On Skydiving and Startups

The second one is a great quote. I disagree with the first bit about skydiving not being inherently dangerous, however - I cringe whenever I hear one of my AFF students say something along those lines. It's not just about mistakes - what you don't know CAN kill you. Another quote: "You're never too good not to die in this sport."

I think we're ultimately talking two sides of the same coin: we drill emergency procedures in skydiving to ensure minimum deviation of the plan if something goes wrong...but do we ever know something is going to go wrong? Same thing goes for reserves and helmets: all are there to handle what we don't know is coming. Ultimately, we're preparing to go out and handle what we don't know.

As you said, in startups, we don't have the luxury of a regular process - the whole process is about what we don't know. But if there was a known set of events that happened every time we started a company (i.e., gear up, gear checks, board plane, etc, etc), we'd definitely drill it in order to minimize risk. And we DO do this to some extent - why else does almost every tech startup founder read Steve Blank's book?

In skydiving, you can make mistakes because of the gear and emergency procedures you're working with - and you learn from each of them. In a startup, you can make mistakes because your goal is to make mistakes and learn from them. But both require a 'safety net' of some sort to allow you to make those mistakes. Without it, the company fails...or the skydiver bounces.