Curing the symptoms instead of the disease in high tech and space startups.

I always like to watch interesting webinars, recently I have been interested in everything about the new "corona-world" and a webinar was organized on that topic by Mr. Peter Diamandis. Gentleman from investment funds were talking about what has changed and what hasn't changed in their point of view, related mostly to investing in new disruptive technologies, high tech stuff, but also real estate and so on.

I saw the comments from many startup leaders and I felt the need to share my experience of managing a team competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, because I see some of them have the same dilusions I had ten years ago, so maybe my experience will help them save some time, and time is money. Google Lunar XPRIZE was a competition in which teams competed to send a rover to the Moon and send videos and pictures back to the Earth, for a total of US$ 30 million in prizes.

(By the way, I believe there should be more f*ck-up webinars, where people share their mistakes, not only success.)

(Almost) everything is possible.

I became the leader of a team competing to send a rover to the Moon, which was highly unlikely taking into consideration where I'm coming from and what my status and contacts were at the time. My best practice, to quickly programme my mindset into achieveing something is to imagine that it already happened. I don't know about others, but it very often works for me. It's not magic, it won't create gold out of thin air, but it will remove any obstacles you may have within you and give you courage and ideas.

It all started when I was invited to join another team, but after a while, I disagreed how it was supposed to be managed. To cut the long story short, they were more into inspiring people, quoting Arthur Clarke and promoting space industry (which is fine), and I was more into making a business case out of it. I'm not greedy about money, but money makes the rocket fly to the Moon, so you need money.

I saw that my attempts of making a good business case could not be carried out unless I lead the team, so I decided to leave them and either start a new team or take over a dormant one.

As it was too late to start a new team, and also I didn't have the money to apply, we started looking for a team which was dormant, and the best indication of that was the activity (or better, lack of activity) on social media. So we found Team Stellar, but we had no contacts. At that time, Internet was not so resourceful in terms of reaching somebody.

The only thing we had was the name of the team leader. I decided we start calling all the people in US with that name / last name, until we find our guy. Luckily for us, it was the first guy we called. After some negotiations, I flew to the US, signed the paperwork and took over Team Stellar, a team competing to land a rover on the Moon, as a part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition.

Stop playing Star Trek and get to work!

I realized, from before, that many of the teams competing had a serious lack of management. The most usual pattern was that the founders, which were space enthusiasts and engineers, assigned the titles amongst themselves and took it from there.

So, for example, if three guys started a team, an electronics engineer, a propulsion engineer and a communications engineer, they would probably have a team structure of a CEO on the top (one of them) and electronics manager, propulsion manager and a communications manager.

This kind of a setup is not good, because there are so many tasks not being recognized or done by anyone, you open up for possibility of two people doing the same thing and also some people not doing anything worthwhile.

It's like building a house from the roof instead of foundations.

The correct way would be, to see what is the main proccess, what are the supporting proccesses and assign the people according the vacancies you have in the team.

For example, if you have a bakery, the main proccess is baking and selling bread, and the supporting proccesses would be buying the supplies, making the dough, baking, sales, marketing etc.

In our case, the main proccess was sending the rover to the Moon, and the supporting proccesses were rocket, lander, rover, communications, mission control, marketing, legal etc. So all of the sudden, you realize, you don't have anyone to lead the lander team and you can't design the rover until you design the lander.

Seeing teams creating rovers and impressing everyone at science conventions with a space-looking remote controlled toy car was in a way dissapointing, because when you ask them what is the volume, mass and power budget on their lander, they don't know, because they haven't designed the lander yet. How do you know the dimensions of your rover then, and creating this toy was just a waste of time. A shiny gift box, but when you open it, there is nothing inside.

A good example was, on one GLXP summit they were telling us that most of the teams' websites are bad and we had lessons how to improve the websites. My comment was, that we are curing the symptoms, not the disease. The real problem was lack of management, because if the magament was set up according the proccesses, then someone would be in charge of the marketing/PR proccess and this person would have goals, deadlines, a budget and the website would be number on priority for him/her, for sure. If you cure the websites, tomorrow another problem or a "website" will happen and this will go on forever, but if you cure the management, the website will be fixed automatically, and most other problems.

OK, so we drew our proccesses in a brainstorming session, now what?

Well now, you go to project management and create at least a low detail Ghantt chart, so you have some kind of a plan. Resources, budgets (working time, money etc.)

Then you can build some kind of a budget, to know how much it will all cost. And YES, in our case, it cost more than the GLXP award.

How to build something from nothing?

Now, before you go looking for money, you have to become more than just that shiny box with nothing inside. The art was, how to build something from nothing? As we didn't have any money, or any other thing to offer to the investors, other than our high spirits, we decided to invite engineers into our team to take positions without being paid. The logic was, if we set up a team with great c.v.s, the investors will see the value and trust us that we could do it. Suddenly, (also thanks to linkedin), we gathered quite an impressive team. Designers of electrical systems on mars rovers, engineers from top level aerospace companies, people who worked on Apollo 11, designed de-mining robots and so on. The problem was, now we had members from all over the Globe and each country has it's own export restriction, and especially the US was strict with the ITAR. So basically, we could have all the names on our lists, but we couldn't use most of them because we were not allowed, and we started some basic groundwork to get approved once we get funded and to allow them to join in, in several steps. Funny enough, I would never be allowed access to some aspects of our operation.

