Relativity Hires Microsoft’s Scott Van Vliet to Boost Its Factory Operating System for 3D-Printed Rockets

Alan Boyle, GeekWire

GeekWire contributing editor Alan Boyle is an award-winning science writer and veteran space reporter. Formerly of NBCNews.com, he is the author of "The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference." Follow him via CosmicLog.com, on Twitter @b0yle, and on Facebook and MeWe.

Relativity Space uses giant 3-D printers to produce components for its Terran rockets.
Relativity Space Photo

Relativity Space, the startup that was founded in Seattle and is now building 3D-printed rockets in Southern California, has brought in a Microsoft executive to lead its growing software engineering team and expand upon its AI-powered “Factory Operating System.”


Scott Van Vliet, who headed up the team behind the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform as a corporate vice president, will oversee more than 150 of Relativity’s employees on its Integrative Software and Additive Manufacturing teams as senior vice president of software engineering. He’ll be based in the Los Angeles area.

Before his four-year stint at Microsoft, Van Vliet played a leading role in the development of Amazon’s Echo devices and Alexa voice-assistant platform. He told GeekWire that he’s looking forward to helping Relativity Space revolutionize industrial applications for 3-D metal printing, just as he helped Microsoft and Amazon blaze trails for collaborative software and AI assistants.

Scott Van Vliet

Scott Van Vliet has left Microsoft to become the senior vice president of software engineering at Relativity Space.

Image via Twitter

“Thinking about where we’re going with our Stargate family of printers, and the technologies that we’re building across the stack, we can apply similar models of machine learning to transform the way we do predictive modeling, predictive printing, and build the products that we’re going to build,” Van Vliet said.

Relativity Space’s first big product, its Terran 1 rocket, is due for its first launch this year, and the company is already working on a more powerful, fully reusable rocket called the Terran R.

Relativity CEO Tim Ellis, a veteran of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture who co-founded the company in a Seattle co-working space in 2015, said software will be key to the future of Relativity Space — and the future of the launch industry.

“Scott’s really the most senior hire the industry has made in software,” Ellis told GeekWire. “That’s exciting to me, because I very much do believe the quote from Andreessen-Horowitz that ‘software is eating the world.’ … Everything that Relativity is doing, transitioning manufacturing to more software- and data-driven approaches, is inevitable. We’re just the farthest along.”

Relativity is betting that automation and 3-D printing will dramatically reduce the cost of building rockets, resulting in far cheaper access to space.

The Factory Operating System is a key concept in Relativity’s approach: Van Vliet said he and his team will aim to boost the capabilities of a software platform that knits together all the processes involved in building rockets from piles of powdered metal. He compared the FOS to the platforms provided by Microsoft Windows, or Microsoft Teams, or Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant software.

“Frankly, it’s going to be the platform that enables things we haven’t even thought about yet — capabilities that the engineers and designers on our team will start to unlock as we think about an end-to-end integrated experience that can apply to any purpose,” Van Vliet said. “That’s the most exciting thing for me: building this platform that will accelerate the vision of Terran 1 and Terran R as well as other industries.”

Ellis acknowledged that the operating system he and Van Vliet have in mind could be applied more widely to other manufacturing markets — for example, planes, trains and automobiles. But at least for the time being, he insists that everything Relativity Space does will be focused on building the infrastructure needed to get to Mars, and eventually get industry going on the Red Planet.

Like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Ellis is fond of saying that Relativity Space’s long-term goal is to make humanity a multiplanetary species. “We’re still only the second company in the world that has this core mission of wanting to make humanity multiplanetary,” he said. “And I do hope that there’s more. I hope we inspire dozens to hundreds of companies to be ambitious and go after these big plans.”

But unlike Musk, Ellis isn’t planning to build satellites.

“We see the opportunity for doubling down on our own platform and making our own better end products,” Ellis said. Focusing on software-optimized additive manufacturing is “an investment in that approach,” he said.

Ellis said Relativity Space’s fourth-generation Starbase 3-D printers are already theoretically capable of turning out a Terran 1 rocket in six days, and turning out a Terran R rocket in 30 days.

“There are other parts of the factory process — downstream processing, machining, inspections — and really, Scott and his team are going to be accountable for achieving that rate,” Ellis said.

Relativity seems likely to have the required wherewithal: Last June’s $650 million Series E funding round for Terran R sent total investment past the $1.3 billion mark, and total valuation is said to be in excess of $4 billion.

The company now has more than 600 employees, roughly double the workforce it had a year ago. Those workers aren’t just at the headquarters in Long Beach, Calif.: There are teams working in Washington, D.C.; at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi; at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California; at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida — and even in Kent, Wash., not far from Blue Origin’s HQ. (Relativity says its Seattle-area office has four employees.)

“We were at a little over 100 at the beginning of the pandemic,” Ellis said. “I believe we’re the fastest-growing launch company in history, in terms of headcount growth and rate of growth over that period.”

And Relativity is still growing: Its career website lists more than 100 job openings. “This is an investment in hiring far more software engineers, data scientists, computer vision, machine learning,” Ellis said. “It’s really a kind of doubling down on a very different type of team that hasn’t existed in aerospace before to this level.”

Van Vliet said he’s long dreamed of working in the space industry, and he can hardly wait to jump in.

