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Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Roz. Rivian Trucks and SUVs are some of the most in demand electric vehicles on the market. This is both a good and a bad problem to have. Good. Well, because lots of people want a Rivian. Bad because there's a backlog. Supply for the time being can't meet demand. Now back in 2022, we told the story of Rivian and its founder, RJ Scorange. RJ and his team spent almost a decade in stealth mode working on building an electric pickup truck.
And if you haven't heard that episode, it's really great. Just go scroll back in the podcast queue to find it or do a search for Rivian and how I built this in your podcast app. Anyway, we wanted to invite RJ back for an update because the company has big plans. Not just to increase production, but also to build an all electric midsize SUV in 2026.
One that will be significantly less expensive than its current models. But even with all of the success, Rivian has faced many challenges over the past 18 months, including the aforementioned backlog. Much of that has to do with a supply chain squeeze that is really affecting some electric vehicles. We just started production in late 2021 and we launched our truck, our R1T. It's sibling variant, the R1S. And then a commercial van with Amazon as the lead customer.
Essentially all within very close proximity of each other. So within six months, we launched those three different products. And with the product is complex as a vehicle. There's thousands and thousands of things that can stop production. You have a supply chain with hundreds of suppliers providing thousands of parts.
If any single one of those components is missing or delayed, the whole system comes to a halt. You can't build a car if it's missing a bolt. So we ended up being very challenged as we were not only ramping one vehicle, but the three.
And then managing three supply chains just led to it being, I would argue probably the hardest imaginable year you could pick to be ramping a supply chain, particularly ramping it for the first time and then ramping it across three different vehicles was just, it was a challenge.
Your primary factory is a normal Illinois and large part because that's where the supply chain kind of meets up. But there are also parts that come from overseas like the semiconductors. And because there's so much technology in these vehicles, there's also a lot of competition for those for those chips for this part.
We didn't anticipate the supply chain challenges, but we also were fighting a battle with a lot of these suppliers where we had no existing sort of purchasing relationship or history. And so a lot of the decisions on who was allocated chips or who was allocated components was built around buyers and purchasers that had years and years of experience knowing the person I was out of the line, so to speak.
I think the thing that we probably talked about less, but was also a challenge is it's not as if if you're missing one part, the only challenge is just that you're not building vehicles is that all the other parts still continue to come. So you have this ballooning challenge of inventory where it's not just the cash. You also have to have a place to put all these parts if the plant shut down for let's say a week.
Because you're missing a handful of components, the rest of the supply chain keeps coming in so managing all of the suppliers to not only be pushing really hard to get as many of the constrained parts as possible, but then also be managing down production supply of some of the parts that were being produced as expected. Just meant that it was a full court press. I mean, I spent hours and hours every day on the phone or in person with supplier CEOs, managing all aspects of this.
I mean, it must have been so incredibly frustrating. There's a wonderful video that I've seen that shows the factory and normal Illinois and it's a really high tech facility that you built there, but at the time we spoke, it was only running 25 to 30 hours a week, which must have been incredibly frustrating knowing what it can do, but you couldn't do that. In meantime, all of these supplies that you were getting in were just piling up.
What could you do? I mean, you mentioned that you were on the phone and you were even going to meet with CEOs of these suppliers. I mean, were you pleading with them? Were you, what leverage did you have? Yeah, I mean, it was all the above pleading with them, painting the broader picture of why it was disproportionately important for us as a company to gain access to supply relative to other companies that might have multiple product lines or multiple suppliers providing the same component.
But at the end of the day, the only way to get through it was sort of swallowed as painful pill and just get through it. You had, I think at the time we spoke in the summer of 2022, there were about 100,000 pre-orders people waiting for their vehicles. And that year, you know, you would produce a fraction of that. How did you manage frustration? I'm sure a lot of people are angry. They're saying, I put the deposit down. Where's my car? I've seen one in the wild. Where's mine?
Yeah, I mean, that was a real challenge. I would say it continues to be a challenge where we have the great fortune of a product that is in high demand.
