Rivian Founder RJ Scaringe Is Building The Future: Leadership, Mindset, Innovation, & His Mission To Decarbonize Transportation

RJ Scaringe is the visionary founder of Rivian, who turned his childhood obsession with engines into one of automotive history’s most audacious ventures. This conversation explores the intractable challenges of starting a car company from scratch, balancing “extreme optimism” with “robust realism,” and why this moment represents a once-in-a-planet opportunity to reinvent transportation. RJ shares intimate details of Rivian’s journey toward a carbon-neutral future, from nearly running out of payroll to leading a publicly traded company. This is a masterclass in playing the long game. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Momentous: 20% OFF all of my favorite products 👉livemomentous.com/richroll On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL 👉ROKA.com/RICHROLL One Skin: Get 15% OFF with the code RICHROLL 👉 oneskin.co Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  The whole fabric of our society is gonna look very different in 30 or 40 years. There is a desire to create a world in which the generations to come are inheriting something that's as magical as it was for us.

• 1:17Rich Roll?

  I think it's safe to say there are easier ways to make money than by starting a car company. But today's guest, R.J. Scaringe, isn't really interested in what's easy. He's interested in what's possible, and, more importantly, what's necessary. R.J. is the founder and CEO of Rivian Motors, and he's a guy who's very focused on a singular and pretty audacious mission: decarbonizing transportation. It's a dream. He launched, fresh out of MIT, at a time when auto giants like GM and Chrysler were declaring bankruptcy. And it's a vision that demanded billions of dollars invested before even a single vehicle could exist.

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  It's also an ongoing journey in which he is constantly faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  I think everybody deals with challenging situations differently. There's no right or wrong answer. We need to be able to work together. And it's easy to say, let's work together and be collaborative when things are easy. It's naturally hard to work together when things are difficult and when there's not an easy or obvious solution.

• 2:19Rich Roll?

  But RJ's most valuable contribution isn't just another electric vehicle on the market, it's proving that patient, multi-decade thinking can solve impossible problems. So while others are out there chasing quick gains, RJ is a guy who's quietly mastering the long game. So his is a story about the courage to dream big, but also the wisdom to wait. Today, we explore what it takes to devote your life to such an audacious mission, the hidden complexities of manifesting that mission at scale, and how to maintain resolve when the odds seem insurmountable.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  When you look at the beginnings of the auto industry, it was born out of people that were tinkering or dreaming and challenging convention. We need to have innovation that's not in any way constrained by dogmas of how a company used to do things, but rather a team of people that can come together to create something that doesn't exist.

• 3:21Rich Roll?

  Thank you for doing this. I know you're a very busy man, and I've been trying to make this happen for a long time.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, excited to hear it.

• 3:27Rich Roll?

  I have so much admiration for this mission that you're on. And I think what's really kind of most notable to me is that you're playing a very long game and you appreciate like the length of the game that you're playing. And you're also playing it at a very high level. So I think it would be helpful, I mean, this is in a car podcast, people who are listening or watching, I'm sure know Rivian, but they may not know your story.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  And so they may not know just how long this game is because it goes all the way back to you being a very young child.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, since I was 10 years old, I've been a huge car enthusiast and thinking about doing something in transportation. I grew up. Restoring and working on classic cars and along the way realize these things I love so much, these things I was working on all the time, we're contributing to some of the biggest challenges we have as society. You know, everything from a lot of the geopolitical conflict that we have to the local air quality issues we have in essentially every major city across the world, to most importantly, I think, the effect we're having on climate.

• 4:31Rich Roll?

  Well, you were deconstructing like auto parts and engines like in your bedroom before you even had a driver's license, right?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Oh, way before, yeah. If you were to go into my like 10-year-old bedroom, you'd find like a literal engine, windshield, hoods. I was acquiring parts for all kinds of projects I was dreaming up.

• 4:48Rich Roll?

  And what is your earliest memory of knowing that you wanted to found a car company?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  I don't know, like 13 years old, something like that, when I started to realize I wanted to do more than just work on cars, but I wanted to start something new and work towards solutions that would allow, allow the idea, the dream of personal ability to continue in new forms. And so I had no idea what that meant in terms of like building a company, what does that mean? But I knew that I wanted to be in a place that 50 years later, kids would be inspired in the same way that I was around the, the idea of something that can take you places, go long distances, be enjoyable to look at, enjoyable to drive, enjoy the details of how the many, many decisions are made across a product like this. That was

• 5:39Speaker 01

  one of the things that always intrigued me is a car is such a complex device that it's a, it's a manifestation of a ton of teamwork. And the better the car, the better the teams work together, the worse the car, the likely the worse the teams work together. And so you can see how the chassis is executed, the body is executed, the way it looks, the way it drives, the powertrain, all of those things have to come together. And you literally have thousands of people working on a project to complete it in a couple of years.

• 6:09Rich Roll?

  It's one thing to be a car enthusiast as a young person and to have this engineering kind of approach to wanting to know how everything works. And it's not unusual that that type of person would want to be in the automotive industry. It's a very different thing altogether, especially at a very young age, to say, "I'm going to start my own, like, new car company." Where does that, like, confidence or kind of sense of self come from? Like, what is the origin around the origin of that?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Uh, I guess, maybe not confidence, extreme optimism, maybe? When you look at the beginnings of the auto industry, it was born out of people that were tinkering or dreaming and challenging convention. And that was what I loved to do, and that's what I loved to work on and to think about in terms of what's possible. And so, in my own tinkering, I thought, "Boy, I'd like to tinker on something bigger and at a larger scale." And, again, I didn't fully appreciate even then, I probably appreciated 1% of how complex a car company actually is. You know, it's one thing to build a car from parts in your garage when you're growing up, it's a very different thing to build a company of this complexity.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  But I knew that, I did fully appreciate just how important innovation is going to be. And that was the part that played from the very beginning, when I first started thinking about this, to, obviously, today, which was, we need to have innovation that's not in any way constrained by dogmas of how, you know, a company used to do things, or how an organizational structure was set up, but rather, a team of people that can come together to create something that doesn't exist. And in fact, when I first started the company, I was 26, and we were in this decrepit-looking warehouse, and I wrote on the wall, we had on the back wall, I said, "We're building this company because it doesn't exist."

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And the point was, is we need to be building technology, ideas, product concepts, that are different than what is out there.

• 8:17Rich Roll?

  You go to Rensselaer, you graduate top of your class, you knew, you know, very young that engineering was going to be your thing. You end up at MIT after that, you get a master's and a PhD in the automotive lab. And it was all about like preparing yourself so that you could go out into the world and like found this company, like that vision, you know, I don't know, like, I'm sure that the specifics of it weren't in place, but you know, the imagination had been animated for a very long time. It's sort of difficult to appreciate that not so long ago, I mean, now, you know, with Tesla and what you're doing, and there are like, you know, a lot of sort of car startups.

• 8:58Rich Roll?

  But it wasn't very long ago, like before, like remember back before Tesla, the idea of, of creating an independent car company was like an impossibility. I mean, right when you graduated MIT, GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy. Nobody thought that that was a good idea or even like a viable concept to pursue at all. So in the midst of all of that, thinking back like, yes, but I'm still going to do this.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. In some ways, the Chrysler GM bankruptcy, which was happening, as you said, right as I started Rivian, was a, was a indication that it's important that new ideas are born and that new companies are born. But you're right. I mean, the challenges of starting a car company are unique because you need so much capital. You need thousands of engineers that are working on a solution, engineers and designers working on a product. You need hundreds of suppliers to make all the parts that go into it. You need technology that's robust and differentiated. And that all needs to be wrapped into something that customers ultimately want to buy. So the product concept and the brand positioning are all really important. And if you had all those things, you know, at day one, you know, many billions of dollars

• 10:07Speaker 01

  of capital, a manufacturing plant, hundreds of suppliers, multi, you know, several thousand person engineering team, a brand, a product concept, it would still take you a few years to get to your first product. So it's, in the beginning, you have none of those. So it's the order of operations of how do you get...

