Episode 3 — Dolly Singh

From building SpaceX's engineering army to engineering a better stiletto — Dolly Singh on hiring rocket scientists, surviving Elon, and why every industry needs an R&D department.

Hosted by Jeff Ward · Former VP of Avionics & Software, SpaceX

Transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Timestamps reflect the original recording.

Jeff Ward   [0:00]

Hey, welcome to Episode 3 of the It's Not Rocket Science podcast. Thank you for your interest. I suppose that recording three episodes over the course of three years isn't much of a track record, but with Starship on the pad, it seemed like time for a relaunch. I'm going to kick off Block 2 with an interview I recorded about two years ago with Dolly Singh, entrepreneur and serial badass who was a recruiter in the early days of SpaceX. Dolly has some sharp observations about tech, entrepreneurialism and politics, and I think you'll enjoy the interview. Assuming that you do, I'll go on and edit my interview with electrical engineer, submarine designer, scuba diver, barista and chef Edwin Chu, and then we'll hunt down some more interesting people, make some interviews and release some podcasts. My name is Jeff Ward, and for a few years during the design of Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon, I had the pleasure of being the Vice President of Avionics and Software at SpaceX, and this is my podcast, It's Not Rocket Science.

[1st stage engine sequence initiated. 4, 3, 2, 1]

Dolly Singh   [1:04]

When men design, they design from a place of fetish. How do I want her to look when she's laying on the bed so I can ravish her? Let me tell you, most of my days are not spent laying on the bed waiting to be ravished. Most of my days are spent running around from meeting to meeting, trying to be productive.

[We have liftoff.]

Jeff Ward   [1:23]

On my first day at SpaceX, Elon called me to his office and said, the thing you need to remember is that hiring is always priority one. Always. Based on that, you could say that my guest today had the most important job at SpaceX. I'm Jeff Ward, former SpaceX Avionics VP, and this is my podcast, It's Not Rocket Science. In this episode, we'll be hearing from serial badass Dolly Singh. Dolly has created billion-dollar teams at SpaceX, Oculus VR, Citadel, and Service Titan, as well as creating her own high-tech, high-heel company, Thesis Couture. I caught up with Dolly on a typical morning during the pandemic lockdown.

Dolly Singh   [2:03]

Our hot water stopped working yesterday, and I'm waiting for a plumber, and my kids are like, when is the water going to work? And I'm like, what do you want me to do? I can't think to myself. I'm not a plumber.

Jeff Ward   [2:13]

You need to be a plumber, right? That's the point.

Dolly Singh   [2:15]

Yeah, I mean, look, plumbers make a lot of dough, but best kept secret in the world, plumbers are millionaires.

Jeff Ward   [2:21]

We got back to Millionaire Plumbers and Dolly's work at Service Titan later in the interview, but I wanted to start out with her SpaceX trajectory. So thanks for getting up this morning to talk to me. I always want to hear about how people got to SpaceX. So how did you end up with the job of building the SpaceX team?

Dolly Singh   [2:38]

It was a kind of a convoluted, double-whammy process. I was working with Aerojet and trying to steal people out of Rocketdyne. And I was working on a combustion-specific search, like combustion for turbopumps, I think is what it was. And at the time, I didn't really know what a turbopump was. So as I started doing research on turbo machinery, I kept seeing Tom Mueller's name everywhere.

Jeff Ward   [3:02]

Tom Mueller is a world-class expert on rocket engines, maybe the world-class expert. He was SpaceX employee number two after Elon. Tom and his teams created every SpaceX rocket engine, And I think it's safe to say that without Tom, there would be no SpaceX as we know it today.

