Crusher of Dreams

7 minute read.

I've gotten this moniker from a number of sources over the years and at this point in my life/career I'm willing to embrace it. How did I become a crusher of dreams? I might say it's because I value skepticism and the hard truths of physics. My wife would say it's because I'm not very agreeable. Really, I was set on this path in grad school.

I would never recommend getting a PhD to anyone - if you need a recommendation, you're not in love with it enough to endure it. First you need an advisor, who is expected to be 1) brilliant in their field, 2) an excellent lab manager, 3) good enough at writing grants to keep everyone paid, and 4) ideally a decent teacher. I have no idea why universities expect to have all of these criteria met by a single person, much less every professor they tenure. The tragic stories of most grad students show how often 2) and even 3) cannot be taken for granted. 

The biggest academic challenge is not the qualifying exam or the dissertation defense, but finding a problem: something that walks the line of being novel enough to be interesting, while also being actually solvable. This is what distinguishes the Doctorate from the Master's and Bachelor's: you're no longer solving a problem that's been set for you and using old principles in new applications - now you're expanding the state of the art, venturing into the unknown. All the solutions we learn in school are the successes of these past greats, but what's often lost is that most attempted techniques don't work, can't work, maybe even provably so.

One major job of a grad student's advisor is to help them find a suitable problem, since this is so difficult and many years of the student's life are tied to this fateful decision. Of course tenure is no guarantee that every problem a professor recommends will turn out to be both novel and solvable. Most grad students live in fear of the "terminal question", that terribly prescient remark at the end of the seminar by someone who has been quietly listening to your life's work and noticed the fatal assumption that collapses the house of cards that was going to be your thesis. 

Is it terrible that I aspired to be the asker of those questions? It's not that I want to see anyone's hopes dashed, but that I want to save them from this plight. I want to be there early enough to steer them onto a more fruitful path when their advisor has failed them. 

Of course I've been on the wrong side of this as well. My first job after grad school was with the Department of Defense at a very small DARPA contractor writing seedling studies for drones and such. The owner made a point of bringing me along to meetings in DC so I could quickly answer any tough technical questions that came up during his presentation (an excellent approach to both mentorship and sales that I wish more executives were humble enough to practice). They started calling me "the young doctor" around DARPA because I was still 25.

One time we had a project DARPA had funded that made clever use of buoyancy. Unfortunately our DARPA program manager left and we were assigned a new one, who quickly made clear his intention to cancel our project because it couldn't possibly work. He told us, proudly brandishing his MIT beaver ring, that any fool knows buoyancy only pushes upward. I politely disagreed, since buoyancy is the sum of pressure around an object, so it pushes up in a static fluid, but not necessarily an accelerating one. He was not convinced.

As a last-ditch effort, we invited him and his SETA contractor (think independent technical advisor) to our office and my boss asked me to prepare a desktop demonstration of buoyancy. I put a ping-pong ball into a glass snap-lid container that I'd completely filled with water. I set it on the table, the ping-pong ball floating, pressed against the middle of the lid. I asked, "when I push this container, accelerating it down the table, will the ping-pong ball get closer to or farther from my hand?" His response was, closer to, since the ball's inertia will keep it from accelerating quite as quickly as its container and buoyancy doesn't come into play as it is orthogonal to the motion. I said, actually it will be the opposite because the buoyancy in an accelerating fluid will push forward and outweigh the hollow ball's inertia many times over. He laughed, but stopped short when I pushed the container and he saw the ball jump forward. 

He was visibly flustered, and insistent that we were playing parlor tricks on him. He left quickly, but his SETA gave us a subtle grin. A week later that program manager was fired and we were assigned a new one, who was much better disposed toward our work. It turned out this SETA, who had to deal with this abrasive program manager more often than we did, happily spread the gossip around DARPA of this particular demonstration, and it turns out they don't let people run hundreds of millions of dollars for the Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency if they don't know their physics. 

I didn't feel bad about crushing this particular guy's dreams. I've never had much respect for authority that hasn't been earned. I'm just a high-school drop-out who put himself through public university, but I don't love being talked down to by someone who assumes they know better because they're older and went to a fancy school. Knowledge is the great leveler. 

These days I'm being approached by engineering startups surprisingly regularly. It's flattering to be pitched and I love hearing new ideas, but I find myself asking the tough questions. If you're considering your own startup and would like your dreams crushed early in the hopes of finding a better path forward, here are some common themes I've noticed.

No one is going to steal your idea. All the "stealth-mode" and NDAs are childish nonsense whose only purpose is to make people feel special. Your most treasured idea I guarantee at least 100 people have already thought of. If other people are actually working on the same idea, that's a good sign! That's validation the idea has some merit. We're all believers in (reasonably) free-market capitalism, right? Embrace competition! It's what makes us great.

Intellectual property is a sham. Patents have utterly ceased to have societal value - I say this as someone named in a number of them. No one finds inspiration by looking through patents anymore, if they ever did. Any decent engineer can invent their way around a blocking patent. The reason companies end up infringing is because they never saw the offending patent. All they do now is serve a fantasy to financiers and lawyers that they can commoditize engineering and restrict innovation. Publishing your ideas in any form is adequate for patent defense - you only need patents if you want to be a rent-seeking troll.

Execution is everything. Ideas don't matter because ideas (even great ideas) are everywhere. Actually creating a thing that realizes an idea - that's the hard part. To succeed, you need to be better at execution than the competition. If your only hope of being the best is to be the only, you may as well give up now. 

If your big idea will be executed outside of your own expertise, that's a very bad sign. Do you really think the people in that field haven't thought of your idea? If they aren't doing it, what do they know that you don't yet realize? And how do you plan to lead a team of these experts when you aren't familiar with how the work is done? Don't make the same mistake as GE and Boeing, letting accountants run engineering companies.

Know what kind of hard your problem is. Is it a business model problem, an engineering problem, a design problem? Avoid research problems at all cost - they cannot be scheduled, there is little chance they will bear fruit, and no amount of resources will change that. The most common mistake of a founder out of their depth is not seeing the line between research and development. 

If you don't have a plan to make a successful small business, why do you think you'll be able to make a successful large business? Small teams are more efficient - even if you envision yourself as the king of a vast corporate empire, start small. Prove not just that you can make something or even sell something, but that you can balance the books and support a few staff with revenue. That's what defines a successful businessperson. Build from that foundation. This will also let you keep much more control (and ownership) of your company. 

Of course we also have an old joke that aerospace startups are for turning billionaires into millionaires. By this I mean my compatriots often find themselves working at startups that they clearly see have no chance of commercial success, or even of flying anything at full scale, but the work is fun and interesting and if the check clears, it's a good gig. One can always pivot when reality gets too close for comfort. And this mentality goes well beyond aerospace - sometimes it becomes fraud, but mostly it powers the churn of the venture capital slot machine. Plenty of people make their fortunes off PowerPoint engineering, but I prefer to build things with lasting value.

I get asked occasionally what would entice me to leave Google, and honestly it would take a fair bit; I like my job. There is a job I can imagine, though I'm unsure if it exists: a professional crusher of dreams. I could be a true asset to an investor or venture capitalist who didn't want to just play the slots, but get some edge by truly vetting technical startups. I can be the person who's immune to the slick haircuts and handshakes, who asks the hard questions and interviews the technical team - a polymath who knows enough about a lot of disciplines to quickly review a new space and understand the risks. The difficulty: finding someone that needs this advice, who is humble enough to realize it.