Yeah, it's really resonated with consumers. And as a result, we still have a pretty significant backlog. In some backlog is helpful, but we need to of course make sure that that backlog doesn't create a glass ceiling to interest in the brand because we don't want to be known as as Rivian is the brand for which you place an order in your eight years. So we were trying very hard to carry some backlog, but to of course shrink that to a much more reasonable level.
A challenge in terms of the customer experience is that there is still a wait time and there are still people that have been waiting for the vehicle for years. And that's what he isn't lost on us. I know that you're on track. I think to build 50,000 vehicles this year, this calendar year. Yeah, we're actually we've guided to say we're going to exceed 50,000. So yeah, we're we're doing well this year. And I would say we're in a far better situation than we were in 2022.
Yeah, that's not to say there aren't supply chain hiccups with such a large complex supply chain. There's always going to be that that's just the natural course of doing business with this type of a product. I want to ask you about the R2 in a moment. This is a mid size sort of lower priced vehicle that you plan to I think release in 2026. But I want to ask you about the general market around EVs, right?
Because there's been a lot of chatter that the EV market has slowed down. I think there's some truth to that we've seen Ford and GM and even Tesla report slow down in sales. Yeah, you know, what's what's your take on? I mean, I think we can probably agree that in 25 years, no one's going to be driving. I mean, except for enthusiasts. No one's going to be driving a combustion engine. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully, sooner, but yeah, yeah.
But right now, there seems to be a slow down, which may be connected to sort of macro economic factors. Yeah. Are you seeing that in things like pre orders? I'm so glad you asked this question because I think often in really complex systems, we try to oversimplify the dynamics of a system. And there's a few big drivers.
So first, I'd say broadly in looking across all manufacturers, combustion vehicles and electric vehicles, interest rates being where they are, creates pressure on purchasing expensive assets. So things like vehicles that have a high percentage of financing, you're just going to start to feel that and you're going to see it manifest with people being more price sensitive than they historically would have been.
The second thing is there's actually very limited supply of great EV products. And that may seem surprising when I say that because there's a number of manufacturers of launch products. But when I say great EV products, products that are truly represent a meaningful step forward in terms of features, attributes, cohesive brand story and product story.
And so I think we have a gap as an industry where we need a lot more choices at affordable price points. And so competition is the ultimate way to get there. And we need to have multiple highly successful car companies that are capable first conceiving of and then developing products that strike a chord that are interesting. And then building them at scale and building them at cost.
I don't think we're going to end up in a world where there's one or two electric vehicles that we produce 70, 80 million of a year that the whole world buys exactly those two or three products. I think the world needs lots of products hundreds of different types of vehicles. Yeah, but today there's like a handful. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back more on RJ's work to create more choice in the EV market, including where to power up.
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Welcome back to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Ries. I guess today is Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scarenge. Over the next few years, this company plans to expand their line of all electric vehicles. RJ, the R2, this is going to be your mid-priced sort of crossover that you plan to release in 2026 and it'll, as you say, retail for between $40 and $50,000. It reminds me a little bit of how Tesla rolled out its car started with a road stir, if you remember, right?
It went to the Model S, which was a premium priced vehicle out of range for most people. And then they introduced the Model 3. And that was really how Tesla achieved profitability. It seems like a similar kind of approach. You've got the R1T, which is a pickup truck and then you've got the SUV version. They are sort of on the higher end of the EV scale. And so this R2 that you'll release 2026, that essentially is kind of your version of a Model 3.
Yeah, it's, I mean, in terms of like strategically, it's very similar. You started with what we think was like our flagship products, the R1. They're intentionally designed to be positioned at a higher price point. The performance, the capability, the feature set is set up for that.
And then we're taking the essence of the brand that's represented by those products and then building that into something that we're achieving lower price points through really intentional and thoughtful trade-offs you make around content and features. And of course, innovations were driving around cost and manufacture. You're too visible consumer products are the truck and the SUV, but you're also developing delivery vehicles, vans, which will be used by businesses.
There's well over 10,000 on the road right now on the road. Yeah. And how much of your business? I mean, do you do you imagine in the future that is actually going to be the biggest part of your business? No, the consumer side will always be quite a bit larger just because the the dress market on consumer vehicles is so much larger.
