Essays

Aerospace and engineering thinking, applied to meaning, work, and the inner life. For technical founders and senior leaders rebuilding the thing they built when it stopped fitting.

For founders and technical leaders

You built a company, or a senior technical function, and it stopped fitting you. Start here.

Integration Multiplies Opportunities and Problems

Rocket Lab put a satellite in orbit 16 hours after the order, then agreed to spend 8 billion dollars on Iridium to integrate even further. Vertical integration is a multiplier: it made them fast because their parts were already tight, and it would spread a loose system's problems just as fast. For technical founders and senior leaders deciding to take on more, why adding multiplies whatever state your system is already in.

June 29, 20266 min read

The Work Nobody Films

A viral robot-hand demo hides millions of invisible test cycles. The real work, in a company and in you, is the unseen reliability, not the breakthrough.

July 13, 20264 min read

The Thing You Built Stopped Fitting You

A design choice made for the Boeing 737 in the 1960s contributed to the deaths of 346 people half a century later, across two crashes. Not because the design was wrong, but because the requirements changed and a chain of patches grew unchecked. The same thing happens to founders and senior leaders: the original misalignment is rarely what breaks you, the unexamined patches stacked on top of it are.

June 8, 20268 min read

The Founder Who Outgrew Their Own Company

The airlines you fly today started by flying the mail, and survived by letting the mail go. For technical founders and senior engineers whose company, role, or product has quietly stopped fitting: how to find the real requirement under the thing you built, and why outgrowing it is a signal, not a failure.

June 16, 20267 min read

The Decision a Founder Can't Make: Pivot, Sell, Step Back, or Stay

Pilots compute a decision speed, V1, before every takeoff: the line past which not choosing is itself a choice. For technical founders stuck on the big decision, pivot, sell, step back, or stay: how to tell real waiting from avoidance, compute your own V1, and find a place to think when everyone close to you has a stake.

June 16, 20267 min read

More founder essays are landing here over the coming weeks.

The engineering-a-life series

Elon Musk's five-step algorithm, the overview plus one essay per step, in reading order.

The Five-Step Algorithm for Redesigning Anything

SpaceX deleted Super Heavy's landing legs and catches the booster with the launch tower instead. The decision came from a five-step algorithm whose steps are ordered by cost: question the requirements, delete, simplify, accelerate, automate. Most of us run it backwards, on our companies and our lives, and pay the most for what we should have deleted for free.

June 12, 20267 min read

Stop Optimizing Your Life. Start Specifying It.

I spent ten years getting really good at the wrong things. Then I learned something from Elon Musk's five-step algorithm for building rockets. It also works for building a life.

March 15, 202410 min read

Don't Build an SLS

NASA's newest moon rocket flies with engines from 1982 because Congress mandated heritage hardware. Most of us build our lives the same way, around parts we never picked.

April 28, 20267 min read

The Best Part Is No Part

SpaceX's newest rocket engine is missing a heat shield, a fire suppression system, and most of its external plumbing. The engineers there have a phrase for this approach. It might be one of the most important things I have ever read about how to live.

May 6, 20269 min read

Delete Where It Hurts

Surgical robots got better by deleting parts: the da Vinci went from four arms and four holes to one arm and one 2.5 cm port. In my University of Tokyo PhD we deleted ten of twelve electromagnetic coils on paper and gained a bigger workspace. The lesson for technical founders and senior leaders: deletion is not a diet. Delete at the boundary where failure is expensive, and let necessary complexity live where slack is cheap.

July 2, 20267 min read

Why Your Life Won't Run Smoothly Until You Stop Trying

We are always trying to make life more efficient, and that is the problem. Simplification is the third step of an engineering framework for living. Not minimalism, not optimization. It is finding the interfaces in your week and folding two things into one.

May 19, 20268 min read

The Weekly Retrospective: How to Run Sprints on Your Life

A rocket engine line that builds four hundred engines a year has fewer defects per engine than one that builds twenty. High cadence forces quality. The fourth step of an engineering framework for living: speed up the cycle, and run a five-minute weekly retrospective so you find problems while they are still small.

May 31, 20268 min read

Don't Automate a Life That Shouldn't Exist

Automation is the fifth and last step of an engineering framework for living, and the one most people reach for first. The moment you automate something, you marry it: you commit to maintaining it forever. Automating a bad process does not fix it, it cements it. When to build, when to question the requirement instead, and why the last step points back to the first.

June 4, 20268 min read

On failure, risk, and decisions

What aerospace and cave diving teach about the failures that actually get you, and the decisions you keep deferring.

Grounded Is Not Broken

Japan's H3 rocket lost a satellite because a payload adapter had delaminated months earlier, in a factory oven. The failure was old before it was visible. On damage that hides between the layers, the watermelon-green status report, and why grounded is not broken. It is tracing.

June 13, 20268 min read

Nothing Went Wrong for Ten Years

The failure that gets you is almost never the dramatic one. It is the small drift that went fine for years, until the day it did not. An aerospace engineer and cave diver on the normalization of deviance, for founders and senior leaders, and the skill of noticing the quiet erosion early.

June 7, 20269 min read

The Safest Rocket Never Launches

The only rocket with a zero percent chance of failure is the one that never leaves the pad, and that one has already failed. For founders and senior leaders sitting on a decision that will not move: how to tell the safe choice that protects something real from the one that just keeps you on the ground because flying is uncomfortable.

June 7, 20268 min read

It's Just a Way

There are two ways to bring a crew home from space: the Americans splash into the ocean, the Soviets land on dirt in Kazakhstan. Neither is the clever way and the other the workaround. Each side just used what it had. On unknown unknowns, the assumptions you cannot see until you stand somewhere else, and what raising kids across five countries taught an aerospace engineer about the laws that are only constraints he stopped noticing.

July 7, 20266 min read

You Don't Prevent the Failure. You Make It Safe.

Fail-safe engineering does not try to build something that never fails. It makes sure that when a part fails, it fails into a safe state. An aerospace engineer turned coach on why the most important thing he does has almost nothing to do with the questions he asks: building a space safe enough for the true thing to be said out loud.

June 4, 20267 min read

Burnout Is Not a Bug. It's a Spec Mismatch.

Burnout is not a personal weakness. It is what happens when a real human spec sheet is run inside a system whose requirements do not match. An engineer's view on what actually breaks, and why fixing the human is the wrong fix.

May 1, 202610 min read

Personal

The road here. NASA, Tokyo, a wall of rejections, and learning to read my own instruments.

I Got to NASA. The Search Didn't End.

I wrote my diploma thesis at NASA, did a PhD in Tokyo, applied to be an astronaut. Then an astronaut on a private tour showed me the search has no finish line. It only upgrades. What the search cost me, and what finally answered the question it was asking.

May 16, 20269 min read

My CV of Failures

A toddler falls down hundreds of times before walking. Adults trying something hard get a much emptier room. Here, for the record, is a partial list of the times I fell down, and what I notice now from this side of it.

May 1, 20269 min read

Tight Chest. Less Tight Chest. That Was the Whole Reading.

I sat on a call with ten coaches. They could read their bodies in 4K. I had two channels. Here's what happened when I started taking emotional data seriously.

April 30, 20266 min read

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