquidity problem within automotive was just a different level relative to everything else because you know, liquidity, you try and match supply and demand. And within automotive, you know, your car is different to my car, which is different to someone, you know, some down the road. And so you kind of end up needing to have supply, supply for every single car.

Levi Fawcett:
And there’s about 1.4 billion billion vehicles in operation, about 18 trillion parts in operation today on passenger vehicles alone. Across those about 50 million vehicle variants and 200 million part variants. So it’s not like selling an iPhone or selling a pair of socks, right, where your sort of supply side and demand side can interact with each other. You’ve got a nice two sided network effect. Every new node adds value to the network. It’s not like that. It’s sort of like you supply constrained and you need to build this massive supply side before you, before you really have a product. So it was just really interesting.

Levi Fawcett:
No one had solved the problems well. And the time that I’d spent fixing cars, fixing motorbikes, reconditioning engines, the time that I kind of spent in the industry, it was really obvious this was a problem. It was obvious to me then it was obvious to everyone in the automotive industry. Just no one had solved it.

Paul Spain:
Right. So how do you sum up partly when someone says, well what, what is partly how do you sum that up?

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, I mean, partly have one goal, only one goal, and that is to make it really easy for buyers to find the right parts, exactly the right parts every time. That’s all we do and it’s all we’ll do for quite some time. The reason that is so valuable is 1.9 trillion USD spent every year on car parts alone, passenger vehicle parts, and about over 95% of that is done offline or using these quote based systems. The reason for that is it’s extremely hard to find the right parts. So the whole industry relies on parts interpreters which are human beings whose job it is to answer the phone from workshops or repair shops, figure out the parts needed, where they’ll memorize up to 20,000 part numbers, they memorize vehicle details, use a whole suite of different tools and spreadsheets and catalogs and then send the right parts. Just that. That is essentially what partly are automating. So we do that one thing, make it easy to find exactly the right parts every time.

Levi Fawcett:
We then sell that as infrastructure to some of the largest companies in the world. It’s actually conceptually just that.

Paul Spain:
And so talk to us a little bit about those sort of customers. Cause you must have the bigger customers and then there are sort of smaller customers, you know, in the mix. I don’t know, you know, whether you sell to those directly or you know, how your, your technology ends up, you know, getting, getting utilized.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah. So we would, we, we find the, the biggest buyers or the biggest spenders of parts. And these are typically large enterprises. You can think fleets, enterprise, you know, Hertz car rental companies. We’ve behind big marketplaces like ebay and Amazon, which is what sort of the infrastructure bit means. But an example here would be, we would go to say Hertz, Hertz is not a customer. But just as an example we would go to Hertz and we would say hey, you’re spending 600 million a year on parts. But today you’ll have a central parts procurement team.

Levi Fawcett:
You’ll have a thousand odd repair shops that are all kind of ordering their own parts. Working with this central parts procurement team, you’ve got no visibility where you know which part’s being purchased. You can’t negotiate with your 600 million in volume within collision, which is the biggest focus for us at the moment. You’ve got rental cars that need to go out. So you know, it’s a, it’s a hugely inefficient process. Instead work with partly, partly make it really easy for your repairers to Find exactly the right parts, we give them the tool so that they just put in their license plate, highlight the damage area or the job that they’re doing, swipe away parts that they don’t need, and go order. Where we pick the perfect parts based on price, location, shipping times, you know, ESG, carbon impact. There’s about 50 different things that factor into this perfect part algorithm we call the selection algorithm.

Levi Fawcett:
So that at the end of the day will reduce your cost by around 15% and reduce your repair times by 20%. And so for a company like Hertz, that’s massive, right? Particularly on hundreds of millions of dollars in annual spend. They get to brand it. They can call it Hertz, parts procurement platform, Turbo Pro, it doesn’t matter. And we kind of sit behind the scenes because the brand is not the critical thing for us. Critical thing for us is building something that is great for repairers and then being able to onboard suppliers.

Paul Spain:
So walk us through the journey from those early ideas to where you are now. But it seems these things don’t. It’s not always a straight line.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Start the company. We said our strategy is, number one, build the protocol, the common language that describes the relationship between parts and vehicles. Build a common language. It didn’t exist in the industry in a unified way. Number two was get the biggest supply aggregators in the world to adopt that protocol. Gives you the sort of nice embedded protocol network effect, which is a very defensible, you know, very defensible business model, high moat. And then three, we would bring on the supply side using the big supply aggregators.

