the onda

I've recently told a couple of first-time entrepreneurs that a venture backed startup is like throwing the parts of an airplane off a cliff and hoping that you've got a tall enough cliff and a good enough team to assemble the aircraft before you hit the ground. It's a bit dramatic, but it generally gets the point across.

Last night though I came across a better analogy in the form of the Wikipedia article on the "Gimli Glider," an Air Canada 767 that, due to a series of small errors by people on the ground and in the cockpit, managed to run completely out of fuel at 41,000 feet mid-flight (the article is a gripping read). The pilots, experienced with gliders, managed to find a runway and glide several miles to a crash landing such that everyone survived.

A venture backed startup, or the ecosystem around it, is quite similar to the one that caused the Gimli mistake. Your board, advisors, and team are responsible for making hundreds of small decisions, some based on analysis, some experience, and a whole bunch of just gut alone, that are usually only tested "system-wide" along the trip when you go to raise money. And when enough of those decisions compound in the wrong direction, you can find yourself at 41,000 feet without any fuel and not a runway in sight. In those situations, the best entrepreneurs are able to calculate glide ratios that land the company either at another funding event, or often times, at a suitable corporate acquirer— but this too, has a huge element of luck.

To continue the analogy with Gimli, the scariest thing is how often it is not about one big decision, but a whole bunch of little ones along the way, which add up to one big bad outcome. This is why I am such a huge fan of what Eric Ries has been proselytizing in the form of the "lean startup," a very effective way to test the validity of all sorts of small decisions, from business ones to technical/architecture ones, along the way. When I think back to my last startup, Tabblo, I think of of the things we did right were right out of the lean startup playbook, without knowing that is what we were doing.

Bootstrapped startups often do this sort of thing out of necessity— but increasingly, the better venture backed startups are doing it as a way to avoid the Gimli situation. And that is a good thing for the ecosystem as a whole.