A Letter from Chris Suarez

MUSK, BEZOS, & BRANSON: ONE COMMON THREAD

Hard work.  

It’s doubtful that anyone would argue with the fact that building or creating anything valuable, useful, or worth something takes hard work. Plain hard work. Consistent hard work. At moments however, we all will reach a point where we ask ourselves, “should this be getting any easier?” or perhaps, “will I have to work this hard forever?”

The answers to those could be “yes it should” and “no you won’t”. Let’s explain.  

Starting any business, building any team, creating anything new in any industry or marketplace will take incredibly hard work. Just ask Elon, Jeff, or Richard. All know what it’s like to do hard work over a long period of time. However, each of them have run multiple companies on the same premise. They have each proved that once the right systems are designed, once the right tools are built, once the right models are executed consistently, and once the right people are in place, the initial effort needed will decrease. 

Enter the race for space. All three of these men have decided to do something incredibly hard once again. They are individually trying to change the future of space travel through their companies Space X, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic respectively.  I’ve been fascinated by each of them based on their unique mission, their varying strategies, and their undying commitment. And yet, as I got down the rabbit trail of space travel, I came across a few simple facts that would be helpful to know - whether launching a rocket or launching your new business or career.

In order for a rocket to get launched into orbit, a lot needs to happen. We’ll focus on just a few things.

First, the rocket needs to be able to break the earth's gravitational pull, leaving earth’s atmosphere, and literally making it into orbit in space. How does that happen? The rocket must produce 7.2 million pounds of thrust in order to escape earth’s gravitational pull. At that moment, the rocket achieves what is called escape velocity. Historically a rocket would need to carry about 500,000 gallons of fuel in order to achieve that thrust, and thus get into orbit. The new Space X Falcon 9 actually runs on Rocket Propellant 1 or RP-1 and burns just under 30,000 gallons of fuel as a comparison. There is definitely a lesson there in learning from the past and improving for the future. But that is for another day. 

Second, every rocket needs to be able to achieve a speed of 25,000 miles per hour (that's 7 miles per second).  Achieving escape velocity is one of the biggest challenges of space travel. If unable to achieve that minimum speed, reaching orbit will be impossible. Most challenges, problems, and aborted missions happen during the launch phase. Launching anything will always take the most effort, the most energy, and the hardest work.  The same is true in the case of launching a business. 90% of all small businesses fail, with 21.5% of startups failing in the first year and 30% failing in the second year. The launch phase always takes the most energy and effort while simultaneously presenting you with the most resistance and friction.

But here is where things get interesting. The further away from the earth that a rocket gets, the less resistance it will face as the air gets thinner and the gravitational pull weakens. The 7.2 million pounds of thrust that is needed to push through all of the resistance and friction in the earth’s atmosphere can slowly be lessened. As the fuel burns, the rocket picks up more and more speed as it gets lighter and lighter. A rocket can then easily launch a satellite into orbit or break the earth's atmosphere itself. Incredibly, once in orbit, the satellite or rocket needs very little energy or effort. It has now broken free of the resistance and friction of our atmosphere.

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein once said, “If you can get your ship into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.” Let’s put that into perspective for us as business owners. If you were launching a rocket with the goal of reaching Mars, you would use half of your fuel to get out of earth's atmosphere - just about 250 miles in distance. You would then use the other half of your fuel to go from there to Mars - about another 36,000,000 miles away. Building a business at times can feel like a trip to mars. We expend a lot of energy out of the gate, oftentimes feeling like there is no way we can maintain the pace, the energy level, or the hard work for much longer. But we need just focus on getting our business to the point of orbit. Malcom Gladwell called this the “tipping point”. The energy it takes to grow the first half of our business journey will be wildly different from what it takes to achieve exponential growth during the second half of our journey.

Our takeaway? We all want to get into orbit. The hard work we are doing and experiencing right now is to launch our business. And that launch phase can be long - longer than we had hoped for. We are building a rocket, we are preparing our crew, we are adding fuel, and building up speed to achieve escape velocity. The good news? The hard work today will get easier in the future if we build this rocket ship right. That is where the systems, the tools, the models, and most importantly, our talent and partnerships play a massive role. Musk has been working on Space X for over 19 years. Bezos has been working on Blue Origin for 21 years. Branson has been working on Virgin Galactic for 17 years. Success isn’t always about speed. All three of these brilliant men have incredible teams and partners at their side. All of this can be summed up by a simple African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Chris