Levi Fawcett:
And then finally, you’ve kind of got a. You’ve got the demand side. So the big mistake there was going, well, who are the biggest supply aggregators? It’s Amazon and ebay. Great. We went off, we signed Amazon, we signed ebay, we signed olx, the biggest marketplace in Eastern Europe. But what we found was the business model was not actually that defensible because at the end of the day, we didn’t own the customer. The customer is the buyer spender of parts, it’s the car owner. And our mission was to make it really easy for buyers to find the right parts.

Levi Fawcett:
Or actually, that was what we do. Our mission was to connect the world’s parts. Right? Mission to connect the world’s parts. How we do it was make it really easy for buyers to find the right parts. We couldn’t actually control either of those. And when what we wanted to do or our vision didn’t align with Amazon’s, and Amazon said this is going to take five years to implement. Well, we can’t wait five years. Right.

Levi Fawcett:
We want to have this done by the end of the month. And 10 months ago, 11 months ago was when we really just pivoted the whole business. And that’s super painful. Right. You’ve got to restructure, cut about 30% of the company. We completely changed the focus, moving from marketplaces to these bigger fleets. Thankfully, we’d already been sort of in conversations and we’d been working with some and it sort of has scaled since then. We’ve always been bigger in Europe.

Levi Fawcett:
It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve been back in New Zealand.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah, talk about that sort of challenge. You mentioned there not being a protocol in relation to sort of parts, you know, across the sector. Maybe you could just break that down a little bit in terms of what, you know, what, what that problem is and what it looks like and then how you’ve been able to come across that.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, this is an immense problem. It’s much more difficult than most people realize. So I touched on this earlier. The 1.4 billion vehicles in operation and 18 trillion odd parts on the roads today. But those vehicles are made by a thousand odd OEMs. Total. It’s about 80 of them that are huge. There’s.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, yeah, there’s.

Paul Spain:
So the OEMs being those that are manufacturing one part or another. Not necessarily manufacturing, no, that’s.

Levi Fawcett:
That’s the vehicle manufacturers themselves.

Paul Spain:
Okay.

Levi Fawcett:
I think so Toyota would be the biggest.

Paul Spain:
Okay.

Levi Fawcett:
As I said, there’s about 80 big ones. By the time you’ve gone through your Toyotas And Audis and PSAs, you know, Hondas, Mitsubishi, you know, all of these. But there’s a lot of. There’s a long tail of these smaller brands that might have made a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand cars more coming out of China these days as well. So. Okay.

Paul Spain:
Oh, that’s a much bigger number than I would have picked.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot on the manufacturing side. There’s around 40, 45,000 manufacturers of the parts. And then these vehicles go back 30 odd years. Right. The average vehicle age is 14 years. On average, it’s 14 years, meaning the data. You’ve got a thousand different vehicle manufacturers, you’ve got sources that go back 30 odd years.

Levi Fawcett:
It’s PDF files, it’s paper catalogs. Right. The way through to CAD systems today. Each one of them will use a different language, a different way of describing parts, different terminologies and so structure and standardizing that was, I mean, there’s a reason why it hasn’t really been done before. There have been sort of localized efforts, but nothing at scale. And that’s where we have been better than anyone else, I think. First of all, we were able to bring in a lot of machine learning, a lot of algorithms. So we, you know, first of all, we’ve been out Talking to the OEMs, we’ve been licensing this data.

Levi Fawcett:
We have our own sources on top of that. So that’s physically dismantling vehicles, it’s government databases. You’re working with the NZTA here and Miveris, the SMMT in the uk, kind of local government databases. So there’s multiple hundreds of different sources, which we would spend multiple millions a year consistently just licensing now to all these different sources or getting access to or dismantling vehicles. Then we need to structure and standardize it. And that’s taken us three years to get to the point where we have something that is good. So we’ve got 20ish mechanics who manually label information so that we build all these tools. It’s probably half a dozen odd core tools.

Levi Fawcett:
They’ll be in every day labeling information, researching certain vehicle variants, researching parts. And then we run some machine learning algorithms. So you used to rely a lot more on a graph neural network. These days we use a lot more language models, just good at taking data from one format to another.

Paul Spain:
Yes.

Levi Fawcett:
And that gives us about another 20x multiple each of the Precision recall curve. Your recall’s 95% and you should kind of, kind of think of it as a 20x multiple on your humans.

