01:41:16 · Ethan Thornton
[01:41:16] S1: There are so many names for the same thing. It's basically like restart the program. Okay. Keep going. Now that happens when an engineering org is functioning very healthy. That also happens when it's functioning in a very unhealthy way. Dude, we jacked up the development process on RevA, a Viper, to, like, a heinous, heinous, heinous debris, and it probably set us back, like, nine months on company engineer on, like, a... What has been, like, a thirty, thirty six month timeline. And that came down to... There's a specific art to providing voltage to your engineering teams. And this is more of a leadership scale, but that leadership skill translated poorly into development. Folks think about executing fast, and they think that comes down to setting aggressive timelines and then sticking to those timelines really, really, really hard. And then there's also... There's always this very, very healthy balance with with you and a lot of your team that is you're you're generally responsible for for advocating short timelines that are high risk, and they're advocating long timelines that are low risk. In those discussions, there are two ways those discussions can happen. If you were were were an engineer on my team and you say this is gonna take twelve months, I say no. I think that this should take nine months. That is super, super demoralizing and pushes people to make the wrong decisions. And I did that hardcore in in RevA. It was a crappy, crappy product. Like, we barely reached wings level flight on the product after, like, months of trying. Like, level. And this is like... This thing was like the sophistication of, an RC, like, RC, like, model airplane. It's like an easy challenge, and we executed it poorly. What I've... What I found on that specific thing is you do have a job of getting things done on short time lines. But there are two things that I still... I'm still not great at it. I'm still trying to get better, but two things you wanna do. One is if you say, I think this should take nine months and push that down top down. That is very different language than for the sake of the mission. This actually just has to take nine months. It sounds it sounds like small nuance, but I think it's actually very, very important in the way your team feels.
01:43:22 · Ethan Thornton
The first puts you at odds with your team, and you're kind of calling them idiots or saying they don't work hard even if you don't think they are. The second is like, guys, I'm on your side. Like, this is, like, objectively a a crazy thing, but if we don't get it done, like, the product won't ship in time, and the Ukrainians won't win the war or China will invade Taiwan. And so that is a really, really important reframing. That then allows the second thing, which is instead of saying, I think this should take this long, ask why is this taking this long? And that again kind of inverts the the way that conversation is leading. And suddenly, in that in that process, the first is just purely adversarial. And you're not a good engineer at this phase of your... You might have good engineering fundamentals. You might be super smart. But, dude, I don't... I... Like, I'm quite acutely bad. I'm getting better in most of our engineering domains. Like, I'd say, like, I'm probably strongest on, like, vehicle level slash mechanical stuff, still not excellent. The second you get into RF, the second you get into chip design, I'm actually just not in a place to say these things should take faster because I'm not the expert. But there's this there's this art you have to you have to get good at. You're hiring people from companies where timelines are long, and they don't have to be long. And you do have to constrain them because they should be shorter. I I tend to think most companies ship products way, way, way slower than they ship. In the process of asking why something takes longer, It sounds so simple, but it's so easy to mess up, and I see people mess it up all the time. So I am gonna explain it even if people are, like, rolling their eyes because it sounds super abundantly clear. You learn a lot about what the hard processes are, and you're on the side of your team. And you can you can actually way, way, way more successfully sort of push that timeline down. And then that... Though, that fundamentally just builds a better engineer culture. One, the execs are on the side of engineering, and you together are against the problem. Two, when you admit things that are... Like, you admit bad things, you get a lot more credibility.
01:45:26 · Ethan Thornton
And when you admit you're not confident on things, you get a lot more credibility when you say things are good or you say, I am confident on this thing. And there's this trap, I think especially for young leaders, of thinking you need to be the smartest in the room. Again, this is so cliche, but I I fumbled hard on it. Your job is to be the dumbest in the room on any given thing happening. Your job though is to have the most developed world model on how those things work together. And also... And that's kind of the microscope part and then the telescope part of where do we need to wrangle these things to be in in a handful of years. And so in the process of admitting what you deeply, deeply don't know, and in many cases actually playing dumber than you are, you gain a lot of trust with your team. And then when you push back on things, do say, I'm very, very confident on that. You you you get a lot of confidence. And then similarly, if you're always saying, this will take this long, this will take this long, this will take this long, it's a completely different balance of how you're applying pressure to the team.
01:46:29 · Ty Morse
[01:46:29] S0: I think one of the most important things for founders as well as, like, organizations is being able to kind of bounce back from failure. And I love this line that starting a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. And then being a founder or being a good founder is someone that enjoys that. How do you, when something goes horribly wrong, basically rapidly get away from the emotion of that, you know, experience and kind of rethink, you know, how do we move forward most effectively?
01:47:00 · Ethan Thornton
[01:47:00] S1: I think so much of so much of company building is discipline. Like, there's nothing actually inherently that hard about company build. You're in an office. You have meals. No one's shooting at you, you're not like getting attacked by wild animals. Like, it's a lot of like sitting or or walking and like talking to people. Like, from like an objective biological standpoint, it's not that hard. Now it is inherently terrifying, emotionally painful, and cognitively exhausting. And there's something I I think you you want to get good at doing, which is completely separating completely separating those two things. And this is controversial, and I may change my mind here. But I actually think fear and stress are just the worst, worst, worst decision makers. Like, I actually don't know situations in which having those two emotions at the table push you as a CEO to make better decisions. And so there's an art that starts starts by disciplining yourself on those two things. Like, yes, I'm terrified of this thing, but that will cloud my judgment. I will not listen to the fear or or the stress. And then if you do that enough times, you stop feeling those things as much. Because you see you see the results of not making decisions those ways. And you want you want... My my COO has a good line here. It... It's all about emotional inertia is the other thing. Like... And these these, I guess, are the same thread, but, like, it's so spiky. Like, you'll have weeks where just everything is humming, you'll have weeks where everything crashes, and you can't get too high when everything's going well. And and for a number of reasons, you can't start believing that you're Yeah. Very But then similarly, things just inherently stack to be bad. And during those periods, you basically need to bank all of the emotion that you should have felt in the good times and use it at the bad times. And if you're doing your job right, and it's a very, hard thing to do and I'm not great at it, and it's... It starts with discipline and then it becomes habitual, it's just not that painful because biologically it's not that painful. And I think the first time people hear that, they they think that you will care about risk less. They think that you will care about the stakes of what you're doing less, that you'll care about your team less. It's not that you don't care about them.
01:49:20 · Ethan Thornton
It's just that you you act objectively in reference to them without personal fear, and that ends up being the best thing you can possibly do across those three different things.