Lilium raised $750 million, had $5.5 billion in LOIs (at Saudi group unit prices), yet never delivered a product and died.

Many other similar cases exist: Canoo, Arrival, Virgin Orbit.

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Time to mass deployment in hardware takes years. This is capital-intensive. Thus, in the early days of a hardware startup, narrative takes precedence over substance to acquire capital - hoping engineering reality catches up.

However, this initial necessity can become fatally maladaptive: As stories are easier to craft than products, it’s easy for the curves of the narrative and substance to have different slopes, and as the lever of narrative is so much easier to pull, it becomes tempting to spam it. However, with time, the curves of narrative and substance become irreconcilable; one has to snap to the other. As engineering cannot become successful overnight, only narrative can snap to reality. This is not pretty.

If the substance curve's double derivative is lower than that of the narrative, with time, there comes a need for deliberate narrative deceleration. I can only surmise this feels like suffocating your own baby - founders avoid it at all costs; sometimes at the cost of their company’s long-term viability.

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This narrativeism isn’t exclusive to startups; it hurts giants too:
“These men will probably enjoy massive short-term gains in the value of their stock options, but there is a price; the loss of the long-term viability of Boeing in the commercial aircraft business.” - Leaked Boeing Engineers’ Memo, 2002.

Boeing decoupled their narrative and substance curves in the name of short-term cash - at the price of lives, and long-term market share and brand value.

Due to the large capitalisation of hardware companies, ailments can take a long time to kill them. Consider Lilium lived 10 years. This is a blessing and a curse; correction takes years, but the long runway allows it, so the most difficult thing about periodic realism in a world of ambition and its simulacra is the emotional fortitude to let the slower dancing partner take the lead.

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The mark of a great hardware founder is expert coordination of the delicate dance between narrative and substance.

“I care about outcomes, not hours” is valid for traditional companies. However, work in a startup is virtually infinite and nobody can say “that’s not my job.”

Thus, once a person has completed “their” allotment of work, they ought to work on the myriad of other problems that exist within the startup - within their self-defined sustainable limits.

If the right kind of people were hired, high-quality outputs are expected, so the remainder becomes a function of hours.

996 is a heuristic that pushes one’s employees while having their commitment be (hard but) long-term sustainable.