83% Full

My pastor recently talked about divorce statistics:  40% of first marriages fail, 60% of second marriages, and 70% of third marriages, averaging the 50% statistic that we all hear.  He went on to say how this does not differ from Christian to non-Christian, churched to non-churched.  All well and he made a good show of it, but...

What he failed to say was that 83% of the people who get married do find a marriage that sticks until "death do us part." 

(Math alert:  Those who never find a happy marriage among their first three spouses are 0.4 * 0.6 * 0.7 = 0.168, or 17%.  The rest, 83%, have at least one marriage that "succeeds.")

So why put this into a blog about entrepreneurship?  Because that--turning a 50% failure rate into an 83% success rate, is one of the key skills of an entrepreneur.  Central to the job description is the ability to make silk purses out of sows' ears.

Here's a quick story:  In developing the fiber, I was trying to make a "high tenacity, high modulus thermoplastic olefin." That was the original business plan.  Unfortunately, it wasn't very high tenacity, wasn't very high modulus, and nobody really understood nor cared what a "thermoplastic olefin" was.

But we had a scientist working for us (another Brian unfortunately--I guess you can't make this up) who saw the fiber and said, "There's something different about this fiber."  He tested it for ballistic properties and found it worked reasonably well.  Then he put it under an electron microscope and found that he microstructure was full of millions of little crazes and holes. 

You could take that and go, "oh crap," and wonder how a fiber that is full of little micro-breaks and defects is going to have any strength. 

Instead, our group combined that with the ballistic data and what the Formula 1 race-car guys had found and saw that the fiber really had millions of little pillows inside it, which made it the lightest structural fiber in the world.  And, when we learned that those pillows were all connected, then we realized that when each one took a hit, it would blow a tiny micro-puff of air into the ones near it, and all these millions of little micro-puffs would dissipate a lot of energy, each one acting like a nano-shock-absorber.  The shock of a bullet would dissipate and on a race track, when a car is tapped by a neigboring car at 200 mph, the energy of the "tap" is absorbed so that the part remains intact, keeping the car in the race.  This feature is being taken advantage of in bullet proof vests and panels that are lighter and less expensive, in race cars that are faster and more durable, in aircraft, in surfboards that "reduce the chop of the wave," in hockey sticks that "feel more like wood."

Instead of having a fiber that is full of micro-defects and micro-voids, we have one that is the lightest fiber in the world, among the toughest, and the only advanced fiber that naturally dissipates energy through it's microstructure.

In any entrepreneurial endeavor, there are a million reasons to quit, a million ways to look at your product or your market or your team as a sow's ear, and give up.  The difference, I believe, between success and failure is being able to shoo away all those folks who are "just being realistic," or "trying to show the practical side," and somehow adjust, adapt, change, twist, or frankly just make up that those reasons aren't right, and perhaps magically turn the sow's ear into a silk purse, even if only by the sheer force of will.