Dolly Singh   [3:18]

So then I kept trying to find who this guy Tom Mueller is at TRW, and I couldn't find him at TRW. Eventually, I found out that he was at SpaceX. He and I had a good exchange. So I had this positive experience with Tom. He and I were building this rapport. And then a couple years prior, I had read in Discover magazine when SpaceX first launched. So I just remember having this like seed in my mind that, hey, SpaceX seems kind of cool. And then when there was a recruiter position opened, you know, I asked Tom what his thoughts were and then ended up applying. And really, it was because of I think it was like the seedling of those two things. Seeing it in Discover made it feel semi-legitimate, even though it was this long shot. And remember, like this is during the period of time where everything that was written about SpaceX was negative by the major news press. Nothing was like, oh, my God, they're so awesome. Everything was like, these guys are a joke. Stay away. But when I was like, Tom is too smart to be doing something stupid. Like, clearly, there's something there that the media hasn't yet figured out. I just felt like, hey, you know, what's the worst that could happen? And at that point in my career, I had successfully built my headhunting business. And, you know, headhunting, what people don't know, it's another like best kept secret. You think you have to go be a banker to make millions of dollars? Like, as a recruiter, you make 30% on placements. So every time I place an engineer that makes $200,000 a year, I get a $60,000 check. If I do that 20 times a year, I'm doing okay, right? And 20 placements a year is highly achievable. And so I felt like this is a big risk. This is scary. But I'm very comfortable doing what I'm doing. I could do it for the rest of my life. And it's like a bike. Like, I can always go back to it.

Jeff Ward   [5:04]

So your job at SpaceX was essentially headhunting.

Dolly Singh   [5:07]

That's right. That's right. So to build an engineering army that could get us to Mars.

Jeff Ward   [5:12]

And what was the magic ingredient that allowed you to find top class talent for SpaceX day after day?

Dolly Singh   [5:18]

I mean, I think the magic, the magic is not me. The magic is picking a business where the mission is so meaningful, right? And where it is scary. Now, when I was headhunting, most of my business had been in aerospace and defense. So most of the people that I knew that were super smart at JPL and other places kind of thought SpaceX was a joke at the time, right? We'd blown up two rockets. There was that article in the LA Times about how everybody's committing professional suicide and drinking Elon's Kool-Aid and how nobody that works for SpaceX will ever get a job again in the aerospace industry. So at that time, it seemed like this batshit crazy thing. Now, when I do lectures or talks on talent, one of the things I talk about is this paradox of hard problems. You think that if it's a very, very, very hard, scary thing, that it's going to scare everyone away. It's not true. It scares away 90% of the people. The sick fucks that are sick enough to actually try to do it, it gets them really excited because they're freaking loony, right? And for a company like SpaceX, what are the things that I used to look for in candidates? I need you to be highly neurotic. I need you to be OCD as can be. Like, those traits work great at SpaceX.

Jeff Ward   [6:35]

I'm not sure we were exactly loony, but one thing we had in common is that each of us found a way of working with Elon. How did you make sure that the candidates you brought in could handle that kind of unique pressure?

Dolly Singh   [6:45]

The first few months, I thought my job was like to make Elon seem less scary to candidates. But as it turned out, that was really stupid because then once they were actually exposed to him, they would wet the bed. So then I was like, okay, so how do I reframe the psychology on this? And I started to realize that, and I think at some point Elon said, SpaceX is like special forces. We take on the missions others deem impossible. So then I was like, okay, that's my angle. That I need to scare away the 90% of people that are going to wet the bed because they're never going to make it anyways. So my trying to shelter them from the reality of what it's going to be here or my saying, no, you don't work 80 hours a week. Nah, it's not going to work. So I had to be, I had to actually use that as the attraction mechanism. You're going to work here because you're going to work harder than you've ever worked in your life, but you're going to be better, stronger, faster than you ever were. Like Navy SEALs choose to be handcuffed and hogtied and dropped in the ocean. And if they live, they get to be Navy SEALs. And if they die, they die. And giving people that information in advance actually made it much easier for them to be able to understand what they were signing themselves up for and made it to where they had kind of the steel in their spine necessary that they could effectively navigate that very tricky internal culture. Because you know, like I do, it only took you saying one wrong thing in front of Elon for him to assume that you are an idiot forever forward. And so that is a tough work circumstance, right? We want them to be bold. We want them to be audacious, but do it all without saying anything remotely stupid. And that's hard because taking risk requires you to sometimes try things that might be stupid, right? So this is really, I think, delicate balance of maintaining credibility with Elon by being enough over your skis that he thinks you're ballsy, but not being so far over your skis that you trip up, fall over and call an avalanche, essentially.

