Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
🇺🇦 I’ve been thinking about Skunk Works lately. Not only the great book by Ben Rich (read it!), but what Lockheed actually did to make innovation move so quickly.
The U-2 spy plane went from green light to first flight in 8 months. The A-12, the CIA spy plane that preceded the more famous SR-71 Blackbird, went from contract to first flight in ~27 months. The F-117 stealth fighter did it in 31 months.
Crazy, no?
It worked because they created an architecture of learning.
It compressed the feedback loop inside a company. The engineers were close to the people building the planes, the people testing them, and the customer. Everyone was sitting next to each other and constantly talking and seeing the direct result of their work.
SpaceX is a good example of this with rockets. 🚀
But today, Ukraine is turning into something like a country-scale Skunk Works.
They’re compressing that loop across an entire military-industrial ecosystem, from the battlefield to the engineers to the manufacturers.
There’s a very dark reason the feedback is so fast and the signal is so strong: the battlefield is an unforgiving test environment. Things that don’t work get exposed very quickly and people die.
As Torsten Reil of Helsing puts it, the truth is in the field. (more on him below)
📲 Poking in ChatGPT’s settings, I found this:
Makes you wonder how many depressed and suicidal people are chatting with AI right now. The labs must see all kinds of things in their logs… 😔
💚 🥃 The paid subscription includes the full feed, every podcast, Zoom Q&As with me, and access to the private Discord clubhouse, where a core group of us hang out and discuss the interesting stuff we find:
🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴
