Iain Christie

In this column I am going to take a slightly different viewpoint than my last two. In the last two columns I provide what I think is sound advice to founders of small businesses on how to deal with customers. In the last column I specifically singled out government customers.

This is another of my columns under the general heading of “advice to founders.” It’s kind of an extension of the last one, but this time dealing with how to deal with the government.

This is one of what I hope will be a series of columns under the general heading of “Advice to Founders.” These are topics that I find I come back to often in my conversations with founders of small businesses and which I think are things that anyone who has, or is thinking about, founding a business should know.

In my work with companies in the space sector I am increasingly seeing what I think is a serious issue that is impairing the growth of companies that seem to have all the factors in place to be successful.

Over the past few years the space industry has been undergoing a disruptive change.  This has been, and is, an interesting experience for those of us who have worked in the industry for some time. Because there is (or was) a funny paradox about the space business that while what we did in space was constantly changing and presenting new challenges and opportunities, how we did those things had …

Anyone who has been working in or following the space business over the last decade is familiar with the dichotomy that has grown up between “new” or entrepreneurial space ventures and traditional space programs. Often these sectors seem to be a model of the classic two solitudes, existing side by side but embodying two different world views and without a lot of (constructive) interaction. But …

As some of you may know I recently started a podcast called Terranauts. I like to say that the purpose of the podcast is tell stories about people who work in space without ever leaving the ground. Hence the name.