This is my first column in a while and I got to thinking that, although I’ve been writing this column for a while now, a fair number of readers may have started reading it without ever getting a proper introduction. So let me start the “new” year with an introduction.
What I write about, most of the time, are founders — the people who start and run their own businesses in the space sector — the challenges they face, the environment they work in. And, sometimes, about how their success or failure is enabled and influenced by government policy.
I write about these things because I think it’s underexplained, and because I spend a lot of time with founders. I have come to know that they spend an enormous amount of energy assuming the problem is them, when usually it isn’t. I can see that, but they often don’t.
That’s the topic. The reason I feel entitled to write about it — and I use that word carefully, because entitlement is exactly the thing to be suspicious of — comes from a somewhat unusual combination of experiences.
I spent close to 25 years at a small Canadian space company called Neptec, starting in a technical role and eventually running the company as President and CEO, taking over from the founder when he stepped back. I did not start that business. I want to be precise about that, because I use the word “founder” constantly in this column and I am not one, in the strict sense. But I ran a business in which I was a small minority shareholder for the better part of a decade, which taught me something different than founding one does — it taught me what the job looks like from the inside once the founder’s original vision has had to survive contact with payroll, customers, and boards.
After Neptec, I moved into the executive team of Canada’s national trade association representing space and aerospace companies, large and small. That was its own education — an intimate look at how a wide range of companies were run, and a close-up view of how government really works. And whatever you may have heard, it does work. But not the way they teach in civics class. I learned to see how the sausage of government policy gets made. The actual version, with actual people in it, making actual trade-offs under actual constraints.
While working at the association I also started volunteering as a mentor in the Creative Destruction Lab Space Stream, which ended up being the bridge to my next career. While I was at the association, Neptec was sold. I was a minor shareholder, and the exit left me with enough of a nest egg to go looking for what I really wanted to do next. Which turned out to be this: using everything I’d absorbed — the operating experience, the government experience, the pattern-recognition that only shows up after you’ve spent enough time to see the signal through the noise — to coach and mentor founders who are somewhere on the road I’d already traveled.
That’s the combination. Operator, industry-association executive with a government-facing seat, CDL Mentor listening to founders’ stories and hearing investors reactions to them. And now coach, sitting across from founders every week, and with investors’ who fund them.
I don’t know many people who’ve stood in all those places. That’s not a boast so much as an observation about supply — there just aren’t that many people who have worked in a startup, then run a small business, then run a trade association, been a government relations professional, and now spend their days coaching startups. Whatever perspective that combination produces, I don’t see it represented very often. That, and not any particular talent for writing, is the reason I write.
Which brings me to the part that matters more than the résumé, and the part I want to be careful to get right.
I don’t write these columns because I have a cause. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, and if that sounds like a strange thing for a columnist to say, I mean it precisely. I write because I believe the things I’ve seen and the patterns I’ve noticed. And I believe that what I think I know might matter to someone else — might be useful, might save someone by making the mistakes I have made or seen made. Or it might allow someone to see a similar pattern they can make use of to become more successful.
But whether any of it actually is useful is not for me to decide. That, dear readers, is your job. My job, as I see it, is to describe what I’ve noticed as clearly as I can and then get out of the way. You get to decide what, if anything, is worth keeping.
It is not uncommon in our attention economy to find writing that that leads with certainty — that insists the framework is right, the five steps work, the lesson is universal if you’d just apply it correctly. I’ve never trusted that voice, in other people’s writing or in my own head when I catch myself reaching for it. Forty years gives you a lot of pattern-recognition. It does not give you the right to skip the part where you stay curious about whether this particular pattern applies to this particular situation in front of you. The moment I stop being curious about that is the moment I should probably stop writing this column.
And that curiosity isn’t a one-time thing I did and then wrote up. It’s ongoing, which is really the point I most want to land before I let you go today. I’m in rooms with founders every week. I am also in rooms with the investors who back them, people who support them and government officials making policy that is supposed to help them. All of this is data that adds to the database, and as happens when you collect enough data, I start to see new patterns – and recognize new signals – which leads me to new understanding.
And that is what generates new ideas that I can turn into “content.” Often, it isn’t a case of discovering something new. Often, it’s a case of a new perspective that lets me understand things that have happened in the past. So, my columns are not always about the here and now, but they are always about how I see the world, and the things that I now understand that I think will be interesting to others. Hopefully you will continue to be one of those people.