• 10:23Rich Roll?

  It's like shocking that you've gotten, you know, it's just amazing that you've been able to like manifest this. Yes, you need billions of dollars even to get to the point before you can shift...

• 10:31Speaker 01

  The first dollar revenue takes many billions of dollars of investment. So it's a really hard, the hardest thing for me that I didn't appreciate was the, the capital raising process. So imagine... I come into you to pitch you, you're an investor and I imagine I'm pitching the idea of a car company. And I say, I want to start a car company. He says, okay, great. Tell me about your technology. Well, we haven't developed that yet. Okay. Well, they'll show me what it looks like. Well, we don't have that yet either. Well, you must have a group of suppliers and partners lined up to work with you. No, we still haven't done that yet. Okay. Well, you must have an amazing team of people. It's those three guys over there. And you sort of go through it and you can imagine it was, it was not surprising that there were a lot of no's and a lot of closed doors in the beginning, for obvious reasons.

• 11:13Rich Roll?

  Were you, were you having those conversations on Sand Hill Road with like the tech venture capital funds at that time?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  At some point, but even before that, to get a meeting with a venture capital firm on Sand Hill Road, you have to have some level of credibility. And so just the, the very nature of startup car company, no capital, no technology, no team, you know, no partners, no plant. It's, you're not, you're probably not even going to get the meeting. So you have to like build into that and build some credibility. And that was one of the big reasons I decided to do a PhD is I thought to myself, I'm going to have to raise a lot of capital, to bring a lot of people together on this, and then want to do it while I'm young. And I don't want to go work at another car company first, and I don't have any capital. So the only way to sort of accelerate past that, to have some earned credibility was to have

• 12:01Speaker 01

  a doctorate from a top tier school. So that was very calculated.

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  I know that you told Guy Raz in How I Built This, that when you are getting your PhD, you didn't tell anyone that this was your idea and your intention. And that's very curious. Like I, why not? You were having this experience in the automotive lab. Why not like, share that idea and see if you could get buy-in? What was the reason that you kept it quiet?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Probably two reasons. One is, I was intellectually aware that the odds were so low, that with a bunch of other highly intelligent people that understand the industry well, if I said to them, I'm going to go start a car company, they would just-

• 12:44Rich Roll?

  They would talk you out of it.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  They would tell me that it's a really bad idea and not be wrong. They would be right. They would be, they would be indisputably right, that this is a hard thing to do, and that this is low probability of success. And then the second reason was I didn't want that to be a distraction from all the doors that were open to me as a PhD student. So, you know, one of the- Great aspects of my time at MIT was that if I wanted to go visit a plant in Europe for pick a brand, just about any brand, any company, they would open the doors and say, hey, come in, we'd love to give you a tour, let you understand how we do engineering. So it was a great platform for me to be doing research and into how the existing incumbent manufacturers operate, what their innovation strategies are, how ideas go from the idea stage to

• 13:30Speaker 01

  the production stage. And so I was pretty guarded with putting this idea out there because I didn't want the idea to be like just crushed by the perspectives of those that knew how hard it was.

• 13:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  And I think entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs go through this. I've now spent time with lots of founders of different types of companies. And in the beginning, the idea is so precious and so fragile that you're really careful with your own emotional state, knowing that you sort of almost have to manage your mental state around something that's so unlikely.

• 14:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. To nurture and kind of foster that dream in that fragile state when you just got a couple guys and a couple second mortgages to like keep you going.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in the beginning, that's a big part of, like, my job was to have extreme optimism, but balanced with, call it like robust realism, like understanding that this isn't like you can hope your way to starting your car company. You have to, you do have to spend billions of dollars of capital. You do have to bring on hundreds of suppliers. You do have to build a manufacturing plant. You know, we're sitting in one of our retail spaces. You do have to build a whole network of sales locations and service locations. So those aren't things that you can just will away. They have to be there, but you have to build up to them. You have to build a basis of some of the foundation before you can get to those pieces. But it's a long chess game.

• 15:02Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  It's much easier if you start with a lot of money. Like I used to always joke, it'd be a lot easier to start a car company if at least you could start with a few billion dollars.

• 15:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  But starting with zero, it's a really hard, it's a really hard starting place.

• 15:14Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's a bit of a, I mean, you say 3D chess. It's sort of like you have to, you have to go into those rooms with confidence and be, I would imagine, a little bit ahead of yourself in order to engender the confidence level that you need for them to invest in you, right? And I know, you know, some of those original investments, they came in stages. Like, let's get you through this stage, let's get you through that stage. So it was always just sort of like gracefully, gradually, like walking you forward. But in this process, I mean, you're an engineer, you have this dream, you're taking one step at a time.

• 15:51Rich Roll?

  And you're trying to protect this, you know, amazing vision that you have. I suspect that requires a level of obsession, right? This isn't going to happen as a part-time hobby. This has to be, you know, full buy-in. Do you think that you have to be obsessed to do the kind of thing that you're doing? And what is your own, like, relationship with obsession?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  You need to be in a place in life where you can, obsessed has a negative connotation to it. I'd say where you have the ability to be maniacally focused on a singular thing. And to the extent that it's hard to imagine those early years, if I were to have had kids or if I had other things that would require me to, that would absorb any level of attention. Now, at the same time, I look back and the way I went about things, I think I could probably do more efficiently now. But I, but it's also beneficial to have that early on, just infinite energy to keep trying things and be wrong. And because it's not just, the task wasn't just hard.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  It was also that it was my first time running a company, so. It's not as if I was coming into this with like, this is my third startup. This is my first time starting a company. This is my first time making an investor deck, my first time building a financial model. I went to school for engineering, but I had to learn how to be a pretty strong in finance because we couldn't afford to have a finance person. So that was me. So a lot of the elements of the business, I had to learn in real time. And I actually describe it to friends now as actually a blessing that we didn't have a lot of capital in the beginning because it afforded me the chance to learn and grow.

• 17:34Rich Roll?

  You had to know every aspect of it.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Well, it gave me the chance to make mistakes.

• 17:38Rich Roll?

  Grow into the job.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Like the mistakes were relatively low impact. Like I could completely shift the strategy and I had to manage three people and essentially no shareholders. Whereas like today, I couldn't walk into the office and be like, okay, we're going to do a completely different thing today. The whole company, you know, 17,000 people, we want everybody to make 180 degree shift. Whereas in the beginning, you could do those types of massive changes to everything.

• 18:18Rich Roll?

  I'm interested in the lessons that you've learned and the kind of growth curve of going from, you know, that startup mentality and being nimble and having the ability to pivot and you having your fingerprints on like every single aspect of the job, like understanding, you know, deeply every aspect of what needs to get done and how to do it to today. I mean, you, you go from that role and now you've raised billions of dollars to publicly traded company. There's got to be just tremendous pressure on you. You have to kind of deal with the volatility of the stock market and your investors, et cetera. And along the way, you go from a guy with a vision and a couple other people that you

• 19:01Rich Roll?

  got buy-in from to having to let go, delegate, team build and like lead these teams and step, step back. And you know, it's not like you went to management school or you know, were formally trained in like how to be a leader or lead teams of people and empower them. What was it like to learn that like on the job?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  The strength of mine is I've always been good at reading people and interacting with people and understanding how to motivate teams, motivate groups of people. And so that's been a skill that I've had to sharpen over time. And a lot of the mechanics of how you communicate or how you pull groups of teams, people together change, but the fundamentals are the same. So they change in that, you know, in 2010, we could have a full company meeting at a room much smaller than this. You know, today, we have many, many locations. We have 16,000, 17,000 employees between our plant, our multiple service locations, multiple retail, multiple development locations. So like you can't have a team meeting in a room.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  So you can't even have a team meeting where everybody intends at the same time because of the time zones. So just like the way you cascade information, the way you cascade decisions is totally different. But it's not like we went from one to the other. So there was, I think of it as my skill set in terms of leading a team had to be reinvented and relearned like every year. So what I did with a five person team was different than it was when it was 100, which was different than it was 500, which was different as a private company versus a public company. And being willing to like accept that, hey, like the way I did this before has to change. So like the classic expression, the one constant is everything's going to continue to change.