Jeff Ward   [8:47]

I'm going to admit that I always wonder whether I might have caused an avalanche that I didn't notice. But what I wanted to ask Dolly is how she dealt personally with the pressure of working for Elon.

Dolly Singh   [8:58]

I had never been in a corporate environment before, so I was too stupid to not know what to do. So while everybody else would kind of tiptoe around Elon and be very careful in what they said to him, my attitude was kind of like, well, I'll just go back to my own thing. So I was just like, I'm just going to call it how I see it. And if he fires me, he fires me. You know what I mean? So I think it was really that I didn't know enough to be afraid of him that then allowed me to build a good working rapport where I think he respected me to some extent because he knew I wouldn't just tell him what he wanted to hear. So I will defer to the fact that you are smarter than me, but I'm not just going to be a yes person and just do whatever you say without at least voicing my opinion. And that's why I think I survived six years, frankly. Because I, you know, wasn't afraid of being myself. Whereas a lot of people, I think, because Elon is such an enigma, they lose track of themselves in his presence.

Jeff Ward   [9:53]

Yeah, I think there's a perfect balance of fear and fearlessness that makes people compatible with Elon. So I'm glad that you managed to stay in the sweet spot for so long. Do you think Elon treated you any differently than he would have treated a man in your post?

Dolly Singh   [10:08]

Here's what I'll say. We never made diversity, like we never used that word, right? But I never felt less respected in any way, shape or form. I never felt that there was a barrier for me that didn't exist for anybody else. So I do think like we lived true to the idea of being a meritocracy. Now, to be, to give you full disclaimer, I'm now working more closely in the field of diversity and meritocracy is considered kind of a dirty, bad word because it assumes that the playing field is even, which we know it's not. But inside SpaceX, actually it is. Everybody's equally shit or equally amazing based only on the contributions of what you have actually done. So I don't think that Elon cares if somebody is blue, purple, a man, a woman. He just cares. Can you solve the problem? And so I think that that is very clear. And I really am very proud of the fact that if you look at somebody like Shana Diaz, who we hired from Amazon, she was the lead of the team that was the grasshopper. So the fact that we have vertical takeoff, vertical landing, it was like a team of eight people led by one amazing kick-ass female engineer that made that first phase of that possible. So I think that of everywhere I have worked, we have had the best ability to not care about somebody's creed, background, gender, or anything. So I do give Elon great credit for that. I don't think he did it trying to do it. I think he's just equally merciless with everybody. And that's really all it takes, right? Is I don't care who you are. Show me your resume. Show me your accomplishments. And I'm going to judge you on the basis of that.

Jeff Ward   [11:44]

But as you say, in a world where opportunities are not created equal, a pure meritocracy is not the perfect solution.

Dolly Singh   [11:51]

The one thing that I think SpaceX could do better from a diversity standpoint is really identify high potential leaders that are either minorities or female and actively help build them up and prepare them for that next level of success. Even if it's not going to be at SpaceX, groom them so they can go get that job somewhere else. So being now a more senior woman myself, I actually go very far outside of my way to hold the door open for other women. So on every team that I've had post SpaceX, you know, I hire women, I hire people from diverse backgrounds, and I do my best to help prepare them so they can be recruiting managers and they can do that next step.

Jeff Ward   [12:31]

Before we move on and talk about what you're doing now, I want to hear about your favorite SpaceX story.

Dolly Singh   [12:37]

Ah, yeah. My favorite moment, at least my own moment of the most self-reflecting pride, our first mission for Dragon, I don't know if this is public information, but there was like four hours where we didn't know what the fuck was going on. It was spinning out of control, and like, literally, it was kind of a shit show and everybody was terrified.

