I listened to the podcast that the founder did about a week ago. It reminded me of how retired folks in the middle class open a restaurant when they don't know anything about running a restaurant. Except this dude isn't investing $1M on a McDonalds, he's investing hundreds of millions.

He seemed almost proud of his inexperience, and nearly said that it gave him an "advantage" because existing engineers weren't willing to "innovate."

This is a common story in the startup world. Outsiders are able to break free from the mould; its harder to innovate when everything you do is already shaped by best practices, and your career is highly dependent on your peers’ approval. Doing things differently is a high risk move that few are willing to make.

Incidentally, Ray Kroc, the guy who made McDonalds the $200B company it is today, didn’t know anything about running a restaurant. His closest experience was selling blenders.

SpaceX did Falcon-1 a few times cheaper than assumed, and that was the first aerospace experience for Elon. Turned out impressively good...