Working at a startup can be stressful and downright difficult, but that doesn't mean you have to be a rocket scientist to get your business off the ground.
But, it couldn't hurt.
It turns out the skills learned working at NASA can help your startup succeed, at least according to two Austin tech veterans. We talked with these former NASA employees to learn how their time working on the nation’s space program helped them launch their own ventures.
As a kid, Aceable chief product officer Erin Defosse (pictured above) always wanted to build spaceships. During his time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that’s just what he helped do. With training in aerospace design, he worked in program design on the Galileo and Cassini spacecraft, in what he called the “product management” role within NASA.
“You have to put together an entire plan that includes designing the spacecraft,” he said. “What is it going to look like? You’re talking to scientists, who are your customers essentially, to figure out what the spacecraft needs to do to get the science that they need to satisfy their goals.”
When it came time for Defosse to found his own startup, a remote sensor management software maker called Isochron, those product management skills helped. But he also learned how to work methodically at NASA, constantly pushing toward a concrete set of goals. That focus helped balance a more freewheeling attitude that often pervades (and can derail) many startups.
“We can't just talk about stuff and pray that it happens,” Defosse said. “We have to document things, we have to be checking up on them, we have to have closed-loop processes so that when we identify an area of opportunity we actually follow up on it. Which sounds obvious, but if you don't have that rigor of actually doing it, it can be very easy to just be lackadaisical about stuff.”
A balance of rigor and agility
Since NASA is a government agency working with public money, it had to be very careful about wasting funds.
“When I got there, Galileo and Cassini, those were multi-billion dollar programs, so you had to do everything with military precision,” Defosse said. “There was no room for error. If one of those things didn't work out, you were out a few billion dollars, and not only that but like decades of people's careers. They were very conservative programs.”
That military precision helped Defosse stay on course with his own startup and in his work with other startups. But NASA may have taken some lessons from the startup world as well. Thanks to lower hardware cost and the growth of commercial space programs, the space agency is able to take a few more risks.
“Some of these missions you can put up for $100 million,” Defosse said. “I know it's still a lot of money, but $100 million versus a few billion changes your risk profile in terms of how you decide to do things. Now, the programs are much more entrepreneurial than when I was there.”
NASA is a big place, and not everyone is working directly on getting things into space. Katy Jeremko (pictured above) was a designer in residence with the space agency before cofounding large-format 3D printer manufacturer re:3D.
“At NASA, they're working on these really strange missions [to collect information], but I was more on the side of deploying that information to people and understanding how to communicate it and how to put it in a nice package so that they can really do something with it,” Jeremko said. “That's been a big part of 3D printing too. You have to think about the educational aspect and how to make it digestible.”
For Jeremko, the lessons learned were less about project management or military precision and more about building communities. With re:3D, she is relying on people building useful and interesting 3D-printable objects that her company’s 3D printers can create.
“People want to participate in space. They want to feel like they're part of your mission,” she said. “And so if our organizations can try to align themselves to accept participation, then they're definitely set up for success.”
Listen to your customers
Jeremko also learned to value outside opinions. Since she was working with the public, listening to citizens critiques of her work was part of the job. But she also got to see how they put her work to use, taking data she helped release and use it for projects at Maker Faire events around the country.
"At NASA, we realized how to open-source a bunch of digital data, but then actually going to these Maker Faires and talking with people and seeing what they were doing in the park," she said. "It was a really exciting moment to see that there was a tangible opportunity to transform people's lives and give them the ability to physically solve their own problems."
In fact, seeing what people were doing with 3D printers at those Maker Faires helped inspire re:3D. When Jeremko was studying at Syracuse University, the 3D printer was $40,000 and simple projects cost $50 to print. But small machines that could be assembled by the end user brought down those costs and jump started an ecosystem of devices.
By harnessing all the public data like what she worked with at NASA and building large-format printers to build larger objects, she hopes re:3D will help more people design, share and create with 3D printers.
Images via Shutterstock and featured companies
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