6 ms·

How do you maintain momentum at these kinds of time scales? When I ran engineering at a startup, I tried to structure things such that we deliver something wor

by m0zg 7y ago

How do you maintain momentum at these kinds of time scales? When I ran engineering at a startup, I tried to structure things such that we deliver something worthwhile at some kind of predictable cadence. It's the best set-up for everyone: the employees feel like they've accomplished someting, the investors feel like there's progress being made. With software this is pretty easy to do (and even so, people often fail to do it). But with a "hard" startup the gap between concrete deliverables can be years, and while you could put together some intermediate milestones, they'd probably feel contrived. How do you keep people engaged over long timescales like that?

tucaz 7y ago
I know nothing about businesses like these, but I assume that the people who need to be engaged with the idea and work know that things come at a slow pace and are fine with it. It's different than getting someone who wants to see results every day. In that type of work, progress is measured differently.
FiatLuxDave 7y ago
That's a good question. My first thought was, "We didn't". But that's really just pessimistic memories speaking. My second thought was, "A perpetual state of stress and fear!". Also pessimistic memories, but closer to the truth. In reality, we had initial seed funding for about a year. We had a number of goals we had established, including vacuum chamber, getting the ion source running, first beam, first neutrons. We fell way behind in the first six months because I made the stupid decision to try to build a duoplasmatron ion source to save money. This cost us about 4 months to make a shitty ion source that was full of leaks and barely usable. Luckily the experienced electrical engineer came up with an RF ion source bought used that did the job well enough. We actually ended up meeting all of our 1st year goals in just over a year if I recall correctly. By that time the money was running out, so DFJ basically extended the funding by issuing us convertible debt in 3 month increments. Every three months we would have a set of goals mutually agreed upon by the board, which was two of us and Tim Draper. This was pretty stressful for us, as we were living paycheck to paycheck and we had no idea if we didn't meet a goal if Draper would pull the plug. Tim was never anything but supportive but we understood the point of milestones. That is also when things got technically difficult, as everything we had done before was using existing techniques but when we went off-the-map things slowed down a lot. That went on for about 3 years. Basically the same dynamic as software guys tend to see in the classic death-march sprint. I blame leadership (myself). Eventually we ran up against some hard limits that wouldn't work with our design. We faced a choice between making an expensive bet on a supersized ion source (an inelegant brute force solution, which I know now would not have worked) or a new risky design (which also would not have worked). Tim was in favor of the brute force design, because he saw that as money being the barrier. I had my doubts about the brute force design, and I didn't want to waste the money on something that would only fix one of the 3 major problems we faced. I tried building the long-shot design. Then a piece of plastic got into the main turbopump and it ate itself. The 2000 market crash happened. Everything fell apart.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  Fascinating, and also probably painful to live through. Thanks for sharing that story.
- otoburb 7y ago
  If you attempted another fusion startup today would the odds of success be higher, or is fusion still about as far away as it was 20 years ago?
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Fusion used to be aiming at being better than fission, because that was the default post-fossil energy source. But now renewables are cheaper than that. So the competition has gotten better since then, and continues to improve rapidly, and it's not clear fusion can ever get cheap enough to compete with them. Another argument is that fusion reactors will require robots to maintain them (even the aneutronic ones will become too radioactive for hands on maintenance). But if you require robots that can do that, why not just develop and sell those robots, which would be generally useful?
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      People say that about molten salt fission reactors too. The maintenance robots will need maintenance robots. Just sell the robots. Lots of people still in fission and fusion are assuming trouble with renewables related to intermittency, land use, grid integration, EROI, raw materials, etc. might arise as we approach deep decarb. If that doesn't happen, wonderful! If it does, then it may be nice to have some low-carbon atomic power stations on hand or in work to diversify the risk. It's basically the nuclear Pascal's wager. With a big risk like climate change, there's room for investors who choose to take an interest in nuclear. Fossil fuels still power the vast majority of the world. It's not yet clear that we're out of that woods. For instance, Japan just announced that they're building 33 new coal plants to replace their atomic power stations. How on earth does one reconcile this with the game-over-renewables-are-already-cheaper-than-everything popular narrative? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...
tzhenghao 7y ago
Might be a non-answer, but I think this really depends on how much leverage you have in pulling engineering + product culture levers. In my experience, you need to first define a small set of north star metrics that lead to the promised land, which could be years, if not a decade away. Ideally, this should not be more than 3 so there's focus in the long term. If you define this well, everybody will understand the significance of it and be aligned to hit those objectives. Any increase, exponential or not, is progress the team should feel proud of. This is 80% of the "selling" for long time scale projects. Once you've done that, all other initiatives should focus on improving only these metrics. Generally speaking, very aggressive milestones and keeping that momentum going, while not punishing teams for missing targets will move the needle faster than the other way round.

by m0zg 7y ago

tucaz 7y ago

I know nothing about businesses like these, but I assume that the people who need to be engaged with the idea and work know that things come at a slow pace and are fine with it. It's different than getting someone who wants to see results every day. In that type of work, progress is measured differently.

