Most Initial Estimates are Bullshit

I was reading an article this morning with a quote by Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO. He was talking about how xAI, Elon Musks OpenAI competitor, connected 100,000 H100s GPUs in 19 days. He said this to usually takes other companies 1 year to complete...

19 days is a spectacular feat by any measure. But how could any company do something 20X faster than another? I'm sure there is a huge amount of detail that goes in to providing an accurrate answer on exactly how, but at a high level I bet there is one very simple answer:

One person, or a few, expected it to be done much more quickly and push very hard.

Most founders never learn a very simple lesson

You must be extremely unreasonable on timelines

The worst possible thing that could happen is you miss. Sure, there may be more pressing concerns of company runway, but for most projects this simply isn't the case. Few things are on the critical path. And so it's on the founders shoulders to push for "the impossible".

The first key to “the impossible” being possible is refusing to believe initial estimates.

They have buffer built in. Everyone plays it safe. Nobody wants to miss an initial estimate so it is generally padded to within an inch of it's life. And almost every estimate is missed. I've said internally at Firstbase an inumerable amount of times that I've never seen an estimate over 30 days being hit. That's not because people don't want to, or aren't fighting incredibly hard to do it. But beyond 30 days, everything os too complex to give an accurate date.

Said different, most initial estimate are on the upper bound of what most people think is possible. It's usually the highest possible number they think is reasonable to suggest.

And the problem is most companies never push back on this!

The estimate becomes the anchor.

Setting Better Target Conditions

Every business could benefit from being more ambitious.

When JFK visited to the NASA Space Centre in 1962, hes noticed a janitor carrying a broom. He walked over to the man and said: “Hi, I'm Jack Kennedy, what are you doing?” The janitor responded: “I'm helping put a man on the moon, Mr President.”

Missions drive. Ambition unites. Achivement inspires.

Leaders must implore everyone to ask: “Is this ambitious enough?”

And everyone must ask that all the time. "You said, last week. Why not tomorrow? Why not today? Are we being ambitious enough?"

For every project aspirations and ambitions must be pushed: "Why stop there. What if we shot for this? What if we dreamed bigger? How could we be more ambitious?"

Leaders need to fight the entropy of bullshit estimates.

It's human psychology to want to under promise and over deliver.

There is only one way I've seen that gets companies anywhere close to understanding what is actually possible in estimates: push people until they literally tell you "that's impossible".

Once you've established what's impossible, you can dial it back one step. You want people to say: "That’s crazy, I think we can do it, I have no idea how we will, but it’s possible."

Until you hear those words, you aren't being ambitious enough.

You're accepting less than what is actually possible. And every time you do, each of these prior situations stacks on top of the other and pushes a company toward death. Every time a startup accepts less ambitious, they accept becoming a slow, big, beurocratic business.

And there is massive discomfort that comes from doing this.

Founders must embrace it.