Mike Smayda
Founder & CEO, FortastraWhat’s A Challenge You Faced Early On?
It was definitely an adjustment going from academia to the SpaceX environment.
When you're out in the world, it's a different framework – you have to do the thing and it must work, whereas an academic environment, I think, is a bit more forgiving.
Figuring out how to do things at a massive scale with much larger teams, can be a challenge to learn. At SpaceX, for example, figuring out what the right thing to do was just as important as doing the thing correctly and well.
I really enjoyed it though – lots of fun and a lot of growth.