Everything is a draft
In undergrad, you brainstorm, outline, draft, critique and revise in the convenient container of one semester. Then you turn it in, get a grade and forget all about it.
In grad school, you spend 3+ years figuring out what the hell you are doing, then a few more writing about it. The school year doesn’t matter anymore, but you still have to work with a similar mentality: brainstorm, outline, draft, critique and revise before you get scooped. Then your paper is published in Nature Nanotribology and you can finally get some sleep. Since you will have unearthed more questions than you will have answered, you get to leave behind a huge mess when you graduate. A mess that some poor sucker will have to sort through to try to reproduce your work. (In startups that is called technical debt ;)
In school you get to submit a final version, be done and move on with your life.
In real life, everything is a draft.
This ‘final version mentality’ is one of the biggest psychological hurdles for deep tech founders. I know it was for me. There are no submission guidelines for your first product. There is no editor to decide whether or not it is allowed to launch. There is no semester schedule or expected graduation timeline. Without some structure, you will go into analysis paralysis, or worse, a never-ending spiral of R&D efforts that somehow never get any closer to the ‘final version’.
I can’t explain the mechanism, but deadlines are extremely helpful, especially if there is an external forcing function. On my ARPA-E project, we mysteriously managed to hit the first 8 quarters worth of milestones within days of the deadlines. In many cases, we hit the milestone after submitting the written report, but before the in-person meeting a week later. This is on a project with insane scientific risk. It’s not just the kick in the pants — that is only part of the story. There is some other mysterious force at work. I have no scientific explanation. Deadlines are magic.
My advice to the PhD to CEO is to accept this magic. You don’t need to know how it works to harness the power of this mysterious force. Here’s how:
- Find an excuse to create a deadline. It could be a customer visit, a demo day, your dwindling bank account — whatever. Psychologically — it is better if it is external, even if you have to engineer it yourself.
- Accept that everything is a draft. You are very likely going to need to reduce the scope of the project (a few times) to even come close to hitting the deadline. What would this project look like if it were easy? What is absolutely essential? What is nice to have (for next time)?
- Ship it. It is okay to be a little embarrassed (internally), but whatever you do, don’t apologize for it (externally). Be confident, proactively talk about how valuable your tech is. Don’t apologize for what it is not (yet). They probably won’t even notice that something is missing. If they do want something that is missing, tell them that you could do it faster if they paid you to. Or that it is not currently on the roadmap, but it could be if they paid for it. Help them help you.
- Capture feedback. Be open to feedback, document it, and organize it into an actionable plan. What are the words that excite people? What pieces fall flat? As long as you don’t burn any bridges — each encounter is really just an option to a future encounter. It is up to you to be relentless in your follow-up. Be relentless in your follow-up.
- Iterate and repeat. One of the biggest disadvantages of deep tech: you can’t loop through this cycle 10,000 times per year like Facebook. One of the biggest advantages of deep tech: neither can anyone else in the world. Choose hard problems to solve. Not just ones that you think are novel — use the feedback that you receive to solve really hard problems for customers.
