The other day I ran across a line from Peter Thiel saying that if you have a plan for where you’d like to be in ten years, ask yourself if you could get there in six months.

I don’t think he’s simply saying see if you can do everything 20 times faster. If you estimate something will take ten days, it probably will take more than half a day. We’re better at estimating things on the scale of days than on the scale of years.

If you expect to finish a project in ten days, you’re probably going to go about it the way you’ve approached similar projects before. There’s not a lot of time for other options. But there are a lot of ways to go about a decade-long project.

Since Thiel is well known for being skeptical of college education, I imagine one of the things he had in mind was starting a company in six months rather than going to college, getting an entry level job, then leaving to start your company.

As I wrote in an earlier post, some things can’t be done slowly.

Some projects can only be done so slowly. If you send up a rocket at half of escape velocity, it’s not going to take twice as long to get where you want it to go. It’s going to take infinitely longer.

Some projects have to be done quickly if they are going to be done at all. Software projects are usually like this. If a software project is expected to take two years, I bet it’ll take five, if it’s not cancelled before then. You have to deliver software faster than the requirements change. Of course this isn’t unique to software. To be successful, you have to deliver any project before your motivation or your opportunity go away.

I only connect to people on LinkedIn that I know. This almost always means people I have met face-to-face or at least talked to over the phone.

If you’d like to connect on LinkedIn and we haven’t met, please contact me to set up a phone call. I look forward to talking to you.

Richard Feynman tells a story in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman that I’m reminded of periodically when I realize something is smaller and less sophisticated than I imagined.

[Update: A couple people pointed out in the comments that I got the roles of the two characters in this story reversed, so I’ve corrected this.]

Feynman tells the story of a colleague at Los Alamos, Frederic de Hoffman, describing his company’s attempt to plate plastics with metal. De Hoffman said that his company was making progress, but gave up when he saw that another company, Metaplast Corporation, was apparently way ahead of them, based on Metaplast’s advertising. Feynman had worked at Metaplast a few years earlier, but didn’t tell de Hoffman immediately.

Feynman asked de Hoffman how many chemists he thought Metaplast had.

“I would guess they must have twenty‑five or fifty chemists … How the hell could we compete with them?”

Feynman told de Hoffman “You’ll be interested and amused to know that you are now talking to the chief research chemist of the Metaplast Corporation, whose staff consisted of one bottle‑washer!”

I don’t think Feynman was trying to gloat that he was smarter than the staff of chemists at de Hoffman’s company, though he may have been. Feynman knew all the problems his company had and the times they screwed up. They projected a more confident image in their advertising, and the competition bought it.

Large companies take longer to start projects. How much longer?

A plausible guess is that project lead time would be proportional to the logarithm of the company size. If a company with n employees has a hierarchy with every manager having m subordinates, the number of management layers would be around log_m(n). If every project has to be approved by every layer of management, lead time should be logarithmic in the company size. This implies huge companies only take a little longer to start projects than medium-sized companies, and that doesn’t match my experience.

In my experience, lead time is proportional to something like the square root of the company size:

T = k √ E

where T is lead time, k is a proportionality constant, and E is the number of employees. For example, someone told me that he moved to a company 1000 times bigger and things seem to move about 30 times slower. That would be consistent with a square root rule.

If T is measured in days and k = 0.5, the square root rule would say that a solo entrepreneur could start a project in half a day, and a company of 130,000 employees would take six months. That seems about right. Of course small companies can move slowly, and large companies can move quickly. But it’s a good rule of thumb to say individuals operate on a scale of days, small-to-medium companies on the scale of weeks, and large companies on the scale of months.

The reason may be that large companies scale up well, but they don’t scale down well. They can put together large deals fairly quickly, relative to the size of the deal, but not small deals.

It’s hard to transfer intellectual property. When I was managing software projects, it would take months to fully transfer a project from one person to another. This was with full access to and encouragement from the original developer. This was a transfer between peers, both part of the same environment with all its institutional memory. If it’s this hard to transfer a project to a colleague, how hard must it be for a competitor to make sense of stolen files?

I’m most familiar with intellectual property in the form of software, but I imagine the same applies to many other forms of intellectual property. Some forms of data are easy to understand, such as a list of passwords. But others, such as source code, require a large amount of context beyond the data. One reason acquisitions fail so often is that the physical assets of a company are not enough. The most valuable assets a company has are often intangible.

Of course companies should protect their intellectual property, but a breach is not necessarily a disaster. On the other hand, the loss of institutional memory may be a disaster.

Yesterday on Twitter I said I was thinking about writing the names of each of my clients and leads on balls so I could literally juggle them. I was only half joking.

I didn’t write my clients and leads on balls, but I did write them on index cards. And it helped a great deal. It’s easier to think about projects when you have physical representations you can easily move around. Moving lines up and down in an org-mode file, or even moving boxes around in 2D in OneNote, doesn’t work as well.

Electronic files are great for storing, editing, and querying ideas. But they’re not the best medium for generating ideas. See Create offline, analyze online. See also Austin Kleon’s idea of having two separate desks, one digital and one analog.

In a recent episode of EconTalk, Phil Rosenzweig describes how the artificial conditions necessary to make experiments scientifically valid can also make the results practically invalid.

Rosenzweig discusses experiments designed to study decision making. In order to make clean comparisons, subjects are presented with discrete choices over which they have no control. They cannot look for more options or exercise any other form of agency. The result is an experiment that is easy to analyze and easy to publish, but so unrealistic as to tell us little about real-world decision making.

In his book Left Brain, Right Stuff, Rosenzweig quotes Philip Tetlock’s summary:

Much mischief can be wrought by transplanting this hypothesis-testing logic, which flourishes in controlled lab settings, into the hurly-burly of real-world settings where ceteris paribus never is, and never can be, satisfied.

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