The Real Job of a CEO with Matt Gialich
From Leadership Launchpad by Matt Gjertsen - Better Every Day Studios
May 5, 2026 · 36 min · Episode 192
About this episode
In this episode, Matt Gjertsen interviews Matt Gialich about the essential responsibilities of a CEO and the challenges of leading a team in a high-stakes environment like asteroid mining.
Most leaders think their job is complicated. It’s not. I tend to break it down into three things: get people working together, get them working on the right things, and improve the work over time. The problem is that second one. Getting people focused on the right things sounds simple, but in practice, it’s where most teams fall apart. In this episode, I sit down with Matt Gialich , CEO of AstroForge , to talk about what that actually looks like inside a company trying to do something insanely hard, mining asteroids in deep space. We get into how he unexpectedly became CEO, why the job is less about vision and more about doing whatever needs to get done, and how easy it is for teams to drift even when everyone is talented and working hard. A big theme throughout this conversation is focus vs overengineering. Engineers naturally want to go beyond the requirement, make things stronger, better, more robust. But that almost always comes at the cost of speed. And in environments like space or startups, speed is not optional, it is the advantage. Learning faster, iterating faster, and actually shipping matters more than building something “perfect.” We also talk about fear, how it…
People in this episode
Host: Matt Gjertsen
Guest: Matt Gialich
Topics covered
- leadership
- CEO responsibilities
- team focus
- space mining
- startup challenges
- engineering vs speed
Keywords
- CEO
- leadership
- teamwork
- focus
- overengineering
- AstroForge
- space
- startups
- iteration
- fear
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: AstroForge
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