An Ex-SpaceX Engineer on Elon Musk, Starship, and Building a $1B-Valued Startup (Scott Morton, Founder & CEO of Revel)
The GeneralistShow Notes
Scott Morton is the founder and CEO of Revel, a software platform for testing and controlling complex hardware systems. Before founding the company in 2024, Scott spent nearly a decade at SpaceX building control software for Falcon 9 and Starship. That experience helped him recognize a broader problem: while rockets, nuclear systems, supersonic aircraft, and other advanced machines have grown increasingly sophisticated, the software used to test and control them is often fragmented and decades old. Revel was created to close that gap. The company has raised $180 million, was reportedly valued at just over $1 billion, and counts Impulse Space and Radiant Nuclear among its customers. Its platform scales from small benchtop tests to industrial systems with hundreds of thousands of telemetry channels. Revel has also created its own programming language, RevelCode, designed to combine performance and accessibility with the runtime safety required for high-stakes physical systems.
In our conversation, we explore: How AI can accelerate high-consequence software teams without replacing rigorous testing and review Why hardware test and industrial-control software still relies on tools created in the 1980s and 1990s What Scott took from Elon Musk about betting on teams before you know the answers Why Revel created its own programming language The “runtime safe” philosophy: what it means and why it matters Revel’s one-to-many model and the hardware frontiers it’s touching The strategic case behind Revel’s $150 million Series B How Revel’s edge showed up in an industrial-control bake-off How Scott hopes to preserve Revel’s engineering culture as it scales toward 500 people Revel’s long-term mission – and what it means for the hardware renaissance — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (02:04) Why no one will vibe-code a nuclear reactor (04:15) Revel’s engineering edge (05:27) What Revel actually does (06:34) Why industrial software has stagnated (07:52) Why previous startups couldn’t crack it (10:26) The limits of building control software in-house at SpaceX (15:20) Lessons from nearly a decade at SpaceX (20:22) Why Revel built RevelCode (24:46) Will Revel open-source the language? (25:25) Scott’s early projects and builder mentality (32:28) Where his drive comes from (33:50) What Scott took from Elon – and what he chose to leave behind (36:02) Scott’s standards as CEO (38:56) Scaling from small tests to industrial systems (43:40) Deploying Revel and the hiring bottleneck (45:23) How Revel finds and assesses talent (46:21) Emerging frontiers in hardware (49:36) Revel’s unusually smooth trajectory (51:05) How AI fits into Revel’s platform (52:42) Revel’s long-term vision (54:18) Final meditations — Follow Scott Morton LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-morton-68334a15 X: https://x.com/scottgmorton — Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/an-ex-spacex-engineer-on-elon-musk — Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
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