I’m an irreverent person. I’m a college dropout and a company founder. I’ve built my career on coloring outside the lines, and I’ve pissed a lot of people off that way. So many of the people I’ve looked up to over the years have operated similarly – galloping roughshod through territory that is held sacred by many. Burt Rutan was, of course, an early figure of inspiration for me. So was Steve Jobs. It’s hard to admit, but seeing the world as it is today, I think I was wrong about some pieces of this.
I’ve done a lot of things that most reasonable folks would consider to be dangerous. I’ve spent many years commuting on motorcycles, to include one winter in Michigan. I taught myself aerobatics in a wooden airplane I bought for $7,000. I’ve singlehanded a 36’ sailboat in the open ocean. As of today, I have a little over 200 skydives and 11 BASE jumps.
I’ve also worked with teams doing dangerous things. Professionally, I led a test team that brought a company into explosive test operations, acting as test conductor for the first explosives tests in the company. I’ve worked a mission control console on 5 different test programs including three first flights.
I’ve also seen things go wrong. I’ve managed a stand down and disassembly after a hang fire. I’ve put out fires and cut live battery cables. As a pilot, I’ve had flight control jams and engine failures. As a skydiver I’ve taken a terminal reserve ride. Tragically, I’ve seen two fatal accidents during test programs.
After all of this, I’m still going to do dangerous things and take risks; it’s an important part of who I am. The piece that I really care about is that everyone involved understands the risk they’re taking, and I firmly believe that the responsibility for this lies with everyone. The skydiving community loves to revel in the choose-your-own-adventure nature of the sport – you’re responsible for your own destiny, and the risk you take is yours. I love this too. What I don’t like, however, is when new skydivers are encouraged to join jumps that are far beyond their capabilities, and no one discusses the risks with them. It’s an unreasonable expectation for a new jumper to know the subtleties of freefly-friendly gear, or why it’s so important to coordinate multiple tracking groups on one jump.
When I see this happen, it hurts. I feel like all of the pain I’ve experienced, both emotional and physical, was for nothing. I feel like my colleagues who aren’t here anymore didn’t matter. I feel like I’ve failed. I feel all of this because risk acceptance is something I hold sacred.
These feelings changed how I look at reverence. I’m still irreverent, and I still push hard to find the boundaries of what I’m capable of and push them out further. I will always be trying to do the impossible. What’s new, though, is an understanding that this can cause real hurt for reasons that I might not be able to see. I’m trying to handle these things with less brashness and more softness, and when someone is pushing back on what I’m doing, I’m striving to handle it with empathy instead of blasphemy. I might not always get it right, but I’m trying.
It’s a difficult balance for an innovator. It requires a lot of faith – sometimes blind – that you’re doing the right thing, and there will always be people trying to talk you out of it. Creative energy can be really hard to come by, and when you have it, you need to protect it fiercely. Creative energy is another thing I hold sacred.
I’m not advocating against innovation, or for walking on eggshells – I’m advocating for innovation with empathy. I’m advocating for understanding that when you overturn closely held ideologies, you’re going to be talking to people who are in pain, and as innovators we have a responsibility to understand that, approach it with respect, and consciously decide if it’s worth it. My experience has been that these ideologies can just as easily exist in technical spaces just as much as they can exist in moral and religious spaces.
Right now, I’m thinking about something that generations before us held sacred. Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, and many more were worried about how technology can erode our humanity - or the figurative humanity of another world - in ways that we might not see until it’s too late. Today, we’ve seen their detached vignettes bloom into our world in ways that I see every day. As a sci-fi nerd, I love it. When I hear a sonic boom from a Space-X launch, I think of Rocket Summer. When I get into an electric car, I think of Minority Report. It brings a lot of color and inspiration to my world, and I’m thankful for that.
I’m not sure, though, that we’re doing it right. Only small slices of our industries are fully leveraging the power of data analytics as it existed even in the early 2000s. I only recently started leveraging the power of simple database tools like PostgreSQL in my own work, and I’ve been blown away by what I’ve been able to accomplish. Looking across all of the industries I’ve worked in, it’s clear to me that we haven’t mastered the ability to really use all of the data that’s available to us at the individual level.
I always run before I can walk, but now, I believe all of us have a responsibility to consider the sanctity of the ground we’re running on. Today, we’re seeing rapid integration of AI tools into military kill chains. Maybe we should all think about that.