00:15:30 · Karthik Gollapudi
A lot of times, people push something off, and they say, oh, well, we're waiting for this person before we have that meeting. It's something scheduled for two weeks from now. And it's like, well, why does that person even have to be in the meeting? Well, can we go around and still move? Let's say something's not working. Instead of just saying, like, oh, that's not working because it's just broken, or it's like a thing that you can't do. Like, people say you can't land rockets. Like, why? Why can't you land a rocket? We fly and land planes all the time. People are like, oh, because of this or this technical reason. And it's like, well, it's not actually blocked by physics. It's just that nobody's ever done it before. Basically, you keep asking why till the point physics is the reason you can't do it. I think that's what I would consider first principles. But it applies everywhere. It's like, I think a lot of times we have a tendency to just say, oh, the hardware team says we can't do this. It's like, well, who on the hardware team? And you go talk to that person, you realize they actually can do it, but it's just, like, some other thing that they also need. And if you... As long as you get that, then you can actually get this thing a lot faster. There's actually... This plays into a lot of, like, risk as well. Wernher von Braun, who used to run NASA back in the... During the Apollo era, he noticed that, let's say, some engineer identified a risk, and then they told their manager about it, the manager would downplay that risk. It would go from saying, oh, this is fatal when you stop the mission, to the manager saying, hey. This is a really high risk. That person's manager says, oh, we need to go look into this. By the time it reaches Wernher von Braun, he would actually just basically... Someone that says, oh, everything's good to go. He actually implemented this thing called, like, weekly notes. So what he would do is he had every individual engineering squad or team write notes, and his team would compile them into a book. And he would actually review all of them, so he basically sees ground truth, and he can actually make decisions from first principles about what's holding up the program. And, basically, that's how we put a person on the moon. Those rockets probably have the compute power of, like, a t I 84 calculator.
00:17:04 · Karthik Gollapudi
You can do some pretty cool things when you actually dig into why.