“I definitely have a lot to learn, getting involved with the company and starting, but I think there’s just such an incredible footprint already,” he said. “That’s what’s most exciting for me — there’s the experience that I have scaling up and leading large teams, and there’s an incredible set of assets that exist already.”

This story originally appeared on GeekWire.

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How the 'Thrift Haul' Boosted Secondhand Ecommerce Platforms

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
How the 'Thrift Haul' Boosted Secondhand Ecommerce Platforms
Evan Xie

If you can believe it, it’s been more than a decade since rapper Macklemore extolled the virtues of thrift shopping in a viral music video. But while scouring the ranks of vintage clothing stores looking for the ultimate come-up may have waned in popularity since 2012, the online version of this activity is apparently thriving.

According to a new trend story from CNBC, interest in “reselling” platforms like Etsy-owned Depop and Poshmark has exploded in the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. In an article that spends a frankly surprising amount of time focused on sellers receiving death threats before concluding that they’re “not the norm,” the network cites the usual belt-tightening ecommerce suspects – housebound individuals doing more of their shopping online coupled with inflation woes and recession fears – as the causes behind the uptick.

As for data, there’s a survey from Depop themselves, finding that 53% of respondents in the UK are more inclined to shop secondhand as living costs continue to rise. Additional research from Advance Market Analytics confirms the trend, citing not just increased demand for cheap clothes but the pressing need for a sustainable alternative to recycling clothing materials at its core.

The major popularity of “thrift haul” videos across social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok has also boosted the visibility of vintage clothes shopping and hunting for buried treasures. Teenage TikToker Jacklyn Wells scores millions of views on her thrift haul videos, only to get routinely mass-accused of greed for ratching up the Depop resell prices for her coolest finds and discoveries. Nonetheless, viral clips like Wells’ have helped to embed secondhand shopping apps more generally within online fashion culture. Fashion and beauty magazine Hunger now features a regular list of the hottest items on the re-sale market, with a focus on how to use them to recreate hot runway looks.

As with a lot of consumer and technology trends, the sudden surge of interest in second-hand clothing retailers was only partly organic. According to The Drum, ecommerce apps Vinted, eBay, and Depop have collectively spent around $120 million on advertising throughout the last few years, promoting the recent vintage shopping boom and helping to normalize second-hand shopping. This includes conventional advertising, of course, but also deals with online influencers to post content like “thrift haul” videos, along with shoutouts for where to track down the best finds.

Reselling platforms have naturally responded to the increase in visibility with new features (as well as a predictable hike in transaction fees). Poshmark recently introduced livestreamed “Posh Shows” during which sellers can host auctions or provide deeper insight into their inventory. Depop, meanwhile, has introduced a “Make Offer” option to fully integrate the bartering and negotiation process into the app, rather than forcing buyers and sellers to text or Direct Message one another elsewhere. (The platform formerly had a comments section on product pages, but shut this option down after finding that it led to arguments, and wasn’t particularly helpful in making purchase decisions.)

Now that it’s clear there’s money to be made in online thrift stores, larger and more established brands and retailers are also pushing their way into the space. H&M and Target have both partnered with online thrift store ThredUp on featured collections of previously-worn clothing. A new “curated” resale collection from Tommy Hilfiger – featuring minorly damaged items that were returned to its retail stores – was developed and promoted through a partnership with Depop, which has also teamed with Kellogg’s on a line of Pop-Tarts-inspired wear. J.Crew is even bringing back its classic ‘80s Rollneck Sweater in a nod to the renewed interest in all things vintage.

Still, with any surge of popularity and visibility, there must also come an accompanying backlash. In a sharp editorial this week for Arizona University’s Daily Wildcat, thrift shopping enthusiast Luke Lawson makes the case that sites like Depop are “gentrifying fashion,” stripping communities of local thrift stores that provide a valuable public service, particularly for members of low-income communities. As well, UK tabloids are routinely filled with secondhand shopping horror stories these days, another evidence point as to their increased visibility among British consumers specifically, not to mention the general dangers of buying personal items from strangers you met over the internet.

How to Startup: Mission Acquisition

Spencer Rascoff

Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

How to Startup: Mission Acquisition

Numbers don’t lie, but often they don’t tell the whole story. If you look at the facts and figures alone, launching a startup seems like a daunting enterprise. It seems like a miracle anyone makes it out the other side.

  • 90% of startups around the world fail.
  • On average, it takes startups 2-3 years to turn a profit. (Venture funded startups take far longer.)
  • Post-seed round, fewer than 10% of startups go on to successfully raise a Series A investment.
  • Less than 1% of startups go public.
  • A startup only has a .00006% chance of becoming a unicorn.

Ouch.

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From The Vault: VC Legend Bill Gurley On Startups, Venture Capital and Scaling

Spencer Rascoff

Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

Bill Gurley in a blue suit
Bill Gurley

This interview was originally published on December of 2020, and was recorded at the inaugural dot.LA Summit held October 27th & 28th.

One of my longtime favorite episodes of Office Hours was a few years ago when famed venture capitalist Bill Gurley and I talked about marketplace-based companies, how work-from-home will continue to accelerate business opportunities and his thoughts on big tech and antitrust.

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