Lesson #2: Commit To Failing In A New Way

“Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts,” says Musk. “If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way.”

In launching his space exploration company, Musk knew he was getting himself into dangerous territory. He had little to no experience in the field, and he knew that many if not most of those who had come before him had failed. Starting a business in this industry, Musk knew, he was setting himself up for failure. Indeed, the odds were against him. But Musk was willing to take that chance. And he decided that if he was going to fail, he was going to fail differently than anyone else ever had.

“There’s a graveyard of prior attempts, a big graveyard,” he says. “There’s probably some freshly dug graves just waiting to be filled. Our aspiration is to avoid that destination.” Musk analyzed the reasons for which previous companies in his line of work had failed. He narrowed it down to three: the lack of critical mass of the appropriate technical skill; insufficient capital to complete the project, especially in the face of unexpected obstacles; and, relying on a series of technological breakthroughs that never happened.

“I think we’ve got the risks pretty well characterized,” says Musk. “I think we are at least avoiding the mistakes that have been made in the past.” Still, he admits, that upbeat attitude might change in a few months time. “I think the rocket business is quite cyclic. There are a great many peaks and troughs.”

To that end, Musk says this third business is much more of a challenge than either of his first two, Zip2 and PayPal, although he uses them as an analogy to compare. “Imagine creating a huge software program that can only be tested in little pieces on a computer that is slightly different from what it is supposed to run on,” he says. “However, when you do run it as a whole on the actual computer for the first time, it must run almost flawlessly without a single significant bug. When is the last time you saw a software program do that?”

Despite the troughs, however, Musk believes in the promise of the industry, and thinks the risk of failing is one worth taking. “When thinking about starting a business, I think it’s actually better to start in a trough and come to market in a peak, than the other way around,” he says. “Frankly, if anything does, and it’s almost cliché, space has a long-term future.”

And, through it all, Musk is willing to continue working towards his dream because he is having fun in the process. That is why he is putting everything he has into it. “I want to be able to make sure that we have enough capital to survive at least three consecutive failures,” he says. “If you want to make a small fortune in the launch vehicle business, start with a large one.”



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