On the other hand, because we were a team competing for the GLXP, we got a lot of freebies, and one of them was a software to preciselly calculate our mission to the Moon. So we used the engineers from the countries where we didn't have the export restriction issues, to design our mission to the Moon. And we did. We calculated the launch masses, trajectories, parking orbits, trans lunar injection and landing, everything. Our 4000 kg payload at low Earth orbit was enough to bring a 169 kg payload to the Moon.

We didn't have the money to set up an actual lab, but we had a big chunk of engineering and planning already done. We had a plan, it seemed like we knew what we were doing.

How do we get the money?

There are many strategies how to get the money. You can maybe rob a bank (they started first, right?), try crowdfunding, get investment from companies, individuals, get sponsorships, try advertizing, joint ventures, selling payload space, inheriting money from your rich aunt from Australia or playing the guitar on the street. The point is, you can't invest your very limited resources to investigate all of those strategies. You must choose a few which are most likely to succeed.

In our case, our strategies were advertizing, offering joint development of spacecraft and education.

Advertizing strategy. Space is boring!

Advertizing was, in my opinion, the best shot. For example, we were guests in a Space Agency in the Middle East, they already had two satellites and a nice operation. Right next to them, there was a football field, and the football club got more money from the government than their space programme, at the time.

It was very clear why it happened. The reason why sports, and especially football has so much money is because people are personally involved in the team. When they come home from the game, they say WE won, or WE played well, or WE brought a new player. Ordinary people wear the team's dresses and feel like they are personally involved. What did we do with the space industry? We make satellites, which are boxes with solar panels. That is extremelly borring and not even the mothers of the engineers who build them are impressed. How can ordinary people relate to that, or become personally involved? In the eyes of the public it's: "Those nerds burnt a lot of money to send a box into the orbit to make nice photos from space which we can get from one million other boxes that are already in space." People want the USS Enterprize, hotels in space and so on. That is far into the future, but with current promotion of space exploration, it's even farther. More kids want to be youtubers than astronauts. Why not both? Don't have astronauts showing telemetry data, have them play tennis in microgravity, if you want to promote space.

On the other hand, imagine if we created a robot vehicle that is displayed in the Mall of Dubai (for example) and everyone gets to drive it on the fake lunar surface. People would be personally involved, in their minds, its "our" rover, not "their" rover.

Imagine if you bought, for example, Nike space shoes, you got a password to upload a photo of your kids to our rover, and have it sent to the Moon. Every time you looked at the Moon, you would remember that your kid's photos are there, but also you would remember who made it happen. If Nike sold 100 million shoes through some space launch reality show campaign, they would need to give us one dollar per set of shoes to make it happen. We spoke to many clothes manufacturers, car manufacturers, spart phone manufacturers and the reponse was more than often: "We don't like your idea, we LOVE it!". The problem occurs when they ask if we are sure we can perform the mission sucessfully. We can't guarantee that the launch provider's rocket wouldn't blow up, that the trans-lunar injection would work, that the communications would work, that the Lunar navigation would work. That's why it's so attractive, however, the decision makers in the big companies had a lot to loose personally, if the project fails, but not much to gain, so after a lot of efforts, the strategy that seemed most likely to succeed, turned out to be too early for the market.

Car manufacturers just don't see the benefit of letting their customers remotelly drive a rover on the Lunar surface just to show off that nobody else did it.

The second strategy was to connect with various companies producing stuff or offering services which we could use on our spacecraft (free use of ground antennae network, batteries, communications devices etc.) and offer them an opportunity to be a part of a Google Lunar XPRIZE competition in exchange for free software, batteries and so on. I believe this strategy could have worked at some later stage of funding, let's say if we already had a lab and were already on our way to finish the lander, rover etc. Other than free software (which is otherwise very expensive), it was just some sporadic connection with not much result.

The third strategy was to include the kids and students in our work. We wanted to set up a lab in a way to allow talented kids and students to work alongside our engineers. The plan was to boost the global status of various universities and even countries. Many rich countries have programmes and invest a lot of money both for propaganda and educational purposes in similar projects. Other than some realtivelly small sponsorships, we also couldn't get very far, money wise.

How to explain the investors that you want to open a "mobile phone accessories factory" before mobile phone has been invented?

That was the biggest problem of our business case. When you make a business plan for a "normal" business, you have the obligatory chapters about the competition, the market and so on. Here, we don't have any successful competition, but also there is no market, we would have to create our market and new needs. Of course, at the moment, there is no market in selling 10 minutes of Lunar rover driving time with VR goggles to a millionaire's son for his birthday. But for sure, the first company that does it, that creates that market, will do well.

