The Curse of Complex Systems - Sarah Lamaison (Dioxycle)

So you've passed all this, uh, you still think it's, uh, it's gonna work. And there's a, a final trap which is, you know, it can work, it's fundamentally sound, et cetera. But now you lose space because you're tired. You're really tired. You know, it's possible, but not nothing, nothing is working in the lab, and you don't know why. And, um. Yeah, and so there's a, I mean, a friend of mine, entrepreneur Sebastian Boyer, gave me a good image to think about that, which is like the curse of complex systems. So you have to imagine your system, when you're working on a complex technology, as a sort of series of components, and they are all in series. And as you know from your electricity process, when one thing is not working, then the series line is not working. Um, and so here on this graph, you basically represent the probability of a system comprising n components of working, uh, based on the probability of one component working. And so you see that when you have one component, n =1, it's very easy. I mean, there's a, I mean it's one. I mean, it's linear, of course, but then as you increase the number of components, you, there are more and more probability that the series of component won't work at a given probability of one component working. And so you end up, when you have a lot of components, you end up by having like a very long portion, you know, I mean, a very long time where, where your system is not working, although you like incremental, incrementally optimizing each of your components. And you have to really reach a threshold where, you know, above that threshold, above that, like, probability of working of one component, the series starts working. And I think that's, I mean, that's a very important thing. And we had that a lot also. I mean, at the beginning and I mean, we still have systems that don't work. And you know, you, you, you test one hypothesis, you think it's not like you think the result is negative, but it's actually kind of a false negative because there's still something else that is not working. And yeah, and that's, yeah, that's really hard. And the answer to that is to keep, keep pushing. And actually there's a second part to that quote of Phil Knight when he says sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else is genius, which is giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't even stop. And that's the answer to the Last Republic.