Do Rocket Scientists Make Better Pizza? An Interview With Benson Tsai, Stellar Pizza

Benson Tsai is the CEO and co-founder of Stellar Pizza, a pizza-making truck operation that Tsai calls a “spaceship on wheels.” Why? Because inside the truck, the chef making the pies is actually…a robot. The spaceship analogy is particularly apt because Tsai is a rocket scientist who left his job as a battery engineer at SpaceEx to launch Stellar. His co-founders and nearly 3-dozen employees are also former SpaceEx employees who jumped ship to join the so-called spaceship. They aren’t alone in betting on pizza-making robots…recently, Jay-Z invested in Stellar. For his part,Tsai seemed destined for this journey…having been an engineer turned entrepreneur after grad school and then working at Lucid Motors and of course, SpaceEx, where he said he learned a lot about innovation from his face-to-face meetings with Elon Musk. But Tsai’s drive to build new things also comes from his childhood…where he learned to do hard things.