How to be a good first-time soccer coach

My kids play soccer, so I get to coach their teams and help run Pasadena's AYSO club. Here's some of what I've learned about coaching:

If the league organizers did a good job, you'll lose half your games. Half the kids you're coaching are below average. Actually, more than half, because the best players are driving all over the state in a fancy club team. So, for your team, success isn't winning, it's helping everyone (including the referees) to have fun so they return next year.

Strategies I've learned from coaching my kids' soccer teams

Investing in new technology

Follow along on substack. The plan is to publish every 2-3 weeks, thus forcing me to write investment memos for my portfolio companies.

Chapter 0: Recap
Chapter 1: Rethink Everything
Chapter 2: Power Laws and Disruption
Chapter 3: Incentives
Chapter 4: Failure
Chapter 5: Strategy
Chapter 6: Complexity

Part of my job at JPL was to promote and advance new technology. Of course, the usual problem with new fancy things is that nobody wants them. Or, as they say in Silicon Valley, "the business plan doesn't close." I use a one-page improved Heilmeier catechism to describe why it's worth the time and effort to invest in inventing something cool.

I invest my own money and time in deep tech companies, mostly at pre-seed stage. The theme is, "overlooked critical infrastructure". The portfolio is: Titan Aerospace (sold to Google), OmniEarth (1st investor, sold to EagleView), HeliosWire (sold to EchoStar), ATLAS Space Networks (1st investor), Weather Stream (1st investor), EarthOptics (1st investor), LEOLabs, HawkEye 360, SkyWatch, fuse, Carbice, Olis Robotics, Hydrosat, Autio (HearHere) (not deep tech but I would have invented it myself if I weren't so lazy), Krucial (R3-IOT), Aquaai, Precursor, Iris Dynamics, Pixxel, Rivelin Robotics, TrustPoint GPS, Prewitt Ridge, Castelion, SpinLaunch. I regret passing on the BlackSky seed round, ... actually, that's it for regrets. Can't win 'em all. Go ahead. Pick up the phone and cold-call me. It'll be a welcome relief from the auto warranty scams.

Many of these companies follow Big Data From Space Playbook. to plan their strategy, and the Application Readiness Customer Journey. Paying customers are the best way to demonstrate demand. For a B2B technology company, use the 4-stage Statement of Work to plan a path from feasibility study to recurring revenue.

Steve Blank says a startup company is a temporary organization created to conduct a set of experiments that search for a business model that is repeatable and scalable. You should listen to him.

1. A venture fund invests in 10 startups, hoping that one will be big enough to provide substantial returns to their investors.
1a. Investing $100k on an uncapped SAFE in anyone with a pulse seems to be more effective than picking winners.
2. In the startups that I have seen succeed, the team experimented with 5 - 10 different products and markets, and one became really, really big.
2a. Your first few guesses are probably wrong.
2b. Customers sometimes know what they want. Lean Startup is about failing fast by interviewing them
3. Startups are marketing companies, even if they are hardware companies.
3a. Unique technology gives you a temporary barrier to entry.
4. Each product experiment by a venture-backed startup needs to be capable of returning the value of the entire venture fund.

Raosoft was bootstrapped. We experimented with 10 new products or major features a year. Usually, one would take off. Risk capital allows entrepreneurs to conduct these experiments in parallel and capture market share before Facebook/Microsoft/Apple imitates it.

When you take money from an investor, your investor's business plan becomes your business plan: each experiment must have the potential to return the entire value of the venture fund. Fortunately, anything in space can affect everyone on Earth. What would you do from space to deliver $1 of value per month for each of the 7 billion people living on Earth?

How I Start Companies

My fastest-growing and most profitable business ever was the store the back of Ellen Nottingham's classroom at T.T. Minor Elementary School. I bought a box of pencils at a store near our bus stop, and Cy Keener and I sold them the next day at school for 15 cents each.

The next week, we diversified into erasers, pens, and paper. A month later, after expanding into higher margin, about 3 weeks of reinvestment, and annoying pink things that Cy claimed that girls would buy (he was right). We were netting about $20 per week, which was back when $20 meant something.

The partnership worked pretty well: Cy had a good idea of what peple would buy, and I was stingy with the money.

Initial investment: five dollars.

Read more: Lesson 1. Don't get a MBA

Business Development

This is just about the startup deal. Running an organization in which stakeholders are empowered to grow and contribute is a different story.

Business development is not selling a product. It's predicting what people will want, and then figuring out a way to deliver it. Success requires more than technology. Development is applied game theory, because for an idea to catch on, it has to be in everyone's best interests. As with any game worth playing, you start from a losing position. If you started in a winning position, someone else would have already done it, right? So, as with any game (in the Von Neumann-Morganstern sense), you can change the rules, change the facts, or change the players.

