Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our Slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer. And currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on slack. So before we kick off today's review recording, ive got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools. And if youre looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline, and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot.

Youll be able to manage your whole sales process. Plus my favorite part, the reporting, its super intuitive, powerful and customizable. Plus the whole thing is powered by AI, so your teams can spend less time on tedious, time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto, but getting set up on saleshub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business, and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons, you can tune it to your exact needs. Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales hub what is going on? DTC pod. Today we're joined by John Morgan, who is the founder of Pelagic, uh, which is an operations and supply chain, sort of, uh, network of the best people in the field.

So we're really excited to be able to talk about operations on this episode. But prior to starting Pelagic, uh, John was the VP of ops at Seed Health, uh, which is one of the largest health and probiotic supplement companies in the world. And before that, he was at SpaceX. So, John, I'm going to let you kick us off. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about your background, how you got so involved with supply chains, operations, and what kind of took you along your career journey to get where you are in logic, logic today.

Great. Thanks, Blaine. And really happy to be here. So, yeah, to go way, way back, I guess I did not come from a family of entrepreneurs or any background like that. I had two doctors as parents and so when I told them I was interested in this career path, they were like, cool. We have no clue what that means, how companies are built, but go for it. And, um, a really pivotal discovery was from my time in undergrad at USC, I found an entrepreneurship minor and got to hear directly from these founders building their businesses. And I thought they had the coolest jobs.

They, they taught, like, one unit classes and would go in and talk about what they were doing and then, uh, run their businesses on the side. So I think that was the first time I, I even knew that was a thing. But on top of that, I got very lucky and did a MBA level supply chain internship from one of the gurus in the space, Jimmy Anklesaria, a mentor of mine out of San Diego. And that experience put me on the map when I applied to a role fresh out of college at SpaceX, and it was originally in procurement, we were a fast growing company. SpaceX has had a few different chapters. Now, as a thing, it's been amazing to watch and be a part of. But at that time, they were perfecting the design of the Falcon nine rocket and just coming out with like, here's how we're going to launch humans into space. So that was around 2014.

The company grew very, very quickly. From there, I got handed a lot more responsibilities in all different ways, shapes and forms, but I found this niche skillset of working with engineers to outsource carbon fiber assemblies or sub components of the actual structure of the rocket across Falcon nine and dragon. So imagine just very complicated designs and some of the most brilliant engineers in the world constantly iterating on and trying to get Falcon nine fully reusable as a product or just like, to work and, like, fly. There were definitely a couple of times where we, you know, blew up a rocket on accident in different ways, shapes or forms. That was tough to swallow as a company. But overall, I think what I got out of that was just getting to work on kind of products that were first in, first of their kind for human history in a really amazing way. Making rockets fully reusable and then learning how to problem solve in a really intense work environment, but also amongst, like, a pretty passionate culture towards those problems. Everyone was like, we're going to Mars or bust.