The name Blackbird comes from the Lockheed SR-71, the world's fastest fighter jet. A massive, well-funded team failed to build it, but Lockheed's Skunk Works, a small lean group, succeeded by breaking away from bureaucracy. It's about how small, agile teams outperform large organizations.
Chapters
I'd be curious if you could share more about the inspiration behind the name Blackbird.
Hmm. Well, there are two. One is Blackbird from the world's fastest fighter jet, which was produced by Lockheed Martin. And originally they had spent billions of dollars in a big team to try and build the world's fastest fighter jet. That did not work out, as most things when you spend billions of dollars with a large team to, to do something new tend to do. And then it was a breakaway group, Skunk Works group, that said, screw it, we're just gonna do it. Small amount of people with very little resources, the world's fastest fighter jet. So I think that, that idea of small teams beating big teams and people kind of tied themselves up in a knot over like, oh, they have so many, so much resources. And, but big companies have middle management and big companies have this failure minimization.