Building Deep Tech at Scale: A Conversation with Jonathan Criss, CEO of Vital Lyfe

The Forge Series highlights the founders and experts driving Deep Tech innovation. Hosted by Stifel Bank’s Venture Banking team, these conversations explore industry trends, investment insights, and the challenges of building transformative companies. This piece builds on a conversation with Jonathan Criss, CEO and Co-Founder of Vital Lyfe.

Vital Lyfe is reimagining how clean water is produced and delivered through advanced engineering and high-rate manufacturing. Rather than relying solely on large, centralized infrastructure, the company is building compact water purification systems designed to put clean water directly into the hands of consumers.

After spending 13 years at SpaceX helping develop Dragon and later scale production of Starlink’s satellite internet hardware, CEO and Co-Founder Jonathan Criss is applying those same principles to one of the world’s oldest infrastructure challenges.

Stifel Bank Managing Director Al Guerrero sat down with Jonathan to discuss building in Deep Tech, first principles thinking, manufacturing at scale, leadership, and the realities of scaling a hardware company. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You spent 13 years at SpaceX working on Dragon and Starlink before starting Vital Lyfe. What ultimately motivated you to leave and build your own company?

Jonathan Criss: Spending that much time at SpaceX was interesting because I got to work on what were essentially two completely different businesses. On Dragon, I started off making straps, basically the seat belts that went inside the spacecraft. Because the company was still small, it was, “Hey, we need someone to make the shelves.” I was like, “I’ll do that.” Then it became, “We need someone to install them.” “I’ll do that.” Then it was oxygen systems. I just kept taking on more and more ownership.

When we shifted to Dragon reuse, I became a product manager and got to run that program cradle-to-grave. That really taught me how to run a business within the business of SpaceX.

Dragon was all about solving some of the hardest engineering problems on Earth. Starlink was a completely different challenge: how do you mass produce an affordable product that anyone can use? Those two experiences really set us up for what we’re doing at Vital Lyfe.

The thing that ultimately pulled me away was wanting to continue making a meaningful impact. I love solving hard problems, and I felt like I had learned what I wanted to learn at SpaceX.

Why water? What made you believe this was the right problem to tackle?

Jonathan Criss: My co-founder, Andrew Harner, and I knew we wanted to start something, so we made a list of what was important based on our experiences at SpaceX.

Number one was making a meaningful impact. It had to have a rate manufacturing aspect because I think that’s a skill set very few people have. It needed to be a consumer product because we think that’s one of the hardest problems to solve, and it had to be a really difficult engineering challenge. When we took that funnel of requirements into building a company, there really weren’t a lot of things left. 

We started digging into desalination and realized the industry’s traditional way of thinking had shaped its path over the last 50 years or so. Applying what we learned at SpaceX about solving hard problems and driving cost reduction, we could see a real opportunity to make an impact. So we just went after it.

You mentioned the industry’s “traditional way of thinking.” What did you uncover that made you believe there was an opportunity to approach the problem differently?

Jonathan Criss: The industry is absolutely dominated by academia and large industry. Academia, in general, is designed to go slow. They’ll make a discovery over a long period of time, then make incremental improvements over another long period of time.

There’s definitely a time and place for that, but it also leaves the door open for somebody to go back and revisit the original assumptions.

When we started looking at water, we realized reverse osmosis had been around for 50 or 60 years. So we went all the way back to the very beginning. What if we redesigned these systems with the understanding of materials and physics we have today? Could we make an incremental improvement, or was this actually a step function change? Pretty quickly, we realized it was a step function change in how these systems could be built and deployed.

Tell us about Vital Lyfe’s first product. What are you building, and where do you see it fitting into the market?

Jonathan Criss: Our first product is called Access. We geared it toward the consumer for a number of different reasons. We actually think the consumer is the hardest problem to solve. These are high pressure systems, so building something that anyone can use and operate is a really hard challenge by itself.

Around here we always say, “We design for Terry.” Terry’s my mom. I love her to death, but she’s not the most sophisticated user. If Terry can use it, we’ve probably done our job. She sets the baseline for how we think about product design. We’ve got to build something affordable that anyone can use.

