I’ve long tried to convince hacker friends to start security product companies. It’s obvious (to me) that the world needs more great security products (there are so many awful ones), and I think hackers are very well placed to make them. This view stands on two legs: the firm belief that great hackers love building, and the equally firm conviction that “building a good company is mostly a series of hacks”.
For me, the first leg is almost self-evident: From companies, to products or security tooling. Every great hacker I’ve known has built stuff.
The second leg points out that building a company is just another kind of hacking; when challenges arise in company building, great hackers will work around them like they would security boundaries.
Deeply entwined was my view that the product is absolutely central to the long term health of the company (almost to the exclusion of everything else).
Reading the (excellent) Wright brothers biography by David McCullough recently, I was reminded of a bunch of things that people (me!) overlook when giving simple advice like “just start a company”, or “just focus on the product”. There are factors of the necessary-but-not-sufficient kind which I gloss over, but are visible in the Wright brothers’ story.
So, for founders, here’s what the Wright brothers can tell us about starting a company in 2026. I’m going to summarise sections of the book and pull out my favourite lessons as we go. Join me.
There’s always “skeeters”
Before the brothers had anything close to a prototype, they decided they needed a location with consistent wind and sand beaches to test their mini experiments. They mailed the US Weather Bureau and, based on a letter from the government meteorologist stationed there, decided on Kitty Hawk, some 700 miles from home in Dayton, Ohio.
You might think the lesson is about “going to where the wind is”; i.e. that the geographic location is of utmost importance and, for tech companies, that means go to the Bay Area. But no, I don’t think that’s the lesson. We built Thinkst Canary while sitting for the most part in South Africa. The most interesting thing was seeing what the brothers had to put up with when they got to Kitty Hawk.
Kitty Hawk was pretty barren and there wasn’t much around. They lived in a tent, which housed them, their tools, and their supplies. They had to catch their own fish to eat, and their diet was monotonous consisting mainly of “eggs, tomatoes and hot biscuits [made without milk]”.
Their second expedition to Kitty Hawk when they were starting work on the glider was almost abandoned due to an immense seasonal swarm of mosquitoes (aka “skeeters”). The book makes it clear this was an awful experience:
- “It was by far the worst experience of his life, he would tell Katherine”
- “The agonies of typhoid fever were ‘as nothing’ by comparison”
- “Such was the torture of the night the followed, Orville vowed that come morning they would head for home”
They (temporarily) put down their prototyping tools to instead construct mosquito nets and defences.
Founders who’ve been put through the mill recognise that “there’s always skeeters” and, while distracting, they can’t be ignored. It’s the burst pipe above your server room (if you have one these days) or the tax ordinance you never heard about or the heap of other little things that are death by a thousand cuts (or mosquito bites). One of the ideal founder characteristics is the ability to build the mosquito nets you didn’t think you’d need, and move on to focus on the actual mission.
You build more than the product along the way
Any experienced woodworker knows the value of building jigs. You spend a bunch of time building the things that help you build your things. Building software is similar: You spend a bunch of time building the pipelines and infrastructure that allow you to reliably build, test, and run your product. Goodness knows how much internal code we have that customers never interact with, but it’s loads. There’s more testing code written for our honeypot, than there is in the honeypot.
After the brothers had completed their famous first flight, they returned to Ohio to work on their next prototype. However the consistent winds for which they picked Kitty Hawk were not to be found in Ohio. So they quickly hacked up a catapult-launch system that could get them airborne without the Kitty Hawk winds.
When they figured out control surfaces on their glider, they planned to simply add an engine, except none of the engine-makers they contacted were able to deliver one that was light enough, so they, being bicycle-shop folks, spent 6 weeks on a lathe and drill-press building one to their own specification.
The book is replete with examples of the brothers building quick experiments and infrastructure that never make it onto the Flyer-1, but which are every bit as important as them building it.
Early on, they spent three months building a gasoline-powered wind tunnel, and hand crafted 38 different wing surfaces, testing them in various configurations to gain insight into the ideal wing shapes and angles for flying.
This caused Octave Chanute (an early collaborator and one of the founding fathers of aviation) to comment that they were “evidently better equipped to test the endless variety of curved surfaces than anybody has ever been“.
They were clearly amazing first-principle thinkers, but you seldom see a clearer example of us first shaping our tools, and then having our tools shape us.
Your early team matters more than you think (and sometimes you get lucky)
The lesson above contained a sleight-of-hand when discussing the first engine on the Flyer-1. I didn’t know this before reading the book, but a key third person was heavily involved with the construction of the flyer, Charlie Taylor. A mechanic by trade, he arrived in Dayton and assisted the Wrights with bicycle work on occasion, before they offered him a permanent position in the bicycle shop. He said “So far as I can figure out, Will and Orv hired me to worry about their bicycle business so they could concentrate on their flying studies and experiments.”
When they couldn’t source the light-enough-engine they needed, it was Charlie who mainly built theirs.
People love a good startup story and often valorize the founders, but I know we would have been a very different company if not for the first few people who joined us.
Dug Song and Jon Oberheide (who built Duo Security) were fond of saying their success was about “the team, the team, the team”). As a pretty introverted hermit, it’s not the first thing I would have expected when we started the company, but the right early team members being a “godsend” sounds pretty spot-on.
Hard work & relentless resourcefulness.
Paulg has long canonized the essential founder trait of being “relentlessly resourceful”. The brothers reputation for this is well known (and well deserved) but it’s also worth noting that I’ve never met a successful founder who wasn’t also just incredibly hard-working.
While resourceful and hard-working overlap, they are separate. Hard work is simply table stakes for a successful company. In the Wright Brothers, the townsfolk of Kitty Hawk pointed out that the Wrights were the “‘two of the workingest boys’ ever seen”.
The point of sharing our work
The book has a bunch of other lessons that founders will recognize. How experts initially wrote off their efforts (even if successful, “it will carry nothing heavier than an insect”). How the press pilloried them, until they didn’t. How the building of the plane was, in some ways, easier than the selling (even when the product was literally the first airplane in the history of the world).
But I want to end on a different note that is much subtler in the text.
Recounting how the brothers first got drawn to the idea of flight. McCullough writes of them discovering and following the exploits of the German glider enthusiast Otto Lilienthal who had been killed in an accident. This caused Wilbur to pursue an interest in flight, which led him to a re-read a book that had been on his family’s bookshelf for years, “an English translation of a famous illustrated volume, Animal Mechanism, written by French physician, Étienne-Jules Marey, more than thirty years before.”
In the (translated) introduction of that volume is this passage:
How frequently has the question been raised, whether man must always continue to envy the bird and the insect their wings; whether he, too, may not one day travel through the air, as he now sails across the ocean. Authorities in science have declared at different periods, as the result of lengthy calculations, that this is a chimerical dream, but how many intentions have we seen realized which have been pronounced impossible.
What struck me most was wondering if Etienne-Jules Marey ever found out how his book, and indeed his introduction, impacted the brothers and, by extension, the rest of us.
Marey passed away a year after the first flight at Kitty Hawk, but it would still be a while before the official flights would propel them to fame. Even on the off-chance he knew of his contribution, there is no chance he could imagine the full gamut of where flight would progress to. It is such a reminder how great science (and meaningful innovations) are built on small contributions by so many players along the way.
It reminds me why we blog, why we talk at conferences and why we publish, even when there isn’t a direct line between our publishing and our bottom line.
