I was employee #110 at SpaceX.
When I arrived, we hadn't launched a single rocket. The Falcon 1 was still theoretical. The factory floor in El Segundo was a controlled chaos of engineers who had left stable careers at Boeing, Lockheed, and TRW to bet on a guy who made his money selling software on the internet.
Over seven years, I helped design and maintain the backend infrastructure, produced the early live rocket launch broadcasts, and created promotional content — including working with Elon Musk on the first-ever rocket launch music video. I watched three Falcon 1 launches fail before the fourth one made history.
But the thing that stayed with me wasn't the rockets.
What I Was Actually Looking At
The obvious lesson from SpaceX is about technology: build better rockets, iterate faster, reduce cost per kilogram to orbit by an order of magnitude. That's the narrative everyone tells. It's true. But it's not what kept me up at night.
What kept me up was the operating system underneath the technology. The invisible infrastructure that made the visible breakthroughs possible. SpaceX didn't just build rockets differently — it ran its people differently. The decision loops were shorter. The tolerance for impossible-sounding goals was higher. The feedback between "this didn't work" and "here's the next attempt" was compressed into days instead of years.
I was watching a company that had figured out how to release potential at a higher clock speed than anyone thought possible. Not through exploitation — though that was certainly present — but through something more fundamental: a shared belief that the impossible was merely the not-yet-achieved.
The technology powering the rocket matters less than the operating system powering the people building it.
That's when I understood what I was actually obsessed with. Not rockets. Not technology. Potential — and the invisible systems that either release it or keep it locked up.
The Obsession
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Potential is everywhere, and almost all of it is locked up.
Quantum advantage is the most powerful computational paradigm ever conceived, but it's locked in research labs. The barrier isn't physics — it's accessibility. The container for getting that potential into the hands of companies that need it doesn't exist yet. So we're building it at Quantum Star Systems — quantum software that makes enterprises quantum-ready today, and deterministic optical hardware that will make the advantage permanent. Potential as physics.
The human capacity for conscious evolution is vast, but it's buried under survival instincts and cultural programming that hasn't been updated in thousands of years. What's already inside people — the talent, the imagination, the capacity to operate at a completely different level — is real but inaccessible. So we're building the operating system for that at The Passion Company. Potential as participation.
My father, Paul Lasman, blows glass — a 2,000-year-old art form fusing aerospace-level precision with organic beauty. Most people only encounter it as a souvenir on vacation. The potential locked inside that craft is invisible unless someone builds a space where you can actually encounter it. So we opened Stellar Art Gallery. Potential as material.
The Cost
There's something nobody tells you about seeing potential everywhere: it has a cost. When you can see what something — or someone — could become, the gap between what is and what could be is always visible too. That gap can feel like urgency. It can feel like restlessness. Sometimes it feels like grief.
The temptation is to build faster, launch more, close the gap through sheer force of output. I've learned that doesn't work. The gap isn't a problem to solve. It's the space where the work happens.
The real question is never "how do I close this gap?" It's "am I willing to stay in it long enough for the thing to become what it already is?"
One Body of Work
I used to think I was building separate things. A quantum computing company. A human potential company. An art gallery. A body. A performance practice. It looked scattered, even to me.
It took me a long time to see that it's all the same work. Different surfaces, same obsession. I see potential that other people can't see yet, and I build the container that makes it visible.
Not the rocket. The thing that makes the rocket possible.