• 20:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And so that's

• 20:48Rich Roll?

  And you can't be the bottleneck in any of these decisions. But do you have that temptation to like roll up your sleeves and get into the granular engineering stuff that you've sort of had to like let go of?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that's been really a big learning for me is being super intentional with how I spend my time. So in the beginning, like on day one, when it was just me, I would do everything. And often I would be doing things that weren't necessarily highest impact. They may feel the most urgent, but they weren't actually the most important things for the business. And now I'm very intentional on making sure the things I'm spending time on are not only high impact, but there are things that I'm uniquely positioned to do well. Meaning on product or technology topics, I still think I'm uniquely positioned because of the breadth of experiences and because of my visibility to the whole technology stack, I can, I can add a lot of value. But on our Tax strategy or accounting strategy, those are not areas, there are people who are

• 21:43Speaker 01

  much more skilled than I am, that I shouldn't spend a lot of time on those topics. And so I've designed the team and the company in a way that allow me to be more product and technology focused. I'm still our head of product and the product functions are poured out to me. But then in other aspects of the business and some of the like more G and A, the general administrative functions, I of course stay linked in and tied into those, but I'm not as in the weeds.

• 22:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  So like earlier today, I was reviewing, you know, electrical board designs and power electronics and the detail level down at the board level, which is like, I'm not doing the

• 22:24Rich Roll?

  I don't even know what that means.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I'm not doing the parallel of that in let's say, you know, in some of our G and A functions.

• 22:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The automotive industry is such an intractable, I mean, you gave these reasons why it's so complicated, so complex and why it's so capital intensive. I heard you say that the development of a car requires something like 20 to 30 million different decisions.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  It's hard to estimate, but it's

• 22:48Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Many millions of decisions.

• 22:50Rich Roll?

  Insane, right? So what is the average person who's listening to this not kind of fully appreciate or understand when it comes to, you know, having this idea like we're going to make this electric vehicle and turn it into reality? What do you think gets missed and why it's so hard?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Um, I think there's two things. I think at the highest level, you said it already, is that the number of decisions is really large. And so the best products, and this is true not just for cars, but for just essentially every type of product is a product that has a really clear vision for what it wants to be. And in the case of a car, that's harder than let's say like a coffee cup, because the scale of the decisions and the breadth of the decisions is so broad. So it's not possible for like me to have a really crisp vision and for me to me purely to go execute it. That vision has to be communicated effectively across many groups. So there's teams of people doing power electronics, battery design,

• 23:48Speaker 01

  motor design, chassis design, interior design, exterior design, you know, materials design. And each of those teams need to be looking at it with the same mindset around how we make trade offs between cost and features, between mass and

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Costs like there's all these trade offs that you have to make decisions where you can't get everything on everything. You can't make it the lightest weight, the lowest cost, the highest performance first trades. And so across the many millions of decisions being made by thousands of engineers and designers across many functions, it's really an exercise in coordination and communicating and disseminating a vision that's easily understood and easily actionable. And not every single decision is going to align with every single customer need. And I look at like

• 24:39Rich Roll?

  And they're going to let you know.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  And customers let you know, why did you do this? And like, well, we, it wasn't like it accidentally happened.

• 24:45Rich Roll?

  How much time do you have to explain?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  But there's not, there's no accidents. I'll give an example. In the interior of our vehicle in the R1, we decided not to have buttons. So the entire interface is through a touchscreen. And if you want buttons, you're not going to like that decision. And it doesn't matter what I say, but we optimized for the ability to have a completely updatable user interaction, user interface, that with software, we can change anything. And so that meant we drove everything to a touchscreen, a multi touchscreen. And that singular decision means that it has like long term repercussions. It also means that the vehicles can get better over time. But there's so many decisions like that, that we had to make trade offs.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  And we try to make them in a way that both feels consistent to the vision, but also we think encapsulates something that's going to be highly compelling. But by nature of the cars being compelling and unique and pointed, you're not going to have everyone like everything.

• 25:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  And so that's okay. I say that all the time. If someone disagrees, I said, that's okay. Like, that's why, like, hopefully, there's lots of great choices that you can choose from. This is one company's perspective on how to make, you know, this, call it set of 30 million decisions. There's other companies that have different ways of making those decisions.

• 26:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You're always quick to say like, we're at the very beginning of this huge mission. And I want to hear you articulate what that mission is specifically. But, you know, as of now, what is it like, EVs are 10% of the consumer transportation market, something like that. And we think like, oh, well, there's Tesla and there's you, it's late. It's not. It's very early. Like, there's so much growth. And so you're always kind of like celebrating any kind of innovation in this space and not looking at it through a sort of competitive lens.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:33Rich Roll?

  You know, when these other companies win, like you win as well because there's lots of room here. But back to the mission, like if you have to say, what is the mission statement of Rivian? Or what is your mission statement with this company?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we actually look through that lens, through the lens of what are we trying to accomplish as our objective or as our mission in driving a vast majority of the decisions we take as a company. And for us, it's, it's really helping to advance our whole society towards a climate neutral transportation ecosystem, energy ecosystem. And so that means moving towards sustainable energy. That means moving off of combustion and fossil fuels. And you're right, I do talk about this being the beginning all the time. And it's the beginning in so many ways. It's, you know, 8% new vehicle sales are electric in the U.S. There's one and a half billion combustion powered vehicles on the planet. All of those need to be converted. There's thousands of coal power plants, thousands of natural gas power plants.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  So our grid is still, you know, in the United States, about 60% fossil fueled. All of that has to be shut down and replaced. But amazingly, that's going to happen in our lifetime. So the world we live in today.

• 27:42Rich Roll?

  The optimism is still there.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  It's just so, but it's just so amazing. Like imagine everything we know of in the world, like the room we're sitting in, the lights that are in the microphones we're speaking to, this technology was developed within the last few generations, meaning our parents, parents, parents. That string of four generations has built the world we know today. And the world we know today is so different than what it's looked like for the vast majority of human history. But of course, that was built with fossil fuels. And we uniquely, in this moment in time, are responsible for replacing that entire energy infrastructure and industrial ecology with something that's going to be sustainable for many, many generations to come. And

• 28:27Speaker 01

  We're running this whole world that we built off of a very finite fuel supply. So we could either say we're going to run another two, maybe three generations worth, and then we'll be out, you know, no more fossil fuel and re-carbonize the atmosphere to such a degree that life as we know it is at high risk. Or we can make the transition much sooner. And obviously, I think we should make the transition much sooner. And I think a lot of companies like Rivian need to emerge to recreate the industrial footprint that we live.

• 28:54Rich Roll?

  No one of these companies is going to do it alone.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  It's just too big.

• 28:57Rich Roll?