But the commercial van, you know, is important for us when we launched the decide to go into that business to have a core anchor customer, a flagship customer, if you will, and your Amazon is a great first customer. One of the things I was talking about in the context of that product is even for customers that haven't yet decided to buy an electric vehicle.
If you buy a package through Amazon is delivered with an electric vehicle, you're an electric vehicle customer without even knowing. And so I think that's a really exciting manifestation of our mission to see it come to life through the lens of a van. And that van, as you say, they're on the road. I've seen them. This got the round Rivian lights in the front. Yeah. That's very friendly looking. Yeah.
The other thing that you did was you send an agreement with Tesla to allow Rivian vehicles to charge a Tesla charging station. So it's obviously the biggest network in the world, which presumably will be an incentive. A lot of people are freaked out about charging. This question I get asked all the time about when people see me in my car, they'll say, well, you know, what if you run out of charge, which never happens.
But presumably that will later rest some of those concerns. How is it going to work? I mean, are Tesla still going to have priority at those chargers? Well, there won't be any prioritization. So starting early part of next year, well, Rivians will be able to access the Tesla charging network.
And in the beginning, it'll be thrown adapter. And then over time, our vehicles charging port will move to what's called the North American charging standard, which is the was previously the Tesla standard, but they've now made an open standard. Yeah, I think the thing to recognize is even as big as Tesla's network is, we still need to build a lot more charging infrastructure.
And so we're continuing to invest in our own network, what we call the Rivian adventure network. Today we have around 60 sites live. So we have hundreds of sites to build. But we really believe that having robust charging infrastructure, a few different suppliers or providers of that charging is going to become really important. And part of the room with Tesla is also to allow Teslas, and for that matter, other vehicles, other brands to use our network when we open our network up.
And we think that will be important, both for us to make sure our networks are profitable part of our business, but also to give again, customers of all brands access to a lower risk and high confidence, high up time charging infrastructure. You know, what I really appreciate about about your story is how hard it is. It's just it's not a cookie brand. And for years, you had a team that was working on something in stealth. They couldn't talk about it.
There was no product. It took, you know, seven years before you actually could show something at and people are like, what is this brand where to come from? And I know that there's so much sort of obsessive thought put into every detail. I mean, the cars have flashlights that you pop out of the door and an air compressor inside a compartment in the car.
I mean, just all these things that are really, really cool. But the cost of building these cars is high. I mean, I believe that effectively, Rivian is subsidizing every vehicle. And the cost more money than you actually are making from the sale. You lose money on every vehicle. So how do you cut costs on every car, but still maintain that obsessive kind of, you know, those quirky details and the things that make the car appealing to the customers you're going after.
Well, in the case of our one, you know, today, the product is not gross margin positive. So today is in like middle of Q4 2023. But there's a very clear roadmap for that to achieve very healthy margins and the two big elements of that are one we have to ramp production. So when you have a large scale plan, as you talked about before, that's running, you know, a 10% of its capacity, which is about where we were a year ago. It's just wildly inefficient so you get no fixed cost absorption.
So that ramp is what we're experiencing now and we're starting to see significant improvement in the cost structure as a result of just much better fixed cost absorption. The other is the material cost side. So what are all the components that we purchase to go into the vehicle? What do we pay for those? And it's worth calling out that when we negotiated a lot of these original contracts for our bill of materials.
It wasn't like 2018, 2019. So our leverage was essentially zero way to beg the suppliers to work with us. Right. And the expectation was always that when we launched, we would be able to then negotiate savings based upon the success. Yeah, what we didn't anticipate was just how hard 2022 was we couldn't negotiate savings. We were begging just to get supply.
That's changed a lot. We're now in a position where suppliers want to see a successful. They're extremely excited about it too. And it's allowing us to make very significant reductions in the overall cost structure. So sort of like airlines buy fuel in advance. You can, you're now in a position to negotiate better rates for your supplies, which will drive the cost of each vehicle down.
Okay, now that's on R1. So R1 has inherent costs built into it. Things like the speaker that pulls out of the center console or this, you know, this flashlight in the door. Yeah, some of those unique features will make their way into R2. But R2 has also been, you know, with us as a more mature organization and having a lot more engineering resources than we have when we were developing a lot of the core features in R1.