Jeff Ward   [12:58]

Just for the record, from my memory of what happened that night, Dragon wasn't exactly spinning out of control. The capsule has two ways of figuring out its range, which is exactly how far it is from the space station. There's a LIDAR system like your robot vacuum cleaner has, and there's a system that uses the GPS satellites. Each of these systems produces a solution, and the two solutions are compared. If they disagree by more than some expected value, the approach to the International Space Station is stopped. And if the situation is bad enough, Dragon retreats while engineers figure things out. The problem on the demo flight was that there wasn't enough fuel to retreat and then go back to the station, so everything had to be solved on the fly while Dragon was standing off from the station. Fortunately, the capsule was really being well-behaved, and NASA decided to let it loiter a while while the engineers fixed the range comparison software. Yang Li was the Dragon ground controller in Hawthorne for that demo night.

Dolly Singh   [13:59]

But Yang Li was like the voice of cool, calm, and collected. And I was like, okay, we're just going to stay cool, calm, and collected. But in the end, there was a guy that we hired from JPL, Andrew something. I think Andrew Howard? I'm not sure if that's his name. So PhD, really brilliant, who I had helped hire, and essentially eight members of the avionics team that saved Dragon with this bit of code that nobody knew about. So it was this secret kind of Easter egg that they'd written that saved the day. They had just come out of mission control once we regained control of Dragon and were celebrating. And I, like, took a picture with them. And then I went home, and I realized I had hired seven out of eight of those people. And, like, I was just so proud of myself, you know, because I was like, not that it wouldn't have happened without me, but knowing that I contributed very directly to the people that made sure this mission was successful, that was really, really a moment of pride.

Jeff Ward   [14:57]

I was there that night, and that whole thing was amazing, that NASA trusted us to go through that process, and that that team had the rabbit already tucked away in the hat.

Dolly Singh   [15:07]

That's right. That's right.

Jeff Ward   [15:10]

It seems that for each person I talk to, there's a kind of high point in their career, and then they decide to move on from SpaceX. How did that happen with you?

Dolly Singh   [15:18]

You know, I was fully vested at five years. And so I was noodling around in my brain about, like, what's, you know, what's interesting enough that it could follow with SpaceX, right? I was an entrepreneur before coming to SpaceX, so it just kind of felt like that would be a good thing to go back to. But trying to do something new and different, trying to do something in the startup space.

Jeff Ward   [15:37]

Yeah, but why high heels? What's the connection between SpaceX and high heels?

Dolly Singh   [15:41]

If I think about SpaceX, really what it is, is like, they're giant toys for Elon. Rockets are his toys, and like, he's making these fun things for himself on some level, and of course, it's for humanity as well. But if you think about that at a general level, men really work on their toys, and they're very special to them, and they really, really, they take a lot of effort.

Jeff Ward   [16:03]

So, billionaire men build rockets, and there's no equivalent for women?

Dolly Singh   [16:07]

The consumption power of women is very strong, but our creation power is very limited. And the things that we care about have pretty much been the same for like 100 years, right? So, there's no other thing that's worth $40 billion a year. Like, high heels, people don't know that. It's a $40 billion a year industry, and it's probably the only industry other than tobacco where you get to literally inflict harm on your consumers, and everybody is totally cool with that. You know what I mean?

Jeff Ward   [16:35]

But of course, you're not cool with that.