  In order to solve it, there's a vertical integration of systems in order to achieve that, right? So let's just start with the climate impact of the sort of consumer transportation industry on the environment, like how damaging or deleterious is that? And what is your sense of if you could, you know, flick a switch and everybody's driving an EV, we'll set aside like the power grid for a moment, like what degree of improvement do we accomplish in doing that?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, transportation is one of the single largest contributors to climate change. You know, between carbon emissions and then unburned hydrocarbons, things like methane, it's one of the most damaging. It also has the unique role that it plays in the air quality in our cities. So if you're sitting here in LA, we saw like a sneak preview at the start of COVID of what air quality will look like if we drive less combustion powered vehicles. One of the first times in a long time where you could see across the city without smog. And so one of the benefits of moving to electric vehicles isn't just the reduction in carbon emissions, but we actually improve air quality across all of our cities. And that's, that's super exciting.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  But the, this flick the switch point that you bring up, I wish that was possible, but it's really going to take a couple of decades. And that's maybe a slightly optimistic view to replace the one and a half billion vehicles on the planet, but it's. You know, we could say whether it's two decades or three or four decades, but it's I characterize as like my lifetime. But the time skills to do that are very similar to the time skills to completely clean up our grid. And that's turning off thousands of power plants that are running today. That's building many, many sites that are doing renewable energy, both solar and wind. It's going to involve continued development of nuclear power.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  So we're going to see a whole new grid emerge over that 40 to 50 year timeframe as well.

• 30:58Rich Roll?

  When you think about charging infrastructure and the power grid, like most power grids are powered by natural gas, oil, coal. And I think there is this sense with the consumer that is this really any better? I'm plugging into the grid. It's coal, like it's kind of the same thing. It's actually not because of the law of thermodynamics. And you know, there's a reason why it's still better. I'm sure you could articulate much better than me. So you're still doing a good thing by doing this. But yes, of course, the problem doesn't get solved until the power grid is powered by renewable energy.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  We should talk about that just for a second. I'm glad you bring it up. So if you think about what a power plant is, let's say a natural gas power plant, and you were to compare that to an engine in a car, they're very similar thermodynamically, except the power plant can run at very high levels of optimal efficiency. So it can run at, let's say, an average efficiency of 40 plus percent in terms of converting the energy in the fuel, natural gas, to the actual mechanical power, which is like it can be converted to electricity. In a vehicle, because the engines went smaller, because it has to be throttled to run at lower speeds, you know, it's running at maybe on average 15% efficiency.

• 32:16Rich Roll?

  Right, like something like 20% of the energy from the gas is lost to heat.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  A huge amount of the energy is lost to heat. So you have, call it. 15, maybe 20% efficiency. So you have at least a 2 to 3x improvement just by using these larger centralized power plants. And of course, the energy to go from electricity to mechanical power, electric motor is very efficient. It's close to 97, 98% depending on the design. So you just have a very big difference in terms of energy efficiency between an engine and a vehicle versus what you're using at the grid level. Now, above and beyond that, the grid is not 100% fossil fueled. We've already made some progress. In the United States, 40% of our grid is carbon free. Of that 40%, roughly half or 20% of the grid is renewable, and the other roughly half,

• 33:05Speaker 01

  roughly 20% is nuclear power, which is carbon free. And so we're already on a journey. And the neat thing about electric vehicles, every year, every month that goes, every month or every year that goes by, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. And so in year 10 of owning-

• 33:21Rich Roll?

  And then there's the air quality aspect of it as well, just with the emissions aspect of it.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  You can do a lot more to control the emissions of the plant because it's large, it's centralized, you can use things like scrubbers. There's a lot of technologies to clean up the output from a plant. But the other point, which I'd say is more philosophical, is if we all waited until everything was perfect, if we said, "I'm not going to switch out of my combustion powered vehicle until the grid's 100% green," and like held off on that, or until battery supply chains are perfectly optimized, we'll end up waiting for forever. So we have to start making this transition. As we make the transition, the technologies will become better, the efficiencies will become better. I say this all the time, like, that's our role. Our moment in time is that we're at the start of this transition, and so it'd be wrong

• 34:10Speaker 01

  to judge the end state by what it looks like in the beginning.

• 34:12Rich Roll?

  Sure, it's going to be messy for a while. I mean, that applies to battery manufacturing-

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Applies to almost anything.

• 34:17Rich Roll?

  And lithium mining and all these other kind of like considerations that come into play. Like, if the mission is decarbonizing transportation, like, there are other problems that have to be solved as well.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  It applies to so many. I mean, if you were sitting, so, let's say, 1980 and imagining a world in which you have a computer in your pocket, you'd say, "Well, I don't want to start with that because I have these giant computers, they're a pain, so I'm not going to use a computer. Tell me when it's ready to go in my pocket." It took us going through many iterations before we could get to what we now think of as like an iPhone, or a Pixel, or a small amazingly powerful device that goes into our pocket.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  But if we'd gone back and just said, "We're going to wait until it's there," we would have never gotten there.

• 34:59Rich Roll?

  How do you think about your customers? Like, what is the Rivian customer? How do you cater to that person? How do you think about that in how you message around this mission and the products that you create?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  So, linked to this, just the overall mission around driving towards sustainable energy, sustainable transportation. One of the words we've talked about a lot in building the brand is the word inviting. And we want to create a brand that's highly inviting. And it doesn't tie to any specific demographic or age group, but rather, it's inviting across a broad spectrum of people, personalities, backgrounds, what have you. Part of that is, we wanted to look at it beyond just the effects that our products are going to have in a positive way on the climate. And so, we really started to design the brand. And this was maybe six, seven years ago.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  We started to design the brand around enabling people to do the kinds of things that would connect them back to the world, to connect them back to the natural environment. And so, we started to build this idea of a brand built around adventure. And when we talk about a brand built around the idea of adventure, and it really was going after this idea of there's an adventure in all of us. And your version of adventure may be different than my version. I may want to take a telescope out to an open field and look at stars at night. Yours may be running a 100-mile race, riding a bike 50 miles. It could be going to the beach with kids. Everybody has a different form of adventure.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  But we want to make those types of experiences both highly accessible, but also, and I'd say perhaps even more importantly, we want to help inspire those things. So, we want to inspire people, in addition to enabling them, to do the kinds of things you want to take photographs of. When I think back, what was I doing 10 years ago? What was I doing 20 years ago? We rarely think about the things we bought. We rarely think about the clothes we were wearing. We look back and remember the emotions we had, the experiences we had. We look at the pictures of those things and that as a brand is what we're trying to embody.

• 37:07Rich Roll?

  The ethos behind this from my perspective is you're somebody who wants the products to speak for themselves, which is very different from Tesla. There's definitely a cult of personality around Elon and that has its pros and cons, I suppose. I mean, his ascendancy into everyone's consciousness, I'm sure, has a positive impact on Tesla's sales, but the downside of that is because he's very opinionated and has aligned himself politically in a certain way, that ultimately could become an Achilles' heel. And you're somebody who I see is very neutral.

• 37:52Rich Roll?

  You're trying to create this welcome mat for everybody. Maybe it's a slower growth curve, but at the same time, you're more in the background and letting the work talk for you. Is that fair?

• 38:09Speaker 01

  It's funny, when you think about building a brand or a company, in the process, you do all this work envisioning the future. So you're like, what do we want to have happen? What are the types of outcomes we'd like to accomplish? And one of the things we spent a lot of time talking about was envisioning a world where our products would inspire people to go do things that they love, to do the kinds of things they want to photograph, but importantly, bring groups of people together to go create these experiences together. And I'd say the sharpest...