Access is about the size of a shoebox. It can take ocean water, or really any naturally occurring water source, and turn it into drinking water. We see it as our middle market product and the test bed for deploying this technology at a scale that’s never been done before. Our factory can build more desalination devices in a month than currently exist, giving us the customer feedback and data we need to accelerate our innovation cycle. That helps us improve future products, whether that’s more affordable household systems or larger industrial applications.

You’ve said before that we’re entering a period where infrastructure itself is becoming decentralized. What do you mean by that?

Jonathan Criss: We really believe we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift. Traditionally, infrastructure has been centralized. Look at Starlink. Traditional fiber infrastructure has essentially been pulled apart and put onto satellites with little dishes that anyone can use.

And so, we looked at water the same way. Traditional desalination infrastructure costs a billion dollars, takes a decade to deploy, has a huge footprint, and a pretty significant environmental impact. We asked ourselves, can we take that same technology, scale it down, give it to individuals, and allow them to access it directly? It’s essentially what we’ve done.

One thing we hear a lot from SpaceX alumni is “first principles thinking.” Can you explain what that means, and maybe share an example of how it shaped the way you approached a problem?

Jonathan Criss: Around our office, we have a saying: there are no requirements. Everything is possible outside of breaking physics. It’s just a cost or resource trade. 

We train our team to rethink every problem from that first principles approach. What’s actually driving this design? What’s driven by physics versus what’s simply been accepted over time? That mindset gives our engineers the freedom to rethink problems from the very beginning, and it’s something that was beaten into us at SpaceX.

Starlink is a good example. Phased array antennas used to cost tens of thousands of dollars. That’s the core technology inside the Starlink user terminal. To make a product affordable enough to deploy around the world, we had to rethink not just the antenna itself, but how it was manufactured.

Traditional phased array antennas are a laminated stack, which means you’re gluing all these antenna pieces together. Gluing anything in manufacturing is super labor intensive. You have cure times, bond prep, and a lot of variables.

So we asked, “Is this glue actually the rate limiter? Is it one hundred percent driven by the laws of physics that these antennas have to work this way?”

Everybody in the RF world said, “One hundred percent. You have to have it.”

We started running experiments and going down this rabbit hole. Could we redesign it as a dry stack? Could we use a completely different approach to keep the assembly together?

Now you’ve got Starlink antennas that went from costing tens of thousands of dollars to a few hundred dollars. 

You also mentioned rate manufacturing. What exactly does that mean?

Jonathan Criss: Rate manufacturing is a core principle that I think very few people outside of the Starlink team really understand. When I was on Dragon, we were building four Dragons a year and thought we were moving really fast. Then I got to Starlink, where we were building about 1,800 Starlink Minis an hour. When you’re operating at that kind of scale, the design principles completely change.

Now you’re thinking about how to make that assembly install in under five seconds, or even three. Can it be automated? You’re still designing from a first principles standpoint, but now you’re layering in rate manufacturing. The goal is to build it as fast as possible. That’s what makes it fun.

Around here we say the factory has a beating heart. That beating heart is 30 seconds. Every 30 seconds, an operation on our assembly line is being completed. That’s what gives us our units per hour. Every 30 seconds, something better be getting done, or you’re going to hold up the line.

We make the line a straight line because we want to see the problems. If an eight year old kid walks into the factory, they should be able to point to the bottleneck and say, “It’s right there. We should go fix that.”

You made a deliberate decision to launch Access with consumers first. What drove that strategy?

Jonathan Criss: We have a number of different verticals for Access, but where we see the most traction today is maritime, overlanding, RVs, and off-grid living. Those types of systems have existed in the maritime world for a long time. They’re just super expensive, incredibly painful to use, and maintenance is hard. That industry has kind of gotten used to outdated hardware.

We intentionally went after consumers because we wanted that feedback loop as fast as possible, especially in those communities because people are incredibly vocal. I’ve personally been roasted on Reddit since my Starlink days, and nothing will make you iterate or design faster than a keyboard warrior calling you dumb.

But we actually love that feedback because it helps us make the product better. As we build more units, that’s where rate manufacturing starts paying off. You get economies of scale, which drive costs down over time.

