Sarah Lamaison from Dioxycle discusses when to abandon a climate tech project instead of pushing forward. She separates good reasons to keep going from bad ones, and warns against sunk cost fallacies that trap founders into scaling doomed ideas.
And so now you've done all this, uh, you have actually a business, you, I mean you, you're sure that if your technology is working then, then the, the, the economic incentive will be aligned. Uh, and then you have another trap that you can still fall into is that um, deep down you know, you realize this technology won't scale, for example. So you know, on the lab bench it's working. And if, if everything scaled then it would be working and it would be like viable but actually doesn't scale. And then like one of the problem is if you don't give up and if you keep going, and I think there's a cool citation quote from Phil Knight, the creator of Nike, who said sometimes you have to give up, sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else is genius. And I think it's true. Especially in a climate tech where we really need people, I mean we really need the talents to be funneled to the, to the, to the technologies at scale so that we meet our, our emission reduction goals. And so you know, thinking about that, I've thought about like a sort of framework of what are the good reasons to quit and what are the bad, Sorry, what are the good reasons to keep going with a tech or a business idea and what are the bad reasons to keep going? So I think the good reasons to keep going are first, this technology is fundamentally sound like fusion. It's going to be very hard, but you know, it can work and it's incredible what it can do and it just can work fundamentally. Then the economics can work soonish or you have a plan to really back that up for a long time in terms of funding. And finally you haven't tried everything. It's not working yet, but you haven't tried everything. And so there's still hope. And perhaps you're one experiment away from nailing it down. So these are the good reasons. And now the bad reasons to keep going are probably like first in line, the sunk cost. You've invested so much energy that you can't let it go. It's like five years of your life and you're like oh my God, like if I stop doing that, what am I going to do? And it's a terrible reason because like, I mean the cost in the future are so much higher compared to the ones you've already paid for. Then you told other it will work. So now you don't really want to admit it won't work or even worse, you told yourself it would work and you don't even admit to yourself it would work. So I think these are the thing with Dave early on, we've kind of made a promise that if one day we stopped believing that we could make this work, we would just stop and go work with a company that had a better idea, like simply said, and that we would watch out for one another. Egos getting in the way of actually doing something good in a reasonable time scale.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
Depois de tantas histórias, aprendizados e pausas necessárias, o @interior_iza está de volta