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Maybe perhaps most unlikely thing we envisioned was the idea of user groups forming that would help create opportunities for people to experience the world in different ways or new ways. And those user groups to be really diverse. Our team would put together these slides of like groups of people going out and like checking out a trail or going on a hike together but getting there in the Rivians or, you know, imagining that group of someone who's never been on a, you know, like an outdoor hike before and the first time doing it. And what's amazing is that's actually happened. And we have one of the most active customer bases that I'm so happy is so diverse. And in the world we're in now, where unfortunately sustainability and electrification have

• 39:26Speaker 01

  become politicized in ways that I really could have never imagined, we see people that are on the right, on the left, guys, girls, you know, different, you know, every orientation of everything you can imagine that are aligning around this. And I think that's really good. And so we don't want to lose that. We want to maintain that. And we want to, as you said, be as welcoming as we can across such a broad spectrum. I think along with that, the products need to speak for themselves. So a big area of debate I had when I first started the company was whether the product wants to be like purely optimized for the most diehard, climate-focused customer or something that would be broadly appealing.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  And I did the, the summer before I started the company, as I was still thinking about what it wanted to be, I did an experiment where I tried to live carbon neutral. When I did that, I went full in.

• 40:22Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  So no dishwasher, no clothes washing, no lights, no AC, like raw foods. I'm vegetarian, so it was like everything was raw. It was very, very low carbon. And I got through with that. I'm like, well, I don't think that many people are going to sign up to do that. And if we want to sell highly efficient vehicles, we need to create products that are compelling, that meet people where they are. So like a teeny little car is probably not going to sell that many. It may be really efficient, but it's not going to sell that many.

• 40:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You got like Ed Begley Jr. and people like that who are all in, who will be your customers.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  But you're just not going to have impact. So we decided to make the most incredible SUV and the most incredible truck that regardless whether it's electric or not, it's just amazing. So it's, you know. Quicker than a supercar is zero to 60. It's more capable off-road than anything you can buy. It's comfortable and premium in a way that you wouldn't imagine an off-road capable vehicle can do. And so we did all this work to create a flagship product that would, regardless of your orientation towards climate, is just interesting. And it's been really successful. So we have people that are buying it just because they love the product. And then they tell their friends and say, look, I wasn't really super excited about electrification, but I drove this thing and it's freaking nuts. It's so cool.

• 41:39Rich Roll?

  The experience of driving them is just, I mean, it's just a better experience.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  It's just better. And so the more people that get exposed to that, it just self-perpetuates.

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  When you reflect back to the early 2010s and you think about EVs, this is sort of the purview of the NPR tote bag wearing coastal elites. That's very much changed. To me, it's just only a matter of time because the product is so much better. But I'm curious around like your sense of the consumer marketplace and like, where is this going? There is some sort of market stagnation. The growth is slower than I'm sure you would like at the moment. And I think the marketplace is dominated by players who are creating products that are essentially like luxury products, right? Inaccessible to a lot of people.

• 42:48Rich Roll?

  And I know you're moving in the direction of affordability and scale allows you to do that. But from your perspective, like, how do you win the hearts and minds of all of these people who are either skeptical or thinking like, you know, this is like, not for me? Like, why is this a little bit stagnant right now? Set aside regulation and political climate and all that.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  I think the biggest driver of this is there's a lack of choice. And so today, if you want to get a highly compelling, well-engineered, software-first product that's sub $50,000, there are very, very few choices. I'd say less than the number of fingers in my hand. It's obviously Tesla Model Y, Tesla Model 3, great products. But if you're In the market for something that costs less than $50,000, you have to make big compromises today around form factor, up around brand and brand presentation, what the brand stands for. And you also have to accept that there's a single player Tesla that has so much market

• 43:53Speaker 01

  share that it's, that you're gonna end up with, it's a great product, but a lot of people have the same thing. So it's a very, it's becoming more and more ubiquitous. And I think in order to see large scale adoption of the magnitude that is the global automotive market, so call it 80 to 90 million electric vehicles per year, it's going to need more than two or three choices. And you could argue that it's more economically optimized for everybody to buy the same thing. But that, without hydration, that has not happened in any part of human society. Meaning, it'd be way cheaper if everyone wore the exact same pair of clothes. And we had six factories across the planet that made all the world's clothes. But, you know, there's probably 100 people on our campus right here.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  I bet you know ones wearing the same shirt. And so like, we have a desire as a human species for personal expression. We have a desire for differentiation. And I think the same is true in vehicles. So we need lots of great choices. We haven't had those. It's one of the reasons we're so excited about our, as you've called it out, our more affordable products, our R2 and our R3. And it's one of the reasons why I'm constantly reminding people that, like, it's not going to be just R2 and R3 and Model 3 and Model Y. We need a lot more great choices.

• 45:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've heard you talk about how, how, you know, you wish these other companies weren't like just trying to copy Tesla. Like, we need creative differentiation in here as well.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so I take our R1S. It's, as you said, it's an expensive product, but it's been very successful. And in terms of vehicles priced over $70,000, it's the most popular SUV in California. And not most popular electric SUV, just most popular SUV over $70,000 in California. So it outsells any of the incumbent, traditional internal combustion vehicles at the premium, you know, within the premium segment. And so our hope is we can translate that success that we've had in a premium segment to something that's in the more, call it, middle of the market, around the price of an hour, what an average transaction is in the United States, which is under $50,000.

• 46:00Rich Roll?

  It wasn't that long ago, three, four years ago, you're in this very challenging position. You've raised billions of dollars. You buy this former Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois, and you invest like $1.5 billion in equipment to install and retrofit this plant to produce Rivian vehicles. Pandemic happens, COVID, supply chain disruption, you've got hundreds and hundreds of suppliers, and you're also like new. You had to convince these suppliers to even work with you in the beginning. You know, like, just leading up to that is, you know, case studies and overcoming obstacles. But now you're faced with having

• 46:42Rich Roll?

  to like, deal with, you know, problems you couldn't have even foreseen. You know, it's sort of amazing that you navigated that and have come out the other side. So, I say all that just because I'm curious around like how you think about and manage like obstacles. Like, I'm sure a day doesn't go by where you're not presented with some insane challenge that you couldn't have imagined two weeks earlier that you have to figure out a solution to. So, how do you problem solve in those situations? How do you like maintain your equanimity and stay focused on, you know, kind of moving forward on your mission?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  I mean, we were talking about, before I started the company, how I didn't talk about what we were doing to very many folks. And at that point, the risk was enormously high. And I contrast that with today, where, you know, everyone, we're a public company, so our, you know, like every quarter, we put our financials out. And you called out just some of the challenges that happened that were linked to COVID, supply chain crisis, multiple vehicles being launched at the same time, there's all those challenges. And, you know, as I look at our situation today, people say, are you stressed? And I say, of course I'm stressed. I'm like incredibly focused on what's in front of us. But the risk profile today is, is so different than what it was before. In fact, I said to my dad that I've never been more confident in Rivian than I am right now.

• 48:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  You know, and if I would just contrast today with 15 years ago, you know, we have built a world-class brand.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  The last two years in a row, we've come out in a bunch of independent brand studies as the number one rated brand, the highest rate of repurchase, the highest level of customer satisfaction. We launched a flagship product that's the dominant market share player, depending on how you categorize it, a number of ways. And we're about to launch our mass market product, which means we're spending a tremendous amount of capital to develop that, make sure that from a technology point of view and a product point of view, it's among the best in the world. But before we launch that, we have all the costs associated with building that business. We're forward investing in service, forward investing in our retail and service, uh, sales infrastructure. But that's all really visible to us. And so we have real clear line of sight to what's to come.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  And so we're really excited about that. But the difference as a public company is it's very easy to look at this from the outside and say, boy, you're losing money today still. Looks like you're having to invest in technology and spend a lot of money in your R and D. And I look at it and I say, of course, this isn't easy, but, but we're so focused as a team, so focused as a company around what we have to do. And I said this to a group of our leaders the other day, like, we need to be successful. We must be successful. And society needs multiple version, multiple companies like us in transportation, in energy, in consumer goods, in agriculture, to be disruptive agitators that are changing the way these industries work.