Dolly Singh   [16:37]

I like to dress nice. It's like part of my personal brand. It's one of my things. But the older I got, the worse it just got, right? And especially as a recruiter, your job is to smile, right? To host people and to make sure that they have a really warm, fuzzy, friendly experience. But when you're physically in pain, keeping that smile plastered to your face kind of gets tougher and tougher, and the shoes that I loved in my 20s, and I took so much joy in, I started to like really have this like kind of bitter, sweet relationship with. And then I was just curious, and I know that you guys as engineers, when you are frustrated with something, I've watched it millions of times at this point, what's the first thing engineers do? They're like, rip it apart. They're like, let me see what's inside, and let me break it, and then I'm going to build it again. So, I went to a cobbler and just had them rip apart a pair of my shoes because I didn't know what was inside. So, I was like, well, I don't think they're great. And so, let me rip them up to see what's inside because that's what my engineering colleagues do when they're unhappy with things. And then when you rip apart a high heel, you see a metal strip on the inside called a shank. So, it's like a popsicle stick, right? I'm not an engineer, but the minute you see the inside architecture of a high heel, you're like, huh, that's not particularly smart.

Jeff Ward   [17:50]

And somehow you found lessons at SpaceX that were going to help you modernize the stiletto.

Dolly Singh   [17:55]

What allows Elon to do what he does is this idea of cognitive diversity and building teams like an algorithm. The humans you put on this side of the equal sign directly impact the ideas that can come out of the other side of the equal sign. So, I just tried to use that same philosophy, right? Like, let me put together a team of rivals, people that would not normally sit at the same table, and let's see what we can do. I put together people that had been doing fighter jets and, like, aerospace-grade parts and Formula One race cars and put them together with a really phenomenal designer from the world of fashion. Found a factory in Italy that's one of the best. They do Manolo Blahnik shoes. So, like, considered one of the top three factories in Italy. So, I asked the engineers, and I would speak to them in language that they understood and say, hey, don't worry about a shoe. Don't think about a high heel. I need you to design me a tiny little chassis. And they're like, a tiny little chassis? I know what that is. And so, that's really where it But I went in super cocky because I was like, look, I built a rocket company. I'm going to build a $2 billion company in, like, two years. I'm going to take over the world of shoes. And look, I have so much compassion for Elon now after trying to be a founder than I ever did before because it truly is just unforgiving, thankless. And the thing is, whether things go right or things go wrong, your life only gets harder. So, when things go right, more work. When things go wrong, more work. And, like, reinventing a metal stick seemed, like, a lot easier than reinventing an entire rocket. But anything that interacts with the human body gets remarkably complex remarkably fast because one-tenth of a millimeter in the wrong direction can take it from a high heel to now it's a top because you're like, oh, this is not right. So, it took almost five years to do version one of our technology. Then we did our first release. That was pretty successful. Then we did a second drop. That was also pretty successful. Then we surveyed all those customers. Then we took that feedback. And we made version two of our technology. And then we're going to rinse and repeat that again.

Jeff Ward   [20:00]

I think you'll agree that Dolly doesn't seem like a rinse and repeat person. So, I asked her about her future plans personally at Thesis. Now that you're in that phase, how are you going to keep Thesis fresh for yourself?

Dolly Singh   [20:13]

I've got an awesome counterpart who is an executive at Google. She's like a performance marketing whiz. And so, she really will be the day-to-day operator of the business.

Jeff Ward   [20:23]

I don't know if this is another thing that Dolly learned from SpaceX, but the handover that she plans is similar to the sharing of responsibilities at SpaceX, where Elon forces the pace on the bleeding edge of technology, and Gwynne Shotwell, the president, makes sure that things get delivered on schedule and on budget.

Dolly Singh   [20:40]

I did really great at innovation. I'm good at product, but I'm not a digital marketing and commodity person. She's much better at that than I am. And so, you know, it's a bad idea to try to teach yourself everything. Like, you need to know enough to be dangerous, but you really need to hire people that are better, smarter, and faster. And so, as it relates to taking Thesis to the next level, I think she's much better equipped for that next stage of growth. And I'll obviously be here as the founder and really want to, you know, stay focused on that hardware and product piece of it. And because that's the most fun part for me. Like, I love shoes. I like touching leathers. I like smelling leathers. So, it's like that's the most fun part. So, that's the part that I really want to contribute to and then really thankful to have found an awesome partner that can take it to the next level. And that goes back to what I was saying. Like, Thesis in seven years has given me a lot of heartache, but I've also been able to build this really remarkable network of women, remarkable network of investors, just really great people who I would want in my life. And this was the excuse through which the universe brought them into my life.