We are optimizing heavily around cost for R2 to maintain as again, as much of the what makes a Rivian a Rivian. But at a smaller footprint, so it's a smaller vehicle and with simplified architecture and with a completely different supply chain relationship where the level of leverage we have today is night and day. And probably the best way to anecdotally explain this is a lot of the sourcing decisions for R1.
On sort of the bigger components, I would have to fly to go meet a supplier in one of their offices. The person I'd be meeting was maybe a vice president, but very often like a senior manager. And we would be begging to get them to say yes, we'll supply. This is before you produce the first this is in like 2019. Yeah, because they were like, who are you and what what do you. Yeah, so they're with like a PowerPoint explaining who is reviewing here's what this thing's going to look like.
Yeah, not a single customer yet. Today, those very same suppliers have their CEOs flying to normal Illinois or to California to sit down and meet with our team and spend a whole day talking about how they can work with us as part of a broader relationship. So it's just like a completely different backdrop for how these contracts are being built for the supply chain for R2 versus what we had originally put in place for for R1.
You are an engineer. I mean, that's your background, but I think in the last couple years you've had to focus more on the public markets and being a face of public company and raising money and managing a growing business. I know recently you assumed responsibility for product development. What does that mean? Why did you take that portfolio on in addition to the other things you're doing.
Since the very, very beginning, I've been deeply involved on product. It's the reason I started the company. It's my core area. It's interesting too. It's more interesting than raising money. Yeah, it's a different part of your brand for sure. Other than it will take some creativity. It's sort of why I feel like I could create unique and distinct value for the business.
As the company has evolved, I've maintained half of the product team for a long time. For a while, the current had a product that I've been working together to transition those responsible directly to me and essentially have the full product organizations,
so vehicle engineering, propulsion engineering, electronics, software, and then autonomy report up through me. It allows me to be very close to the product. Of course, I also need to have across the rest of the business a very strong team that allows me and enables me to be so product focused. I wonder, Arjay, you've got this product that obviously you're really proud of. You've seen customers' satisfaction through the roof. At the same time, there's an external narrative.
The newspapers and TV of Riveans challenges, Riveans problems, Ford, which is a big investor in Riveans stocks sold nearly all of its shares. Amazon wrote down their shares. There has been this other narrative of like a Rivean struggling to keep up with orders and struggling to keep its head above water. How do you keep the internal team motivated and excited when they're getting these external messages of like doom and gloom?
We do a company all hands every two weeks and it gives me a chance to talk about things relatively real time to what's happening whether it be externally and very visible or things that are big milestones or challenges internally. One of the things I've said multiple times to the team and we've talked about quite a bit is just the reality that building something like this like Rivean, it's a very visible company. It's not like we're building sort of obscure enterprise software.
This is you see it in your neighborhood. It's a car. In the market shifted following our IPO to looking at high growth, high capital businesses like ours very differently. So we've seen a lot of volatility in our share price.
At the end of the day, if we continue to make products that customers absolutely adore and for which there's growing and continually excited awareness along with driving or cost structure to a point where we have a very profitable business and then launching new products all of that takes care of itself.
It's like that classic line of in the short term, the stock market can be a bit of a sort of voting machine, but in the long term, it's a weighing machine. It captures the weight of the value that you create. It's a classic horn puffed line. But I mean the reality is is we have to take the longer term view. And so we spend a lot of time making sure people recognize that.
Now look, there's not a lot of like super clear scoreboards that exist in the corporate world and the public stock market is certainly one of those. So it's hard not to glance at the scoreboard and say boy, that doesn't feel appropriate to what we're building.
Yeah, but you know, it's the job of myself and the rest of the leaders across the business to make sure we celebrate the winds, make sure we call out, you know, the excitement that we're seeing and with customers, make sure we call out the awards we're receiving and keep our head down and just continue to execute.
And I will say this there's an element and this is sort of I think implicit and embedded often in entrepreneurial companies or startups where it's more fun to be the underdog. So when you have these types of things happening, it's sort of like, well, great, let's go show them, you know, let's go. We know what we're building is great.
And so that that percolates throughout the organization's culture. Yeah, I can tell you how many supplier visits I had in 2017 or 2018 were this, if you want to build an electric truck, who the heck wants to buy one of those.