• 49:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  And they need to be not monopolies. They need to have multiple different companies that are driving through competition, better products for, for customers.

• 49:47Rich Roll?

  You have this vision, you know the trajectory you're on, you can like see the path to profitability. You understand that it's long and labor intensive and capital intensive and all of that. I get that you have the patience and I'm sure your teams do as well. But that, that kind of version of playing the long game isn't always simpatico with, you know, being a publicly traded company.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 50:13Rich Roll?

  And the pressures that come with, you know, with, that come with that world, right? Like it's quarterly earnings and it's like, what, you know, where are we right now? There's, there is, there is, it's the antithesis of patience, right? So do you feel that pressure? I mean, it's not, you know, it's, it's pretty common. Not necessarily in the automotive industry, but it's pretty common for founders who are visionaries, who, you know, figure out a way to create something real and solve like a problem and create a huge business around it, go public, grow, and then get to that place where the board feels like, maybe it's time for a change. Like, let's bring in the real operator. You can be the visionary guy in the face of this, but like, we need, we're at a place right now that's, you know, outside of

• 50:57Rich Roll?

  your depths, right? So how does that work with your board? And how do you kind of maintain, you know, amity amongst the board members so that you kind of avoid that situation that befalls a lot of people? It's quite common.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  We talked about it before. The skills that I need to have to run Rivian have evolved a lot since I started the company. And there is certain moments where there was like step changes in how I need to look at the business and how I would look at what I even do. And one of those was the launch of our products. We went from a company developing products to a company suddenly selling products and actually having customers. Another was the build out of a large service, you know, service infrastructure and go-to-market infrastructure. But one of the biggest was us going from a private company to a public company. And for me, it was a lot of, there was a lot of learning in the first year of being public of there's going to be lots, especially a company that's public,

• 51:57Speaker 01

  that's not, it's not like we're doing enterprise software or something that's obscure, that's not, people aren't paying attention to. This is, we sell products that you like can see on the road, and it's very relatable. And you've recalled that already, there's natural comparisons that one will want to draw between our products and Tesla products, or our products and incumbent vehicle manufacturers. It's unavoidable that there's going to be, it's going to be a complex environment to manage externally. And really core to that is that it's important that the, in my role as CEO, that I have a really close relationship with our board, that we have active discussions around the challenges we're up against, that we're consistent and aligned and on how we approach

• 52:40Speaker 01

  these challenges in terms of balancing the short-term focus and the long-term focus. And then that we, as a leadership team, can manage the choppiness of a share price that is highly volatile. And so it's taken some practice, you know, it's taken some learning. And I think I certainly feel like I'm much stronger at managing both the emotional ups and downs, but also the types of relationships necessary across investors and analysts and stakeholders like suppliers as a public company than I was just a couple of years ago. But the beauty of a high-functioning board is that it's not just a fiduciary function,

• 53:22Speaker 01

  it's also an advisory function. So it's an opportunity for me to get great counsel and advice from the board that we've put together. So I'm really pleased with that. You know, it's lots of learnings. Like a weekly board memo goes a long way to keeping everybody aligned.

• 53:37Rich Roll?

  Be proactive.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  I really enjoy a weekly board memo. I like to write it. Our board enjoys it. So there's like these little tactical things.

• 53:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, just in case they're listening, like, let's make sure they know that, okay? But this idea of like taking counsel, like, you know, a big part of the Rivian ethos is collaboration. Like, you have all these partnerships. You've got this incredible partnership with Amazon, and you're creating this, you know, fleet of commercial Amazon delivery vehicles, and now your own like kind of commercial vehicle for multipurpose, right? And this new deal with Volkswagen that was recently, you know, enriched even further, $5.8 billion, that's going to allow, you know, kind of your technology to find its way into the Volkswagen suite of vehicles, which include Porsche. And, you know, that's

• 54:27Rich Roll?

  very exciting. It gives you kind of like some nice...

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Big strong mission, big time.

• 54:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, some nice capital. And you could see the benefit. Like, you're a technology company that manifests its technology in...

• 54:41Rich Roll?

  Automobiles, right? These other companies, legacy automotive companies, they're automotive companies that have figured out how to incorporate technology. They're upside down of each other, right? So there's clearly a synergy there. But on this piece around collaboration, I'm interested in what you've learned as a leader from these relationships. Like, what was that first meeting like with Jeff Bezos? And what did you learn from him? And what is the counsel that he's providing you?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  I mean, Jeff, having among the friends and advisors that we've accumulated as a company that I've built over the last 15 years, Jeff's been really interesting because he's been through, he built one of the most valuable companies in the world. It was not a straight line journey. And he famously wrote in an annual shareholder letter around the importance of focusing on the long term versus the short term. And that opening passage of that shareholder letter is something I've probably read 150 times. And so he's been a great advisor and someone that, particularly when there's hard decisions around trade offs between short and long term, hard decisions around technology and how we invest in technology

• 55:57Speaker 01

  in our current state as we're scaling, it's been really valuable. And so that's true in the case of Jeff. That's true in the case of a number of other leaders across other businesses that we've partnered with or worked with. And I think one of the really key parts of, that I deeply believe is important for our success and for that matter, the success of our society, is that we need to be able to work together. And it's easy to say, let's work together and be collaborative when things are easy. It's actually really hard to work together. It's naturally hard to work together when things are difficult and when there's not an easy or obvious solution. And so that's true within our product teams. That's true within our business.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  That's also true with our corporate partners and relationships. And so one of the things that has me very excited with Volkswagen. Is we didn't just sign this deal after like Oliver, the CNO had like a fun weekend meeting and said, hey, let's do a $5.8 billion deal next week. It was, there was a year of rigorous work that our teams got to know their teams who worked through challenges. You know, for, for us to deploy our electronics stack and our software across their whole portfolio of vehicles, it's, it's not like, you know, inserting and uploading a new software package is a deep set of changes that have to happen to their vehicles to do that. And so the work of seeing our teams come together, collaborate, disagree, challenge each other,

• 57:24Speaker 01

  ultimately arrive at solutions where both sides are equally excited to move forward on the deal is, is really, I think speaks volumes to the kind of culture that we've worked so hard to build within Rivian. And the same is true in our relationship with Amazon. The same is true in our relationship across our own business within, between, let's say, our manufacturing teams and our engineering teams or our, our go to market and sales teams and our product teams. But it's not a skill that's, it's not like a naturally equilibrium point. It's something that takes constant focus, constant attention. And that means you need to have the right leaders in place. If you have the wrong leaders in place, it's incumbent upon myself and other leaders to make changes. The right types of behaviors need to be, you know, identified and rewarded. And the wrong types of behaviors also need

• 58:07Speaker 01

  to be identified and actioned on. And so it's, it is a constant, active gardening of the culture, active work of, of how it looks and how it shapes up.

• 58:20Rich Roll?

  When I asked you about navigating COVID and the supply chain issues at that time, you said something along the lines of like, well, that was like the least sort of risky time, like amongst all the obstacles that you faced and overcome, like you feel like, you know, the, the company isn't under threat through these, like it, like it has been in the past and you had to get over these sorts of things, a byproduct of which of course is like, you know, you're building this resilience to like meet these challenges. But was there ever kind of an existential threat to the company where the obstacle was so dire that you thought like, this is it, like I can't do it?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Oh, many, many times, yeah.

• 58:58Rich Roll?

  How are we going to wake up in the morning kind of thing? Like, what was the most intense crisis that you faced?

