Sky’s the limit for Kiwi rocketeer
Peter Beck named Herald Business leader of the year
Whatever the secret of Peter Beck’s success, it doesn’t involve the usual eight hours’ shut-eye. “As long as I get sort of five hours’ sleep, I’m good to go,” the Rocket Lab founder and chief executive says.
That’s “good to go” for working up to 16 hours a day.
The pyramid-building hours, and a lot of smarts, have started to pay off.
Beck, named Herald Business Leader of the Year today, had a banner 2018.
January saw Rocket Lab’s first successful test flight; December its second commercial launch.
In between, his company raised $206 million at a $1.5 billion-plus valuation, chose the site for its first launch facility outside NZ (in the US state of Virginia) and opened a giant assembly plant and mission control centre in Auckland.
Rocket Lab was also awarded three medals by the prestigious London-based Royal Aeronautical Society, including a gold for Beck.
“2018 has been a stellar year for us — I’m having the time of my life,” he says.
And although Beck is reaching for the heavens, he also has an eye on the bottom line.
“We’ll come out of the end of this year cash-flow positive,” he says.
That’s good news for Rocket Lab’s investors, who include Lockheed Martin, and Silicon Valley venture capital heavyweights Khosla Ventures and The Data Collective — plus, on the home front, Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 fund, ACC and Beck.
Beck grew up in Invercargill, born into a family who loved machines. While at high school, he pulled an old Mini apart and rebuilt it part by part, hotting it up with a turbocharger. But even then he wanted to build rockets.
He never went to university. A tool-making apprenticeship at Fisher & Paykel gave him the hands-on engineering skills and access to top of the line machinery and materials after hours.
In 2001 he got a job in Auckland at Industrial Research (now Callaghan Innovation) which had its base at Balfour St in Parnell and continued working on his passion — rockets. He set up Rocket Lab in 2006 and gained backing from Tindall soon after. The Warehouse founder was visiting another investment (clean energy company LanzaTech) when he literally stumbled across Beck’s startup, which shared the same Parnell office building.
Today, Rocket Lab has made it to low-Earth orbit, and made it to profit. But there’s no slowing down. Beck says his team will work right through the Christmas break as his company gears up for its third commercial launch in January.
The New Year will also see Beck continue to hire at pace. His company now has 280 staff. He wants to add a further 100 over the next few months, spread between Auckland and Los Angeles.
“We’ve got some big R&D projects that we’re cracking into next year, lots of scaling, we’ve got the new launch pad coming online in America, some really high-profile payloads too — it’s just a blast,” he says. Rocket Lab taken the odd jab this year, including from departing Vector chairman Michael Stiassny, who claimed media give Beck’s company an easy ride over shareholder Lockheed Martin’s military-industrial links.
Speaking generally, Beck says Kiwis need to be more upbeat.
“One thing I’m very passionate about is entrepreneurialism. And in New Zealand, we produce fantastic entrepreneurs but suffocate them.”
That may be the case for some, but the boyishly enthusiastic Beck remains singularly unstifled.
“I’m just getting started.”