The Rocket Launch Feeling
This is a post about a feeling. A feeling that comes as you build a high-potential startup rocketship. One of the most exciting and terrifying times in developing a startup is when you can feel that rocket trembling on the launch pad, with fuel burning fast to generate the massive thrust required to begin to move and transition into enormous acceleration.
Building a high-potential startup is analogous to building a rocketship. Rocketships are profoundly complex, with dozens of interlocking and interdependent systems. Guidance. Power. Heatshields. Life support. Structural systems. Payload. Getting all those systems designed, developed, built, and tested takes time and expertise, just like a startup. Sometimes it seems like it will take forever as you overcome problem after problem to iterate into something that seems likely to accomplish the objectives you set out to achieve. As you and your team persevere along the way, there is risk, failure, success, excitement, disappointment, and camaraderie.
Then there comes the point where it feels like all the pieces are finally coming together. You can see the thing starting to take shape. Component and subsystem tests begin to demonstrate that you are getting to a point where you can actually envision taking off. The team starts to gain confidence that the major problems have been solved, and you move from broad brushstrokes into completing refinement steps. Someone out there who might become a customer begins to show interest in actually trying your solution.
As you approach the true launch when your solution is out in the wild being deployed by an actual customer(s), you feel the preparation, the countdown in your head that can take months. You are dependent on outside forces like the weather. Delays happen. Costs overrun. Difficult, urgent, and sometimes life-threatening problems emerge. You solve them. One at a time. Overcoming each obstacle in turn. You work with your hopefully future customer to align your solution with their needs and build up a compelling case that your solution will solve an important pain point that they are highly motivated to solve.
At some point, you can feel it. The rocket is approaching launch. The countdown has begun. The fuel ignites and begins to generate the tremendous thrust to move the rocket from a standstill into the acceleration required to achieve escape velocity. The pressure is on. The focus is total. Everyone on the team is maximally engaged as you do your best to engineer success. The dynamic tension between the confidence you built along the journey to reach this stage and the certainty that there remain unknowns that could still cripple you is palpable. As the smoke begins to pour out of your rocket, others can start to feel the tremble. Everyone gets excited. The moment of truth has arrived.
Now you will know. Sometimes the anticipated launch fizzles or blows up. Sometimes it goes off spectacularly. Sometimes you need to abort and solve a critical problem before trying again.
This analogy feels so real to me as a startup CEO. While an actual rocket launch takes place in minutes to hours, for a startup, the process of a startup trembling on the launch pad can persist for months. Nonetheless, it is still the buildup followed by the moment of truth. One of the most challenging things for a startup CEO is that we often have detailed insight into all of the elements that must come together to achieve liftoff far in advance of others, including those in the trenches on the team as well as those watching from a distance (e.g., investors), so I find that I can feel the tremble begin far in advance of the actual launch. This becomes stressful because as the burn becomes intense, many start to worry, and I end up spending lots of time reassuring others to hold tight. The launch is coming.
For example, at my life science tools startup, once we had the product developed, we built a sales force and began to sell. The orders were coming in. We were trying to get our manufacturing to produce consistently and quickly enough. We had a backlog of orders to fill. The burn climbed and reached a heart-stopping $1M per month. The investors were very anxious because we did not have enough money in the bank to do this for long. But I could see the turn coming. The rate of orders juxtaposed against the manufacturing progress and the fixed cost of the sales force were trajectories coming into successful alignment. It felt like a high G launch as we accelerated towards sustainability. That is what the beginnings of an accelerating launch feels like.
Another time it was the opposite: instead of feeling the pre-launch vibrations, the feeling was one of momentum eroding or the whole launch fatally breaking apart. We were hoping for breakthroughs, but the competitors were dropping their costs at a precipitous rate, with bids for massive projects coming in dramatically lower as time passed, eroding our potential for the essential cost advantage required to get customers to take a chance on something new. The problems kept piling up. As the customer business case eroded for a couple of years and the potential for technical innovations to close the gap vanished, it became clear that we were breaking apart on the launch pad. Eventually, I had to make the call to abort. Painful as that was, again, it was seeing the shake apart coming and convincing the rest of the team and supporters that indeed we were not going to make it to the space we wanted to occupy.
Now, again, we can feel the trembling on the launch pad as the fuel ignites and begins to roar. It is exciting to see the potential energy converting into slow acceleration with the rapid acceleration stage coming into focus. The excitement of our pilot sponsors and partners is palpable and feels like so much pent-up demand that is just on the cusp of being realized. I feel like I am holding my breath in hopes the weather does not sweep in and cause us some unexpected delays as we work to complete the countdown and execute our launch, even as I can see the momentum building.
Hopefully, this analogy resonates as you build your startup and progress through the development stages to the moment of truth when it becomes clear if you will succeed in launching a rocket. May your acceleration get you to space!
