On April 20, 2023, SpaceX tested Starship, the most powerful rocket in the world, in Texas. About four minutes into the flight, the rocket exploded. SpaceX called it a “rapid, unscheduled disassembly.” SpaceX employees could be heard cheering.
SpaceX said: “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn.” NASA administrator Bill Nelson congratulated the company. Elon Musk said another booster of a newer design was ready for the next test.
“Done is better than perfect.” Facebook painted these words on the walls of its offices. Mark Zuckerberg explained why in his letter to investors. The letter was part of the filing, dated February 1, 2012, for the company’s stock market listing. The words were there “to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.”
In the same letter he described what he called “the Hacker Way.” Hackers, he wrote, build “by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once.”
The saying is older than Facebook. It has been in print since at least 1979.
“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.” This is lesson 7 in Eric S. Raymond’s essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Raymond first presented it in May 1997. O’Reilly published it in a book of the same title in 1999.
Raymond wrote that he had once believed the opposite. Early versions are “almost by definition buggy versions,” and developers did not want to “wear out the patience” of their users. Linux changed his mind. In its early days, Linus Torvalds sometimes released a new version of the kernel more than once a day.
“It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Franklin D. Roosevelt said this on May 22, 1932, at the commencement of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.
Roosevelt was governor of New York and was running for president. In the same speech he said: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” He won the election that November.
In 1999 Nick Swinmurn wanted to sell shoes online. He went to a shoe store in Sunnyvale, California, and made an offer: “I’ll take some pictures, put your shoes online, and if people buy them, I’ll buy them from you at full price.”
People bought them. The website became Zappos, which Amazon bought in 2009 for about $1.2 billion.
In July 2013, Paul Graham of the startup accelerator Y Combinator published an essay that begins: “One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale.” The most common such thing, he wrote, is “to recruit users manually.”
The founders of Airbnb went “door to door in New York, recruiting new users.” The founders of Stripe did not wait for a user to sign up. They said: “Right then, give me your laptop,” and set it up on the spot. Graham’s advice on launching: “All you need from a launch is some initial core of users.”
The musical Oklahoma! first opened under another title, Away We Go! It played out-of-town tryouts at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven from March 11, 1943, and then in Boston. Audiences were enthusiastic, and the reviews were only fair. Before Broadway, the creators restaged the big number “Oklahoma” and renamed the show after it. It opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943.
The Shubert in New Haven has hosted more than 600 pre-Broadway tryouts.
John Boyd, a US Air Force colonel, built a model of decision-making out of his experience of air combat: observe, orient, decide, act, then repeat. His central claim was about speed — that cycling through the loop faster than your opponent is what wins, because it leaves them reacting to a situation that has already changed. As a Weapons School instructor he was nicknamed Forty Second Boyd, for his standing bet that starting from a position of tactical disadvantage he could defeat any student pilot within forty seconds.
The model spread from the Air Force into American business and sports coaching. It is a formal argument that acting quickly beats acting correctly.
American public health has spent decades training ordinary people to start chest compressions immediately rather than wait for professionals, and has simplified the instruction repeatedly to lower the barrier to starting. The campaign is not about doing it well. It is about doing it now.
Nike, 1988. Three words, an imperative, and no object — it does not say what to do. The sentence assumes the deliberation has gone on too long and supplies the only missing ingredient.