Jeff Ward   [21:47]

So, you're at a pretty sweet spot with Thesis having been successful in planning this transition. What message would you send to other entrepreneurs who are a little bit earlier in their journey?

Dolly Singh   [21:58]

So, it really takes special people to say, hey, I want to start a company because it is such an excruciating, painful process. You have to be kind of a glutton for punishment and you have to be a little bit batshit crazy. Otherwise, there's way easier ways to make money in the world. But I think it's really something that I encourage lots of women to do because for entrepreneurship, the beauty really is more in the journey than the destination.

Jeff Ward   [22:25]

A lot of entrepreneurs will tell us that not only is the destination elusive, but that the journey is painful. Elon used to tell us that he lived on broken glass and hot dogs when he was starting his first companies. But Dolly has a different take on that.

Dolly Singh   [22:39]

Elon also didn't fall for, oh, if you don't starve and do nothing but your startup, you're not a real entrepreneur. That's a crock of shit. Elon runs five companies concurrently. So, the idea that you should starve and die for your startup is ridiculous. So, post SpaceX, I did Oculus, Citadel. I did all of that concurrently to doing all of the early development work for Thesis. And the reason that's great is, one, I get to learn from other great founders. So, if I had just the lessons from SpaceX to apply to Thesis, that's like 20% of the knowledge that I now have. SpaceX had all these great lessons that I learned from Elon about, like, how he innovates, how he builds teams, how he never accepts the status quo, how he uses the raw material cost to basically squeeze out the cost of everything. Because he'll say, well, the steel costs this much, the steam that you need to put into this process costs this much. It should be four man hours of time. And so, you should have this X cost, not this other cost. So, he really would break things down. So, that way, you can't bullshit them, right? So, it really is quite brilliant from a business standpoint. And so, tried to take all of those tricks that I could. I mean, you or I, less, more me and less you, we can never match his cognitive horsepower. Like, the CPU processing speed, no. But we can steal all the frameworks, right? All of the methodologies, because they are highly robust and repeatable. Like, you can repeat them reliably. And so, all of those things just become tools and tricks and tips that then we should all be taking with us to every other business we go to.

Jeff Ward   [24:22]

It sounds like you took that lesson at Thesis and you created a team that was diverse and fun to work with. Did Oculus teach you different lessons when you went there?

Dolly Singh   [24:32]

At Oculus, they were remarkable storytellers. And they built a room. It was all censored. And they'd walk investors into that room and they'd say, remember, computers used to be the size of this room 30 years ago. So, in 5 to 10 years, it'll be, like, integrated into eyeglasses on your face. So, remember that when you walk in. And when you went in there, you feel like you have been transported into the matrix. So, we were able to show that, hey, this is what the future looks like with Oculus. We only had a couple hundred thousand dollars in real revenue when we sold the company for $2.5 billion. It was literally, I think, less than 15 months from founding to a $2.5 billion check. There's no metric on which that makes sense. It really was their ability to tell the story of how and why they were building the team and the product that was going to be the tipping point, the tip of the spear for what would be a $100 billion plus industry.

Jeff Ward   [25:32]

And what was the vibe like there?

Dolly Singh   [25:33]

Also, very refreshing. I mean, you know, at SpaceX, it's kind of mercenary. Very serious, I think, because Elon feels the weight, like Atlas, the weight of the world on his shoulders all the time. And because of that, we all have to be very serious and focused on the mission as Mars. Whereas at Oculus, they just wanted to have fun. They were, like, very, like, hey, we want to create beautiful experiences. We want people to be happy. And so it was really nice to see that, hey, you don't always have to be so, so serious and intense. You don't have to crush people in order to be successful. Not that there's anything wrong with it, frankly, because I don't think that SpaceX would be able to achieve what it does if he wasn't who he is and if the culture isn't what it is. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Jeff Ward   [26:18]

After Oculus, Dolly became head of recruitment at Citadel, a huge American hedge fund currently worth something like $38 billion. So you built the team up at Oculus, and then you moved on to Citadel?

