Rivian’s much-hyped make-or-break moment has arrived.

The electric-vehicle manufacturer on Tuesday will start deliveries of its second-generation vehicle, the R2 SUV. Company leaders (and investors) hope the product will be a breakout moment that brings widespread awareness to the brand, launches Rivian into the mass market, and drives the company toward profitability. CEO and founder RJ Scaringe has called it “maybe the most important thing we’ve launched to date.”

No pressure, right?

Scaringe has been successful at getting investors and VC firms on board with his ideas. As TechCrunch reported, the three companies he’s founded (Rivian, micromobility spinoff Also, and industrial AI and robotics startup Mind Robotics) have collectively raised $12.3 billion. Rivian, which Scaringe founded in 2009, raised nearly $12 billion in its 2021 IPO, and today has a market cap of over $22 billion. Now it’s time to convince mainstream consumers.

Morning Brew caught up with Scaringe at an event in Utah last week, just before R2 deliveries were scheduled to start.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Looking back to R1 and some of the manufacturing challenges, what lessons learned are you applying to the production ramp for R2?

It’s just such a different company. When we launched R1, we built the plant and put it together through Covid…We were still learning how to work in-person again. We hired a whole new team to run the plant that had not worked in person much together. We then ramped. We then had a bunch of supplier challenges, which is the 2022 supply-chain crisis. We had no leverage with the suppliers. We were just a brand new company. But we also just didn’t have processes and systems, and the teams weren’t as mature.

And so when I look back on the Rivian of five years ago, it’s like the difference of looking at somebody graduating high school today and somebody that’s starting eighth grade, times an order of magnitude…We’ve now launched a bunch of other things and iterations, but we now have all these processes that allow us to avoid a lot of the heroics that were necessary just to get the lines to run.

And maybe the best personal evidence of this is, on R1, I was designing fixtures and on the floor making machines work, like brute force. Whereas on R2, we have really well-operating teams that went through a design validation build, multiple iterations, went through multiple manufacturing validation builds. We did all the ramp-up sign-offs on all the equipment, and so we’ve tested all the systems really well, such that there’s far fewer surprises. Now, of course, any launch as complex as this, you have thousands of different parts coming from hundreds of different suppliers. There are things you don’t expect, but the number of surprises is quite small, and so it’s very manageable…We hit the launch date—to the day—that we set years prior…despite a tornado hitting the plant a few days before…And we’re now continuing to ramp on schedule.

Read more about RJ Scaringe’s outlook as Rivian launches its new model.—JG

What if your next hire isn’t a full-time employee, but part human and part AI agent?

The question isn’t meant to conjure images of cyborgs and humanoid robots—at an event during New York Tech Week, two founders actually presented it as a viable option. The human worker would be fractional—a part-time, temporary high-level employee who pitches in at a startup for a specific phase of its development. The AI agent side of the equation would work in the same domain as their human counterpart, doing whatever the company deems automatable.

At “Your Next Exec Won’t Be Fully Human,” hosts Michael Meo and Christopher Bunker made the case for employing fractional and agent workers, respectively, in a friendly debate. Founders in the room told Morning Brew that some combination of fractional and agentic employees would help them scale their businesses, even if they have some reservations about autonomous AI.

Meo, the founder of venture studio Build Momentum, has worked as a fractional employee himself. He explained that hiring a fractional employee is an opportunity for founders to “get access to really high-value, impactful talent” while not having to pay a full-time wage and allowing for flexibility in team composition.

“[Now is] a time where we can start to think critically about the team as another product that you’re building,” he said. “You get a rigid team, and then you find yourself sometimes in a position where you’re building out roadmaps or thinking about work in terms of satiating the talent in the company instead of working toward the problem or the mission of the team.”

Read more of the conversation about hiring fractional employees and AI agents.—TC

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