• 59:04Speaker 01

  I mean, there's been so many. The obvious one is along the way, there's many times we almost ran out of money. And so How close? Oh, like way closer than I would have ever wanted the teams to know. Days, weeks? Yeah, like a week or two before it could be payroll. It is early, early on. Early on, yeah. And that was like, just, that became just the norm, that we were essentially hand to mouth for so many years. But I'd say in more recent times, the, you talked about COVID. We were planning to launch our first product in 2021. And so to do that, there's obviously the product engineering, but there's a buildup of hundreds of suppliers that can make all

• 59:45Speaker 01

  the components and tool all those components. So, you know, like a face or a headlight, the supplier has to build that, but they also have to build the tooling for it. And so that was our first time turning on our supply chain. And in each case, we had to go through the really painful process in 2018, 2019 of negotiating deals with these suppliers from a position of weakness. The brand wasn't known. We didn't have a balance sheet that looked particularly robust. It wasn't clear whether customers wanted to buy electric trucks and SUVs. And we were unproven as a company. And so we had to pay, and by the way, the auto industry was at its peak. So it was like, high times. It wasn't like the automotive supply base was desperate by any means. So essentially, we had to pay

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  a pretty significant premium just to get all these suppliers to work with us. And it wasn't as if we had a choice, because there was just such a lack of leverage that we had. But the assumption that I made was that after launching, we would be able to negotiate meaningful cost reductions off the success of the product and continued volume growth. And what we didn't predict was first that COVID would happen, and that would make setting up a plant, not just our plant, but all these suppliers, getting tooling set up and coordinated and tested and quality loops worked through, really difficult from 2020 to 2021 when we were supposed to launch. But then subsequent to that, setting up the plant and installing

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  equipment, that the supply chain would have such a hysteresis of, of capacity, it'd be like, just constrained for so long. And so rather than us being able to negotiate cost savings, those same suppliers came back and said, if you still want to keep getting parts, you have to keep paying us. And so there was this I won't call it extortion, but it was almost like we had no choice but to pay whatever,

• 1:01:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  You know, whatever additional fees were on top. So it was just-

• 1:01:37Rich Roll?

  This is why you're still having to subsidize like every sale.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  And so that-

• 1:01:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  We had to really work through that and it was, we launched another thing. We decided to launch three products at the same time. So we launched a truck, an SUV and a commercial van all at once. And so if things were going well, that would have been a really positive thing. In that environment, it made it immensely complex. And just to illustrate how hard this is, probably two things. The install of the equipment at the plant, we had hundreds of truckloads of equipment that was sitting outside our plant in 2020 with no ability to install it because we couldn't get contractors to work outside to like do the, you know, electrical drops and all of the above.

• 1:02:17Rich Roll?

  To actually install the equipment.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  So we had to like-

• 1:02:19Rich Roll?

  You paid a billion and a half dollars to have delivered.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  So we had to like come up with all sorts of crazy schemes to get the equipment installed. We had, you know, multiple different colors of shirts for different teams so that they wouldn't walk by each other and exchange, you know, COVID. It was, it was very complex.

• 1:02:33Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Once we got through that, when our supply chain was ramping, any single supplier can stop the plant. And I think the focus is always on the single supplier that stops the plant. What's not appreciated is the other suppliers keep sending stuff. So we would have-

• 1:02:49Rich Roll?

  You keep a stockpile of-

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  We would have insane stockpiles of the stuff we did have enough of and it would, it overflowed all of our warehouses. We had to rent additional warehouses. There were times where we would have a hundred semis lined up at one of our warehouses because there's nowhere to put the parts because a single part was stopping production. So we couldn't build vehicles to consume the other parts. And so the pain and the complexity of learning for the first time how to run a complex supply chain across not just one vehicle, but three, and to do that in that environment was, you know, we like had to go zero to highly capable really quickly. And so we're just now coming out of that. So we renegotiated and resourced about half of our vehicle on R1.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  But as I said, like the linkage to how that started still remains.

• 1:03:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the hangover, the hangover is long.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  But on R2, it's a totally different supply chain. So the cost structure on R2 is, it's like,

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  You're like, this is easy, this is so easy.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  I'm so excited about it. It's so much cheaper than what we did in R1 and it's just starting from such a different position.

• 1:03:56Rich Roll?

  The supply chain stuff is so interesting because it's not like you're getting, you're waiting on a part, you're waiting on, in many cases, components. And so when there's a piece that's required for your supplier to create that component that's missing, they have their supply chain issues. So it's sort of like it's a domino effect all the way down the line. It takes a very long time for that to repair itself and get back on track. Meanwhile, you've got, you know, 100,000 pre-orders and you've got all these customers waiting. Like, when did we do that panel in Denver? Do you remember with Alex?

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:30Rich Roll?

  That was before the pandemic. It must have been 2018?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  18 or 19.

• 1:04:35Rich Roll?

  Something like that. And, you know, it was a big dog and pony show. You had the vehicles there and it was like, we're on the precipice. Everybody's gonna be getting this soon.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then boom, yeah.

• 1:04:45Rich Roll?

  You know, it would be like three years later, right?

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Rich Roll?

  I mean, you know, and you're trying to manage like, uh, you know, making sure there's no customer revolt amidst all of this. Like, I can't even imagine. So when you look back on all of those experiences, you know, what do you tell your younger self? Like, had you known all of this going in? I mean, you strike me as somebody who would be like, yeah, I'm still doing it. Like, sign me up.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it wouldn't have changed. I probably would have spaced out the three vehicle launches. Like, I wouldn't have compressed so much complexity. So probably would have launched R1S first, then the truck, then the van, instead of all within the same six-month window, but. In some ways, the pain, the world has not yet seen it. And it hasn't been realized yet, but R2 is going to be so much better from a cost point of view and a supply chain robustness point of view because of the beating that we took on R1. And I actually think the pain that we went through on R1 is leading to R2 being a better product. And so, the R2 is like the aggregate result of all of our experiences as a company.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  And so, those experiences are viable. They helped inform how we operate, they informed our culture, they informed how we negotiate with suppliers. And, you know, it's like, I could certainly wish some of those things were less painful, but it's going to make us stronger in the end.

• 1:06:16Rich Roll?

  You seem like a very grounded, calm, equanimous person by nature. And I'm just trying to imagine you in the center of the firestorm and how you kind of maintain that level of calm so that you can, you know, make good decisions. What are the lifestyle habits that you, you know, kind of deploy to, you know, kind of maintain your sanity in a very insane life?

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Hmm. I think everybody deals with challenging situations differently. There's no right or wrong answer. For me, what I find is that as the situation becomes more complex and more pressurized, I'm at my best if I'm consciously staying calm. So, if you were to look in my notebook at the hardest moments in Rivian's history, you'll find written on pages, "Stay calm," or I often write, "The calm person wins." And it's a reminder to myself that, you just said it, but we make better decisions, we can process things more thoughtfully, or at least I should say, I can make better decisions and I process things more thoughtfully when I consciously stay calm.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  And...

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  That's easy to say, sometimes hard to do. But it's the reason I write it down sometimes to remind myself.

• 1:07:35Rich Roll?

  Do you have a practice, though, to do that, other than just a reminder? Like, is there, are there things that you do? Or is there a way that you set up your life that makes it more conducive to remaining calm?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  There's three things I think that can, that'll help. So I eat very healthy. I'm vegetarian for a long, long time, plant-based for also a long time. I like to exercise. And even if it's, when I say exercise, I think we, like, our minds often go to, like, being in a gym. But exercise is walking, hiking, biking.

• 1:08:09Rich Roll?

  Rivian-style exercise?