Yeah. So it's I think the organization is more resilient to that than you might think just because of it's how we grew up, we grew up around people doubting the likelihood of success and we're seeing it translate into you hop on the drive home from work and you see 10 ribions in my home. It's pretty clear that the products are probably still well.
We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back more from RJ on the future of Rivian stay with us. I'm Guy Roz and you're listening to how I built this lab. This episode of how I built this is sponsored by Miro. If you haven't heard of it, Miro is this incredible online workspace. Our team relies on it for a lot of our own brainstorms and processes. And I think it's super useful to try out if you want to build something great with your team.
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We've had founders in the show who built products and then were surprised when they discovered who was buying them. The R1 vehicles are really positioned for adventure seekers, right? And there are all kinds of components in the car that make it really easy to go surfing or skiing or drive into the mountains. Are you finding that that is your typical customer? Or are you finding like a suburban family wants the SUV because they can use it to take the kids to school?
It's been for me just a remarkably fulfilling journey of seeing what we just very much decisively said we want to target in terms of our type of customer will pull in to what's been achieved.
And there were a few core aspects of what we were targeting. Number one, and perhaps most importantly, is we wanted to make sure that the customers that were attracted to our brand were new EV customers, meaning we wouldn't be accomplishing anything towards our sustainability objectives if our brand just simply would customers from a Tesla over to Rivian. So it needs to be pulling people out of ice and therefore out of a much broader cross section of vehicles.
Those internal combustion engines. Yeah, internal, sorry, internal combustion engine vehicles. And so around 80% of our customers have never before owned an EV, which is awesome. The second thing we really wanted to achieve as a brand is to have a diverse set of customers, both in terms of background, demographic, even like political orientation. And the reason for that is your early customers can often become defining for the brand.
And it's a dangerous thing to have a sort of if you think it almost like a monoculture of customers that then embody or become emblematic for what the brand stands for, it's much better to have a melting pot of consumers that are coming from all different angles and aligning around something bigger.
Yeah, then just their own existing perspectives, which really brings me to the last point, which is the something bigger for us was the desire as a brand to inspire consumers to be adventurous when I say adventurous, it doesn't mean simply like climbing or mountain biking, but, but the idea of having a curious mindset to want to accumulate new experiences that adventurous mindset.
We think is is one of the most remarkable human characteristics is our desire to explore its our desire to try new things. And so that's been the one that's been for me the most fulfilling to see that we're really connecting with that so I get all kinds of custom emails but a couple of weeks ago from a customer said.
It starts off thank you and it was like okay good to see me a friendly email that's good, but it goes on to describe how this person used to be very active, they used to enjoy skiing, used to enjoy exploring and life sort of gotten away and they found themselves like having a life that was not very adventurous and they then said.
I connect with the Indian brand and I'm now I've lost 80 pounds wow I'm walking around my neighborhood I'm going for jobs and all this stuff that's like they connected it back to our brand, which was awesome because you know we're building vehicles but if the brand that our vehicles represent is inspiring people to live a more full and a more inspired version of life like that's incredible and so.
The echoes of that what we see is the groups that are forming and the groups they're very diverse sets of customers so politically as diverse as you can be different ages different everything and what they're lining around is this excitement for new experiences.
Yeah, I think it's important to note that the three states with the most EVs are California, Texas and Florida not surprising the most populous but still I mean Texas and Florida I'm not as politically liberal as California I think I think people when they drive an EV they realize it's just a better experience totally as a driver yeah and I think we've and that's an important point you bring up it's a lot of our customers are buying the product because they see it as a better.
Product not just simply because they're focused on the environment carbon neutrality yeah but what we've been able to do is we know we make that path to carbon neutrality something that's exciting and interesting and I think that's really important for large scale of option.
I recently read an article about gents and wang the founder of Nvidia and apparently he opens every meeting with a line that goes back to the early days where he says we're 30 days out from going bankrupt and it was true in 1997 when they bet the company on one product but I think it tells you something about how they think even that's worth a $1.2 trillion there's this mentality there that they are just a step away from from it all going up at a puff smoke.
