Peter Beck: Transforming his fascination with space into a billion-dollar rocket company
Originally published by Bessemer Venture Partners.
Many companies claim they’re a rocketship—but few mean it literally. Learn lessons in passion and persistence from CEO of Rocket Lab Pete Beck.
Photo by Bill Jelen on Unsplash
As a young child growing up in New Zealand, Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, spent a lot of time stargazing. “The earliest memory I have is standing outside with my father looking up at the night sky,” he says. “He pointed out all the stars and told me that every one of those stars has a planet—and there could be somebody on a planet looking back at me. That’s what really got me interested in space.”
Today, Rocket Lab touts the highest launch success rate of any rocket company in history—and was the first private company in the southern hemisphere to go to space. As an end-to-end space company, the team not only builds launch vehicles (the rocket-powered component that sends satellites or spacecraft into space), but also builds communications constellations and spacecraft for interplanetary missions. They’ve launched 160+ satellites into space, have sent their technology to the moon, and have plans for a mission to Mars.
But it wasn’t always that way—for a long time, rockets were just a personal passion of Peter’s. Without a university education, a lot of traditional routes to space were closed to him. Still, he tinkered ceaselessly, building and testing his own rockets, devouring books, and corresponding with experts. Through a mix of passion, persistence, and experiments you probably shouldn’t try at home, Rocket Lab was born.
As part of our Wish I Knew podcast series, we sat down with Peter Beck to discuss how he turned his lifelong passion into his career, the surprising advantage of being an outsider in the space industry and the importance of staying humble enough to eat your own hat.
With enough persistence, your “second shift” can become a promising career
Peter’s passion for space started early. “I was probably the youngest member of the South End Astronomical Society,” he says. “It was irresponsibly late for a school night and I didn't really understand what anybody was talking about. But the energy and the coolness of all the discoveries was super exciting.”
He eventually found it wasn’t enough to just talk about space—he wanted to be building rockets.
“Starting from when I was school-aged, I would build and test rocket engines.” Soon, he realized the best way to test how well his experiments worked was, to use his words, “put a leg in it”—so he started building rocket bikes. “I was also at the point in my life where my brain wasn’t completely developed,” he admits now.
His parents were reluctantly supportive. Peter recalls a drag race he participated in with his rocket bike as a teenager. “My parents had traveled up—they hated me doing this stuff, but they somehow felt compelled to come watch,” he says. “They arrived just as I disappeared down the road in a cloud of smoke. They even sent the ambulance after me. I remember my mother in fits because she had no context whether or not I made it to the end.”
As an adult, Peter kept pursuing his passion for space. “I had two passions: one was engineering and one was space. And there were no university courses that taught this at the time. I had no logical trajectory.” He figured the best way to learn was just by doing. “I would run two shifts in my life. I had the day shift where I created the financial resources to do the night shift—building rockets.”
Though he never formally studied rocket science, he managed to teach himself everything he needed to know through reading books, corresponding with experts in the U.S, and continuing to test his designs. (Eventually he upgraded to using a load cell, which is a much more sophisticated and safer way of measuring how far a rocket can push than strapping your body to it.) He absorbed every failure as a learning opportunity. “Whether you're building a little engine or a big engine, the things that cause failures are often very similar.” These early lessons would become incredibly important later on as he moved on to found Rocket Lab.
A lack of formal experience can be a barrier, but also a surprising advantage
In 2014, Peter traveled to the United States and went on what he calls a "rocket pilgrimage." For a couple months, he visited different places significant to the space industry, from NASA to Aerojet Rocketdyne, a rocket manufacturer that, at the time, had an F1 engine sitting in their parking lot.
As a self-taught rocket scientist, however, he faced some significant barriers. “As a foreign national, it's very difficult to gain access to work in the space industry in the United States—even more so when you don’t have a university degree or formal training in the field,” he says. “All I had was a picture book of all of the engines and rocket contraptions that I'd built. It’s very difficult to take a book of photos and turn it into a career.”
But Peter also recognized the opportunities his unusual experience created. “That trip showed me that so many of the things I thought were important—like doing dedicated small launches—weren't being done.” Peter thought small launches had huge potential and was ready to stake his career on it.
On the plane ride home, he ruminated on his ideas. “I didn’t sleep one minute of that twelve-hour flight. When I got home, I'd already come up with a logo for Rocket Lab.”
Not having formal experience gave him and his fledgling team an edge. “Nobody we hired had any space background,” he says. “That was part of the magic because there were no predetermined ways of doing things. Going from first principles and the latest technologies, we were asking, ‘What’s the best way to solve this problem?’”
And while the journey wasn’t always smooth, it led to a lot of innovation. “It forced us to rethink the way everything was done. We were the first to 3D-print a rocket engine, create an all-carbon composite rocket, and to do an all fiber optically networked avionics suite on a launch vehicle and put these new technologies into orbit.”
Staying humble means being willing to eat your own hat (literally)
“At Rocket Lab, everybody lives and dies by the motto ‘Do what you say you're going to do,’” says Pete. “I think it's really important to be honest to the extreme.”
For the most part, they’ve stuck by this principle. Every time they’ve committed to doing something—such as opening the first private launch site, building the first reusable small launch vehicle, and going to the moon—they’ve followed through.
But there were a few things Peter insisted the team would never do. Chief among them, build a big rocket. And he had good reasons: “Plenty of times, an entrepreneur gets 80% of the way, then wants to pivot to something new and shiny,” he says. “I'd always had the idea of a big rocket in the back of my mind, but I wanted our existing projects to be done and dusted before we moved on to that.”
“But keeping an open mind is critical in this industry,” he says. “And when it became clear that in the 2024-2030 timeframe, there was gonna be a massive deficit of launch, we realized this was an opportunity.” In 2021, they announced their first big rocket project: a mega constellation called Neutron, to be launched in 2024.
This contradiction of the company’s motto prompted Peter to clear the air. “A lot of people said, ‘You have to eat your hat over that, Pete,’” he says. “I thought, well, all right, I'll go and eat a hat.” True to his word, in the video announcement for Neutron, he put a Rocket Lab hat into a blender and ate it.
“I really, really do not recommend it,” says Peter. “We put it in a blender because it was the most digestible way to eat a hat. I remember removing the lid of the blender when we were filming and smelling the pungent odor of formaldehydes. The disappointing thing was that I had to do that three times because the cameraman wasn't happy with the shot. So I ate more than one hat.”