FiatLuxDave 7y ago

That's a good question. My first thought was, "We didn't". But that's really just pessimistic memories speaking. My second thought was, "A perpetual state of stress and fear!". Also pessimistic memories, but closer to the truth. In reality, we had initial seed funding for about a year. We had a number of goals we had established, including vacuum chamber, getting the ion source running, first beam, first neutrons. We fell way behind in the first six months because I made the stupid decision to try to build a duoplasmatron ion source to save money. This cost us about 4 months to make a shitty ion source that was full of leaks and barely usable. Luckily the experienced electrical engineer came up with an RF ion source bought used that did the job well enough. We actually ended up meeting all of our 1st year goals in just over a year if I recall correctly. By that time the money was running out, so DFJ basically extended the funding by issuing us convertible debt in 3 month increments. Every three months we would have a set of goals mutually agreed upon by the board, which was two of us and Tim Draper. This was pretty stressful for us, as we were living paycheck to paycheck and we had no idea if we didn't meet a goal if Draper would pull the plug. Tim was never anything but supportive but we understood the point of milestones. That is also when things got technically difficult, as everything we had done before was using existing techniques but when we went off-the-map things slowed down a lot. That went on for about 3 years. Basically the same dynamic as software guys tend to see in the classic death-march sprint. I blame leadership (myself). Eventually we ran up against some hard limits that wouldn't work with our design. We faced a choice between making an expensive bet on a supersized ion source (an inelegant brute force solution, which I know now would not have worked) or a new risky design (which also would not have worked). Tim was in favor of the brute force design, because he saw that as money being the barrier. I had my doubts about the brute force design, and I didn't want to waste the money on something that would only fix one of the 3 major problems we faced. I tried building the long-shot design. Then a piece of plastic got into the main turbopump and it ate itself. The 2000 market crash happened. Everything fell apart.

rossdavidh 7y ago
Fascinating, and also probably painful to live through. Thanks for sharing that story.
otoburb 7y ago
If you attempted another fusion startup today would the odds of success be higher, or is fusion still about as far away as it was 20 years ago?
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Fusion used to be aiming at being better than fission, because that was the default post-fossil energy source. But now renewables are cheaper than that. So the competition has gotten better since then, and continues to improve rapidly, and it's not clear fusion can ever get cheap enough to compete with them. Another argument is that fusion reactors will require robots to maintain them (even the aneutronic ones will become too radioactive for hands on maintenance). But if you require robots that can do that, why not just develop and sell those robots, which would be generally useful?
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    People say that about molten salt fission reactors too. The maintenance robots will need maintenance robots. Just sell the robots. Lots of people still in fission and fusion are assuming trouble with renewables related to intermittency, land use, grid integration, EROI, raw materials, etc. might arise as we approach deep decarb. If that doesn't happen, wonderful! If it does, then it may be nice to have some low-carbon atomic power stations on hand or in work to diversify the risk. It's basically the nuclear Pascal's wager. With a big risk like climate change, there's room for investors who choose to take an interest in nuclear. Fossil fuels still power the vast majority of the world. It's not yet clear that we're out of that woods. For instance, Japan just announced that they're building 33 new coal plants to replace their atomic power stations. How on earth does one reconcile this with the game-over-renewables-are-already-cheaper-than-everything popular narrative? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...

tzhenghao 7y ago

Might be a non-answer, but I think this really depends on how much leverage you have in pulling engineering + product culture levers. In my experience, you need to first define a small set of north star metrics that lead to the promised land, which could be years, if not a decade away. Ideally, this should not be more than 3 so there's focus in the long term. If you define this well, everybody will understand the significance of it and be aligned to hit those objectives. Any increase, exponential or not, is progress the team should feel proud of. This is 80% of the "selling" for long time scale projects. Once you've done that, all other initiatives should focus on improving only these metrics. Generally speaking, very aggressive milestones and keeping that momentum going, while not punishing teams for missing targets will move the needle faster than the other way round.