Paul Spain:
Wow. So, yeah, if you were to take that technology out, then you would be looking at literally hundreds of people to achieve the work that you’re getting done there.

Levi Fawcett:
That’s right. I mean, with this scaling, let’s say we get the equivalent of 400 people doing this, 400 agents, however you want to think of it. With that, we will now be able to get this done in less than 3 years and costing less than 30 million NZD, which is kind of insane. How cost effective doesn’t sound that quick and easy, but how quick and easy that is relative to what it would be doing it in 2020 or doing it manually because it’s almost unsolvable. The unit economics pretty much don’t work if you’ve got to hire 400 people for three years. And even then there are a whole lot of algorithms that we’re doing to make that faster. Like we inter annotate, we do we’re cross checking, we’re doing, we’re, you know, we’re retraining models every X amount of time so that they’re always QA on the edge of the model. And the interfaces they’re using, we’re showing them the best guesses, which was also using machine learning.

Levi Fawcett:
So even, you know, you took that out, it’d be hundreds of millions to try and try and do it. So yeah, big, big engineering effort.

Paul Spain:
Oh, well done on facing those things. And yeah. What are some of the other things when we chatted earlier, you were saying, oh, you know, we get pretty tough stuff to deal with. What are, you know, what are some of those other things that you. These challenges.

Levi Fawcett:
You know, we’ve had some really irate customers. An example we talked about earlier, where there’s a customer threatening to take out my kneecaps. Right. And some of the industries that we work in, it’s just a bit more aggressive like that. We changed the software, we broke everything. It was a disaster. It was our fault. But then the reaction was, I’m coming to your house, take out your kneecaps.

Paul Spain:
And they had your address.

Levi Fawcett:
And they had my address. That’s right, yeah. They said, this is your address. Fix it, fix it by the afternoon or come and take your kneecaps.

Paul Spain:
Was this quite early in the piece?

Levi Fawcett:
This was quite early.

Paul Spain:
It’s not when you’re selling to sort of your big enterprise customers.

Levi Fawcett:
Actually, this was actually at all goods. We were probably a bit more sensible. Partly. But I mean, I distinctly remember that point in time after the whole like, oh, well, do I need to like get a restraining order? Do I need to like move my family? Do I need to go to the police thinking these things and then kind of getting over that and hardening up to it and going like, oh, well, I’ll just go home for the afternoon, like get a crowbar and if someone comes around, I can deal with it myself.

Paul Spain:
That was your serious thought?

Levi Fawcett:
That was what I did.

Paul Spain:
Wow. I’m picking. Nobody showed, nobody showed up.

Levi Fawcett:
No one showed up. I think we might have actually had it. I think we might have kind of fixed. It’s recovered. But that was all good. I distinctly remember after that the, you know, other issues feel smaller.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah.

Levi Fawcett:
And so. So, yeah. And there were some pretty rough times, pretty high pressure times even. Right. Back at rocket lab. I remember being. I was delaying launch, right. And it cost about a million dollars a day or something to delay launch.

Levi Fawcett:
And the simulation was doing something funny. I remember Pete sitting behind me Just kind of like yelling like we’re trying to launch a rocket here. What’s going on? How am I supposed to make a decision with no information? It was fair enough. Like I’d probably do a similar thing these days because there’s just so much on the line, it’s so high pressure. But you know, you go through some of these and then you get to a situation where some, someone’s upset and they want to quit. Well, okay, fine, let’s sit down. Why? To be fair, that actually hasn’t, it’s probably only really happened once in the earlier days, but those types of situations I think are a lot easier to deal with. And so I think back in the earlier days you just don’t know these things.

Levi Fawcett:
You’ve sort of like, okay, well I want to build a company that, where we change things in a fundamental way, right? We’ve got this huge mission that was clear from the start. But then you’re like, okay, well everyone needs to come in and work 100 hour weeks, right? And then when people don’t, you’re going, well, are you in this or not? Right? We’re trying to do something great here. And you’re not going to work every day till 1am and weekends. And then you kind of realize, well actually there’s a lot more to it than that. Some people don’t operate like that. You, you know, you’ve got, people have got families, they, they can’t operate efficiently for, for 15 or 16 hours a day. And if you are, if you’re also not making that clear, you just hire someone and then go, well, you know, I want you to work your ass off. Or you went, if you’re not clear on that, that’s what the culture is, then obviously you’re going to get people really upset.

Levi Fawcett:
So these days we’re clear on what we are, which is we’re trying to do something extremely hard. You’re not going to get that by working 9 to 5 or by not putting in a huge amount of effort. But it’s also not about working 100 hour weeks. It’s about caring a lot, being sort of obsessive, very passionate about what we’re doing, wanting to make a huge impact, to build something really exceptional, do something that hasn’t been done before and just be clear about that upfront. Like, I mean we still says to people, everyone before they join, like, it won’t be, it won’t be an easy place to work. It’s not, it’s not a cushy job here, but Here are our values. Right. You get a huge amount of freedom, responsibility, autonomy.

Levi Fawcett:
We trust everyone. We’re building something that is pretty exceptional, solving extremely hard problems, doing something that hasn’t been done before. That’s what you’re self selecting into. And if that’s not what you’re into, then that’s totally fine. It’s just different cultures or different things. So being really clear on that and letting people say, well, yes, I want to be part of this, or no, this is not for me, I want to have a cushy job, that’s fine. But I think some of our early mistakes were around that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’s a pretty intense phase for partly at the moment. And you’re also traveling. I imagine other members of your team are traveling as well. So that all plays into it.

Levi Fawcett:
Absolutely, it does. We do our best to really look after the team, but again, to be clear on what that means, it’s sort of. We know that everyone’s obsessed with. We know that everyone cares a lot about the work. We know that they all want to build something like that, something that they care about. It’s not like a job that you often do. It’s a. You’re kind of part of something bigger.

Levi Fawcett:
Then we do everything else we can to support that. So if that means, you know, bringing customers into them, or if it just kind of means supporting in whatever way we can, or doing kind of like the little things to make that more achievable, that’s what we’re doing. So travel is like, it seems to be fairly well managed. People with families are not needing to do much because of the way we structure things, or we’ll fly them around with them or something like that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And that can be a great approach too, isn’t it? Yeah. Being able to travel with family, make a difference.

Levi Fawcett:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
So before we wrap up, what would be some of the advice or lessons that, you know, think that really sort of stand out for you? That might be good takeaways for listeners.

Levi Fawcett:
I’ll probably just repeat what I’ve said before. Number one is raise the average ambition level. Raise the ambition level. This is something I’ve repeatedly learned. There’s nothing special about these Silicon Valley founders. There’s nothing special, there’s nothing in the water there. They just, they’re just surrounded by founders, companies that have done it before. Therefore, the belief is there that they can do these things.

Levi Fawcett:
And the reality is it’s mostly like almost entirely mental. Right. It’s just kind of saying, well, look, let’s just target Something really, really big. And these bigger problems are not that much harder than small problems often, like just the way that kind of money tends to flow. Starting a restaurant is going to be hard and notoriously, notoriously low margin, unprofitable versus starting Visa, also going to be really hard, but insanely high margin. And that they end up these huge, huge companies. So that’d be sort of like the number one thing. The number two thing is probably just to care a lot.

Levi Fawcett:
Have, have a, have, have. Have one clear goal. So you’re going to be, if you are going to be ambitious, if you’re going to try and do something, then you have, have one goal and, and not, you know, not two, not three, one. So that’s, that means saying no to almost everything else. Saying no to big opportunities. Like if you’re not saying no to some big opportunities, then you’re doing something wrong. You’re not saying null enough. Yeah, great.

Paul Spain:
And the traits that you’re looking for when you’re hiring, I imagine there’ll be people listening to this who might be interested in joining partly, as well as others who maybe aren’t necessarily going to be the chief executive or the founder, but might gain something from what you’re looking for.

Levi Fawcett:
I mean, the traits we’re looking for should be fairly well described in what I’ve said. But we align them with our 10 core values which are on the site. They are things like bias for action, think 10x, great judgment value feedback. Kind of boils down to people who care a lot, who like to think outside the box or do things that haven’t been done before. It’s people that enjoy solving problems. Really, really hard problems, proper, globally difficult problems. Then people who want to spend some portion of their lives on something that isn’t going to be easy overall. Those are typically the people that we’re looking for.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Fantastic. Big thank you to our show partners, to Gorilla Technology, HP, 2degrees Spark and One NZ. And thank you very much, Levi Fawcett for joining the show. Been really fascinating and some great insights that you’ve shared today.

Levi Fawcett:
No worries. Thank you very much. It was great.

Paul Spain:
Okay, Cheers.

Levi Fawcett:
Levi.

Paul Spain:
The New Zealand Tech podcast brought to you by Gorilla Technology, proactive and strategic.