You went from leading major programs at SpaceX to running your own company. How would you describe your leadership style?

Jonathan Criss: I think I was one of the fortunate people because SpaceX teaches extreme ownership. If you’re an engineer, you own your product cradle-to-grave. We used to say all the time, “If you were CEO of the company, what would you do?” That mindset gets built into you.

I was also fortunate to get exposure to product management, finance, supply chain, MRP systems, and status accounting – essentially running a business within the business. That translated really well.

The biggest difference is how we lead here. We lead by repetition. We have a lot of younger engineers, and we invest heavily in developing them. I’m kind of a broken record: Extreme ownership; go after 10x improvements; there are no requirements, just cost and resource trades driven by physics. I say those things all the time because we want that way of thinking to become part of the culture.

Every part of the business has someone who’s accountable. If there’s no name attached to a problem, that’s my job to fix.

Earlier you mentioned that moving quickly is one of a startup’s biggest advantages. Is there anything you had to intentionally unlearn after leaving SpaceX?

Jonathan Criss: Money is not free or unlimited. That is by far my biggest black eye since starting Vital Lyfe. When you’re a startup, your competitive edge is moving fast. Time is the only thing you can’t get back. At SpaceX, we’d torpedo a million dollars on a tool if it saved a few days on a part. Those were no-brainers. You should always spend the money to move as fast as possible. I don’t have that luxury anymore. Now I’m constantly asking, “Is this risk reduction worth the cost? Is this tool something we’ll actually use long term? Is it worth throwing away these parts if it helps us learn?” That’s probably been the hardest mindset shift since leaving SpaceX.

Building a company is ultimately about building a team. How do you think about recruiting and creating the kind of culture you want at Vital Lyfe?

Jonathan Criss: We’re pretty fortunate because Vital Lyfe sits in a really interesting Venn diagram. We’ve got a really hard engineering problem, the potential to make a meaningful impact in the world, and the opportunity to build something with significant economic value. That’s a pretty unique combination. 

A lot of engineers in the South Bay want to work on difficult technical problems, but they don’t necessarily want to work on weapons. We’re fortunate that we can offer another option. Long term, we’re building Vital Lyfe for the next two or three decades. That means it’s important to build a company and a brand that lasts. I want engineers who are in high school or college today to look at Vital Lyfe the same way previous generations looked at Tesla or SpaceX and say, “That’s where I want to work.” 

Is there one thing you wish every investor understood about building a company like Vital Lyfe?

Jonathan Criss: Hard tech is different. I think a lot of firms are getting really excited about hard tech right now, but we’re a hardware company. It costs a lot of money just to build the tools. I’ve got tools inside this factory that cost a million dollars before they ever make a single part. Then you’ve got inventory sitting on 30-, 60-, or 90-day terms while you’re building product. 

You have to spend money to make money. That’s very different from the SaaS model, where you can stay lean and generate meaningful recurring revenue. Our growth depends on how much we can build and how fast we can build it.

I also think people sometimes assume every hard tech company is chasing a massive defense contract. That’s not our business model. We have to think about customer acquisition, advertising, manufacturing rate, and all the same commercialization challenges as any consumer company. Understanding that difference is really important.

What advice would you give founders who are raising their first institutional round?

Jonathan Criss: I’d encourage founders to understand what their future use case is going to be, then align themselves with the investors who can help them get there. Maybe that’s manufacturing experience. Maybe it’s commercialization. Maybe it’s strategic relationships. Maybe it’s expertise in a region where you eventually want to build a factory. Those things become incredibly valuable later.

The other piece is really thinking through how you’re going to deploy the capital. I hear founders say, “We just raised this huge round.” Okay, but how are you going to deploy that money?

“Oh, we’re going to hire one hundred people this year.”

That’s really hard. You’re either going to destroy your company culture, or you’re just not going to do it. Founders should think just as carefully about deploying capital as they do about raising it.

Stifel Venture Banking is a division of Stifel Bank, Member FDIC. For informational purposes only. Stifel Bank does not provide legal, tax, or other advice.  Representative companies shown and technologies are for illustrative purposes only. Reference to or inclusion of any company or product does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or indication of a financing relationship with Stifel Bank.