Most of the players aren't trying to manipulate the game, so all you have to do is let them know they're playing, and they'll find the Nash equilibrium on their own.

Read more: The Game of Business Development

The Mad Max Theory of Project Management

1. There is a goal, and we are moving toward it on a flaming bus.
2. We are going Somewhere, but for now, we are in the middle of Nowhere.
3. There is a driver. She's not quite sure where we are going, so she's moving us very fast in what we think is the correct general direction.
4. A lookout watches for evidence of the location of the goal. The search space continually narrows.
5. The engine is on fire.
6. Someone is fixing it. We trust her to do that, because we are busy throwing sharp things at the people next to us, unless she asks for help, in which case we help her right away.
7. The rest of the bus is on fire, too. We might get around to fixing that. Or not. Someone is watching it and will probably do something if it gets worse.
8. The horde saw our smoke. They are chasing us. We must move very fast to get there first or they will stop us or cut us off.
9. If you're at all close to us, you're going to get hit by something. You don't want to be beside us. You definitely don't want to be close behind. It's not particularly healthy to be in front of us, either.
10. In fact, good places to be are a) on the bus, b) very far away, c) waiting for us at the goal, d) moving the goal.

Bringing a new technology into a new market

1. Most people will only do one of these at a time.
2. Willingness to do both gives you moats.
3. Use as little money as possible to prove that it works and that it makes money.
4. Then use as much money as you need to scale as fast as you can before you lose your moats.
5. Don't stop innovating.

Shanti's raytracer

A fast, accurate, and precise raytracing code, based on Bill Breckinridge's dyadic formulation of conic sections. Unlike traditional optical design programs like CODE V or Zemax, Shanti's raytracer describes all coordinates in 3D, so you can apply 6DOF mechanical distortions and see what happens.

This improves on JPL's MACOS by being in MATLAB instead of FORTRAN, is faster (especially if you have a GPU and want to trace a million rays in parallel), and it comes with nifty visualization programs. I've rearranged the order computations to reduce the effects of rounding errors, so you can model beams coming from the surface of the a planet, and propagate them all the way to a telescope in space. I don't know why you'd want to do that ... but you could. Note: it doesn't handle propagation time and relative velocity (yet).

It was developed to analyze distortions of JWST's optics, based on insights by Bill Breckinridge (the guy who rediscovered quaternions) and Dave Redding at JPL. After giving up on migrating their FORTRAN code, I reimplemented it from scratch in both JavaScript and MATLAB/Octave, taking advantag of vector operations suitable for GPU acceleration, while refactoring the computations to make them less susceptible to rounding errors.

You would use it to calculate how a given set of perturbations, from thermal expansion, misalignment, or whatever would affect an observation. See the HabEx example, which calculates tolerances for a 4m segmented telescope. JPL released the code as open source. During the integration and test of an optical instrument, you would use it to calculate the effects of the as-built variations and misalignments, because "better" is the enemy of "good enough."

It also handles deformations such as aspheres, Zernike polynomials, and arbitrary meshes (that don't have to be on a rectangular grid) that you might get from a finite-element model. It also handles diffraction gratings on arbitrary curved surfaces -- even for rays coming in at weird angles!

If you want to research polarization effects, define the rays.local vector, and watch how it rotates at every reflection and refraction. This is also handled correctly for curved diffraction gratings.

Shanti's Raytracer was developed in part with US Government sponsorship and is released as open source by JPL.

Google Apps Scripts

Did you know that you can make Google Sheets act like a database? Well, sort of. Go ahead and use my Apps Script Database Library for the Table Object to abstract reads and writes on a spreadsheet. If you're running a youth soccer program, you might like the AYSO menu plugin that adds team-generation scripts to a division roster. You can do neat things like assign players to the coach who lives closest to them, or randomly generate balanced teams using a nonlinear optimization iterative algorithm.

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Philosophy

• Applying for a job at JPL?
• The next 50 years in space: reading between the lines
• How to write a lab report for Ph1
• How to grade a lab report for Ph1
• The problem with teaching scientific writing is that everyone thinks they know the one true style. (See above.)
• XML encourages bad design or, why you shouldn't try to be too clever.
• Snake oils in engineering
• Presentation to XML.GOV: Electronic forms and XML (slides)
  What they don't say is that I alienated nearly everyone in the room!
• FPGAs are totally freakin' awesome!
• Debugging analog circuits
• 8 simple steps for problem-solving
• The Algol family of languages
• Disinformation
• Doublespeak
• Winning friends and influencing people
• Picking an advisor
• Applying to graduate school