Building a hardware startup — a tale of two dichotomies

I love the word “dichotomy”. Probably because of the way it sounds.

Over the last two months, I have come to perceive two dichotomies that we daily face. So, I thought I should take a moment to write it down. Cognizance of a challenge is the first step in rising to the challenge. And no better way to get cognizant about anything, than to write about it.

The first dichotomy is the constant tension between being mindlessly disciplined and extremely flexible. As we have learnt the hard way, democratic decisions will have to be followed by autocratic implementation (do-exactly-what-we-decided-we-will-do) to make complex, integrated hardware work. This requires a certain level of discipline, rigidity of thought and mindless, tunneled thinking. At the same time, any startup thrives on adaptability and nimbleness — the ability to jump from one challenge to another and tackle it head-on. In fact, the most creative of thoughts flow only when free thinking is encouraged.

Both of these — highly disciplined implementation and flexible, freestyle thinking — are best cultivated as habits. All human beings are creatures of habit as the saying goes. But how do you encourage a team to simultaneously create habits that are fundamentally the antithesis of each other?

The second dichotomy is the starkness of building something as cool as a rocket while having to also build something relatively boring as highly detailed and systematic documentation. How do I ask my best performers, who are generally the impatient lot to sit and write about tasks they completed? How do I ensure, each decision has been carefully understood, debated and implemented without the least bit of confusion, if there is no documentation?

This is probably a more common problem in any startup, albeit, a very important one when we deal with aerospace hardware.

As a cofounder, I spend my nights worrying about how to carefully imbibe this delicate balance in the culture of the company itself. That’s probably one reason why I am writing a blog like this at 0200 hrs on a Sunday morning.