Businessweek just published an article on how a number of former NASA employees (including myself) have transitioned over to small startups. While my experiences at NASA were great, I find it really refreshing now to be able to make decisions and move at a pace that we could only have dreamed of when I was at NASA. While I still believe that NASA is extremely good at crisis decision making when lives are on the line, NASA is definitely not good at taking risks and moving quickly when the opposite is true (i.e. when the consequences of failure aren’t so extreme). Organizational culture does matter.
