Why Pure Software Is Uninvestable: The SpaceX & YC Way to Build Hardware | Jamie Gull DD #12

Boeing took weeks to change one number on a drawing. He left and never looked back.Jamie went from a public school in the Colorado mountains to Stanford, then to Scaled Composites at 24, running the booms, tails, and control surfaces on an aircraft that was flying in nine months. Then SpaceX, where the responsible engineer culture meant you owned your part from design through the shop floor, and nobody needed four signatures to spend $300. Now he invests in the hardware companies most VCs still can't underwrite.We get into what actually made SpaceX fast (a brutally high hiring bar, and no fence to throw work over), why the team zip-tied GoPros inside the rocket instead of waiting for a flight camera system, and what Elon does when a program becomes the bottleneck. Then the investor side: why LOIs have been diluted into noise, what a real one looks like, and the single signal Jamie trusts most in an early hardware team.He also explains, with numbers, why he passed on space-based data centers, and why the humanoid robot company in his portfolio might be worth a fortune on a single customer contract.Jamie is a former SpaceX and Scaled Composites engineer, an early advisor to Boom Supersonic, and now runs his own hardware-focused VC fund. Learn more about Jamie: https://deeptech-decoded.com/guests/jamie-gull