Dolly Singh   [26:32]

One of my investors in Thesis introduced me to Ken Griffin, who's the CEO and founder, and they wanted to think and act a little bit less like a bank and a little bit more like a tech company. Because just like the rest of the world, software is eating the world of finance, and traditionally the asset manager is full of portfolio managers that use human intelligence to make bets. And now the market-making portion of the business uses all machine intelligence and automation to make bets. And so they wanted to be able to balance that and to be able to attract a lot of technical people. And so I spent a couple years helping them do that, and it was – I've avoided Wall Street like the plague most of my life because I have always looked at them like the bad guys. But it helped me actually reframe my perspective because we think of tech as like we're the noble people, we do the good in the world, and like pharma and like Wall Street, like those are the evil people. They do the bad things in the world. And the reality is that if it wasn't for the foundation of the finance industry, our quality of life, the tech ecosystem, all of the things that we care about and that I value so much actually could not be possible without that financial foundation. That prosperity that we have really is a result of the world's financial system. And so, yes, there are plenty of bad actors, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Jeff Ward   [27:52]

After Citadel, Dali went to the land of literal bathwater. She moved to Service Titan, who described themselves on the internet as the world's leading all-in-one software for commercial and residential HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other field services businesses. Definitely not rocket science.

Dolly Singh   [28:11]

And then with Service Titan, what I really love about them is it's kind of the first accidental unicorn I've worked at. So Elon has lots of ego. The guys at Oculus, lots of ego. Same with Ken at Citadel. Like he knew he was special. And I don't say that with any negative light. Like I think you have to have ego in order to want to achieve more than the average person does. Service Titan, what I really love is they actually didn't start from a place of ego. They started from a place of empathy and compassion. They're first-generation immigrants. Their fathers immigrated here from Armenia during times of conflict. And then they both had the common experience. They didn't know each other as kids. But they had the common experience of one's dad was a plumber. The other was a general contractor. And so they had this common shared experience of like remembering their dad comes home. He's like all 30 and like wearing his work clothes. And they're like, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. And they like want dad's attention like every child does. But instead of being able to play with them when he gets home, dad would then also confiscate mom, take her to the kitchen table, and start working through the receipts of the day. So they saw their father's work back-breaking labor all day. And then to come home and instead of being able to relax in the evenings and watch football or whatever other dads did, they just had four more hours of work to do with him. And that experience, when they met in college, they kind of bonded over this common experience. And then they're like, hey, why don't we just do a summer project and like build a software toolkit that can help our dads run their business a little bit more efficiently. And so they can do less on pen and paper. What they did not realize is essentially while it's a highly fragmented industry, the home services industry is worth more than a trillion dollars in North America alone. And all of technology had left those people behind. So if you think about even politically what has happened in our country, those of us in tech, our lives have been remarkably changed. Our quality of life is remarkably better than it was 15 years ago, right? But if you're in flyover country and you're Main Street America, your life might actually be shittier now than it was a decade ago, right? And so that is the dichotomy of the American experience. Those of us on the left and the right coasts, in the last 10 years, we've gotten pretty rich. The rest of the country, not so much. So why do they think we're elite assholes? Because we are rich and they are not. We as big tech tend to build for big business. And so the beauty of what Service Titan is trying to do is take the power of Silicon Valley and make it available to Main Street America. So that way, small business people, whether they're plumbers, whether they're HVAC technicians, right? All of these small shops can scale from being a half a million dollar shop that brings home a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to then being a million dollar shop and a two million dollar shop. And each time they hire another technician into a high earning trade that changes that person's life.

Jeff Ward   [31:15]

So you really see these high paying trade jobs as one of the keys to mending America.