I know that when we last spoke you had a lot of cash on hand in the bank and you can see a path towards greater revenue growth but you still are losing money. Do you bring some of that urgency and maybe fears in the right word but yeah but fear to the table when you're thinking about and talking to your team about how to grow and how to hit sustainability.
Yeah it's sort of implicit for us of how important it is to not only continue to reduce cost but also to continue to grow revenue and to achieve healthy positive growth margin and ultimately be a profitable business. I think the important point is making the urgency to continue driving that progress part of the culture is part of my role it's part of the rest of the leadership team's role but it's also making sure that it's that translates in the right word.
It translates into useful actions and what I mean by useful actions is the time skills need to be recognized in a business complexes this it's not as if like tomorrow we can work harder.
And drive costs and we need to think strategically so it's like balancing the short term medium term and long term and being really intentional around that and building trust between functions that our supply chain team is doing their job or delivery team is doing their job and creating the visible accountability across those different functions.
How do you personally deal with that level of stress I mean you're an engineer so I imagine maybe you take a more methodical approach to things and you're just looking at the data and you're saying all this is the way it is but maybe not I mean. I can imagine if I was running your company I wouldn't sleep I would just be so stressed out all the time there's certainly days that are more stressful than others.
If you're looking at our company today and look at all the challenges that we have I would look at and say this is the lowest risk moment in the river in history. We have clear line of sight to profitability the brand has has connected in a way that we could have only dreamed of you know few years ago.
And so relative to what it looked like in 2018 or 2019 or for that matter 2015 or 2014 I've only known a version of Rivian where there's always risk and you reference Jensen's line but it's I think with Rivian when the company started was one employee me starting a car company that the likelihood of success is I don't know one in a million something like that.
And so from a probabilistic point of view there's a lot of challenges but the sort of height of the clips we have to climb is far more understood and reasonable than what it looked like in years past. What do you do to just personally cope with that stress? I mean do you run every day? Do you do a routine or something that you do to make sure you you are healthy and managing that?
I tried to exercise frequently for me if I miss exercising or some sort of outdoor activity to many days in a row I noticed the quality of my thinking starts to the grade quality of my attitude. If you will or for my like mood isn't necessarily optimistic or positive so for me that's a big part of it.
I think the other thing that's often underappreciated is like building the resilience to block out some of the noise and all the idioms of like glasses have empty glass that full but the reality is is there's any businesses going to have lots of challenges and it's really easy when you're on the outside to look at this and say boy how are they going to overcome those challenges and I just have the benefit of having gone through a lot.
So we're reminding ourselves of what we've achieved and what we've overcome and keeping that front of mind as we look at the challenges in front of us I think is really important. And the other thing is I do really believe it's a mindset I read a letter every year to the whole company in this year actually the sort of core focus the letter was on mindset and it's amazing it's like remarkable what an impact your attitude can have on the exact same set of variables.
And I'm not saying blind optimism but optimism with realism has versus a cynical or defeatist or negative attitude and it's like the outcomes are so different for the exact same situation. Yeah, it's much more fun to operate with that mindset and so I bring that with me if everything that I'm working on and it's fortunately you become an embedded part of the culture as well.
Thank you for coming back on the show. Yeah, well, thank you. That's RJ Scorange founder and CEO of Rivian. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please be sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show and as always it's free. This episode was researched and produced by Catherine Cipher with music composed by Routine Arab Louis.
It was edited by John Isabella our audio engineer was Neil Roush our production staff also includes Alex Chung Carla Estevez Casey Herman Chris Messini, Jacey Howard, Carrie Thompson, Malia Aguadello, Niva Grant and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this lab.
I sent you a feedback email a couple months ago and I think this is a huge innovation that could happen in vehicles which is when you honk your horn to somebody they think you're angry but sometimes just warning them you're just saying hey you know heads up. You know I'm in the you're like in the grocery parking lot and somebody's looking at their iPhone I think there should be another horn yeah, like a friendly horn button.
I think it's a great idea. So I as I said to you, we're we're gonna look at that a friendly horn maybe make it be my voice I can say excuse me pardon me. If you like how I built this you can listen early and add free right now by joining one degree plus in the one degree app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon music before you go tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery dot com slash survey.