🐿️ Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines - The Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter

Originally published 17th June 2024

I don’t remember much of the plot of 1960s madcap British movie Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines – it’s mostly just a series of ridiculous scenes featuring 1910-era aeroplanes, slapstick comedy, and exaggerated national stereotypes – but the pre-credit scene made a real impression. As an introduction to the fictitious air race that drives the film’s action, the producers assembled footage of early attempts at powered flight, including bicycle planes, rocket suits, aerial screws, blimps with helicopter rotors, and, um, whatever this is.

Every one gets a few feet into the air and then crashes more or less gracefully, with a Benny Hill tune and Red Skelton spliced into the shots, the latter hamming it up as he portrays various hapless flyers. But as silly as they may seem on the screen, every clip is real, taken from an actual attempt to get one of these crazy machines off the ground. These repeated smash-ups by aviation pioneers were the only way to learn what worked and what didn’t in the air, and you owe every flight in a nice boring Boeing or Airbus to those successful experiments and their negative results. (Although come to think of it, Boeing doesn’t seem quite boring enough these days.)

I was reminded of TMMITFM when SpaceX’s Starship launched for the fourth time earlier this month. The mission was remarkably smooth, with the spaceship reaching orbit and both booster and ship splashing down safely more or less as planned. But that’s not how the first three launches went: in April 2023, and then again in the following November and March, each attempt terminated early with a rapid unscheduled disassembly whose explosive power completely obliterated a $90m vehicle. That’s right, Elon Musk wrote off the cost of about 9,000 Tesla Model 3s in just over a year, every time being pretty sure he was setting off the most expensive firecracker in history but also getting a little closer to his goal with each liftoff. Like those courageous aeronauts in the film clips, Musk values learning rapidly above the cost of replacing machines and the embarrassment of apparent failure.

Contrast SpaceX’s progress with that of Boeing (again!), who have been trying to get their much less ambitious rocket to the International Space Station since 2019. With a “get it right” attitude instead of their competitor’s explosion-friendliness, they pushed back launch after launch as they frantically tuned and tweaked to achieve a perfect flight (this is a story familiar to many of you building software, I’m sure). After over four years and only two trials, they finally got a crew to the ISS earlier this month, with a bill from NASA for $1.5bn (yes, billion) in cost overruns. None of Boeing’s rockets blew up, it’s true, but you have to wonder whether a little more creative destruction would have been better for the bottom line.

Why do I bring all this up? Well, think about the cost of a software error in your business. Unless your tech team’s code runs a nuclear plant or drives a pacemaker, a bug or misfeature is probably a lot less costly for you than blowing up a spaceship is for Elon – but you stand to gain just as much knowledge from experimenting with your customers frequently as SpaceX does by launching early. Since your engineers already know how to ship code to production daily, there’s really no reason you can’t start learning from your customers today, is there? After all, it’s hardly rocket science.

This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 17th June 2024. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/