Dolly Singh   [31:20]

What people don't know, and this is where our conversation started, a pediatrician makes two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand dollars a year. After taking on a million dollars in debt in 12 years of really aggressive education and then after you deduct their malpractice insurance, they don't actually make that much money. Right. A master plumber with 10 years of experience and zero dollars in educational debt also makes two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand dollars a year and they don't have malpractice insurance. So it's really this sad secret that we have an ability. There's literally 50 to 100,000 plus open positions that we need somebody now in the trades. So instead of being a phlebotomist and spending a year learning how to draw blood and then making twelve dollars an hour for the rest of your life, you can train in six months to make sixty dollars an hour. Right. So what I really, really am most excited about is if we can democratize the power of technology a little bit and if we can open up those gates of prosperity to more people, then maybe some of those people that think we're elitist assholes will think, hey, actually, those elitist assholes are kind of thinking about us now and starting to help us. And so maybe maybe we don't have to be so angry. Maybe we don't have to see it as us versus them. So I just feel like we have to grow the pie for everybody, whereas what we've been doing is like really kind of like gorging ourselves on pie over here while we watch our friends starve over there.

Jeff Ward   [32:56]

I love your optimism that we can use technology to make the pie bigger and that it will have positive social impacts, which in a way brings me to a question I've been wanting to ask you since the beginning of the interview, which is what's the social importance of Thesis Couture? Why have you personally put so much energy into high heels, which some people might take just as another angle of the patriarchy?

Dolly Singh   [33:20]

I mean, I will send you an article from the Atlantic that basically called us the article. You can Google it. If you Google Thesis Couture plus the feminist stiletto, you will find the article and it actually states much more poetically than I ever could. The ultimate mission and purpose of Thesis. Right. So there is this emotional connection I have with high heels that makes me feel more powerful. Right. And there is actually a very literal connection between height and CEOs. You'll find CEOs tend to be taller than most other people. So height does send this unconscious signal of power. High heels do make women feel sexy. They do make them feel powerful. They do have this clear psychological effect that women are very attached to myself included. I just would like to be able to get the good without also breaking all the bones in my feet. And in this case, it's not that hard. It really just takes somebody being willing to do it and caring enough about women to do it. Whereas right now, most of the creation ecosystem in engineering and fashion is men. When men design, they design from a place of fetish. How do I want her to look when she's laying on the bed so I can ravish her? Let me tell you, most of my days are not spent laying on the bed waiting to be ravished. Most of my days are spent running around from meeting to meeting, trying to be productive. So I think that footwear in particular is directly related to mobility. So what we're trying to do is an enhanced mobility for women, enhanced productivity for women through giving them better choices for fashion. So it sounds superficial, but because it's a shoe versus like, you know, curing cancer. But the reality is millions and millions of women wear high heels all over the world and they're all destroying their feet. And at a very, very high level, it's about decoupling this association between beauty requires pain. So you want to be pretty because you're a woman. So I'm going to hurt you in order for you to do it. We just, in general, tend to teach women to hate themselves and to like hurt themselves. Like that is how you should expect to be treated by the world, to constantly question yourself, to say it's acceptable if I buy products and spend money on products that are going to actually hurt me. So I think for me, it's really about teaching women to elevate our standards and to expect more of the world in all aspects. So I think I'll leave you with that.

Jeff Ward   [35:42]

What a beautiful summary and an end point. Thank you so much for taking time for this discussion. And I really hope we can catch up the next time in Los Angeles.

Dolly Singh   [35:51]

Yes, you definitely have to do that.

Jeff Ward   [35:54]

Thank you for listening to episode three of It's Not Rocket Science. For me, the goal of these discussions is to learn how ex-SpaceXers are changing the world. I guess I'm trying to pick up some lessons and get inspired from my own continuing journey. I've listened to Dolly over and over, and I get new insights every time. I have more fascinating discussions in the pipeline, so make sure to subscribe using your chosen podcasting platform. And if you want to share your comments or suggestions, you can always tweet at Jeff W. Ward or at NotRocketsPod. Thanks a lot.

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