It is rocket science.

Yes, however, things have changed since the Apollo times. A lot of things are available online. Books, videos, knowledge. Software. People. I used to write and update a book called "Operations Manual", where we had some basic things, such as management setup, hierarchy, procedures regarding ITAR, decision making procedures, award sharing prinicples etc. In 2012 I used to send it around and ask for feedback. Imagine, how could have I sent a 200 page manual to Australia and get the feedback the next day, just 15 years before? Where would I find a free of charge high resolution Lunar map, a list of launch providers, ISP of a second stage rocket engine and so on?

Today, a spaceship is just a very expensive shopping basket on ebay, if I may use a metaphor.

Also, in 1990s, space was reserved for the lucky few. The average cost of placing one pound of payload to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) was almost US$ 20,000. Now, you can do it for as low as US$1000.

A lot of things are more accessible, knowledge is available online, people are connected and everything is a lot cheaper.

What if it all blows up?

That's what makes it so exciting, and exciting means interesting for sponsors. People watch rockets lift off because it is a rare, impressive and uncertain thing. Not so many people get excited by watching paint dry on the wall, or panda bears move by 10 inches in 5 hours.

If the mission fails, with the proper build up, the next launch will be even more intereting, and even more people will watch.

It's a small world

Pretty soon we got to realize how small the world is. From drinking beer with the head of the Houston Mission Control, talking to actual astronauts, having your kid's kindergarten artwork printed and hanging on the wall of the ISS, we had some pretty cool experiences. For example, we made a presentation as a part of a European Planetary Science Congress, at the University College of London and having a dinner on the Thames where they rose the Tower Bridge in the honor of the group that we were in. Twice. I was a panelist at the ICAO Space Convention in Abu Dhabi, amongst Sierra Nevada, Airbus Space, Virgin Galactic and others, the President of Croatia called us for a meeting and so on.

Non profits?

Don't. Please don't go down that road. We tried to open a non profit as a part of our efforts, because the team was registered as an LLC, and we hoped that having a non profit as well could help us access some resources and funds. We did get some almost free office space, and 2000 EUR government grant to buy a laptop. On the other hand, in a non profit, the whole proccess oriented setup is not possible, unless you pay everyone. In an LLC, you can offer shares in the company, or shares in the GLXP prize or whatever. In a non profit, it's a system where a lot of things rest on member's enthusiasm and democracy. Democracy is a bad way to lead a team. You end up with the same group of peple working hard, same group of people promissing and not doing things they promissed and everyone has the same "voting right". It should be avoided. Also, the investors don't like non profits, there are other people who may provide funds, but they are not investors, they are just giving money away because they feel for your cause, or plan for some tax reliefs. In any case, its a galaxy away from a heatlhy, goal driven, proccess oriented company, where you know who is who, who is doing what and, based on what motivation.

Google Lunar XPRIZE itself was showing some bad signs of a non profit as well. For example, teams needed to have an insurance covering, amongst other things, a rocket launch, hardware testing etc. Does it make sense to have an isurance for a rocket launch if you don't plan to launch a rocket or test any hardware for the next two years? Or does it make sense to have a launch part of the insurance for a whole year if you plan only one launch? Or does it make sense if you use another launch provider which has it's own insurance and is beyond your responsibility or control? In the end, we had to pay US$ 4000 worth of insurance per year to be able to receive a US$ 64,000 award for promoting space science, simply because eligible teams needed to have an insurance. In a company, the whole profit/cost reduction motivated feedback and self check system would have cought this thing and corrected it. This way, the insurance company got a lot of money from us, which we could have really used. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic opportunity and I am grateful for it.

How did it all end?

Well, regarding the Lunar mission, obviouselly, we don't have a rover on the Moon. We made a couple of competitions for high schools in Croatia, where kids made experiments, scinetific papers and youtube videos, and we launched them to stratosphere, roughly one third way to space. I believe we were the team that got geographically closest to the Moon during the regular period of the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition. The kids were great, they made their own radiation sensors, they measured the speed of sound, the viscosity of jet fuel and much more. We gave them a total of HRK 120,000 (cca US$ 20,000) cash awards, which was really great for Croatia. They also flew in cockpit of Croatia Airlines and some smaller pilot schools (ECOS, Delic Air, Air Pannonia). On one of the flights in 2014 we hade live HD quality streaming via Wifi from 30km altitude, which was pretty cool.

A one million US$ award for outreach was split among the teams, so we received cca US$ 64,000, which we used to cover the prizes on one of the competitions for kids and to give awards to 15 most deserving Stellar members.

Next?

Last year we actually got a paying payload to stratosphere, we send some sausages to 39km altitude and got paid for it. We have some other cool projects planned, but this time, as a hobby.

I hope this story helped high tech startups and please remember that engineers are not managers, and if you put a good engineer to manage something, for sure you will loose a good engineer, but you might not get a good manager.