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it can be, it can be lots of things. But it's being active. It's getting your body moving in a way that you may not solve something on a walk or on a hike, but your brain, at least I find, my brain can reset and look at the same exact set of constraints and problem in a different way. And then the third, which I don't do a great job of, is getting enough sleep. I think if you do those three things well, you're in your best position to make great decisions. That's some of the advice I've had from other founders are along those lines, which are, you know, you're, particularly as a company scales. In the beginning, your job in running a company is to do everything. But as it scales, a big part of my job is to make as strong and robust of decisions as possible.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  I'm no longer the person that's going to design every part or, but I need to be making, like, the hard, big decisions.

• 1:08:59Rich Roll?

  And to even know what the most important decisions are to make so that your attention and your focus is being placed in the right.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  And often, the big decisions that are easier, the ones where the answer is obvious. The big decisions that are hard are the ones that are unpopular. So they're either high-risk, or they're ones for which, you know, the whole leadership team is like, "Arj, what are you thinking?" And it's like, "Well, I'm really convicted on this." So you're not going to be 100% right as well. So you have to recognize that you will get some things wrong. But I think on the really big, you know, one-way-door decisions, I try really hard to make sure we're thinking about those in the right way.

• 1:09:31Rich Roll?

  And so what is your advice to the young founder or somebody out there who's tackling a big problem or has an audacious vision for how to change the world, from your experiences and all the things that you've learned?

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  I think first and foremost, I say this all the time, it does take a lot. It takes a lot of time.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  You have to... Maybe it's possible. I can't imagine a way to do it without, you put it as being obsessive.

• 1:09:59Rich Roll?

  Obsession.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, like being really dedicated to the thing you're working towards. And this whole concept of work-life balance, your life is, your whole life is integrated into your work. If you're really doing something big and if you, I think following a model similar to what I followed. So it's just everything you're thinking about in some way relates in. And then as your life becomes, is in the case with me, as your life becomes, has more things added to it. So in my case, had kids, like finding ways for your kids to be part of it is important. But there's no way to avoid that this is going to take a tremendous amount of focus and time. And you have to love it. You have to deeply love it. You have to be passionate about it. You have to be in it for the right reasons.

• 1:10:44Rich Roll?

  A different relationship with balance.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Rich Roll?

  You can't get too unbalanced or you're not going to be able to actually fulfill the mission.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the things I learned a lot in doing this, and so I've gone through cycles where I've been not physically as healthy and I'd say not performing at as effectively as I could have. To where I am today, which is I've been much more intentional on how I find ways to make everything all fit together. And so I talked about being intentional with time. I'm really intentional on energy now. So I think about in the course of a week, what are the things that we're doing? Are there enough things that are creative? Enough things that are like grinding out hard work, enough things that are collaborative? And mapping out the timeline over the course of a week to say,

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  make sure it's balanced and make sure the context switching is also thoughtful. So going from a, an intense negotiation where it's, you know,

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  like a serious, hard negotiation to giving an inspiring all-hands talk to terminating a leader at the company, to your recruiting lunch, that's a bad flow of events to happen in a morning. But you could arrange those same things differently across the course of a week and your energy levels can be much higher. So I spend a lot of time looking at my layout of the week to think.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  You know, like what I did immediately before this was important that it wasn't something that put me in a really bad mood, for example, or not even bad mood, just like beat me up emotionally. And similarly, I know that after this, I'm gonna be in a great mood, so I should go do something creative.

• 1:12:25Rich Roll?

  This is my job.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Rich Roll?

  Our time is winding up. I gotta let you go shortly, but I can't let you leave without some thoughts on where this is all going. Like if you cast your gaze and your vision onto a future, maybe 30, 40, 50 years on the horizon, and assuming there are all these obstacles and it's not gonna go as planned, and there's setbacks, and the timeline, you know, gets stretched, what does it look like? Like what is the world that you wanna see that would match up to this vision that you have?

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  This is where I think, I've said it before, I think we're at such a wonderful inflection point. We're at the early innings of this transition away from fossil fuels. So 30, 40 years from now, we should be in the late innings of that, and it should start to feel as if when we look back, almost unimaginable, the way we, the way the world operated, you know, for the last 120 years. So just we'll look back and be like, boy, that was, that was crazy how we used to do things. Can you believe we used to have these little teeny engines that would be on the end of a stick that we'd use to whack weeds in our backyard? Like, like that actually happened. And we'll like, look at that in the way that my kids look at like a dial-up phone and don't understand what it is. It's just gonna feel so foreign.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  But I think one of the things we haven't talked about here, which is also interesting, I characterize the transition away from fossil fuels as, is more than a once in a generation, it's a once in a planet change. We, as a planet, we had the benefit of this accumulated stored mass of carbon in the form of liquid and solid fuels that allowed us to industrialize the way we did. That's a one-time thing. We're gonna, we use them to get to where we did from a technology point of view. We're now gonna figure out how to get off of them. But that's it. Like, in the history of our planet, that will be one blip, one really important but short blip. And so to be alive in that transition's a big deal. The other transition and change we're seeing is the birth of artificial intelligence. And there's no reason that these two happen to be, you know, occurring at the same time, but they

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  are. And so the combination of those two is gonna create opportunities that are...

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Even beyond what we might think of as science fiction, so things like cars that drive themselves, packages that are delivered to your house without any human involvement, manufacturing plants that are operated, you know, almost entirely through robotics, the elimination of like information asymmetry in making decisions around everything from traffic to what I want to eat for dinner. And so, I mean, we could spend hours just dreaming about what that future looks like, but the point is, is it's the whole fabric of our society is going to look very different in 30 or 40 years. And as we go through these massive changes, anytime there's a set of changes that impact society at this level,

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  whether it's whether you're looking at the transition away from carbon-based fuels, you know, away from fossil fuels, or looking at, you know, the the birth of artificial intelligence, it's going to cause tension in society, you know, and it's going to be, that tension is going to manifest for lots of reasons. It's going to manifest because there's incumbent businesses or incumbent ideologies or incumbent habits that are being challenged by that. So I think it's important that as society, as many leaders as possible work to find the common thread amongst us as a species. And it was one of the reasons early on in our life as a company, we we start talking about our kids, kids, kids. And it's it's one of the, we actually have a shirt, it's a really cool shirt, it's kids,

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  kids, kids, it's three different trees. But it's, I think it's the singular aligning mechanism that I found regardless of almost everything, religion, political orientation, country of origin, age, it's something that unifies us as a species. And I've had a chance, fortunately, to just travel a lot in in life. And it's so consistent. We we want a better world for our kids. And we can debate what that looks like. And that often leads to some of these tensions. But a unifying thing is that there's a desire to to create a world in which the generations to come are inheriting something that's as magical as it was for us. So that's, I think, very important. And I hope, so yes, what I think about for 30

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  or 40 years from now, there's technology, there's changes that are Like you're goosebump inducing beyond even our imagination, I think we'll start to see. But my hope is that the threat of humanity that that has informed our society to date continues. And in fact, we find ways to run towards that as opposed to away from that.

• 1:17:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I share that optimism. It's an incredible inflection point, this decisive moment that we find ourselves in. I know as a kid, you you used to say like, I wish I was born in 1890.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  I used to say this all the time.

• 1:17:20Rich Roll?

  Like a great era of like automotive innovation. 1890 has got nothing on 1983 or whenever you were born. Like, it is really a remarkable time in which we're living and the rate of change is only going to escalate. We're at the very beginning of this and it's exciting to bear witness to that. And I'm very glad that you're somebody who is helping to steward that. So I have to let you go. I could talk to you for four more hours, but I really appreciate you sharing with me today. I think you're on a beautiful and laudatory mission and I'm a fan. Mad respect, RJ. So thank you very much.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:17:57Rich Roll?

  Cheers.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 1:18:13Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment.

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors, who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel

• 1:19:37Rich Roll?

  Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Thanks.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Namaste.